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“If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.” – Virginia Woolf

June 2024

Dear friends,

If you’re a new subscriber to my newsletter, thanks for coming on board!

That probably means you’ve paid at least one visit to my website (www.jeffreysmalldon.com). If you’ve been there recently, you know that my first book, That Beast Was Not Me, will be published on August 6 by Black Lyon Publishing. It’s now available for pre-order on Black Lyon’s website.

I hope you’ll help me by spreading the word about the book’s publication. I also hope you’ll encourage your friends and family members to check out my website.  

For better or worse, mine will be a largely improvisational, DIY-type marketing effort—so anything you can do to help will be appreciated. 

Please email me at JLSmalldon@sbcglobal.net if you think of any marketing-related ideas that I should pursue. I’ll always be open to your input.

I’m hoping that after the book’s publication, some central Ohio book club invitations will come my way. Perhaps you know of book clubs whose members would be interested in hearing about my career as a forensic psychologist, and about my experiences with some of the most notorious murderers of our time. If you do, please provide them with my contact information. Thanks in advance!

New & Noteworthy

Exciting news! I now have a finalized cover design.

As I mentioned last month, my book’s title is a quote from the first proper letter that Charles Manson ever wrote me—nearly fifty years ago. It’s also one of my book’s four epigraphs. Immediately after the Manson quote is a second epigraph, this one a quote from a letter John Wayne Gacy wrote me: “You’re gonna find out I’m a normal person, just like you.”

Sensing a theme?

It’s a theme I circle back to at frequent intervals throughout my book. I’ve always been struck by the vigor with which most serial and mass killers push back against other people’s attempts to define who they are, and to account for what they do. In their warped way of thinking, inscrutability is power—so they use it as a means of ensuring the public’s ongoing fascination with the question of what makes them tick.

I can now provide a few additional details about some  author events that I have scheduled for around the time of my book’s release.

  •  On August 13, at 7 p.m., I’ll be at Gramercy Books in Bexley, Ohio, where I’ll be in conversation with mystery novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, who also wrote No Winners Here Tonight, the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio.
  • On August 19, at 4 p.m., I’ll be appearing at the North Tonawanda Public Library in North Tonawanda, New York, which is where I spent most of my formative years. Back during the 1970s, I paid frequent visits to that library—so I’m especially excited about returning there to talk about my book.
  • On August 22, at 6 p.m., I’ll be at the North Tonawanda History Museum. The History Museum’s director, Howard Roeske, has done a fabulous job making the museum a must-see attraction for anyone wanting to learn more about North Tonawanda’s celebrated, endlessly interesting history. I’m honored that he’s offered to host an event for me.

Just this past week, I was interviewed for a story that’s slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Columbus Monthly magazine. There are any number of other exciting promotional initiatives that are currently in the works: more author events; some additional magazine and newspaper coverage of my book’s publication; and some radio and podcast appearances.

As more detailed information becomes available, I’ll report it in upcoming issues of my newsletter.

I’m not all that comfortable tooting my own horn, but hey, I have a book coming out. So here goes.

Some of you may be familiar with the many books that journalist and New York Times best-selling true crime historian Jeff Guinn has published over the course of the past four decades. They include accounts of Jim Jones and People’s Temple, David Koresh and the tragedy at Waco, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Manson murder case.

After reading an advance copy of That Beast Was Not Me, Guinn had this to say:

“In his memoir, That Beast Was Not Me, veteran forensic psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon takes us along with him as he probes the mind games of old familiars like Charlie Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and other well-known monsters.

It’s a printed journey chock full of revelations and insights. Smalldon doesn’t speculate, he talks or corresponds in exceptional detail with his subjects, and elicits information far beyond the rote posturings ‘revealed’ in other books about them.

By way of personally painful example, I’ll put it bluntly: I spent three years of my life researching and writing a biography of Charles Manson that was both critically acclaimed and a New York Times bestseller. After reading Smalldon’s book, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that there was a lot I missed. Damn!

Anyway, to sum up: all true crime books promise great things. Smalldon’s is the rare example of one delivering exactly that.”

The Reading Rounds

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

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,
by Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring
(Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, and Company).

O’Neill’s book was first published in 2019. Recently, I went back and read it a second time. It’s a mind-blower, especially if, like me, you’ve spent the last fifty years or so trying to claw your way up from the unspeakable depths of the Manson case rabbit hole. 

O’Neill didn’t originally intend this kind of deep dive into the case. He was an entertainment reporter for the long-defunct magazine Premiere, and in 1999 he was assigned to do a piece to mark the 30-year anniversary of the infamous Tate-LaBianca slayings. He never completed the magazine piece; Premiere went under; he lost his first publishing deal because he couldn’t deliver his book on time; he nearly went bankrupt; he developed what he’s referred to as a “mania” for the project that nearly consumed his entire life; and he interviewed so many witnesses that he thought people might conclude he was “insane” if he revealed the exact number. 

