Villains Behind the Badges

by Sandra Parshall

I read far more books than I will ever write, so it’s not surprising that I have the same preferences and pet peeves as any other reader. I have a lot of pet peeves. Publicly criticizing another writer’s work, though, won’t make me popular and might create an awkward future moment when I come face to face with that author.

So: no names, no book titles.

But I have to tell you how tired I am of seeing law enforcement officers, from FBI agents to small town cops, appearing as villains in crime novels.

After the Boston Marathon bombing, a couple of people I had previously considered sane spouted the strong suspicion that the FBI and local police planted the bombs, killed and maimed all those innocent people (including children), and framed two young brothers whose backgrounds (Muslim immigrants) would make them plausible fall guys. Oh, and the older brother was unarmed when the two were surrounded, and he was murdered in cold blood by the cops.

The “proof” behind this theory: everybody knows the FBI and most police departments are corrupt, that they are working every angle to subjugate the population and control every aspect of our lives. (Why would they...? Never mind. That’s another discussion.)

One person told me that if I would stop being a blind sheep and do some research on the internet, I would discover ample evidence of this conspiracy. The internet is where we should all look for the truth. Oh wow. After I stopped laughing, I couldn’t come up with an answer to that.

I asked myself: Where do people get such ideas?

A person’s own inner sense of helplessness and hatred of all authority is a big part of his or her willingness to jump immediately to the wildest, most negative conclusion. But I’ve begun to wonder whether crime fiction writers are feeding readers’ suspicions and delusions.

Even in cozies, the police are often portrayed as bumblers who couldn’t detect their way out of a pastry box and have to rely on women with no law enforcement training and loads of free time to solve all the murders.

In darker mysteries and thrillers, it gets worse.

FBI agents or cops ostensibly pursuing serial killers may turn out to be the very killers they’re after.

Brutal, psychotic Sheriffs in rural areas, particularly in the south, have appeared in fiction so often that they’ve become a cliche.

Then we have entire police departments that are in on the drug dealing and  prostitution or whatever and do not hesitate to murder anyone who gets in their way.

Another type I’m awfully tired of is the rebel cop, sometimes young and relatively inexperienced, who happens to be the only competent investigator on the entire force. She or he breaks all the rules, goes off alone (without backup or notice to superiors) into potentially deadly situations, and may engage in a bit of illegal activity – but in this case it’s heroic because it’s the only way to work around the system-wide incompetence and corruption. Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch is the poster child for rebel cop syndrome. In his younger days, Bosch was given to throwing office furniture through windows at police headquarters and similar acts of hotheaded defiance. He did things that would have landed any real cop on the curb in an instant, and possibly in jail, but like all rebel cops he suffered few consequences. Now he’s too old to be believable as a rebel, but plenty of younger characters are following his lead.

Do corrupt cops exist in real life? Of course. We’ve read and heard about them following their arrests.

Are some detectives incompetent? Without a doubt.

Are some FBI agents psychotic? I don’t know of any offhand, but I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question, given the prevalence of mental illness in the general population.

Have any real FBI agents or cops ever been exposed as raving lunatic serial killers who managed to function professionally at such a high level that they had everybody fooled? If so, I can’t point to a case. Like anyone else, an FBI agent or police officer is far more likely to kill someone close – a lover, a spouse or other family member.

I’m not saying corrupt and crazy cops don’t exist in real life. I’m saying too many of them show up in crime fiction. Such characters probably reinforce the fear and distrust of police that many ordinary citizens feel. Maybe they feed the delusional fantasies some people harbor. Perhaps all forms of fiction – books, TV, movies – have helped to bring some people to the point where it seems rational that the tragedy in Boston was engineered by law enforcement and the Tsarnaev brothers were simply two innocent pawns.

All that aside, these characters have committed the cardinal sin of fiction: they have become ordinary and easy to spot. Predictable. And in crime fiction, “predictable” always means boring.

Torturing Women for Fun and Profit

Sandra Parshall

I’ve just put aside, unfinished, yet another “Instant NY Times bestseller!” that features long and thoroughly sickening passages told from the point of view of a deranged serial killer.

As I wrote in a previous blog, I’m not terribly squeamish about violence in fiction, and I’ll admit that I like Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels, but I usually steer clear of serial killer stories. They seem to be taking over crime fiction, though, so they’re hard to avoid. And they’re more graphic than ever before, especially in the degrading way they treat women. What’s especially disturbing is that many of these books are written by women.

