crime and criminals

This book is good, don't get me wrong. However, the reader has to get through the author continuous complaining about her not being treated fairly in the workplace. She should have saved that for another book instead of trying to get her digs in here and there. She basically comes across with a poor me attitude. Her situation is once in a lifetime. She should have tried to profile these killers better. Instead of being insightful, it is just a quick read. She certainly can't top John Douglas.

This book will disappoint many true crime buffs. Most of the
serial killers she writes about are well-known, and she devotes a
lot of space to synopses of their crime sprees. This might be
useful for true crime newbies trying to get up to speed, but I
wanted to hear more about her interviews with these people.
Among them are Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Peter Sutcliffe (the
"Yorkshire Ripper"), Bobby Joe Long, Wayne Williams, Fred and
Rosemary West, and Gary Ridgway (the "Green River Killer").
Even Gilles de Rais and Vlad Tepes are covered, and I know she
never interviewed them!
She doesn't seem to derive any insight into these killers from her
interviews. For example, she puzzles over why Robert Berdella
would drug and restrain someone who was supposedly his buddy,
make him a sex slave, and perform hideous experiments on him
(like rubbing Drano in his eyes), all the while logging careful
notes of his victim's reactions. Berdella doesn't have an answer
for her. I don't know either. That's why I was reading the book, to
see what insights she gained through her years of experience
with these people.
But some of her interactions with them are interesting. For
example, she enters Gacy's jail cell and he directs her to a seat
with no access to the door. That action in itself demonstrates
how Gacy dealt with people. He was trying to psychologically
manipulate her, put her at a disadvantage, so she would feel
vulnerable and uncomfortable. She remarks on how clean and
tidy his cell is, and he describes himself as a neat freak,
super-organized, and says he scrubbed the floor and walls
himself. Yet he stored decomposing corpses in the crawl space
of his house. That certainly tells you something about how he
was able to compartmentalize his life -- public-minded citizen and
businessman by day, sadistic killer trolling for victims by night.
I would have liked to read more of these simple observations,
because they turn out to be enlightening.
Her conclusion is that serial killers are that way from birth
(actually, from conception), and not responsible for their actions.
I agree with her that they probably have a compulsion to kill (but
where does that compulsion come from?), and become addicted
to it, but anyone who is able to commit crimes for months and
years, and cover them up, knows what they are doing.
She takes what I feel is an unwarranted dig at police detectives
and FBI profilers, saying their methods are not scientific. Well,
they're not scientific in the sense of setting up a controlled
experiment, but they do follow the scientific method of deriving
conclusions from careful observations. If experience shows that
most killers operate within their "comfort zone," an area they are
familiar with, then you can conclude that the perpetrator of a
particular crime probably lives or works within a certain radius of
the crime scene, or knows the area for some other reason. The
comment just irked me because they're trying to get killers off
the streets, while she's helping get them off the hook (as an
expert witness for the defense).

For those interested in serial killers or in understanding the human condition in some of its darkest forms, this book offers a number of wonderful insights. Details from interviews with many of the most notorious killers of our time are both fascinating and truly repulsive. The main reason I gave this book a four instead of a two or three was because of the hard facts that were included from Morrison's interviews and the fact that she did not sensationalize the crimes or criminals, she merely offered the facts. However, it was difficult at times to get past Morrison's self-important attitude and her soap box discussions of the inadequacies she perceives in other psychiatrists and psychologists and many of the police forces she encountered. But Morrison does offer a plausible explanation for the formation of a serial killer, one that will most likely not be proven until advances in science allow definitive answers.