I found this book fascinating. Nearly every page offers something revelatory. I guarantee that if you read Chaos, you’ll never again think the same way about the Manson case—and if you’re unlucky, like me, you’ll wind up obsessing about why the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office seems so determined to shield some important case-related files from public scrutiny.

The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show,
Circus and Victorian Age
,
by John Woolf (Michael O’Mara Books Limited).

My own fascination with the so-called freak show began on the grounds of a state psychiatric hospital in Concord, New Hampshire, where my paternal grandfather, a psychiatrist, was then the superintendent in charge. I was probably seven or eight years old at the time. 

Strange but true, we had to cross Pleasant Street to get from my grandparents’ house to the “carnival” being held on the hospital grounds—ostensibly for the amusement of both the staff and the chronically mentally ill patients who called the hospital home. 

The first “exhibit” we came upon was billed as The Wild Man of Borneo. I remember a partially-clad, hairy, bearded little man in a cage. He kept rattling the bars and emitting a garbled scream (like he was trying to get to me!), and he held a piece of some sort of raw meat in his hand. I’ve never forgotten the mix of emotions I experienced upon seeing him: fear, anxiety, wonder. In any case, for better or worse I was hooked on the freak show and its weird, non-PC allure. Of course freak shows are now largely a thing of the past, and I suppose that’s a good thing.

Woolf’s book provides a fascinating look at the freak show’s origins and evolution. Its roots extend back [at least] as far as the seventeenth century, but the Victorian Age was, despite the era’s extreme focus on industrialization and science, also the Age of the Freak. Queen Victoria loved “freaks” and welcomed them to the Royal Court whenever the opportunity arose.

Perhaps as much as anything in Woolf’s book, I enjoyed his portraits of celebrated sideshow performers like Jeffrey Hudson, Daniel Lambert, Chang and Eng, Joyce Heth, the married giants Anna Swan and Martin Van Buren Bates, Julia Pastrana, and of course Charles Stratton (aka Tom Thumb). I read the book with a mix of nostalgia, wonder, and…relief.

South of Forgiveness: A True Story of Rape and Responsibility,
by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger (Skyhorse Publishing).

I had a complicated reaction to this story. It’s not necessarily the same one I would expect other readers to have.

The outlines of the story can be fairly easily summarized. Thordis Elva was sixteen and a native of Iceland. Tom Stranger, an Australian exchange student who was two years her senior, arrived there in 1996. The two dated briefly (Thordis refers to Tom as her “first love”), and one night Stranger subjected Elva to a brutal, protracted rape at a time when she was clearly incapacitated from drink. 

Not long after the rape, Stranger left Iceland for Australia. Four years later, he returned. During his stay there, the word “rape” first entered their conversations with one another. Thordis made it her goal to seduce him (she succeeded), figuring that if she could break his heart, she’d have exacted revenge and would, presumably, experience some sort of badly-needed catharsis. In the end, the revenge plot didn’t give her the elusive sense of emotional satisfaction that she was looking for. 

About two years after that, Elva initiated an email correspondence with Stranger that ended up lasting for eight years. Then the two agreed to spend a week together in Cape Town, South Africa, with the hope of achieving reconciliation and, the elusive holy grail of their relationship, “forgiveness.”

South of Forgiveness is basically a chronicle of that week in Cape Town, though it moves back and forth in time. I won’t spoil things by giving up the ending. 

I will, however, say this: I often found the writing in this book melodramatic and ponderous. Something else that bothered me: I kept getting the feeling that there was a contrived, performative aspect to many of the events that were being described. Perhaps I’m being unfair. In any event, I’m certainly not trying to minimize the emotional suffering that is at the book’s center. Anyway, check out the book and decide for yourself what to make of it.

At the very least, I suspect that many readers will view South of Forgiveness as a valuable addition to the literature on sexual assault and its shattering impact on survivors.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an
American Commune
, by Alexander Stille (Picador).

Just about anyone who’s studied psychology has encountered the name Herbert “Harry” Stack Sullivan. A celebrated neo-Freudian theorist, Sullivan insisted that personality should always be understood within the context of every person’s complex network of relationships. Not surprisingly, he placed a lot of emphasis on the family—and, especially, on the multitudinous ways in which parents can thwart the creativity and emotional growth of their offspring.

Sullivan died in 1949, but many of his ideas lived on, often in distorted forms that would surely have caused Sullivan to roll over in his grave.

