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A reign of terror that spans more than eighteen years. A serial rapist who stalks and preys on elderly women living in isolated Southern Ontario. With the victim count pushing ten, the attacker’s thirst for violence suddenly escalates to murder. Who is this monster that continues to elude Colchester police? Only a revolution in forensic science can strike fear into the heart of this predator.

A self-appointed angel of death on a mission beyond the law. A sniper who targets abortion doctors and then disappears into the shadowy underground that supports and protects him. But when the sniper’s mission moves to murder, a city is thrown into blind panic that spreads across the country and beyond. Armed with the very latest in forensic technology, this is one game the cops have no intention of losing.

When the police in Farmington, New Mexico discover a broken window at a local head shop called The Eclectic, they expect to find evidence of a robbery. Instead they uncover a horrific crime scene, with two badly mutilated bodies. One year later, a battered body is found tossed into a canyon, the eyes and genitals gouged. Then the bloodied corpse of a naked woman is discovered on a remote road outside of town. As police search for clues to her death, tracking a lost cell phone, scattered footprints and layers of tire marks far into the desert, they soon come to a terrible realization – that one man and his friends are suspected in all three crimes. And when a renowned blood spatter expert finally determines who the murderer is, the community is shocked to learn that a serial killer has been living in their midst.

The world’s top criminal investigators, forensic scientists and behavioral analysts go behind the scenes of some of their most challenging serial murder cases to reveal the cutting edge forensic science, technology, behavioral psychology and investigative techniques involved in tracking down a serial killer. The detection and apprehension of the Gainesville Ripper, who brutally attacked and murdered five college students in Florida, provides the core narrative against which the unique forensic and investigative details of four other cases are compared and contrasted.

One by one, prostitutes in Spokane, Washington are being hunted down and discarded in remote wooded areas by a vicious serial killer. On each victim’s head, police find his macabre calling card – a plastic bag emblazoned with an ironic Smiley Face. Investigators soon realize they are dealing with the worst type of serial killer – an Average Joe with no criminal background and with the extraordinary ability to blend in with the community. With few clues to work with – and as the death toll continues to rise – investigators turn to ballistics experts, space age fingerprinting technology, and to a Forensic Botanist who believes he can solve the crime by reading plants and trees.

A double homicide in Hudson, Wisconsin leaves a small town reeling and two young detectives with little to go on. The victims are upright citizens, shot execution style, with no apparent motive. In Agatha Christie-like fashion, a tantalizing array of suspects emerge but after two years, there are still no arrests. Richard Walter, the famed criminal profiler, becomes intrigued by the cold case and narrows the suspect list down until only one man is left standing. And no one can believe who that person is. A combination of expert crime scene analysis, computer forensics and the perpetrator’s own pathological urge to talk… the bereaved families finally see justice served.

Summer, 2001 and Southern Louisiana is held in the terrifying grip of a serial killer whose initial ‘hot zone’ is the Louisiana State University area of Baton Rouge. The number of victims is growing and all are attractive, successful young women — women whose mainstream, “low risk” lifestyle should never put them on the radar of a killer. But this is the hardest kind of serial killer to catch — impulsive, always changing his M.O. An unprecedented coalition of state and federal police agencies, including the FBI, will join forces to solve this disturbing, yet fascinating case. State of the art forensic science, particularly case-making DNA analysis, will turn the tables on this killer and finally put a face to the monster that haunts Southern Louisiana.

Between January 1994 and April 1996, in central Florida, the bodies of four men are found in a wooded area known as The Hog Trails. All are severely decomposed, all are naked, and all have been genitally mutilated. Police realize they are chasing a serial killer, but the investigation is hampered by the fact that they are unable to identify any of the victims. Finally a fifth body yields a name, and soon puts authorities on the trail of nurse Daniel Conahan. Police are able to prove that Conahan –a sexual sadist with a taste for bondage– lured transients to the woods with promises of easy money posing for nude photographs. In the privacy of the wilderness, he tied them to trees and brutally murdered them.

Caretaker Larry Mallory notices something unusual while on his way to work. Lying in the middle of the highway is a leg from a department store dummy. When he gets closer, Mallory sees two crows feeding on it. The leg is not plastic, it is flesh, and it has been severed from a female human body with surgical precision. The discovery of four more body parts in the area touch off a murder manhunt that involves seven police forces in four countries.

The cry for help comes from Oklahoma City’s most exclusive neighborhood. My wife’s bleeding all over the place, Dr. John Baxter Hamilton tells the 911 operator. I don’t know, she looks like somebody hurt her. It’s Valentine’s morning and socialite Susan Hamilton lies nude, smashed in a pool of blood. The science suggests a crime of heated rage and cold calculation, a killer with the intelligence to cover his trail and the composure to mask his guilt.