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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

December 2024/January 2025

Happy New Year!

 At the risk of becoming known as the “too much information guy,” the reason I didn’t get a newsletter out last month is the open heart surgery that I underwent on December 17. The breathing problems that set in motion the sequence of events that culminated in the surgery first became evident – in a frightening, very unnerving way — late last summer.

 I think I’m finally starting to turn the corner – by which I mean I’m independent in most things, have begun my 12-week program of structured cardiac rehab, and have been given the go-ahead to resume driving.

 I’d be lying if I said it’s been anything but a tough slog since mid-December. But I feel like I’m angling toward a full recovery, or something like one.

 Those of you who know me have perhaps been privy to one of my periodic out-loud ruminations about such matters as aging, death, mortal suffering, mortality, funerals, and so on. I don’t think of myself as a morbid person – though I could be wrong about that — but for about as far back as I can remember, I’ve been preoccupied with these and a whole host of related topics. I don’t know, maybe that makes me different from most other people. Not long ago, I asked a close friend if he thought a lot about death and dying.  He looked at me like I might be an interloper from Mars, then said, “No, I don’t really think about those things very much.”

 For better or worse, my experiences in the days and weeks following my heart surgery had the effect of bringing these matters to the forefront of my consciousness. Weird how that happens. I struggled a lot with bad dreams — and there were plenty of times, especially at night, when I felt like I was being sucked into a vortex of negative thoughts and images.

 I’ve been asked about the first stirrings of my lifelong preoccupation with death and dying. Three things come to mind.

 As a kid, when I was still in the early years of elementary school, I always felt a slight catch in my throat whenever I had to recite these words from my bedtime prayer: “And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I remember thinking, Is that really how it works? Is it possible that I won’t live to see the morning?

 Maybe I wouldn’t have paid quite as much attention to those words had it not been for happened to a boy who lived down the street from us. His name was Chester Knapp. Chester rode the same school bus I did – until he suddenly stopped appearing at the bus stop. When I asked my mom if she knew where Chester was, she said simply, “Chester died in his sleep.”

 Died in his sleep? Apparently, death could occur just that easily, and just that suddenly. Between evening and morning. Following Chester’s disappearance, I began to pay even closer attention to the words of my bedtime prayer. Each time I spoke them out loud, with one of my parents standing alongside my bed, they made me feel fragile and vulnerable. I was scared by the thought of how quickly my life could come to an end.

 Then something else happened that brought my preoccupation into even sharper focus. A close third grade and Sunday school friend of mine – Tommy Putnam – accidentally ran his entire right arm through a storm glass door and bled to death. My classmates and I sang a version of the 23rd Psalm when we planted a tree in Tommy’s memory on the grounds of our school.

 In the many years that have elapsed since those events, thoughts of death and dying have never been far from my mind. That was certainly true during the years when I was consulting on close to 300 death penalty cases. For much of that time, I was dealing with stories and images of death and carnage, not occasionally but on a near-daily basis. It seems strange but perhaps not so strange that I wound up choosing a career where death was my constant companion.

 I realize that death isn’t a particularly uplifting subject. But there it is. People often ask me how I dealt with all the violence and death that were integral parts of my work as a forensic psychologist. Maybe I learned as a kid the benefits of mastering the skill of compartmentalization, I’m not sure.

 On a more positive note, 2025 promises to be an exciting year. Already, I have a bunch of book-related events and appearances scheduled, and there are more in the works.

If you haven’t done so already, I hope you’ll check out the “Free Chapter” promotion for my book. You can take advantage of it by going to my website (www.jeffreysmalldon.com) and clicking on the “Free Chapter” button that appears on the far right-handside of the masthead. Here’s a link to the promotion.

New & Noteworthy

As readers of this newsletter know, my book launched in early-August of last year. Since the launch, each successive month has been full of all kinds of different book-related events. Unfortunately, my heart surgery put most such things on hold beginning in mid-December and continuing until the middle of January. Now, the pace is picking up again.

I’ve appeared as a guest on seven different true crime podcasts (with a couple more such appearances currently in the works); I’ve had my book reviewed in a number of print outlets; and I’ve continued my run of television appearances, both in Ohio and in New York. During most of these latter appearances, I’ve been invited to talk about my book’s contents and provenance, and about my experiences interacting with well over a thousand murderers, including some of the most notorious repeat killers in modern American history.

Despite the fact that during my career I appeared numerous times as an expert witness in all kinds of different civil and criminal contexts, I have to admit that talking publicly about my book and the process of writing it isn’t something that comes easily or naturally to me. That said, I think I’m getting better at it — one small step at a time.

