Newsletters

Greetings on the cusp of a new school year!

On the 6th of this month, my book, That Beast Was Not Me, finally launched after a long gestational period. I’m told that lots of readers pre-ordered the book on Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from Black Lyon Publishing. If you’re one of those who placed a pre-order, I hope you’ve received your copy by now (I know there was some delay as a result of the raging wildfire in eastern Oregon, where my publisher is based). I’m grateful for the early show of support!

In previous newsletters, I’ve encouraged subscribers to contact me with ideas about how I might be able to augment my largely improvisational, grassroots-style marketing campaign. Some of you have responded with helpful tips. Thanks! I’m always open to whatever ideas and suggestions come my way—so please, keep them coming.

In last month’s newsletter, I highlighted what authors John Douglas and Peter Vronsky had to say after reviewing an Advance Reader Copy of That Beast Was Not Me. This month, I want to highlight what Dr. Dan McAdams, the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Northwestern University and the author of numerous books about personality, life stories, and narrative psychology, had to say after reading the book:

“After his psychology professor suggested he write a letter to Charles Manson, Jeff Smalldon embarked on a 50-year odyssey into the twisted minds of mass and serial killers.

In this riveting book, we hear the voices of the world’s most notorious murderers as they try to justify their acts and their lives. The best action, however, plays out in the psychological space between the killers and the people who comprise their audience. It is in that space where we witness how Smalldon reacts to each exchange and then plans his next move, how the killers impact his well-being and challenge his sense of self, and how, over the long haul, these intense and troubling encounters with evil irrevocably change Smalldon and shape his vocation as a forensic psychologist.

With humor, literary flair, and deep psychological insight, Dr. Smalldon tells a fascinating tale about the worst people on the planet—and about ourselves.”

In the weeks preceding Beast’s publication, the book garnered a lot of positive attention in the print and broadcast media.

• Bestselling true crime author M. William Phelps featured Beast—along with an interview that he conducted with me by Zoom—on an episode of his popular podcast, Crossing the Line with M. William Phelps. Here’s a link to the episode.
• Geoff Dutton’s article about my career—and the publication of Beast—appeared in the August issue of Columbus Monthly magazine.

• Andy Downing covered Beast for the alternative news publication Matter News. Here’s the link.
• Margaret Quamme’s review of Beast appeared in the July 28 Sunday issue of the Columbus Dispatch. Here’s a link to her review.
• For NBCCh4’s on-line publication, Stephanie Thompson wrote a piece about Beast, highlighting my long-ago history as an executive at Riverside Methodist Hospital when an unknown assailant murdered two employees in a department for which I had administrative responsibility, just off the hospital’s main corridor on a Friday afternoon in December 1983 (officially, the case remains unsolved, even after the passage of more than forty years). The tragic murders at Riverside are what prompted me to pursue a career in forensic psychology. Here’s a link to Thompson’s article.
• On August 5, I appeared for a brief promotional interview on Bridge Street, a television program that airs in Syracuse, New York.
• On August 8, Anna Staver interviewed me for an hour on All Sides with Anna Staver, central Ohio’s leading public affairs program. Here’s the link.
• My August 13 author event at Gramercy Books in Bexley—where I appeared in conversation with mystery novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins (who also wrote the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio)—sold out weeks in advance of the actual event. There were lots of great questions from the audience members, and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Thanks to Linda Kass at Gramercy Books!

• On August 15, I was a guest on Ted Baker’s FLX Morning radio show, which originates in Geneva, New York. Here’s the link.
• On August 19, I’ll discuss and sign copies of That Beast Was Not Me at 4:00 at the North Tonawanda Public Library in North Tonawanda, New York—which is where I spent most of my growing-up years.
• On the morning of August 20, I’ll appear on the television program Good Day Rochester, which broadcasts from Rochester, New York.
• On August 21, I’ll be appearing as a guest on the television program Daytime Buffalo.
• On August 22, the North Tonawanda History Museum is hosting an author event and book signing for me at 6:00.
• On August 31, I’ll be one of the authors participating in the Local Authors Book Festival, which will be held at the Bexley Public Library in Columbus.
• On September 3, at 2:00, I’ll be talking about and signing copies of my book at the Upper Arlington Senior Center in Columbus.
• On September 12, I’ll be appearing as a guest on the western New York radio program, “Wake Up Niagara.”
• On September 20, the Granville Arts Counsel, based in Granville, Ohio, will be hosting an author event and book signing for me at 7:00.

I’m grateful for the attention my book has received so far—and there are plenty of other promotional activities and events that are currently in the works. Stay tuned—and please encourage your friends to check out my website (www.jeffreysmalldon.com) and subscribe to my newsletter.

Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

Edna Cowell Martin’s is the latest contribution to a growing sub-category of the true crime genre, consisting of memoirs written by someone who either grew up with or lived in close proximity to a person who turned out to be a serial killer. Previous contributors to the sub-category include Ann Rule, who used to be Ted Bundy’s friend and co-worker; BTK killer Dennis Rader’s daughter, Kerry Rawlings; “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson’s daughter, Melissa Moore; John Wayne Gacy’s childhood buddy, Barry Boschelli ; and Ted Bundy’s former girlfriend, Elizabeth Kendall.

Edna Cowell was Ted Bundy’s cousin. Louise Cowell, Bundy’s mother, was Edna’s father’s niece. When Ted Bundy was four, his mother accepted an invitation from Edna’s father and relocated from Philadelphia to Tacoma, Washington, where the plan was that she and “Teddy” would reside with the family of Louise’s uncle until she could get on her feet. At the time of the move, Edna hadn’t yet been born. However, throughout her childhood Edna came to view Ted not just as a cousin but as a close friend.

She spends much of her book describing how well-camouflaged Bundy was, how normal he seemed most of the time. However, there were a handful of incidents that, taken together, eventually convinced her that there was something seriously wrong with her “Teddy.”

She noticed, for example, that in rooms full of people, his eyes were forever in motion, scanning the faces of the other people in the room and acting in the manner of a hyper-alert would-be predator. Then there was the incident when she observed him slow dancing with a friend of hers and saw a look on his face that she’d “never forget.” His jaw was clenched tight, his normally blue eyes appeared to turn “coal black,” and he seemed virtually unrecognizable, as if he had disappeared into “a completely separate universe.” On another occasion, she watched him—she thought he seemed “in rapture”—while he stood in front of a crowd of people with his arms outstretched and proclaimed that yes, he was, in fact that Ted Bundy, the one they’d been reading about in their newspapers and hearing about on television. Edna was stunned by his apparent narcissism and grandiosity.

Martin’s is a book that is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in how skillfully serial killers are able to manage the performative aspects of their presentation—even around people with whom they are very familiar. I was reminded of Hilton Als’ words in his foreword to Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean: “[The] bogeyman may be your father, and hope is a flimsy defense against dread.”

Anne Lamott’s detractors seem to have little difficulty assembling a plethora of reasons why they’re inclined to dismiss—or at least undervalue– her work: she’s too liberal; she’s not quite liberal enough; she’s too religious; she’s addicted to the self-deprecating wisecrack; she still acts like an alcoholic despite her many years of sobriety; she tends to return to the same “life lessons” over and over again; and so on.

I’ve been reading Lamott’s books for years, and I still enjoy her company. She’s warm, funny, entertaining, and optimistic—in spite of life’s inevitable disappointments. Somehow probably isn’t one of her stronger books. In it, she repeats themes that will sound very familiar to her loyal readers. It’s a relatively thin volume, consisting of chapters that are linked by the author’s meditations on love’s power to redeem us in spite of our faults—and to point the way toward a world that is more just, compassionate, tolerant, and forgiving.

This is the second book I’ve read about the November 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students in an off-campus apartment building in Moscow, Idaho. The first was J. Reuben Appelman’s While Idaho Slept. Many readers criticized Appelman for being overly speculative, and for not moving us much closer to an understanding of the “why” behind such a tragic mass murder.

Howard Blum covers a lot of the same territory that Appelman covered (e.g., suspect Bryan Kohberger’s history of serious maladjustment and the investigatory steps that eventually led the police to his parents’ home in eastern Pennsylvania, where he was staying, temporarily, at the time of his arrest)—but he goes one major step further: he suggests that for unknown reasons, Kohberger targeted Madison Mogen, who lived on the third floor of the apartment building, and that the other three victims were, in effect, collateral damage.

He also suggests that Dylan Mortensen, a roommate of the four decedents, confronted Kohberger in the hallway of the apartment building before his departure but did nothing because she and the killer “were in parallel states of shock, both locked so tight into their own private worlds—a young girl’s terror, a killer’s mania—that they could not see beyond the moments they were living through at the time. They both had fallen into a void where no one else could enter.” That’s interesting but obviously still speculative. Mortensen’s behavior remains something of a mystery.

Blum has already sustained his share of criticism, most notably from Steve Goncalves, the father of victim Kaylee Goncalves, who has complained publicly that Blum never spoke to him, and has produced a book that is essentially a work of “fiction”—a “version made up by him relying on sources that have no responsibility or duty to speak the truth.”

Not long ago, the judge presiding over the Kohberger case announced that the trial will begin in June 2025. There are, to put it mildly, many questions about the case that remain unanswered. Perhaps the trial will provide answers to those questions—and perhaps it won’t.

