My Life Among the Serial Killers : Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers

Rating:
Summary: Sickness bag needed
Review: This book was poorly written. It repeated itself numerous times. Dr. Morrison acts as though the world, including cops, are against her. They say psychologists enter the field due to their own personal issues, and this book shows that. She bashes the police, detectives, correctional officers, and FBI in nearly every chapter. If you interview as poorly as you wote this book, I wouldn't want you on my investigation either. Book is poor, don't waste your money. If you are looking for a well written book about serial killers, read "Alone with the Devil."

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This book will disappoint many true crime buffs. Most of the
serial killers she writes about are well-known, and she devotes a
lot of space to synopses of their crime sprees. This might be
useful for true crime newbies trying to get up to speed, but I
wanted to hear more about her interviews with these people.
Among them are Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Peter Sutcliffe (the
"Yorkshire Ripper"), Bobby Joe Long, Wayne Williams, Fred and
Rosemary West, and Gary Ridgway (the "Green River Killer").
Even Gilles de Rais and Vlad Tepes are covered, and I know she
never interviewed them!
She doesn't seem to derive any insight into these killers from her
interviews. For example, she puzzles over why Robert Berdella
would drug and restrain someone who was supposedly his buddy,
make him a sex slave, and perform hideous experiments on him
(like rubbing Drano in his eyes), all the while logging careful
notes of his victim's reactions. Berdella doesn't have an answer
for her. I don't know either. That's why I was reading the book, to
see what insights she gained through her years of experience
with these people.
But some of her interactions with them are interesting. For
example, she enters Gacy's jail cell and he directs her to a seat
with no access to the door. That action in itself demonstrates
how Gacy dealt with people. He was trying to psychologically
manipulate her, put her at a disadvantage, so she would feel
vulnerable and uncomfortable. She remarks on how clean and
tidy his cell is, and he describes himself as a neat freak,
super-organized, and says he scrubbed the floor and walls
himself. Yet he stored decomposing corpses in the crawl space
of his house. That certainly tells you something about how he
was able to compartmentalize his life -- public-minded citizen and
businessman by day, sadistic killer trolling for victims by night.
I would have liked to read more of these simple observations,
because they turn out to be enlightening.
Her conclusion is that serial killers are that way from birth
(actually, from conception), and not responsible for their actions.
I agree with her that they probably have a compulsion to kill (but
where does that compulsion come from?), and become addicted
to it, but anyone who is able to commit crimes for months and
years, and cover them up, knows what they are doing.
She takes what I feel is an unwarranted dig at police detectives
and FBI profilers, saying their methods are not scientific. Well,
they're not scientific in the sense of setting up a controlled
experiment, but they do follow the scientific method of deriving
conclusions from careful observations. If experience shows that
most killers operate within their "comfort zone," an area they are
familiar with, then you can conclude that the perpetrator of a
particular crime probably lives or works within a certain radius of
the crime scene, or knows the area for some other reason. The
comment just irked me because they're trying to get killers off
the streets, while she's helping get them off the hook (as an
expert witness for the defense).

Rating:
Summary: Badly written and unconvincing--skip it.
Review: 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.