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

Morrison, Helen; Goldberg, Harold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470869771 ISBN 13: 9780470869772

Publisher: Wiley, 2004

Synopsis

 

 

Helen Morrison produces controversial theories as to why people commit multiple murders, having interviewed some of the most notorious killers in the world.  Are serial killers born?   Does child abuse really play a part in the formation of a killer's psyche?  Are serial killers neurologically different from the rest of humanity?  Helen Morrison provides her opinions on these and many other questions in her detailed portrayal of the 21 murderers featured in the book.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

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 more than that. She is one of the world's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in rooms with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler ever has before.

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; Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their Gloucester "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 they adopt. 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 ninetheenth-century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.

Through it all, Dr. Morrison's goal has been to discover the reasons 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.

From the Back Cover:

"I've always had a thing about eyes. What's the saying - eyes are the window to a persons soul. OK, I don't believe in a soul, but Yes, I think they are a window to the person inside. Its hard to lie or fool someone when they're looking into your eyes. Too weird. Looking into those girls eyes when they died. None of them looked back into mine very long. Maybe they could see it, that they were going to die. Usually they looked over or just past me. All but Simms. I kept her blindfolded and tried to knock her out first. I didn't want to look at her. I don't know why. Maybe I was afraid she would see it, and I didn't want her to . I didn't want her to know she was dying." - from a letter written by killer Bobby Joe Long to Dr. Helen Morrison

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0470869771
• ISBN 13: 9780470869772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288