Author: Stefano Nazzi
Publisher: Mondadori
Release Date: 09-09-2025
There was a time in America when evil seemed to lurk everywhere—in dark parking lots, along quiet roads, and inside the most unsuspecting homes. The FBI called it “the epidemic”: the golden age of serial killers. Between the 1960s and 1990s, there were nearly two thousand. They killed silently, methodically, with imagination—and often with a reassuring smile. “We are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere,” said Ted Bundy, one of the most infamous among them. And he was right.
With gripping and powerful prose, Stefano Nazzi takes us through those dark decades, delving into the minds of some of the most terrifying American serial killers. Alongside these killers are the stories of the men and women who hunted them, studied them, and tried to understand them. In the basement of Quantico, two FBI agents—Robert Ressler and John Douglas—began analyzing the profiles of serial murderers. Together with psychologist Ann Burgess, they visited maximum-security prisons and interviewed thirty-six serial killers.
From those conversations, criminal profiling was born— the idea that behind apparent chaos, there is a pattern, and that even the most unpredictable acts can be anticipated. Ressler coined the term “serial killer”; Douglas outlined the first criminal types. They searched for patterns, models, recurring traits. They were the first mindhunters — the hunters of the mind.
This book tells the story of that era. A journey into the minds of America’s most ruthless predators — and of those who dared to stop them.