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, demonstrating that this is not a recent phenomenon and these cases help us better understand the serial killers of today. Dr. Morrison will write the stories of her work with these killers as she takes us inside the interview rooms and pushes the killers until they break and reveal their true natures. She takes us out into the field and into the crime scenes as she struggles to profile a killer. The dramatic stories also provide her with the opportunity to explain her theories as to why they do what they do (and it’s not, she says, because they were abused as children). While she’s not an FBI agent, she has been hired to work on a number of their cases, as well as with other state and city organizations. At the end of the day, she goes home to her husband and two children in a quiet suburb of Chicago. Neither her children or her neighbors know what she does.