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Spotsylvania County resident Gregg McCrary has written his first book, 'The Unknown Darkness,' examining the most remarkable criminal cases from his 25-year career with the FBI. |
Retired FBI profiler Gregg McCrary has offered his insight into some of the Fredericksburg area's most notorious crimes and criminals, often veering in opinion from his high-profile colleagues.
But he's almost always right.
Last October, as police stopped every white van from Rockville to Richmond looking for a sniper, the 25-year FBI veteran urged everyone not to put too much stock in the vehicle description.
When other criminal profilers described the unknown sniper as a deranged loner, McCrary said he wouldn't be surprised if there were two suspects.
Ten days later, the FBI arrested John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo as they slept in a raggedy blue Chevrolet sedan at a rest stop in Maryland.
"If we turn out to be 100 percent right, then chances are good that somewhere along the way, we got lucky," McCrary writes of the profession in his first book "The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us."
McCrary, now a consultant living in Spotsylvania County, follows in the footsteps of other famed FBI profilers who have put to paper their experiences studying the world's most bizarre and brutal crimes.
The book, co-written with forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsfield, went on sale in bookstores today.
In the 300-page account of his life as a criminal profiler, McCrary describes 10 of his most provoking crimes, including the videotaped torture and murders of two teenage girls, a mass slaying at a Buddhist temple and the case of a celebrated Austrian writer who killed prostitutes while covering the stories of his crimes for local media.
When McCrary was a cub in the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, which is based at the FBI Academy on Quantico Marine Corps Base, he was asked to study a series of sadistic rapes outside Toronto in the late 1980s. He warned that the attacker would soon turn to murder.
McCrary didn't know it yet, but the killing had already begun.
A year later and not too far away, police in Rochester, N.Y., asked for McCrary's help when four women vanished. Eight were already missing. When one of the bodies turned up, perversely mutilated, McCrary urged police to stake out the scene next time.
When even more women went missing months later, he urged the police to launch a massive search for bodies. They did. Soon, they found another body--and the killer standing on a bridge looking down at the remains.
The tales in McCrary's book are often shocking and grisly, but he feels it's important that people understand the darker side of human nature.
He believes understanding leads to capturing some of the most vile predators among us.
"Criminals are always devising new ways to commit their crimes and because of that we can best fulfill our potential for tracking and stopping them by integrating the disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and forensic sciences with the practical experience of frontline investigators," the former agent writes.
McCrary, a graduate of Ithaca College in New York state, retired from the FBI after 25 years. He served as a field agent in Buffalo, New York City and Detroit before joining the Behavioral Sciences Unit in 1988.
He has a grown son and daughter and lives in Fawn Lake with his wife.
To reach KARI PUGH: 540/374-5413 kpugh@freelancestar.com