The one I just gave up on went into great – and, dare I say it, loving – detail about the killer’s torture and rape of his female victims, and the sensual pleasure and sexual satisfaction he experienced. After three or four such scenes, I was feeling queasy and disgusted. I had to ask myself how many more descriptions of the killer’s engorged penis I really wanted to encounter. The answer was none.

The book was a bestseller, and it was written by a woman, which means that in all likelihood the majority of its readers have been women. I have to wonder what enjoyment female readers get from this kind of story, which seems to me to be a kind of pornography. Yes, justice will be done in the end, but is the triumph of good over evil in the last chapter enough to make the degradation that precedes it a pleasure to read?

There’s no question that crime fiction writers have to come up with ever more shocking scenarios to grab attention in a crowded marketplace, and taking readers into the sick mind of a serial killer seems to be a favored approach. It’s all imaginary, since the average writer isn’t a serial killer and has no firsthand knowledge of the psychopathy involved. The author can make up anything he or she wishes to produce suspense and shocks. Most of the time they choose to portray women as victims of torture. These unfortunate females are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, kicked, raped, sexually assaulted with objects, starved, suffocated, drowned, shot, stabbed, buried alive -- every awful bit of it described in detail, all in the name of entertainment.

Sure, the occasional story will have a male victim. But fictional serial killers have a lot more fun torturing and murdering women. And apparently readers find women much more appealing than men as victims. I’m trying to understand why.

Why does the reading public support the mass production of books about the torture and killing of women? Why are so many readers, many of them female, entertained by this kind of novel? What emotional need does this entertainment meet in the reader? Why do women make “better” victims than men?

An even scarier question: After these maim-and-kill-her books begin to seem tame, what’s next?

Psychopathology in Mysteries: Past and Current Trends

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a mental health professional in my “other hat,” I have a tendency to diagnose the protagonists, victims, witnesses, and murderers in the mysteries I read. Sometimes these characters’ psychopathology is intentional on the author’s part, with a greater or lesser degree of accuracy or at least probability. Sometimes it’s not.

I recently was asked, in a series of questions and answers for a fellow writer’s crime fiction blog, to name my “guilty pleasures” as a reader. I confessed that one of my favorite comfort read characters (or rereads many times over) is Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver. These mysteries from the 1940s and 1950s are classic cozies. They are totally predictable and tremendously soothing. (I do love a happy ending!) They are also incisively written and astute about character as long as you accept some stereotypical assumptions about men and women that most of us in the 21st century no longer buy into. Admitting how much I like Miss Silver was embarrassing only because the guy asking the question was a hardboiled crime novelist. Some over-easy traditional mystery writers reread Patricia Wentworth too.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about the Wentworth canon. I have 42 or 43 of her books: all the Miss Silvers and quite a few of her many other novels, which are just like them except for the decorous but highly intelligent sleuth’s absence, some even featuring other characters—police and villains—from the Miss Silver books. Having read so many of them, I’m struck by how many of the plots revolve around amnesia. In the mid-20th century, amnesia was a tried and true plot device that many mystery writers turned to. Manning Coles’s Tommy Hambledon, for example, was a British intelligence agent who lost his memory in Germany for long enough to join the Nazi Party and participate actively in the rise of Hitler. Luckily, he recovered his memory in time to save the day for England. Writers have also made use of alcoholic blackouts, another form of amnesia. In David Carkeet’s 1980 mystery Double Negative, if I remember correctly, the hero hid a key piece of evidence during a blackout and had to get drunk again to remember where he’d put it: a condition I know now is called state-dependent learning.

Amnesia still crops up from time to time. Annette Meyers’s most recent Smith and Wetzon mystery, Hedging, comes to mind. But amnesia is no longer “in.” I suspect the reason is it’s more widely understood that retrograde amnesia doesn’t usually work quite the way most mystery writers use it.

Blackouts, another kind of amnesia, are still common in crime fiction. So are other symptoms of alcoholism. Sometimes the characters are aware they’re dealing with this serious and painful form of illness. Sometimes neither characters nor author get it. As a longstanding alcoholism treatment professional, I have a bias against what I call “cute alcoholism,” when excessive drinking is presented as comical or charming. Nowadays, we find more and more characters in recovery or at least intermittently trying to get sober. But compulsive hard drinking and cute alcoholism still appear in mystery fiction.

