Newsletters

Dear friends,

Welcome to the inaugural issue of my newsletter. Thanks for signing up!

The most exciting news I have to report: My forthcoming book, That Beast Was Not Me: A Forensic Psychologist Looks Back on Five Decades of Murder, will be published on August 6 by Black Lyon Publishing.

On average, I’m going to try to send out an issue of the newsletter every month or so. It’ll serve as a forum where I can share new developments about my book—but I’m hoping that its focus can be a bit broader than that. Ideally, it’ll function as a space where I can introduce myself and touch upon a range of subjects that are of interest to me. To state the obvious, murder, forensic psychology, and the literature of true crime are three of those—but they’re hardly the only ones. (Just for good measure, at the end of each issue I plan to throw in a music suggestion or two, intended for newsletter subscribers who share my passion for music.)  

In the section New and Noteworthy, I’ll focus mainly on news related to the publication of my book. There will be information about author events, promotional activities, reviews, and so forth.

The Reading Rounds section will provide me with an opportunity to share information about a few interesting books that have occupied places on my personal reading list during the past month or so.

Finally, in each newsletter I’m going to use A Backward Glance to recall an event from my past — often but not always related to my career as a forensic psychologist – that has reverberated across time.

As I’ve gotten older, the process of “taking stock” has taken on new significance. I don’t consider myself a nostalgia freak. Still, I often revisit events from the past and try to figure out what role they played in my life—or what they “meant” in some larger sense. Sometimes the events stand out simply because my memories of them are so vivid.

I’ve been a lot of things in life, but I’ve never before been the writer of a book intended for a general audience. I set out to write a book that readers would find interesting and enjoyable, maybe even edifying in some ways. During my long career as a forensic psychologist, I used to produce anywhere from 2500 to 3500 single-space typewritten pages of court-ready reports every year. That’s a lot. But That Beast Was Not Me isn’t like anything I’ve ever written before. The stories contained in it are all true—but there’s nothing the least bit “scholarly” or “academic” about the way I’ve chosen to tell them.

Here’s my hope: that Beast is a book that will make you feel like you’re accompanying me on a journey of discovery–to places you might never have had an opportunity to visit on your own.

Thanks again for your interest in me and my book.

Once again (I can’t say it too many times), That Beast Was Not Me will be published on August 6 by Black Lyon Publishing. The book’s title comes from the first proper letter that Charles Manson ever wrote me—way back in the spring of 1975, less than six years after the murder spree that gave rise to Manson’s infamy and a full decade and a half before I became a forensic psychologist. If you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, that means you’ve already visited my website (www.jeffreysmalldon.com), where there’s plenty of additional information about the context of my decision to undertake the writing of this book.

I already have several author events in the works, and I’m excited about them. On August 13, I’ll be at Gramercy Books in Bexley, Ohio, in conversation with mystery novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, who also wrote No Winners Here Tonight, the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio. Linda Kass, Gramercy’s proprietor and a tireless promoter of books by Ohio authors, has graciously agreed to host the event.

On August 19, I’ll be appearing at an author’s event being held at the North Tonawanda Public Library in North Tonawanda, New York, where I spent most of my formative years.

On August 22, I’ll be making an appearance at the North Tonawanda History Museum, also located in North Tonawanda.

I’m looking forward to both these North Tonawanda events, which I know will provide me with opportunities to make new friends, and to reconnect with some older ones who I’ve known for more than fifty years.

Details for these events (time and so on) will be provided in subsequent issues of my newsletter. A number of other events are currently in the process of being planned. As details of those events become available, they’ll be reported here, too.

Here are four books that have been part of my own reading rounds during the past month:

Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy, by Karen Konti (Black Lyon Publishing).

Konti was part of the legal team that represented Gacy during his final round of appeals, prior to his May 1994 execution. Konti opposes the death penalty, but in her book she doesn’t devote an inordinate amount of time to advocating for her position on that issue. Instead, she offers a perspective on Gacy—whose pet name for her was Dollface—that differs from the perspective that has dominated coverage of his case over the past forty-five years. She says she discovered in Gacy a sliver of humanity that demands acknowledgment. At the same time, she emphasizes that it doesn’t for even a single moment cancel out or minimize all the atrocities he is known to have committed.

Shortly before Gacy’s execution, Konti even returned his words when he told her “I love you.” Depending on your point of view, her book is likely to seem like a badly needed corrective to the one-dimensional “monster” image of Gacy that’s long been a staple of American popular culture, or a too-liberal lawyer’s attempt to advocate, sort of, for an evil man who long ago gave up his right to any kind of advocacy at all.

The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, by Katherine Ramsland and Tracy Ullman (Crime Ink).

This book provides a timely look back at a case that many Americans know very little about. During a three-year period in the early-1970s, in Houston and nearby Pasadena, Texas, a man in his early-30s named Dean Coryll recruited two teens, David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, to assist him in the commission of numerous murders, many of them involving torture. Altogether, Coryll is thought to have killed at least twenty-eight boys and young men between the ages of thirteen and twenty. Eventually, when circumstances presented Henley with basically no other option, he shot Coryll and killed him. Coryll’s death was the event that finally prompted the police to take a serious—at least more serious—look at why such a large number of youths had been disappearing from the area around Houston. Previously, law enforcement officials had tended to write them off as just so many “runaways.”

