"Aiming A Bit High"

In the beginning of this chapter, Ronson once again meets up with Bob Hare. Right away Bob accuses the concierge of being a psychopath after he "manhandles" and yells at Ronson for trying to use the telephone. The sit down and drink at the hotel bar and Bob tells Ronson about how there are certain experts, psychologists, and profilers traveling the world with little more than a Certificate of Attendance who might have a lot more influence on things like parole hearings and serial-killer incident rooms than they should. After that conversation Ronson seeks out Paul Britton. Britton was a criminal profiler who became famous after he correctly profiled the murderer of a young women. Britton did help to solve many cases but he wasn't always right. The times when he was wrong were just brushed under the rug and ignored. His career fell apart when it came to the murder of Rachel Nickell. He strongly believed that the murderer was a man named Colin Stagg, who turned out to be falsely accused. The police tried to force a confession out of him by using a woman named Lizzie. While the police were preoccupied with Stagg, the real murderer, Robert Napper, killed a woman and her daughter.

I actually enjoyed reading these two chapters a lot. The stories in both were very interesting and they captured my attention. I found these chapters to be different than most of the others so far in the book because they didn't necessarily have to do with the story of a particular psychopath. I thought that the story of Rachel North was extremely sad. This woman had to go through such a traumatic experience, and then had to deal with being accused of being fake and of being part of a conspiracy theory. I was a bit confused whether Ronson was trying to say that Shayler was a psychopath or not. Chapter 9 was also a bit depressing because this poor man was falsely accused of murder. I thought it was really wrong how the police tried to force a confession out of him by using that women. That doesn't seem right to me.