For a while, in the 1980s and 1990s, incest, pedophilia, and dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personality disorder) became popular with novelists. In one of P.D. James’s books, one character with a history of sexual abuse in childhood hides her sexuality in obesity and overeating, while another, who had run away, is found under another identity—not a subterfuge, but to those familiar with DID, clearly another personality. One of Colin Dexter’s best Inspector Morse books turns on the fact that a character who is not what she seems has alters. I’ve also read mysteries by proponents (or by authors who believe proponents) of “false memory syndrome.” Professionally and personally, I’ve met too many people with dissociative issues due to childhood trauma and sexual abuse to have much sympathy for this point of view. It’s made for some interesting stories. But by now, it has been used so often that I can see it coming hundreds of pages before the denouement. Or is that because I’m professionally familiar with the symptoms?

Nowadays, serial killers are in fashion. I’m not very fond of them myself. But readers seem to love them. And some wonderful writers bring them to life. Besides Hannibal Lecter and Dexter, Lawrence Block and Jan Burke have created some convincing sociopaths as foils for Matt Scudder and Irene Kelly. Many sociopaths, by the way, never kill anyone: they just go through life hiding utter lack of empathy behind devastating charm. I’ve had quite a few clients myself who were immensely likeable, so that I had to keep reminding myself that the charm was an integral part of the sociopathy. I’m fascinated by how easily people are fooled. Will I ever write about such a character? You never know. In the meantime, the serial killer trend has to reach saturation point some time. So what kind of twisted souls—or mental illness, depending on your frame of reference—will mystery writers turn the spotlight on next?

Bad Company

Sandra Parshall

In general, I don’t enjoy the company of serial killers.

I mean the fictional kind, of course. Like most writers of crime novels, I’d be scared witless to encounter one in person.

Literary serial killers often seem more focused on their relationships with the police and FBI than on murder itself. They’re heavily into bet-you-can’t-catch-me games and prone to writing jokey, taunting letters to their cop pals. When they’re finally caught at the end of the story, they often crave praise from the cops for their cleverness. I was good, wasn’t I? There's something almost sexual about it, and not in an enjoyable way.

Before we reach that point, we're likely to get lots of scenes in which the killer cackles maniacally as he plots his next crime and savors the shock he’s about to deliver not only to his victim but to the cops and FBI. It also seems essential in fiction that every serial killer be given a snappy nickname, so the writer dreams up a “trademark” that will spawn one. If the killer writes messages to the cops on sticky notes and attaches them to his victim’s foreheads, he can be The Sticky Note Killer and everyone in the book will begin to suspect friends and co-workers who leave sticky note reminders on desks and refrigerator doors and calendars. This adds tension.

From what I’ve read about real-life serial killers, they’re a sad, sick bunch, immersed in the darkness of their own minds and souls, and focused obsessively on satisfying an urge that most of us can never understand. Killing is what matters to them. The clever killer who taunts the police and revels in the chase is rare in reality.

A lot of mysteries and thrillers are utterly unbelievable, but if I’m entertained I usually don’t care. However, most serial killer novels are dead serious, if you’ll pardon the expression, and they’re supposed to “entertain” by scaring us. To be scared, I have to believe that the threat could be real, that I could encounter it in my own life. So when I open a novel to find a detective and a serial killer carrying on a warped version of courtship, I’m inclined to mutter Give me a break and close the book. Writing in the killer’s voice, and making him scary rather than ludicrous, is especially hard to pull off. Few writers have done it convincingly.

Which brings me to Jeff Lindsay and Dexter.

Why do I like Dexter so much? He’s not especially handsome or charming or witty (although the Dexter books drip with black humor). Dexter was bent forever when his mother was slaughtered in front of him and he, a small child, was left to sit in her blood for days before being rescued by the cop who became his foster father. He feels an urge to kill, but he gives in only when he comes across someone who genuinely deserves his attention. He dispatched a hospital nurse who was trying to euthanize his foster father. He murdered a priest who had molested children. He kills other killers who prey on the innocent. His victims are carefully chosen. He rids the world – let’s be honest here – of the scum we all occasionally wish we could bump off. Dexter doesn’t play cat and mouse games with the cops. He works with them as a blood evidence analyst, and he’s deeply afraid of being found out. Now and then he yearns to be normal, to really be the person he pretends to be, but he knows that normalcy would bore him out of his mind.

