My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers [Mass Market Paperback]

Helen Morrison (Author), Harold Goldberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 2005

Over the course of twenty-five years, Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man. Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.

In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.

Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.

Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With serial killers a hot topic in the wake of Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning performance in Monster, forensic psychiatrist Morrison's memoir of working with more than 80 serial killers couldn't be more timely. The author's countless hours of interviews with John Wayne Gacy and others of his ilk have led her to a controversial conclusion: she believes there's a serial killer gene ("He is a serial killer when he is a fetus, even as soon as sperm meets egg to create the genes of a new person"). Unfortunately, she offers little in support of this deterministic view, and she will offend some readers with an implied exoneration of criminals whom she describes as "completely unaware of the process leading up to murder," despite the detailed planning and preparation displayed by many of them. And even readers who are willing to have an open mind about Morrison's theories are likely to find some aspects of her report a little creepy, as when she discusses a treasured trophy she keeps in her basement: "I place John Gacy's brain back in the box because my kids are calling for me upstairs."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In her role as consultant to a variety of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, forensic psychiatrist Morrison has interviewed and studied such notables as John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, and Wayne Williams, along with many other, less well known but equally horrific serial killers. Her memoir is not what you might call pleasant reading; it is relentlessly unpleasant, as a matter of fact, as Morrison describes these men and women and their crimes in precise, often graphic detail. At the same time, however, it is a profoundly enlightening book. Morrison provides startling insights into what factors breed serial killers, and she avoids the broad generalizations that make other books of the topic seem slick and superficial. Still, Morrison recognizes that experts have only the sketchiest understanding of what makes a person commit murder repeatedly. This is an absorbing, disturbing book that makes it clear just how much we have yet to learn. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Avon (January 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060524081
• ISBN-13: 978-0060524081
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #786,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting in parts, but not really that good overall, September 19, 2004

By 

world class wreckin cru "dallasite" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers (Hardcover)

Dr. Morrison has a 100 lifetimes of experience with serial killers. She's interviewed and studied many of them including John Wayne Gacy and Bobby Joe Long. She has even been able to conduct mail correspondence with some of them for years. What has she learned from all of this? Quite a bit for sure. She is convinced that serial killers are essentially created in utero. Genetic anomalies create serial killers not parental upbringing or life experience. Dr. Morrison arrives at this conclusion essentially because the data she has collected throughout the years has convinced her that head injuries, childhood experience, social status, etc. does not consistently have much to do with producing a serial killer.

Is she right? In my opinion, she is partially right, but her exclusion of other reasons is simply not good science. No doubt certain people are genetically predisposed to engage in antisocial behavior and even murder, but Dr. Morrison's assertion that serial killers are essentially created in the womb sounds bogus to me. Genetic predisposition can only be operated upon by environmental factors to engender certain behaviors, yet the author dismisses all the killers' life experiences as not significant enough to contribute to their actions. As she points out, it is true that the serial killers that she studied do not have a consistent set of life experiences, but she does not even account for the fact that different life experiences affect different people differently.

Finally, her thesis is not helped by the fact that her writing is obnoxiously self-righteous. She portrays many people she has dealt with including lawyers, writers, and fellow psychiatrists as incompetent, misguided, and dishonest. Her characterizations may be correct, but since she portrays herself consistently as an intrepid, truth-seeking scientist whose views simply must be correct, her writing often comes off as arrogant and hollow.

Don't waste your time on this one. Get Hunting Humans by Elliott Leyton instead for an interesting viewpoint.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Badly written and unconvincing--skip it., September 4, 2004

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abt1950 "abt1950" (usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers (Hardcover)

This book, by forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison and Harold Goldberg, is a personal account of her experiences and conclusions researching the most heinous of murders. Over the course of her career, Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers and conducted extensive interviews with many of them. In this book, she and Goldberg recount her experiences chronologically in order to paint a picture of how her thinking on serial killers evolved. Morrison's experiences should make for some interesting and insightful reading. Unfortunately, they don't.

First off, this is a very badly written book. It's vague in many places and the actual case accounts are sketchy. "My Life" reads very much like a series of long taped conversations between the two authors, which Goldberg then transcribed and edited. I didn't find a lot of depth in the narrative. Morrison's descriptions often seem to be missing necessary details about why she interpreted things the way she did. In fact, given the information she included, there often seemed to be alternative interpretations of her subjects behavior. Some rewriting and the addition of more information could have strengthened her interpretations considerably.

The authors engage in some rather vague theorizing that could be better explained. According to Morrison, serial killers have no real personality structures and have not developed emotionally beyond the level of infancy. She may be right, but it's hard to tell from this book because she really never develops her hypothesis in sufficient detail or explains much of the theory on which she bases it. She makes a passing reference or two to Freud and, late in the book, one to Kohut, but that's about it. She never really explains her thoughts in a way that a lay audience can really understand. Early on, she describes attempts at hypnotizing serial killer Richard Macek to retrieve details of his killings buried in his memory. Today that work would be highly suspect because of new understandings of hypnosis and the creation of false memories. Morrison never refers to that research, although she does state that the explosive effect of hypnosis on her subject that led her to refrain from hypnosis from then on.

Morrison's ultimate goal in her research is understanding what makes someone a serial killer. For her, the mystery can be solved by examining the chemical mix of neurotransmitters in the brain, the role of the hypothalmus in regulating action and emotion, and ultimately the genes that control these processes . She's keen on testing the brains of convicted killers through modern means of imaging (PET scans, MRIs etc) to see how the thought processes of serial killers might differ from those of normal people. There is probably much to be learned via this approach, although there are legal and ethical considerations to this. However, I doubt that the ultimate explanation lies purely in the realm of nature. Many times Morrison seems to brush of the role of nurture in creating a serial killer. This is too reductionistic, as is her calling the violent behavior of serial killers an "addiction." The parallel may have some merit, but it's an oversimplification.

Morrison claims (and I have no reason to doubt it) that she is a renowned expert on serial killers and that she has been widely consulted by law enforcement, and by lawyers both prosecuting and defending the killers. .However, until the last few pages of her book, the tone of the narrative makes it sounds as if she has been working in a vacuum. Many of her references to the lawyers, prosecutors and police with whom she worked are disparaging. At the beginning, her comments about being one of the few women in what was still a man's field have merit. But as the book goes on, Morrison's presentation of herself becomes more and more annoying. By the end of the book, it seems as if she's as interested in blowing her own horn as doing research in her field. In sum, there are far better books on serial killers available.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I agree with some of the others who wrote, July 29, 2004

By 

A. McCLure (Vidalia, LA;Native New Orleanian) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers (Hardcover)

that while this book does have some interesting facts, conversations, and letters from the serial killers, the author diverges about 20% of the time on her personal rants. The author spends a lot of time telling us how "objective" she is, but gives the impression that she is exactly the same as those she claims to detest so much--egotisticial and arrogant. A good portion of the last chapter of the book is devoted to venting about another psychiatrist she thinks has copied her theories...who cares? The politics of law enforcement and psychiatry should have been left for a separate volume. I also agree that her theories seem quite antiquated. The minute a person starts quoting Freud I get a little skeptical. Basically, she believes all the serial killers are stuck in infancy. Even more, she claims one serial killer manifested blisters on his hands as he was conversing with her about his past crimes. Nevertheless, it is an interesting read, but this author tends to be highly annoying in her manner of writing.