True stories from a forensic psychologist in prisons and out.


‘The most dangerous people I met weren’t monsters. They were broken children wearing adult faces.’

Pamela Nathan, clinical and forensic psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, uncovers the inner worlds of society’s most dangerous and broken—whether behind bars or hidden in plain sight.

In Pain Bleeds Crime, she shares twenty-three gripping true stories from her decades working in maximum-security prisons, courts, and forensic hospitals. The crimes are shocking—murder, rape, paedophilia, assault, fetishism, bestiality, and more—but what lies beneath is often even more confronting.

Each offender, whether male, female or transgender, reveals a hidden world shaped by trauma, pain, and silence. Pamela enters these inner worlds to feel and then to have revealed the internal crime scenes, to see what made them break—mentally, emotionally, morally. These aren’t excuses. They’re revelations.

You’ll come face-to-face with people whose crimes horrified the public—people who insist they’re not violent, or that “it just happened”—and come face-to-face with the dark truth: the past never really goes away. With unflinching honesty and rare insight, Pamela shows how the past never really stays buried—and how behind every act of violence, there’s a story waiting to be told.

Brutally honest, deeply unsettling, and impossible to forget, Pain Bleeds Crime is a journey into the darkest parts of humanity.


‘Mad, bad, or sad—when we listen to the story, we see the person.’


‘A chilling exploration of the trauma and pain behind the most heinous crimes.’