Jan Priddy’s Reviews > A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind > Status Update

And then she did.

Burgess fails to confront, even in retelling these incidents, the sexism and misogyny at the heart of law enforcement's failures to effectively pursue crimes—unconscious unwillingness to consider that a teenage girl could be the killer and assuming that reports of rape might be a lie, for two examples. She wants measurable, quantitative evidence because as a behavioral psychologist. It is cold & not always accurate.

The Bobbies case was a key turning point, but the profiling of that one seems obvious to me. Despite the Behavioral Science Unit central to this story, I am disappointed not to find any discussion of how Behaviorism altered the discipline of psychology to focus on countable and measurable behaviors. Burgess discounts the "instinct" the FBI relied upon earlier. [note: I've read a couple chapters out of order.]

This could have been a much shorter book designed purely to advance the author's thesis. Instead it is a book for people who want to read about serial killers, which is not the same thing at all.