Helen Morrison

My Life Among the Serial Killers wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped. In fact, a lot of it was dull, particularly the final two chapters, and it was a book that was hard to get into, and I wasn't sure at first whether I would read it all the way through. I did, however, although I admit to some skimming over the boring technical details of those final two chapters.

Helen Morrison is a psychiatrist who studies the behaviour of serial killers. Based in Chicago, she is probably best known for her study of John Wayne Gacy, and has spent decades trying to understand what makes serial killers behave the way that they do. I don't envy her this work. I could not deal with the nearness of (mostly) men who kill and torture numerous people.

I don't know what I think about her theory (I am not going to mention it for fear of spoiling someone else's read) about why serial killers kill, or about why they behave the way they do.

Not a great book. Interesting to the die-hard true crime fan, but not enough to keep me reading - I kept putting the book down to do something else, which says a lot about how I felt about reading it.… (más)

She’s a psychiatrist who works as a profiler and claims to have interviewed 80 serial killers. A lot of it feels like bullshit, like how she talked to Ed Gein, but has nothing new to add about him. She says she had a correspondence with UK accessory to murder Rose West, but sorry, she doesn’t have permission to share any of the content. True crime name dropping?
Her own theories seem like personal opinion - she thinks serial killers aren’t psychopaths but are stuck at an infant level of emotional development, and she says there are no female serial killers, which is demonstrably false. The only interesting parts were descriptions of a few cases I wasn’t aware of.
Though I’ll admit my jaw dropped at the fact that Rose West, in prison for life, became engaged to the bass player from Slade, a glam band I like. Turns out it was Slade II, a later lineup of new musicians, and they fired him “for the good name of the band”.… (más)

Hm. An interesting theme (naturally!) and Dr. Morrison goes through quite many cases, a couple of which I didn't know that much about. At first the approach felt scientific and convincing, but the further it went the less convincing it became. At the very end where Dr. Morrison first says that serial murder is basically all in the genes and that's that, and then wants to do PET scans and all other kind of scans to serial murderers' brains to really understand what's going on. I really don't think it's that simple. Towards the end she claims that serial murders are not able to complete lengthy written psychological tests (more that twelve hours is a long time for anyone, I don't think you need to do that at one go) because they are not able to even focus on having a discussion for that long. I mean, come on. That's just bullshit. My attention started to scatter towards the end, when I realised that instead of telling a narrative she was baiscally just listing different murderers. The point really was beyond me at that point.

To conclude, anyone who carries a piece of a serial killer's brain around is not someone who can jugde others for keeping murder trophies. There. That was 5+ hours of my life wasted.… (más)