Tracking a Serial Killer

This gripping, fully-illustrated true crime book explores a range of 25 serial murderers in an innovative new format, using timelines both of the murderers’ lives but also precise hour-by-hour timelines of the crimes that take the reader into the events of a murder, showing the cat-and-mouse game between killer, victim and the police.

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“One side of me says, I'd like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says, I wonder what her head would look like on a stick?"
Edmund Kemper (1948–), ‘the Co-ed Killer’

This gripping, fully illustrated true crime book explores a range of serial murderers in an innovative new format, using timelines both of the murderers’ lives but also precise hour-by-hour timelines of the crimes. Tracking a Serial Killer tells the story of 25 serial killers, from the nineteenth century right up to the present day. It enables the reader to understand some of the thinking of men such as Ted Bundy, who stalked university dorms, or Andrei Chikatilo, whose killings happened at similar intervals, to Randy Kraft who murdered hitchhikers along California freeways over several years, to Volker Eckert, a German lorry driver who murdered prostitutes across western Europe across three decades.

The timeline approach offers a visual overview of the major developments of the murderer’s life, both before the killing began and covering killing sprees, trials, incarcerations, escapes, releases and repeat offences, up to their deaths. The second timeline takes the reader into the events of one particular murder, showing how events developed in the twenty-four hours around the murder, how close they were to being caught, how the factors came into place for the murder, and how they managed to escape capture.