cover image Who Killed Precious

Who Killed Precious

H. Paul Jeffers, Jeffers. Pharos Books, $17.95 (226pp) ISBN 978-0-88687-538-1

In 1983 the FBI inaugurated the behavioral science unit of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The principal function of this group, reports Jeffers ( Murder Along the Way ), is to draw profiles of criminals, especially serial killers, rapists, arsonists and terrorists. Such profiles are composed on the basis of general psychological principles and interviews with people incarcerated for similar crimes. The unit has won some remarkable successes, even anticipating the type of clothing a perpetrator will wear when apprehended, but the special branch came a-cropper when it endorsed a Navy report that, on flimsy evidence, attributed the explosion of a gun turret on the USS Iowa to a suicidal homosexual. An interesting if gloomy read. Photos not seen by PW. (June)