Review - My Life Among the Serial Killers
Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers
by Helen Morrison with Harold Goldberg
HarperAudio, 2004
Review by Christian Perring, Ph.D.
Jun 24th 2004 (Volume 8, Issue 26)

My Life Among the Serial Killers is a fascinating look at some of the world's most notorious serial killers.  Forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison has interviewed these murderers for hundreds of hours in an attempt to understand them better, and she describes her impressions of Richard Otto Macek, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, Bobby Joe Long, and several others.  The details of these meetings and generalizations she makes from them are by far the most interesting part of the book.  She explains that serial killers rarely murder members of their own families, and often have bizarre inabilities to tell whether a person is alive or dead.  They are often of above intelligence and are not retarded.  Yet Morrison relates many cases in which these killers they are caught due to bizarre lapses in their rationality, sometimes letting victims go or escape for no apparent reason.  She points out that while they often have troubled childhoods, there is nothing very distinctive in their past experience that would predict that they would go on to become serial killers. 

Morrison describes many of the murders and even rapes in vivid detail for both adult and child victims.  This may be disturbing for some readers, yet it is clear that as a scientist, she needs to understand such details in order to understand the motivations of the killers.  Given the details we are already familiar with from Hollywood movies and forensic TV crime shows, most readers will probably not be too shocked.  Morrison herself reads the audiobook, and she is a surprisingly good narrator.  She reads her own words with conviction and energy. 

The book is rather less interesting when Morrison describes her own career, her decision to refrain from telling her children what her job entails, and even the failures of the police in their attempts to solve crimes.  These parts of the book do give some background to the story, but they don't add to our understanding of the murderers.

The most problematic part of this book is in Morrison's theorizing about serial killing.  Even though she has published four academic books and more than 125 academic articles, you would never guess it from her half-baked speculation and her vague use of language.  One of the first warning signs is her surprising use of psychoanalytic theory to discuss Richard Macek.  She trots out the theory of the different psychosexual phases of infancy, oral and anal, and speculates that he was stuck at one of those phases.  Of course, most academic psychologists have long ago abandoned these parts of Freudian theory.  Similar remarks apply to her use later in the book of the concept of "personality structure," which is rooted in psychoanalytic theory.  But Morrison is not an old fashioned psychoanalytic theorist; rather she seems to embrace many different theoretical paradigms simultaneously. 

Maybe her most bizarre suggestion, put forward as an incredible realization that came to her in a "eureka moment," is that serial killing is a form of addiction.  The idea is problematic not so much because Morrison lacks any evidence for her hypothesis, but rather because it is hard to know even what the claim might mean.  It is not as if psychology has provided an uncontroversial general theory of the nature of addiction and so to describe anything as an addiction seems more metaphorical than literal.  This is why it is so hard to evaluate other addiction claims about gambling, shopping, sex, love, or the Internet.  She does not even provide any evidence that serial murders feel strong cravings to kill, or feel withdrawal symptoms when they have not killed for some time.  Most addictions involve addictions performed repetitively hundreds or thousands of times, and it is hard to make sense of the claim that one could be addicted to an action that one performs less than ten times in most cases of serial killing, and generally less than fifty times even in the cases of the most prolific cases. 

At the end of the book, Morrison waxes eloquently about the future study of serial killers, and she expresses her belief that genetics and brain science will provide the ultimate key to serial killers.  She believes that one day we will be able to predict which people will be prone to serial killing and we will have to face difficult ethical questions about when to make such predictions and what to do with the information.  She does not explain exactly why she has such confidence in these fashionable parts of psychiatric science, and her belief seems to be based on faith rather than evidence.  This is based on a fundamental assumption that serial killers form a natural kind, a genetic anomaly.  This assumption seems highly dubious.  It seems much more likely that serial killers have a variety of different mental disorders, involving aggression, disturbed personality, inability to appreciate the value of human life, sexual perversion, psychosis, paranoia, and compulsion, among other traits.  Despite Morrison's theorizing, her descriptions of the serial killers she has met display a striking diversity in their character types and their methods of murdering. 

At various points, Morrison says that serial killers are not human because they lack some of the fundamental attributes that make us human.  She does not quite spell out what those attributes are, or indeed, what she means, and so readers are left to speculate.  She does say that serial killers are not psychologically complete, but this does not clarify her meaning.  Who of us is complete?  We can't take her claim about the lack of humanity of serial killers in a scientific sense, because obviously serial killers are biologically human.  My guess is that by "human" Morrison seems to mean something like "capable of moral understanding."  But if this is her claim, it is implausible, since the cases she describes show that serial killers entertain all sorts of beliefs about morality and are even capable of kindness and warmth in some parts of their lives.  Morrison also argues that serial killers are legally insane, and thus should not receive the death penalty.  However, from her descriptions of various murders, there is little indication that they were suffering from psychotic delusions.  While they may not have a solid understanding of right and wrong, they do often have a good understanding that murder is illegal and needs to be kept secret if one is to get away with it. 

Acting as an expert witness in one trial, Morrison testified that she did not think that a serial killer would be able to refrain from carrying on a murder even if a policeman was present.  This is a bizarre claim however since even heroin addicts can refrain from shooting up if a law-enforcement officer is watching.  When she says that serial killers are not psychopaths because psychopaths have self-control while serial killers do not, she is probably wrong on both counts.  It is well documented that many psychopaths, also known as people with antisocial personality disorder, have very poor impulse control, and indeed can act aggressively if given very mild provocation even if this is likely to get them into immediate trouble.  It is worth remembering that most personality disorders, and certainly antisocial personality disorder, are not well understood, and people with these disorders form a very heterogeneous group.  The blanket statement that serial killers are never psychopaths is bound to be false.

It is disappointing that there are such obvious flaws in the theories of an eminent expert in the field of psychiatry.  Nevertheless, My Life Among the Serial Killers is an interesting and provocative read full of powerful characterizations of the men she interviewed. 

© 2004 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.