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Utah, some four hundred miles south of Bozeman—from a man calling himself ‘Mr Travis’. He told Marietta that he was the man who abducted her daughter—but she recognised the voice, and called his bluff. ‘Well, hello, David.’
    Backed now by Marietta Jaeger’s sworn affidavit, Agent Dunbar in Bozeman obtained his search warrant. As the Quantico profilers had predicted, he unearthed various ‘souvenirs’—body parts, taken from both victims—that proved Meirhofer’s guilt. At that, the man who had passed both ‘truth tests’ so convincingly also confessed to two more unsolved murders (of local boys). Although he was not brought to trial—David Meirhofer hanged himself in his cell—he became the first serial killer to be caught with the aid of the FBI’s new investigative technique.
    It was a breakthrough that, within a decade, was to lead directly to the accurate, systematic profiling technique known as the ‘Criminal Investigative Analysis Program’, or CIAP.
    Both the Glatman and Meirhofer cases offered the psychological profilers some important clues to certain types of sex criminal. In childhood they are loners who feel alienated from their peer group. Robert Ressler writes in Whoever Fights Monsters: ‘As the psychologically damaged boys get closer to adolescence, they find that they are unable to develop the social skills that are precursors to sexual skills and that are the coin of positive emotional relationships... By the time a normal youngster is dancing, going to parties, participating in kissing games, the loner is turning in on himself and developing fantasies that are deviant. The fantasies are substitutes for more positive human encounters, and as the adolescent becomes more dependent on them, he loses touch with acceptable social values.’ And he adds: ‘Most were incapable of holding jobs or living up to their intellectual potential.’
    The psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase ‘deprivation needs’ to refer to the basic needs that must be fulfilled before someone can reach his or her normal potential. A child who has been half-starved will lack certain vitamins that are essential to growth. And a child who is emotionally starved is likely to lack certain psychological vitamins, which may form an obstacle to satisfactory relationships. Ressler comments that although the result may not be murder or rape, ‘it will be some other sort of demonstration of dysfunction’. In such people, the Doctor Jekyll aspect, shocked by what Mr Hyde is doing, may become suicidal—hence Glatman’s plea to be executed and Meirhofer’s self-destruction.
    Observations such as these would become the basis of Ressler’s insight into the minds of serial killers.

Chapter Three
The Founding Father

    By the time he was a nine-year-old boy, Ressler knew that monsters were not confined to fairy stories; there was a real one roaming the streets of his hometown, Chicago, Illinois.
    On 5 June 1945, 43-year-old widow Josephine Ross had been stabbed to death when she had awakened to find a burglar in her apartment. Six months later, on 10 December 1945, a 30-old ex-Wave named Frances Brown was discovered kneeling unclothed by the side of her bath, a knife driven through her throat with such force that it had come out the other side. On the wall above her bed someone had written in lipstick: ‘For heavens sake catch me before I kill more—I cannot help myself.’ There was no sign of rape.
    Four weeks later, on the morning of 7 January 1946, James E. Degnan went into the bedroom of his seven-year-old daughter, Suzanne, and saw that she was not in her bed, and that the window was wide open. He called the police, and it was a policeman who found the note on the child’s chair; it said she had been kidnapped and demanded $20,000 for her return. Later that afternoon, Suzanne’s head was discovered beneath a nearby manhole cover. In another sewer police found the child’s left leg. The right leg was