Customer Reviews

My Life Among the Serial Killers

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Count me in among the other reviewers of this book who found the writing poor and the writer pretentious. Morrison is constantly bragging about being an attractive woman of science, and seems bristled and condescending when prison guards react negatively towards a surreal reaction to hypnotism used for uncovering memories, a method even the most prestigious scientists find dubious and controversial.

Morrison makes countless unfounded opinions and inferences regarding her subjects and their intentions. For example, she claims she gradually realized that a prisoner who can't spell, actually misspells in his letters as a way of getting attention. Apparently murdering several people wasn't a sufficient cry for the limelight.

In "studying" the John Wayne Gacy crime for the defense, she interviews Jeff Rignall, maybe the only survivor of Gacy's rampage, and remarks that she "didn't gain a huge amount of insight into Gacy." Rignall ended up being the defense's star witness for the insanity plea.

But perhaps the most egregious error of this book is that this so-called expert on serial killers completely misrepresents the facts of history's most notorious serial killers. She writes of Gilles de Rais and his unimaginably horrific crimes in exploitative detail without even a mention of the fact that his confession was extorted with severe torture and that he was later exonerated of his crimes. Of Elizabeth Bathory, she writes that she killed her victims to bathe in their blood to preserve her beauty, something that never was mentioned in her trial and which was a myth only perpetuated in legenis widely discredited as a myth. This misinformation is from a self-proclaimed serial killer expert!!

One of the most revealing lines of this book is in her interview with Ed Gain, an interview of about 10 utterly mundane statements and an interview that was touted as the last interview with Ed Gain in the promotion of this book, she "added that I was a doctor and I wasn't going to sensationalize his already sensationalized life." But that is exactly what she does with these men.

I heard Dr. Morrison on NPR. Her accounts of working with serial killers sounded fascinating. I'm a licensed clinical social worker in privare practice ( a psychotherapist) and often work with individuals referred by the Court. So.....I thought this would be a great book to possibly increase my clinical understanding of serial killers.

I was very disappointed. In my opinion, the book was long on graphic descriptions of torture and short on clinical explnations or theories about what personality features/attributes/dynamics these killers have in common.
I found it somewhat torturous to read many of the descriptions of torture and not feel deeply moved by the pain that the victims surely endured. However, the descriptions would have been "worth it" if they and subsequent analysis by Dr. Morrison lead to an increase in my clinical knowledge. Well, it did not. A snipit of insight here and there---but you could probably get more information just surfing the Net.

Typically when I finish with a book, I store it on a book shelf. With this one, I threw it out with the recycleables.

This book offers real insights into the minds of serial killers, what motivates them, what triggers them, and how they see themselves. There are some nuggets here that may help law enforcement officials identify or profile serial killers, if they can overlook the irritating arrogance and perceived self-importance of the presentation.

The book is not well written, despite being authored by a highly educated medical doctor who teamed with a talented writer. It's natural to ask why is this so. Is it possible the arrogance that flows through the book carried through the writing process, that the writer was forced to be merely a scrivener. The book has that sort of feel to it, and if so, that's a shame. Because there is substance to this book. It's just too much a shame one has to wade through so much of the how great I am packaging to get to it.

I have never read much about murder, killers and the horrible things that some humans do, though I was interested in a book that promised an insight into the minds of the world's most notorious murderers. The book did provide me with some insight and also provided some interesting reading - the gory details were interesting as were the authors theories. But this book does have a down side. It seems to be an attempt at an autobiography and a clinical study rolled into one - and it doesn't work. You find the tempre switch dramatically at the oddest moments; one second your reading a very dry theory about why a serial killer is not a mass murderer and the next second you seem to be reading about how sure the author is about how she has ensured her profession won't effect her children. I did at times get the impression that the author is ranting about percieved injustices done to her or criticisms made against her, a sensed at times an element of "I told you so" and I also feel the book is partly her way of forwarding her own political agenda (towards the end of the book the author states that she is absoloutley correct in some of her theories but the government and other rights groups are holding her back - and to hell with some of them!)- these things on there own are fine but they don't seem to belong in a book which promises an insight into the minds of the world's worst serial killers. I definately feel I have a greater insight into the mind of a doctor/author who has a husband and two sons and has at times in her life been involved with the study of serial killers.

Its worth a read but dont let the author demand you agree with her every insinct, insight and theory. She says throughout the book, over and over, 'who knows?'...

The first thing that struck me about this book is it seems the author, Dr. Morrison, spends more time complaining about how bad she has it in her chosen profession--between the macho cops who supposedly disrespect her, the correctional facility guards who supposedly try to intimidate and control her, the prosecutors who are supposedly all morons--than she does talking about serial killers.

She dismisses psychiatrists hired by prosecutors (psychiatrists who say something she does not agree with) as, after all, just being hired guns who will say anything to make a buck. However, she herself is paid when she testifies for the defense. I cannot believe she doesn't see this discrepancy in her way of thinking.

You will drop the book in disbelief when she testifies at the John Wayne Gacy trial that he so very much did not know what he was doing when he raped and murdered dozens of boys that when the prosecution asks, would he have done these things if a police officer was standing next to him, she answers, "Yes."

This book wanders all over the map and rarely makes any sense. The chapters themselves do not build to logical conclusions and by the end of the book, you will wonder what the point was to begin with.

Okay, so maybe the lurid title should have tipped me off, but given the description on the back of this book I was expecting something of considerably more scientific substance than I got. Morrison is a forensic psychiatrist, purportedly one of the first women in the field (or perhaps the only, given her self-laudatory tone) and one of the world's foremost. But she seems less interested in discussing the evolution of the serial killer and offering support for the theories she does put forth than in rehashing the details of these crimes. Case in point, she spends a rather substantial chunk of her novel discussing the crimes of Gilles de Rais. Her purported purpose is to demonstrate that serial killers are not a new phenomenon, but does one really need more than a sentence or two to establish this? Her special insight comes from working directly with 80 serial killers. Her work should focus on the ones she knows, not diverge into the stories of centuries dead killers like Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory. Morrison doesn't have much to offer anyone who has done substantial reading on serial killers. There's more information and insight into killers to be found in the thoroughly researched works of English professor Harold Schechter than in this tome even if he never met the killers involved. And the books are better written, to boot.

I wish I had read the reviews written about this book before I bought it. This woman has a chip on her shoulder the size of Idaho! Her theories are laughable and downright dangerous. She dismisses the life-altering trauma that Gacy's surviving victim endured, and most likely continues to endure, by stating something along these lines: "The young man would eventually be able to lead a normal life". Is she serious? She's supposed to be an MD who also practized Psychology why then does she seem unfamiliar with PTSD?

I was also unable to finish the book. I put it away disgusted at the author and at her asertions that serial killers do not derive sexual pleasure from their acts. That serial killers don't have alcohol/drug dependencies (Gacy was a pill popper, Dahmmer was an alcoholic) That the fact that they engage in acts of necrophilia is irrelevant (Ridgeway, Bundy, Dhammer, and even Gacy ALL had sex with their victims after death) She must surely live in a vaccum, as she readily dismisses the many KNOWN traits that most serial killers share: Abusive parents/Controlling Mother, Cruelty to animals, bed-wetting, etc. In her mind, everyone, from the early FBI profilers, down to her fellow doctors are wrong and they dismiss her "theories" not because they are garbage, but because she's a woman.

Please don't buy this book.