In the staid 1950s, two of his ostensible disciples, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, founded the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis in New York City. For the next two decades, Newton, Pearce, and their acolytes preached a doctrine that demonized the nuclear family, discouraged “parenting” because it was seen as too hazardous an enterprise, encouraged sexual freedom (an understatement), and discouraged “bonds” of nearly every kind (the one exception being the members’ bond to the group itself).

Stille’s analysis of “the Sullivanians” is often dizzying and disorienting. The relationships are hard to keep track of; the outrages committed by the group’s abusive and predatory leaders are often almost unfathomable; and the reader is left to ponder how in the world a narcissistic, exploitative cult leader like Saul Newton was able to attract and retain the loyalty of physicians, attorneys, and celebrities like Judy Collins, Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist artists, James Agee’s daughter Deedee, members of  the revivalist rock and roll group Sha Na Na, the eminent art critic Clement Greenberg, the celebrated novelist Richard Price, and others. 

By the late-1970s, the group had devolved into a highly insular “commune” that basically hid in plain side on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For all intents and purposes, it was defunct by the time its toxic leader, Saul Newton, finally died in 1991.

If you’re interested in cults and the dynamics that often cause otherwise intelligent, “normal”-seeming people to become ensnared in them, this book is for you.    

A Backward Glance

Feel-good moments don’t come along all that often in a forensic psychologist’s work life. At least they didn’t in this forensic psychologist’s work life. Over the course of twenty-five years, I spent hundreds of hours in county jails, state prisons, and courtrooms—and truth be told, I spent a fair number of those hours wishing I were somewhere else.

But at regular intervals along the way, something would happen that reminded me why I found my job as rewarding as I did, and why I worked so hard at the relationship side of forensic psychology.

Once, I was asked by defense counsel to provide consultation on a highly unusual death penalty case. I say “unusual” not merely because there were four victims—that wasn’t all that unusual—but because the defendant was a woman. Now that’s unusual.

The case was all about drugs, Oxycontin in particular. The defendant, the woman I was asked to evaluate, had a daughter who was under the age of ten. As part of my investigation into factors about the defendant’s life that I thought members of a jury might find “mitigating” (that is, a reason for recommending a sentence other than death), I wanted to talk to her—alone. I asked her grandmother, who was caring for her while her mom was in jail awaiting trial, if she would grant me permission to do that. She did. 

Once alone with the little girl, I worked hard to develop rapport, and I proceeded with as much caution and sensitivity as I could muster when it came time to approach the subject of her mother’s drug use. As gently as I could, I asked her whether she’d suspected that her mom was using drugs. She looked back at me with a facial expression that said “Like, duhhhhhh.” Then she told me of walking in on her mother once, seeing her slumped down on her bed with her eyes closed, and observing a syringe hanging from her neck.

Months later, I was seated outside the courtroom, waiting to testify at her mother’s sentencing hearing (she’d already been found guilty). As I was silently arranging an enormous collection of case-related facts in my head, I noticed the girl’s grandmother approaching from my right.

“I just want to tell you something,” she said. She spoke of how incredibly difficult things had been for her granddaughter since her mother’s arrest. Then she added, “Yesterday I got her to open up to me about some of her feelings, and when we were almost done talking, she said, “You know what, Grandma? The guy I really liked the best was that psychology dude.”

All these years later, I still count that as one of the sweetest, most poignant, and most satisfying moments of my entire career.

That’s it for this month. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll be back in July.

-Jeff

P.S. For those of you who are music fans:  The release of a new record by Glasgow’s The Pearlfishers is always a big event for me. So this month, I’m going to stick with them and their new collection of gorgeous chamber pop. The record is called Making Tapes for Girls. It’s been a struggle for me to select just two songs to recommend. I love the entire record. But I’ve had to choose, so here are the two I’m inviting you to check out on You Tube:  “The Word Evangeline” and “Hold Out for a Mystic” (because why wouldn’t you?).

Site photography by Hailey Gonya at

www.haileylaurenphotography.com

Get a Free Chapter of

That Beast Was Not Me

 

What happens when a graduate student on his way toward becoming a forensic psychologist sits face-to-face with one of America's most notorious serial killers? In this chapter from my book, That Beast Was Not Me, I'll take you inside the concrete walls of death row for my first encounter with John Wayne Gacy. This isn't just another sensationalized true crime story—it's an intimate glimpse into the complex reality of studying the criminal mind, where claims of normalcy clash with the weight of unspeakable acts.

This free chapter provides a window on the experience of being alone in a room with someone society has labeled a monster, where every word carries weight and often things aren't quite what they seem. It's meant as an invitation to join me on a journey few have taken, exploring that thin line between the familiar and the unfathomable.

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