My Life Among the Serial Killers

For most of her professional life as a forensic psychiatrist with a law degree, Dr. Helen Morrison has been on a mission to discover (or at least lay the groundwork to discover) the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder. Many law enforcement officials say they have become hardened to killings. This is something Dr. Morrison will not allow herself to do. “It won’t work if I treat a murder as through it is anything routine. I have to keep my emotions completely open in order to advance my theories and help eradicate the phenomenon of serial killing,” says Dr. Morrison. This will be a one-of-a-kind memoir by a female forensic psychiatrist who has profiled 80 seial killers in nearly thirty years of work. Some of her profiling—with killers including Richard Macek (known as the Mad Biter), Ed Gein (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Psycho), John Wayne Gacy (upon whom she performed an autopsy as well), Wayne Williams and others—involved 400 hours of interviews. (In fact, she was first to profile serial killers using methods of forensic psychiatry.) She will also provide “psychological autopsies”of serial killers throughout history, from the 15th century through today, demonstra