It was a good but frustrating read. I’d still read more books by Paul Britton but I’d definitely take what he says with more of a pinch of salt than I did when I started reading this one. What he searches for at the scene of the crime are not fingerprints – he looks for the ‘mind trace’ left behind by those responsible: the psychological characteristics that can help the police identify and understand the nature of the perpetrator.” For all you aspiring forensic and criminal psychologists out there, if you’re looking for a bit of summer reading, I’d highly recommend The Jigsaw Man. As early as 1983, Leicester local police turned to Paul Britton for help with the Caroline Osborne murder. The young woman had been brutally murdered the year before and found with satanic symbols on it. Despite the questioning of 15,000 people and the provisional arrest of 80 suspects, all investigations had previously been unsuccessful and the police were now hoping for new investigations. This case was one of the first in the UK to consider the involvement of a clinical psychologist.

Paul Britton grew up in a modest family with his younger brother Anthony and his single mother. When he was twelve years old, his mother married a former major in the Red Army who had left the Soviet Union after World War II as a declared anti-communist . The James Bulger murder is an event that I remember well and I, like many, was horrified when we found out that he had been murdered by two young boys. Britton gives quite a lot of detail on the case including what the boys did to James before and after they killed him. This is not easy reading and is definitely something that has stayed with me since I finished the book. Consider yourself warned.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 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. For psychologists such as Canter the idea of a lone psychologist being called in ad hoc to help in police investigations cannot work. When he is asked at what point a psychologist should be brought into a police investigation his reply is simply: "Before the crime." Whether he was at fault or not I don’t really know, but the theme throughout the book is that Britton is fantastic at his job, loved by the police that he worked with and relied upon to solve numerous cases that he was instrumental in ensuring that the perpetrators were caught and convicted. This did get a little bit wearing and made me start to question how much of each story we were really being told. In something as subjective as psychology and profiling it is surely impossible that someone involved in so many cases didn’t get it wrong once, not even a bit wrong, but that seems to be what Britton thinks, or at least wants his readers to think.

He should have a history of failed or unsatisfactory relationships, if he had relationships at all. In addition to his sexual abnormality, he is likely to have some kind of sexual dysfunction, such as difficulty having an erection or controlling ejaculation . [..] If so, there was no reason to believe that the malfunction would have subsided over time. Psychological profiler, Paul Britton details his involvement in helping the police to solve crimes, including high-profile cases of the 90s, such as Fred and Rose West and Jamie Bulger’s killers. The result is an interesting (if gruesome) perspective on criminality and police procedure.His appearance before the British Psychological Society stems from a complaint about Colin Stagg's treatment. It is understood that it has taken so long for the society to put the allegations before Britton because of the possibility that civil action would be taken against the psychologist. Notably, Britton’s credentials remain in dispute, as his profiling led to the prolonged arrest of an innocent man. Although Britton claims he draws from verified psychological thinking, it’s impossible not to suspect that some of his profiling is based on conjecture. He also makes some statements about the intersection of fantasy and reality that I found unconvincing. Paul Britton has helped with most of the high-profile cases that have hit our newspapers and TV screens in the last twenty years. He doesn't glorify the cases he covers, he simply tells the story of their investigation. The police, in most cases, come out looking good. We learn very little about Paul himself, but you cannot help but realise what his job must have cost him. He mentions his faith, and I hope he holds on to it, because nothing else could make sense out of what he sees every week. You can't put it down because you wouldn't sleep , until you knew the people responsible for the crimes were safely behind bars.

Paul Britton has incredible insight into the criminal mind, and has worked on some gruelling cases. The hearing is important to the society. It is campaigning to be given statutory status - a psychologist cannot be compelled to attend a disciplinary hearing or to swear on oath - and for the title of psychologist to be protected. At present anyone can say they are a psychologist. One respected practitioner, who prefers not to be named, says: "I'm appalled it's taken so long but it's of enormous importance that the British Psychological Society looks at the details of this case and takes a clear view." 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. BBC News, Oct. 30, 2002: charges against Paul Britton dropped (in English, with photo of Paul Britton) While the subject matter, for the most part, is both carry and horrific, Britton goes out of his way to make it as digestible as he can. He split the book up to show the type of cases he works on and how each requires a different skill set to break apart. For many people living in England a lot of them will be very recognizable. For those outside perhaps not after all each of your countries has cases that spent week s in the news and will be remembered forever. For me, at least the serial killers Fred and Rosemary west is still rattling about in my subconscious. While I was too young to really take any notice of it at the time it is one of those stories that has left a stain that will never go away. The other is that of the Jamie Bulger, it wasn't until reading this book that I realized these two boys who had been turned in the spawn of the devil by the news were in fact around my own ages. A fact that seems to have a very chilling effect on me. In reading their interviews you get a very disturbing insight into these two boys worlds and just how little they cared. 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. 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.

Forensic psychologist Paul Britton can 'walk through the minds' of those who murder, rape, torture, extort and kidnap. He can see the world through their eyes and know what they're thinking. That is why the police have called on him to help with many high-profile criminal investigations and catch those responsible.The police decided that there was now enough evidence and brought charges . After twelve months in prison, the undercover investigation and its methods in the trial were heavily criticized by Judge Justice Ognall and judged to be unsuitable for providing evidence and rejected. In his judgment he wrote: " [..] I fear that this behavior not only reveals exaggerated zeal, but also represents a massive attempt to incriminate a suspect through clearly deceptive behavior of the most offensive kind. [..] Any attempt, the material collected through the undercover investigation processing and using is doomed to failure. [..] The prosecution tried to convince me that the purpose of the exercise was to induce the defendant to either exonerate himself or to further incriminate himself. I feel compelled to state that I consider this account of the action to be highly insincere. ". Other experts who were brought into the trials at a later point in time also said that the recorded conversations between Lizzie James and Colin Stagg had such a suggestive pornographic character that they could not believe it. The charges against Stagg were dropped. This one now sued the police for compensation. 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 .