Robert Ressler

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Robert Kenneth Ressler (born February 21, 1937 in Chicago , † May 5, 2013 in Spotsylvania County ) was an American criminologist and FBI agent.

Life

Ressler played a key role in setting up the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) after starting his career in the military . From 1970 until his retirement in 1990 he worked as a profiler for the FBI.

Robert Ressler has interviewed hundreds of murderers and tried to "get into their souls and understand their thinking". He supported the police in South Africa in their search for serial killers (e.g. Moses Sithole ) and helped police officers in London when the "Wimbledon killer" struck. A Japanese TV company asked Ressler for his opinion on a case in Yokohama Bay: The sea had washed up the bodies of a woman and two children. Since 2003 Robert Ressler supported the police in Mexico in the search for one or more serial killers with more than a hundred victims.

He advised the author Thomas Harris as part of his research for The Silence of the Lambs . His most spectacular cases included interrogations of serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer . From his conversations with Dahmer, Robert Ressler gained completely new insights into the emotional depths of a killer.

The essential teaching of Ressler says that one can draw conclusions about the person on the basis of the individual decisions that the perpetrator has to make at the scene of the crime and when selecting the victim.

Fonts

  • With Ann W. Burgess , John E. Douglas : Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988)
  • With Tom Shachtman: Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Hunting Serial Killers for the FBI (1992)
    • German: I Chased Hannibal Lecter: The Story of the Agent Who Hunted Serial Offenders for 20 Years (1993)
  • With Tom Shachtman: Justice Is Served (1994)
  • With Tom Shachtman: I Have Lived in the Monster (1998)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary , Covenant Funeral Service, accessed May 21, 2013.
  2. ^ GB: Criminal Psychology: Killing, Waiting, Thinking , Public Safety , No. 5-6 / 2004.
  3. ↑ Psychogram of a serial killer: The work of FBI profiler Robert Ressler , Spiegel Online , 2002.
personal data
SURNAME Ressler, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ressler, Robert Kenneth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American criminologist and FBI agent
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH May 5, 2013
Place of death Spotsylvania County