John Philpin

Despite the sensational title and cover, this book, written by an FBI profiler, is actually fairly subdued in tone. It covers the famous, unresolved rash of abductions in the San Francisco bay area in the 1980s and 1990s and the prime suspect, a sewage worker named Timothy Bindner. Bindner has never been charged with anything relating to the missing girls, but he has never been ruled out a suspect either. Tantalizing circumstances link him to the girls, and he is definitely a pedophile in the very least, but there is not a single shred of hard evidence implicating him in any kidnappings or even any child molestations.

Philpin interviewed Bindner extensively and presents a good portrait of the man's pathology. I don't know if he's actually mentally ill, but he's certainly a very strange individual. I admired the author's objectivity; Philpin never said whether he believed Bindner to be complicit or not, but simply put the facts down and let the reader decide. Stalemate kind of peters out at the end, but mostly this is not the fault of the author and is simply the result of having no real-life conclusion to make: none of the missing girls have been found and no arrests have been made.… (plus d'informations)