As well as his psychological profiles, Britton talks about his personal experience with working with the police, and how his personal life was affected. He also mentions his NHS career in psychology. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth In the course of his consultancy work, he helped international corporations from the pharmaceutical, industrial, health and banking sectors in the event of a crisis and trained his clients in the event of hostage-taking, extortion, kidnapping and acts of violence. He advised both the American FBI and the Russian Interior Ministry . He was a member of an advisory body to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) for several years .

An intensely private and unassuming man, Britton has an almost mythic status in the field of crime deduction because of his ability to 'walk through the minds' of those who stalk, abduct, torture, rape and kill other human beings. What he searches for at the scene of a crime are not fingerprints, fibres or blood stains - he looks for the 'mind trace' left behind by those responsible; the psychological characteristics that can help police to identify and understand the nature of the perpetrator. The study, which was based above all on the questioning of all departments and the data of some criminalistic-psychological institutes of the Ministry of the Interior, shows a disillusioning picture of “ profiling ". The majority of the effort was not effective or even counterproductive. Many creators of perpetrator profiles were incompetent or put other goals such as reputation enhancement and their own financial interests in the foreground. Nevertheless, there were also promising approaches, especially from the university environment and the practical area of ​​clinical psychology. He was then given the task of developing recommendations for promoting the promising approaches. These included the expansion of a central database for violent crimes, a quality analysis of the perpetrator profile after each investigation and the drafting of a computer program to identify common features in violent crimes committed by serial perpetrators to be able to find earlier, as well as the training of investigators.

BBC News, Oct. 30, 2002: charges against Paul Britton dropped (in English, with photo of Paul Britton) I was surprised about the level of information Britton gives on some very well known crimes and so if you are interested in true crime then this is a book for you, I think that it helps if you remember the main cases that he talks about but this isn’t essential as he will give you more than enough detail. I really did enjoy reading it and found it fascinating, but I would have liked Britton to make himself more human and show that he isn’t perfect and did sometimes get it wrong, and perhaps what he learnt from that. His failure to do that makes me question the book and how true to life it really is, especially when, for example, he states that he believed that The West’s had eaten some of their victims due to marks on the bones, I have not been able to find anything else to substantiate this and even though I know that it would be impossible for it to be proven given the death of Fred West and the silence of Rose, it is something that I would expect to be discussed somewhere if there had been any evidence of that.

I started off enjoying this, but it really began to wear of me as I continued reading. Much of the material in the book is deeply disturbing and even as someone usually unfazed by crime, I began to worry irrationally about serial killers breaking into my house. From the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, the population was unsettled by a series of rapes that took place in the parks in the southern green belt of London connected by the Green Chain Walk . In one case, the perpetrator broke into a residential building located on the road, easily visible from the park, and committed the crime there. Although the victims sometimes gave very different descriptions of the perpetrator, the DNA traces revealed the perpetration of a single man. This does give the book a slightly repetitive feel sometimes, as whilst there is variation in the methodology of both killer and investigations and the personalities involved on both sides of the law, it sometimes feels as if Britton is working from a template to tell his side of these crimes. His tone doesn’t vary an awful amount either, being largely dispassionate and it sometimes feels as if he is writing a textbook or the basis for a lecture series. Although he does occasionally let his emotions show, usually when he sees the victim, or pictures of the victim, for the first time, the tone and pace of his writing doesn’t change a huge amount and it almost reads as if he’s expressing emotions because it feels like the right thing to do, rather than because he actually feels anything.

It has never been clarified why the previous suspect had perpetrator knowledge in the second case. One could only assume that he observed the crime and then carried out the mistreatment on the corpse, which the murderer denied despite admitting the crime. Product extortion from Mars Incorporated and HJ Heinz Company Whilst what is missing may be unforgivable, what is here is interesting. The period during which Britton was an active criminal psychologist covers a period of time I was old enough to be aware of many of the cases, which made the stories more interesting to me, as I was already familiar with the outcomes, as far as was reported in the news at the time and this provided an additional look inside a case from a perspective that few of us get to see. As someone with an interest in both true crime and psychology, much of what was mentioned here was fascinating to me. Britton came to psychology late. He spent a year as a police cadet, then took a series of jobs before studying psychology in his late 20s. While working at a psychiatric hospital in Leicestershire, he was asked, informally, to help in a murder inquiry. His reputation grew and he became head of the regional forensic psychology service. He was consulted on some of the most notorious crimes of the 80s and 90s, from the kidnapping of Stephanie Slater to the horrors of Fred and Rosemary West's house. The real estate agent Stephanie Slater was kidnapped during a bogus apartment tour. Here, too, the extortion letters could again be assigned to the same perpetrator. After successfully handing over the money, whereby the perpetrator was actually able to outsmart the police with his chain of instructions, she was released nine days after the kidnapping. Based on their description, a phantom image was created and published in Crimewatch UK along with a telephone recording . Michael Sams was finally identified as the perpetrator through information from the audience. Due to a police indiscretion, the press first became aware of Paul Britton's participation in police investigations. Green Chain Walk rapists and murder case Samantha and Jazmine Bisset