Scott Bonn is used to seeing a lot of women in the audience when he’s talking about serial killers.

The author of “Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers” said his audience is about 3-to-1 women-to-men on his speaking tours, which includes an appearance Feb. 8 at Packard Music Hall.

Part of it is emotional.

“Women empathize with the victims who, more often than not, are women in what I like to call these little morality plays that you see on ’48 Hours’ and ‘Dateline,'” Bonn said during a telephone interview. “This little morality play takes you into the woods, scares the hell out of you. But then by the end of the hour, you know peace and justice and the system prevails.”

But it’s also practical.

“I think there’s also a real serious desire on the part of women for safety and security and protection,” he said. “I find women asking me all the time, ‘What are the red flags? What should I look for? I don’t want to become the next victim of a Ted Bundy, but I don’t want to end up dating him or marrying him either.”

That empathy women have for the victim is something they should look for in a potential suitor.

According to Bonn, most serial killers are psychopaths. The good news is that less than 1% of the population fits that diagnosis, but it applies to significantly more men than women.

“One of the things you want to look for is an individual who has improper affect or no affect. If something happens, something that would seem to be tragic or sad, and there’s no reaction or something that seems out of place, that may potentially be a red flag. Conversely, something that should seem joyous and heartwarming, if there’s no reaction to it (also can be a red flag).”

Teasing or sarcasm to the point that it makes someone cry or very uncomfortable can be a sign of an antisocial personality disorder, he said.

Children who torture animals or delight in the suffering of others also is a dangerous sign.

Diagnosing children can be easier than adults because they haven’t developed the defense mechanisms to hide those behaviors yet.

“An adult has to learn to at least fake emotions,” Bonn said. “You can’t be a robot or else people are going to really think you’re very strange, so they learn to mimic emotion, even if they can’t feel it. I’ll often tell parents or teachers to look for these sorts of things, particularly in children, because children haven’t yet learned how to fake those responses.”

Bonn, a Cleveland native and 1979 Kent State University graduate, didn’t become a criminologist until later in life. He worked for 20 years in marketing for NBC in New York, and during that time he witnessed people like the Menendez brothers, Jeffrey Dahmer and O.J. Simpson become media sensations.

“I saw how some of these individuals became larger than life, what I call celebrity monsters, and how the world just becomes fixated on them,” Bonn said. “After 9/11, it was a tough time to be in advertising and marketing because of the downturn in the economy, so I went back to school and followed another passion, which is criminology. I got a Ph.D. and then started teaching.

“What I noticed is, any time the two words ‘serial killers’ would come out of my mouth, it’s like my students were hit with a cattle prod. So energized and excited. And it brought me back to thinking about what I had observed during my time in the media industry. I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to look at our fascination with serial killers as a society, as a culture, and then I’m also going to explore their minds at the same time, sort of turn the mirror both ways.”

Bonn has appeared on true crime shows and documentaries airing on A&E, Discovery, Oxygen, Investigation Discovery and the Travel Channel. In addition to his book on serial killers, Bonn is the author of “Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War in Iraq” and the novel “Evil Guardian,” which was based in part on his correspondence with serial killers David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) and Dennis Rader (Bind, Torture, Kill).

Just as serial killers study their prey, Bonn reached out to those two murderers for a specific reason.

“I believe that they really personified the narcissistic serial killer, the type that was so grandiose that they wanted notoriety, and both did,” he said. “They were both headline seekers. I thought that if I phrased my questions properly and appealed to their ego that they would be happy to chat. And so I played a little bit of Clarice Starling to their Hannibal Lecter (from ‘The Silence of the Lambs’) and guess what? They both took the bait immediately, because they’re the most interesting characters they know, so they want to talk about themselves.”

Those two serial killers and others will be part of the first half of the Packard Music Hall program, which Bonn called a multimedia production with video and interviews he’s conducted with murderers. The second half includes a Q&A with the audience.

“Anything is fair game, anything they ever wanted to know about serial killers but never got the opportunity to ask, they get to do with my show. That is oftentimes one of the highlights, because you just never know what people are going to ask.”