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

• Author: Dyehouse, Sara K.
• Position: Book Review

My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers By Helen Morrison, M.D., and Harold Goldberg Reviewed by Sara K. Dyehouse

Yes, Virginia, monsters do exist. Helen Morrison has met some of them. In fact, she has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over the past 25 years chatting amiably with, and reading scores of letters from, serial murderers such as Richard Macek, Edward Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Robert Berdella, and Florida's own Bobby Joe Long. She even has sections of Gacy's brain in ajar in her garage, preserving it for the day when science advances enough to provide further information about this infamous killer of 33 young boys and men.

Obsessive about her reputation as an ethical, objective, and professional researcher, Dr. Morrison has refused for more than a decade to pay for additional interviews with Marcelo Costa de Andrade, one of Brazil's most notorious serial murderers, who in the early 1990s killed 14 young boys, drinking the blood of two. Her persistence, she hopes, will pay off, and eventually de Andrade will decide to grace her--free of charge--with his innermost thoughts about his murderous accomplishments.

In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison, a certified forensic psychiatrist, researcher, and self-proclaimed "profiler," purports to do more in her book than "spin tales about [her] dealings with serial killers." She is on a life-long quest to discover the cause(s) or precipitating factor(s) that lead people to commit serial murder. From her vast experience interviewing scores of multiple murderers, she is "firmly convinced that there is something in the genes that leads a person to become a serial killer." Consequently, she resoundingly rejects various "specious theories" that propose brain injury, childhood abuse, and/or malnutrition as the precipitating factors.

Taking pains to distinguish serial killers from psychopaths who are "[a]ble to kill without remorse," but who "are otherwise humans like the rest of us, able to experience joy and happiness," Dr. Morrison graphically details the gruesome experimental acts that her subjects have inflicted on their victims and their nonchalant...