In the sticky Toronto summer of 1986, a phone rang, a young girl vanished, and Canada—safe and sound—changed forever. The brutal murder of 11-year-old Alison Parrott, followed one year later by a new horror, a sexual predator known as “The Scarborough Rapist,” signalled that a new breed of criminal wasprowling Canada. The old motives didn’t apply. Neither did the investigative techniques.Years later, Inspector Ron MacKay would help stop the Scarborough Rapist, and ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analyst System) would help to identify Alison Parrott’s killer.

Ron MacKay is an improbable revolutionary, a Saskatchewan farm boy out to make the world a safer place. Yet this unassuming RCMP inspector has helped to change the policing world and the shadow world inhabited by the most heinous predators—forever. He has been the driving force behind ViCLAS, the world’s most sophisticated computer database to connect serial rapes and murders.

Dark Paths, Cold Trails is the true story of some of Canada’s most notorious and lesser-known serial killers and rapists, and their victims; a policing community struggling to cope with a new kind of sexual predator; and a high-tech solution combining behavioral analysis, psychological and geographic profiling, forensic psychiatry and serial-crime linkage.

Dark Paths, Cold Trails revisits the Clifford Olson case, the trigger for the RCMP to develop a better way to stop serial criminals. It details how MacKay’s profiling skills helped lead police to identify Paul Bernardo as “The Scarborough Rapist” and the schoolgirl killer in Burlington and St. Catharines, Ontario.

Destined to become a much talked-about book on a little-known Canadian story, Dark Paths, Cold Trails is absorbing true crime reading.

DOUG CLARK is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in publications such as The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Maclean’s and The Toronto Star. He is the author of Unkindest Cut: The Torso Murder of Selina Shen; Billion $$$ High, an examination of the illegal drug trade in North America; and Heart to Heart, an insider’s look at heart surgery for patients and their families. Doug Clark lives in Ottawa.

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