Helen Morrison

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”.… (meer)

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.… (meer)

My Life Among the Serial Killers was a fascinating view into the debate about what drives a serial murderer to kill. Although the book became technical at times, for the most part it was written in layman's terms and in depth enough to leave the reader feeling a bit more knowledgeable in regards to the somewhat esoteric subject.

Where the book went wrong were the long (at times more than half a chapter) rants about the author's life. While I understand that it is important to realize how deficient the police force and FBI can be in terms of catching killers -- and moreso, how the medical community is still prejudiced against women in the workforce -- I do not understand why the author feels compelled to push her cause in these two matters forward in a book regarding serial killers. Yes, her work was revolutionary, but no.. I am not terribly interested in learning whether or not her child did well at that hockey game.

Complaints aside, the book was well structured and a nice overview of the different types of serial murderers that exist. I came away from the book more interested in the subject than I was when I first opened it, which I suppose means I should tip my hat to this book; it was a job well done.… (meer)