Catch me a killer, by Micki Pistorius

Catch me a killer, by Micki Pistorius. The Penguin Group (South Africa) Cape Town, 2004. ISBN 9780140297225 / ISBN 978-0-14-029722-5

Micki Pistorius was already prepared to enter the abyss when she joined the South African Police Force as a profiler. Whenever she got a serial killer into her mind she had to live in the abyss. In the five years that she had worked as a profiler she had been involved in more than thirty serial murders cases. Her book Catch me a killer therefor is a fully true story.

In the five years that I have worked as a profiler I have been involved in more than thirty serial killer cases. My level of involvement varies from being completely immersed in the investigation to sometimes just providing a profile. To my knowledge, South Africa has the second highest rate of serial homicides, the United States of America having the highest. Unconfirmed reports indicate that there have been fifteen serial killers active in Russia in the past five years. Serial killers can appear anywhere, but there is as yet no official international data bank available to provide accurate statistics. During the six-month period from January to July 1998 approximately 11 500 people were murdered in South Africa. By comparison, there were only a thousand people murdered in France during 1997. South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active. I am often asked if there is a particular case which is more special to me than others. The answer is no. Each detective investigating a case regards his case as special and their dedication inspires my full attention, in as much as it is humanly possible for me to give. Having said that, the case of the Station Strangler occupies a special place, only because it was my first, and every detective will always remember his first case as well. The Station Strangler case also brought me into contact with Mitchell's Plain, a place where I encountered the abyss for the first time. The year was 1992. I did not know then that what started as a one-off project would become my life's work. It was my introduction to the world of serial killers. I discovered the work of Robert Ressler and was struck by his Whoever Fights Monsters, and particularly by his adaptation of a quote from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra which appeared as a warning on the first page of his book: 'Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.' Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them. The abyss became my mental home. I do not think I consciously chose it: it beckoned and lured me and I suppose the crusader blood I inherited from my mother answered the call. At first I could not control my entering and surfacing from the abyss. Inside the abyss I found a dark and lonely place, closely related to hell. Had my religion not been so strong, I would never have gone into this place where even devils fear to tread. The abyss is lonely, but populated. Serial killers exist there and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand. [...] Serial killers experience the power over life and death as omnipotence. [...]

This is an excerpt from Catch me a killer, by Micki Pistorius.

Title: Catch me a killer
Subtitle: Serial murders. A profiler's true story
Author: Micki Pistorius
Genre: Crime sience
Publisher: The Penguin Group (South Africa)
Cape Town, South Africa, 2004
ISBN 9780140297225 / ISBN 978-0-14-029722-5
Paperback, 13 x 20 cm, 260 pages, photographs