Talking to ... Thomas Maeder

The serial killer is a figure of pop culture. This may be one reason why one of the strangest cases in this field is little known to this day: the case of the French doctor Marcel Petiot, who spread the rumor in occupied Paris that he was helping people escape to South America, but then murdered his victims, most of them Jews, himself. The American author Thomas Maeder has written an excellent book that captures the figure of the psychopath in all its complexity while at the same time allowing the madness of the time to emerge. And this outlines the cosmos of the author himself. Maeder, the son of a psychoanalyst, has studied the connection between Crime and Madness and the Origins and Evolution of the Insanity Defense. And he recently just finished work on a book that tells the story of a great passion - and in which love and crime bizarrely mix.

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