My Life Among the Serial Killers

Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers

By: Helen Morrison M.D., Harold Goldberg

Narrated by: Helen Morrison

Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than 80 serial killers around the world. What she has learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious killers known to man.

Morrison, a leading expert on serial killers, has spent as many as 400 hours alone with depraved murderers. In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She conducted the last interview with Ed Gein, 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. Dr. Morrison has received 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.

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

©2004 Helen Morrison and Harold Goldberg (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Very disapointing

This is mostly a meadering, self-indulgent book. The author spends too much time telling us how wonderful a person she is and not enough time on the subject matter.

I can highly recommend a book called 'Mindhunter' by John Douglas on serial killers. It's available on audio CD (published by Recorded Books) and is a brilliant listen. Hopefully Audible will offer it for download soon.

Outrageous

While the book initially captured my interest, I soon developed a dislike for Helen Morrison. While she claims to take a "scientific" approach to serial killers, she provides nothing but untestable theories. These include the notion that childhood suppositories contributed to John Wayne Gacy's crimes, yet, one day we will be able to use genetic screens to eradicate serial killing. She never provides justification for her belief that such killers are not responsible for their actions, save the occasional vague, Freudian term. I am not arguing that the book is boring, just infuriating.

Humans are Scary

Very interesting listening material.

Boring reader,boring writing

As a psychiatric nurse, I have always been intrigued by the minds of serial killers. I had hoped to hear a really detailed , and interesting account of these men's lives and that of their families. It is possible to have written something that really made you KNOW those men, know their wives,mothers , fathers, etc but this book left one wondering who they were. You get absolutely no feeling for the personality of the man who committed the crimes.
Worse still, the author also read the book and read it in a slow, boring monotone with pauses in the middle of sentences that made no sense and no feeling in her voice to give you any idea at all how SHE felt during her exposure to them.
I'll stick with Ann Rule's books. She may not have the creds that Dr. Morrison has (maybe she does. I don't recall her background) but at least she can write.

No depth

I was looking for insights like I found in van der Kolk's book, the body keeps score. Not informative

I'd give it ZERO stars...

If that were an option here. I hated this book. It is one of the most boring and self-serving books I've ever listened to (or read). I don't care about this woman having John Wayne Gacy's brain in her basement! I mean, what IS the point in that? He had already been autopsied and the brain had been looked at (no abnormalities) so why would she keep his brain in her basement? To be shocking? Not shocking to me, I think it borderlines on ridiculous. SAVE YOUR MONEY.

needed a ghostwriter

i was all set to buy this book when my local library called to say they had it. i checked it out and was delighted that i hadn't wasted a book credit buying it. while the subject matter is fascinating, the author should have had it ghostwritten and stuck to what she knows. just because you are intelligent and have vast experience with a subject doesn't make you a writer, as proven by this book. this was a mishmash of vague opinions, muddled hypotheses and long-winded speculation. the book goes nowhere, slowly and painfully.

Self-congratulatory and ultimately offensive

I expected a combination of the prurient and the sociological in this book, what I found was a series of paper-thin psychological profiles and an alarming call for genetic testing in childhood to determine who is a serial killer - not quite that simple a case, I admit, but not far from it...

This book is a crime

Sorry about that ; 0 but it was torture trying to listen to it.
The subject is one I'm fascinated by, but Morrison
managed to make it not just dull, but painful.

It's unfocused, and full of unrelated personal anecdotes, but what drove me to finally shut it off was when I realized her excessive rhetoric, writers cliches, and inability to be concise was
not a glitch, it's her writing style, and the subject was lost underneath it.

The woman cannot use an absolute word like "never" without adding something like
"not when he was a teenager, not when he fell of his bike, not when he was on trial, not when he was convicted.. never.
Or after "No one"
Not the F.B.I not the Police, not the Lawyers, not the psychiatrists..

Okay, No one means no one. WE GOT IT!

Additionally, she didn't seem aware that using four bland *and* redudant adjectives has the opposite of the intended effect.

And do we really need to hear
"As spring turned to summer, and summer to fall and fall to winter.."
I felt like I had been listening to 4 hours of grade 9 essays

Ironically, when discussing her cases, and detail was necessary, it wasn't there. I expected far more from someone directly involved in profiling.
Where was her editor? if all the garbage had been eliminated this would have been about 30 minutes long.

She made me admire all the more authors such as Joseph Wambaugh, who's judicious use of language and pointed descriptions hone the subject, not drown it.

Admittedly what I found intolerable would not bother everyone to the same extent. But there's not enough (or any) new, or intriguing information to make it worth wading through.

A definite pass.