Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #717133 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

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.

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

Review
“A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“Interesting and sometimes disturbing...This highly recommended book will make an excellent addition to any collection in criminal justice.” (Library Journal )

“Profoundly enlightening….Morrison provides startling insights into what factors breed serial killers…An absorbing, disturbing book.” (Booklist )

Customer Reviews

Interesting in parts, but not really that good overall
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.

I agree with some of the others who wrote
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.

Badly written and unconvincing--skip it.
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.