Usually I try to avoid serial killer novels, preferring instead stories of ordinary people driven to extremes by some upheaval or betrayal in their lives. Dexter is the only serial killer I’ve been able to read about repeatedly without becoming totally repulsed. (I lost interest in Hannibal Lecter long ago, and don’t get me started about Patricia Cornwell’s French werewolf.) On the whole, I like the Showtime series based on the Dexter books, but only the written word does full justice to the character.

I don’t know how long Lindsay can keep Dexter's story going, but if the author remains faithful to the character and doesn’t slip into the cliches that mar so many serial killer books, I’ll continue to enjoy Dexter's company.

Alex Kava's Life of Crime

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

Bestselling thriller writer Alex Kava grew up in rural Nebraska, the daughter of hardworking parents who believed reading was frivolous unless required for school. She secretly nurtured her love of reading and writing throughout childhood. After college she held a number of jobs, mostly in marketing and advertising, and eventually became director of public relations at her alma mater, the College of Saint Mary in Omaha. When she decided in 1996 to write fiction and try to get published, she quit her PR job, resurrected her small graphic design firm to earn money, maxed out her credit cards, and took on a newspaper delivery route. Her first thriller, A Perfect Evil, was a quick success, and she’s been on bestseller lists ever since. She still lives in Omaha, with her dogs Molly and Scout.

Your new book is a departure from your Maggie O’Dell series. Will this become a second series?

Whitewash is not intended to be series, but I never say never. I do love the characters, especially two of the secondary ones: Miss Sadie, the eighty-one-year-old neighbor who keeps cash in the freezer and drives a 1948 Studebaker, and Leon, the hitman who has his own "standards." It'd be fun to bring them back in another novel down the road.

Was it difficult or energizing to work with a new lead character? What were you able to do with Sabrina that might not fit well with Maggie?

I actually find it very energizing. I did another stand alone, One False Move, several years ago. The novel was loosely based on a real life manhunt I found myself caught in the middle of. It was a story I needed and wanted to write but it wasn't necessarily a Maggie O'Dell novel. Same thing with Whitewash. I had a story to tell but I needed someone like Sabrina, not Maggie. Sabrina is a brilliant scientist and professor but a bit naive when it comes to street smarts. The story works because Sabrina hasn't ever had to deal with corporate corruption and political scandal let alone murder. It ratchets up the suspense.

You’ve said that you grew up in a home with few books and that your parents considered reading a waste of time unless it was done for school. Where do you think your love of books and the urge to write came from? Were you encouraged by any adult mentors?

Reading was always a wonderful escape whether I was following around Harriet the Spy or experiencing the high seas with Mutiny on the Bounty. Perhaps it was even more a treat because it was sort of forbidden.

As for adult mentors, I do fondly remember my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Powers, reading to us every day after lunch and how much we all looked forward to it. And I still get chills at the memory of my eighth grade teacher, Mr. Meyers, reading Poe's The Telltale Heart.

As a child, you wrote stories on the backs of calendars and hid them under your bed. What did you write about, and do you still have any of those stories?

I asked my mom for the old Co-op Grain calendars. They were weeklies, spiral bond and about six inches by nine inches in size, so I had fifty-two blank sheets that I could do whatever I wanted to and no one would miss them or be interested. I wrote stories. I can't remember if any of them were finished. I can't even remember what they were about. And no, unfortunately I don't have them. I think they got tossed for the same reason I thought they were so perfect to use -- no one cared what was written on an out-of-date calendar.

What drew you to writing thrillers? What can you accomplish in a thriller that you can’t in a traditional mystery?

I actually didn't choose to write thrillers. My first novel, A Perfect Evil, was loosely based on a couple of crimes that happened in Nebraska while I worked for a small town newspaper. I didn't know I had written a thriller or a mystery novel. I was concerned about the characters more than the plot. I wanted to focus on what happens to people when something horrific like the murder of two little boys happens in a community, especially a community that sometimes didn't lock its doors in the middle of the afternoon. It was the relationships and transformations of characters and the loss of innocence of a community that I was interested in capturing.