The Ramsland/Ullman book benefits from the involvement of Henley, the only one of the three principals who is still alive, and from a number of people who knew the killers as well as their victims. The book is part true crime chronicle, part psychological analysis of Henley’s thoughts and feelings fifty years after the crimes, and part instructional manual for parents wanting to make sure their children don’t fall victim to a predator like Coryll—someone who possesses uncanny “mur-dar” and understands how to chip away at the soft and hard limits that, under ordinary circumstances, would prevent the children from becoming complicit in actions that their “normal selves” would regard as unthinkable.

This is a terrifying but necessary book. Be aware that if you decide to read it (and you probably should), you’ll be presented with compelling evidence in support of the conclusion that there were—and still are—massive networks of pedophiles operating under the radar of law enforcement, not just in the United States but all around the world.

The Lust for Blood: Why We Are Fascinated by Death, Murder, Horror, and Violence, by Jeffrey A. Kottler (Prometheus).

This is a niche book, certainly not for everybody. Kottler is a well-known researcher on the subject of therapy outcomes. But this book, which was published almost fifteen years ago, almost certainly arose out of Kottler’s need to explore the consequences of his collaboration with a former student named Jason Moss, who, for a college paper, proposed a project where he would try to persuade notorious murderers—among them Richard Ramirez and John Wayne Gacy—to write to him by posing as their “ideal victim.”

Most of The Last Victim, the book Moss and Kottler collaborated on, focused on Moss’s experiences with Gacy. To be honest, my eyes sort of glazed over during my reading of Kottler’s extended analysis of why our fascination with the various things mentioned in his own book’s subtitle might actually serve an adaptive evolutionary purpose. Mostly, I was interested in what he had to say about Moss, who traded graphic sexual fantasies with Gacy and claimed that when the two of them finally met in person, Gacy subjected him to a torrent of vicious verbal abuse and threatened to assault him (in a death row visiting room that was probably the same one where I spent close to twenty unsupervised hours with Gacy across four days in the late-1980s).

A crucial difference between Moss’s situation and my own was that by the time Moss met and had his interactions with Gacy, Gacy had likely come to terms with the fact that he was about to be executed. In other words, Gacy probably felt like he had little left to lose. Moss’s account of what happened when he went to visit Gacy is harrowing—and that’s an understatement. Kottler clearly believes that everything Moss said happened really did happen. He portrays Moss, who he came to know well, as a bright, creative, and extraordinarily narcissistic young man who was, in the end, emotionally unprepared for what transpired while he was with Gacy on death row.

Eventually, Moss earned his law degree from the University of Michigan. Then he went into private practice, specializing in criminal defense. In 2006, when he was only thirty-one years old, he took his own life.  I recommend the “True Crime” chapter of Kottler’s book to anyone interested in revisiting the Jason Moss saga—which I view as an essential chapter in the larger John Wayne Gacy story.

Carson McCullers: A Life, by Mary V. Dearborn (Knopf)

This most recent reconsideration of the life and work of American writer Carson McCullers revisits many themes from prior McCuller biographies, for example the writer’s startling success when her debut novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, appeared when McCullers was just twenty-three years old; McCuller’s “difficult,” almost child-like personality (pathologically narcissistic and dependent); the author’s alcoholism; and her short-lived residency, during the early-1940s, in a Brooklyn house—which merited its own book, called February House and written by Sherill Tippens—that was a commune of sorts for avant-garde American artists that included W.H. Auden, the stripper and aspiring novelist Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and the prominent editor, George Davis.

In addition, Dearborn’s book explores the many reasons—for example addiction, extreme physical infirmity, and the deaths of those people on whom she depended most for emotional and material support—why McCullers failed to produce a larger body of work.

For anyone interested in the Southern Gothic strain in modern American fiction, McCullers’ work is essential. It’s also essential for anyone interested in literary depictions of “freaks” and eccentrics and other kinds of outsiders. Dearborn calls McCullers a “distinctly odd duck.” But she was also a genius, and she might have understood the loneliness of the outcast as well as any other twentieth century American writer. An anonymous reviewer for Time magazine, writing about McCullers’ last serious work, Clock Without Hands, referenced “the special McCullers gift: the moment of high emotion when a lonely soul rapping on the wall of his imprisoned self hears an answering knock.”

At an early juncture in my career as a forensic psychologist, I consulted on the case of a relatively young man who was a resident of Ohio’s death row. What that meant was that the man had already been convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to die for his offenses against the State of Ohio. His appellate attorneys wanted me to tell them whether I thought there were any new mental health-related issues that they should consider raising as part of his latest round of appeals.

To review the massive collection of records that comprised this particular murderer’s file, I paid a visit to the Office of the Ohio Public Defender. I was placed in a room all by myself. As usual when I had to review such a large file, I had with me a yellow pad of lined note paper and a bunch of disposable Papermate pencils.

As I was rapidly leafing through thousands of pages of records, a single piece of paper stopped me in my tracks. It was a photocopied image of an infant’s footprints. Of course those footprints belonged to the killer. I remember thinking, What happened? What went wrong? What set of life experiences caused that guileless little baby to grow up and commit an act that made the State of Ohio determined to kill him?

I’ve never forgotten that moment. In fact, I returned to it again and again during the twenty-five years of my career, when, on so many different occasions, I had to try to make sense of the lives and actions of babies who grew up to become killers.

-Jeff

P.S. If you have the time and inclination, I recommend that you check out the irresistible Joe Pernice/Neko Case duet “I Don’t Need That Anymore” from the new Pernice Brothers’ record,  Who Will You Believe; and the song “Late Blooming Forever,” the opening track on West Virginia native William Matheny’s latest recording, called That Grand, Old Feeling.