A young woman disappears from the convenience store where she works. Her skeletonized remains are found in a field, near a torture device...

A funeral parlor worker steals a corpse she has fallen in love with...

A married couple picks up a female hitchhiker. They kidnap her and for seven years keep her as a sexual slave...

For sixteen years, profiler Roy Hazelwood served on the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, specializing in aberrant sex crimes-cases of sexual sadism, suicidal autoeroticism, pedophilia, necrophilia, serial rape and murder-that brought him face-to-face with human instincts darker than he ever anticipated, and raised questions he devoted his career to answering. Who commits these acts? What motivates them? How common are they? The answers are as unexpected as they are unsettling.

Dark Dreams explores the minds of the insidious and perversely creative criminals Hazelwood has encountered. He reveals the methods of tracking them, catching them, bringing them to justice, and perhaps impossibly, understanding them. He offers a chronicle of crime and punishment like no other, set in a depraved world where the darkness in the mind of man can be frighteningly infinite.