Shortly after A Perfect Evil was published a reviewer called me "the newest serial killer lady." Readers all over the world seemed to connect with Maggie O'Dell (who, by the way, doesn't enter the novel until chapter seven) and suddenly my publisher wanted a series of thrillers with Maggie O'Dell. At that time I couldn't even tell you what a thriller was and I certainly didn't know the first thing about writing a series. Even now I don't necessarily concern myself with whether the novel is a thriller or a mystery as much as how I want to tell the story and who -- which set of characters -- will tell their version.

How do people who have known you all your life react to your choice of subject matter? Has anyone ever tried to talk you into writing about more pleasant subjects?

My mom, who is a good Catholic mother, reads all my novels but we never discuss them. By now most of my friends are almost as fascinated by my research as I am. Although I'm not sure if that says more about their acceptance of me or their own dark interests.

What aspects of your writing have you consciously worked to improve? What aspects give you the most satisfaction?

I'm constantly working to improve every aspect -- to write tighter, to use more concise description, to make the dialogue sound real, to flesh out even the secondary characters and include research that enhances, not bores, the reader.

It seems to be the oddest of things that give me the most satisfaction. But mostly it's when something I've written really touches a reader. For At the Stroke of Madness I gave one of my characters Alzheimer's Disease as sort of a personality quirk until I started doing my research and realized what a horribly sad disease it is. Luc Racine became an important character in the plot and so did his loss of memory. Recently a reader, whose own father suffers from Alzheimer's Disease, wrote to me and thanked me for portraying the disease in such a realistic manner right down to Luc Racine finding his TV remote control in his refrigerator.

Does anyone read and comment on your work before you turn it in to your editor?

Yes, my friend and business manager, Deb Carlin, reads it. Oftentimes she takes my longhand and keys it in for me, too. She's also the only person I sit and brainstorm with to figure out the twists and turns.

How do you divide your time among research, promotion, and writing? Do you attend any mystery conferences?

It's tough because a writer could literally spend all year doing research, promotion and going to conferences and not writing. For example in 2006 I spent five weeks on the road doing an 18-city national tour for A Necessary Evil. Then because One False Move was chosen for One Book One Nebraska I decided to do a six-week, 35-city library tour across the state. For 17 days it was three women and five dogs in a rented RV. We jokingly called it "The Insanity Tour." Also in 2006 I attended three national conferences, BEA, and four book festivals.

I know some writers who can write anywhere, but I find it impossible to write in airports, hotels and RVs. Yet all of it is important, so you find a way to juggle it.

What do you read for pleasure? What thriller writers do you admire, and what newcomers to the field have caught your attention?

I just finished reading Daniel Silva's The Secret Servant. Now I'm reading Kathy Reichs. I love Carl Hiaasen and Thomas Perry. I've been a judge and the Awards Chair for International Thriller Writers so I've had the honor of meeting quite a few authors in the last two years, and now I'm enjoying reading many of their works: Joseph Finder, P.J. Parrish, Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, Christopher Riech, Steve Berry, Jeffery Deaver, James Rollins . . . so many books and so little time.

There are too many thriller authors I admire to mention. For newcomers, I just finished George D. Shuman's second thriller, Last Breath, which was terrific.The character of Sherry Moore that he created in his debut, 18 Seconds is a fascinating character. And for me that's still what makes a good thriller -- just as in any great fiction -- it's the characters.

You’ve had an extraordinary degree of cooperation from the FBI, while some other writers have said they were rebuffed when they asked for help. Why do you think the Bureau has been willing to assist you?

All of my resource connections in law enforcement, including the FBI, have come about through friends and/or readers helping me make those connections. Several of my sources have come to me at national book signing events and offered their assistance with a private phone number and/or email address. I've never had to cold-call anyone. I've been very fortunate.

But once I make those connections I think the sources are willing to talk to me because they know how much I respect what they do and they can trust me. There have been several times that I've had sources sit down and talk to me about open cases, including evidence that hasn't been made public, and they know they can count on me to not divulge anything sensitive. People resources are the absolute best for any research and what they share gives my novels a level of credibility and authenticity that I couldn't get anywhere else.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on the next Maggie O'Dell, called Exposed.

Visit the author’s web site at www.alexkava.com.

