?On 24 February 1994, the police turned up at 25 Cromwell Street, an ordinary three-story house in central Gloucester, with a warrant to dig up the back garden. The door was answered by Stephen West, the 20-year-old son of the householders Fred and Rosemary West. The police told him that they were looking for the body of his sister Heather, who had disappeared in May 1987 at the age of 16.' The world's most depraved murderers were somebody's neighbour, someone else's father. What turns a person into a killer? Enter the dark world of true crime? With nineteen chilling chapters on notorious killers including Harold Shipman and Charles Manson, those less well known such as Albert DeSalvo and Dennis Nilsen, and the massacres at Hungerford and Columbine, this book examines how and why these people became the most barbaric murderers of our times.