The subtitle of Emily Van Duyne’s book speaks pretty clearly to her agenda. Van Duyne makes no secret of her admiration for Plath as an artist. Nor does she shy away from one of the most contested aspects of the poet’s legacy. Was she somehow “fated” to die by her own hand? So consumed by depression and an unrelenting preoccupation with the performative aspects of being “the good girl” she felt her mother and others expected her to be that she finally succumbed to despair? Or, was she a victim of intimate partner violence, suffered at the hands of her husband, the future Poet Laureate of England, Ted Hughes?

Van Duyne provides a skillful and economical summary of Plath’s short life (she died by suicide less than four months after her 30th birthday), then wades into the controversial matter of the dynamics that characterized the Plath/Hughes relationship—and the dynamics that characterized Hughes’ relationships with his many other romantic partners. While doing her research, she unearthed some important historical documents that hadn’t previously been published, and that she uses as building blocks for her case that Plath was an abuse victim.

This book is best read as a companion volume to other Plath-related books—like Red Comet, Heather Clark’s magisterial Plath biography; Bitter Fame, the controversial Plath biography by Hughes apologist Anne Stevenson; Dido Merwin’s memoir of Plath; Plath’s journals, edited by Karen Kukil; Plath’s complete letters, edited by Kukil and Peter Steinberg; Frieda Hughes’ introduction to her recent memoir, George; the biographies of Plath by Paul Alexander, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Diane Middlebrook; the treatments of different periods of Plath’s life in books by Gail Crowther, Elizabeth Winder, and Janet Malcolm; and the biographies of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate and Elaine Feinstein.

In my view, Van Duyne makes a strong case for her central argument—which is that even though Plath undoubtedly had plenty of emotional and psychological baggage that pre-dated her relationship with Hughes, her problems were significantly exacerbated by the way Ted Hughes treated her during their fairly brief but still very tempestuous marriage. I strongly recommend Van Duyne’s book to anyone who’s interested in the life, art, and legacy of Sylvia Plath.

[Note: The events described below occurred during the summer of 1976, roughly a decade and a half before the start of my career as a forensic psychologist.]

I have particularly vivid memories of the day when I decided I deserved a look over the gate at the top of the winding driveway that lead to 10050 Cielo Drive, the house where actress Sharon Tate and four others were savagely murdered by members of the Manson Family on the night of August 9, 1969. I’d traveled to the west coast—tent-camping along the way—with an old college buddy of mine. He’d had to fly home early, for work-related reasons, which left me alone in California to embark on my mad prowl for some of the most prominent Manson case associations that I’d read about in The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion and Helter Skelter.

There was no GPS back then, but I didn’t have much difficulty locating Benedict Canyon Drive and, just off of it, Cielo Drive. Neither were far from Sunset Boulevard.

When I arrived there that day, less than seven years had elapsed since the Manson murders. I wasn’t surprised to encounter a “No Trespassing” sign at the foot of the driveway that led from Cielo Drive to the property where the murders took place. I parked my car up Cielo Drive a bit, away from the 10050 address, the so-called “Tate house.” Then I walked back down Cielo Dive and promptly disregarded the no trespassing sign that cautioned me against going any farther.

I walked all the way up the winding driveway until I came to the closed iron gate. On the other side of the gate, I could see the side of the red garage, behind which was the main house. My movements were hurried and furtive. I was afraid that if anyone saw me, I might get hauled in and arrested on a trespassing charge. At the time, the risk struck me as well worth taking.

On the right-hand side of the driveway was the bottom portion of a telephone pole. I assumed it was the same telephone pole that Manson Family member Tex Watson had scaled on the night of the murders, to cut the telephone wires. I climbed on the stump, which was only about three and a half feet high, so that I could get a better vantage point from which to take a picture—using my Kodak Instamatic camera—over the gate, toward where the house was located.

Just as I was done snapping the picture, I saw, through the lens of my camera, a car coming down the driveway, heading in my direction. I knew I had no choice but to deal with the situation head on. I clamored down from the stump and stood at the gate, facing the oncoming car. The driver got out and walked toward where I was standing. (Although I don’t know this for a fact, I think it’s likely that the car driver was Rudy Altobelli, who owned the property at the time of the murders and still owned it in 1976).

“Didn’t you see the no trespassing sign at the bottom of the driveway?” he asked. I said yes, then floated this lame explanation: “I’m visiting here from Indiana, I’m interested in the Manson case, and I just wanted to see the view from over this gate.” He replied, “OK. But now that you’ve got your picture, I ask that you please leave the property. I’m sure you can understand why we don’t want people to trespass here.” I assured him I did. Then I walked briskly down the driveway and back to my car.

Here’s the picture I took that day.

As the Happenings said back in 1966, See You in September.

-Jeff

P.S. If you’re inclined to want to add some music to your day, here are two recommendations: “Into the Arms of Yesterday” by Scotland’s Neil Sturgeon & the Infomaniacs (such a fantastic song); and “Long Goodbye” by the Sea Dramas, some baroque hazy pop from the period of the pandemic.