The Clues in Handwriting

Sheila Lowe (Guest Blogger)



With more than 35 years experience in the field of handwriting, Sheila Lowe has been qualified as a handwriting expert in the California Court system since 1985. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and was certified by the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation in 1981, as well as the Society of Handwriting Analysts in 1985. She is an active member of the National Association of Document Examiners. Sheila is also the author of a mystery series, beginning with Poison Pen, featuring a sleuth who shares her expertise. Visit her web site at www.shelialowe.com.

While the Zodiac Killer terrorized the San Francisco area in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he wrote letters to the police and newspapers, taunting them in his own handwriting with terrifying threats of torture. The Zodiac was never caught, but more than thirty years later those handwritten letters remain, as accurate a representation of personality as the picture of Dorian Gray. We may not know what the man looked like on the outside, but his handwriting tells us who he really was inside.

After studying the handwritings of more than twenty serial killers, one thing becomes abundantly, frighteningly clear: in many ways, these men and women do not appear to be so different from the rest of us. That’s why many of them get away with their crimes for years -- their ability to hide a compulsion to kill under the mask of civility allows them to function somewhat successfully in the world. Yet, their handwriting tells the truth, and as the need to kill builds, forcing its way to the surface like the Incredible Hulk straining to overtake David Banner, changes in the handwriting reflect what’s going on inside.

But don’t get the idea that handwriting is like a crystal ball that can predict that someone is definitely going to kill. It’s not. But the potential for violence is easily seen if you know what to look for, and those red flags for danger alert the handwriting analyst. I’ve been asked whether the handwriting of a friend or acquaintance has ever made me decide to distance myself from that person. As a matter of fact, it has.

I’ve written and spoken in many places about the alarm I felt when my 27-year-old daughter showed me the handwriting of a new man in her life. He was a special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and he taught hand-to-hand combat to other agents. His handwriting showed a controlling personality, a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality, a potential for violent behavior. In addition, I saw something in the handwriting that prompted me to ask whether he had sustained a blow to the head. He said he had, and that he suffered severe headaches as a result.

What do you get when you add an authoritarian personality to a head injury, mix it with alcohol abuse and stress at work? An explosion waiting to happen. Within a year my daughter had become the victim of murder by this man, who also killed himself. Handwriting doesn’t lie, but we have to listen to what it says. My daughter’s killer never struck her before he shot her eight times, but he had threatened her. I share this story in the hope that it will help at least one person make the choice to leave an abusive relationship before it’s too late. Abuse isn’t just about physical violence. It includes verbal mistreatment, too.

Although I’ve been writing about handwriting and what it reveals about personality for more than thirty years, I’ve wanted to write mystery since I was fourteen. So, it was a natural progression to create a character who works as a forensic handwriting expert, as I do. Remember the old TV show that started with the line, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City”? Well, behind every story is a handwriting, and my expert, Claudia Rose, has already investigated two of them in Poison Pen (in stores now) and Written in Blood (coming 12/08). Like me, Claudia is both a handwriting expert who testifies in cases of forgery, and a behavioral profiler through handwriting.

But besides potential for violence, there are lots of other clues that handwriting provides. Social skills for one -- whether you’re an outgoing, gregarious type of person, or a loner, for instance. Thinking style is another -- logical, common sense, creative? The condition of your self-image. Sexual attitudes. How well you organize your life. Where your fears come from.

So, what did the Zodiac’s handwriting say about him? Google turns up samples on several web sites. You’ll see that the flow of ink is heavy and muddy-looking, an indication of dammed-up anger and frustration. There are letters that suddenly flop over to the right, which signals a sudden eruption of emotion. The way letters and words are spaced show his feelings of isolation and profound inability to connect with another person. Whether it’s the Zodiac, the Night Stalker, Aileen Wuornos, or any of the dozens of other less-known killers on death row, their handwriting reveals the truth about who they really are.

Handwriting can’t tell everything about a person, but understanding what motivates others, what makes them tick, puts an investigator way ahead of the game. It provides a great deal of important information that can be added to other evidence and build an accurate portrait of personality. Having access to that kind of information gives the graphologist an edge when she becomes involved in a murder investigation, or white collar crime, or a child abuse case, or even just analyzing someone who wants to know himself better. So next time you pick up a pen and paper and begin to write, you might want to ask yourself what clues your handwriting reveals about you...