Here’s an updated summary of some of my most recent book-related activities and appearances: 

  • Early in January, I recorded an episode of the podcast Murder Unlimited with hosts Ed Hydock and Melissa Spivey. I’m told that the episode will drop on the morning of January 28. 
  • During the third week in January, I was the guest at a central Ohio book club whose members chose That Beast Was Not Me as their selection of the month. The atmosphere was friendly and welcoming – and members of the book club asked all sorts of excellent, stimulating questions. 
  • On Thursday, January 16, I gave a presentation about Beast at the Grandview Public Library in Columbus. Despite the frigid temperatures outside, the event drew a near-capacity crowd. For me, it was another standout event – with audience members seemingly eager to discuss the wide range of subjects that are covered in my book.

Here are a few pictures from the event:

  • On January 30, I’ll be the guest on the Criminal Mischief podcast. Host C.P. Lyle will be working in tandem with Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who is one of the best-known and most prolific true crime writers in America. (If you haven’t already, I urge you to check out The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, the book Ramsland and her co-author, Tracy Ullman, published last year about Wayne Henley and the role he played in the series of Houston-area rapes and murders that were committed under the close guidance – and intimidation – of the much older Dean Corll, the so-called “candy man,” back in the early-1970s. The book is well worth your time.)
  • I’ll be a participating author at the Newark Book Fest, slated for Saturday, May 17, in Newark, Ohio. 
  • Filmmakers Jordana Glick-Franzheim and Jenna Cedicci of No Name Pictures in Los Angeles recently signed a one-year Shopping Agreement with my publisher, Black Lyon Publishing, LLC. The agreement gives No Name the exclusive right to try and build out a project based on my book, then secure financing, a director, and so on. I’m excited about this development, even though I recognize that there’s no way to predict how things are going to play out. For now, fingers crossed. 
  • I’ve been invited to be a participant-author in the Columbus Book Festival, slated to take place on July 12 and July 13. I’ll be selling copies of my book and giving at least one presentation.

The Reading Rounds

One of these days, I’ll get around to picking up another novel. Actually, now that I think of it one arrived in the mail just the other day: Asia Mackay’s A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage. I’m also looking forward to diving into my friend Andrew Welsh-Huggins’ latest mystery/thriller, The Mailman, which is slated for a late-January launch.  

Since my last newsletter, however, I’ve been immersing myself in a variety of non-fiction books. Here are some that I’ve enjoyed in the last month and a half:

Guilty Creatures
by Mikita Brottman (Simon & Schuster)

This isn’t the first book I’ve read about the scandalous case involving erstwhile best friends Mike and Denise Williams, and Brian and Kathy Winchester. Before reading Mikita Brottman’s book, I read lawyer Steven Epstein’s Evil at Lake Seminole, published in 2020.

Epstein’s is the more granular analysis of how the case against Denise Williams and Brian Winchester came to light and then proceeded through the legal system.

Brottman, on the other hand, set out to try and fathom the principals’ psychological makeups, as well as the psychological makeups of the “audience” members who faced the challenge of having to make sense of these ostensibly faithful Baptists and their descent into a dark place where they were able to justify taking sexually provocative photographs; engaging in behavior that, to most readers, will seem like  hypocrisy of the most extravagant sort; and, finally, committing murder.

Amazingly, seventeen years elapsed before law enforcement officials finally located the body of Mike Williams, murdered as part of a conspiracy involving his best friend Brian and his wife Denise — who would later marry.

I appreciated the fact that Brottman didn’t shy away from asking provocative questions — and drawing some eyebrow-raising conclusions.

Here are a few such questions and conclusions: “It’s tempting to see the relationship between Brian and Denise as primarily physical, forged in lust and shaped by greed. But this is simply inaccurate. The couple were together – first in secret, then as a respectable married couple — for fifteen years….It’s a fact: Their marriage lasted twice as long as most….To their family friends, and neighbors, the marriage appeared to be stable and solid, built on God’s genuine and abiding love”; “As Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret points out, ‘There is no such thing as a murderer. Until the moment of the crime, [the person who commits murder] is a man like any other”; and “[Denise and Brian] didn’t see themselves as cold-blooded murderers. They saw themselves the way we all see ourselves, as good people doing our best to live decent lives. From time to time we may get a glimpse of a darker and more complex truth, but swiftly retreat into the shell of our imagined integrity [emphasis added].”

I recommend Brottman’s book as a brisk-moving chronicle of a bizarre and puzzling crime: the factors that led to it, the fallout after it occurred, and, finally, the long stretch of years before police were finally able to lower their net around murderers Denise Williams and Brian Winchester.

The World According to Joan Didion
by Evelyn McConnell (HarperOne)

I’ve long been a superfan of the late writer Joan Didion. Her Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) knocked me out when I read it several years after its publication. In subsequent years, I returned to Didion again and again – mostly to her essays, though I also dipped in and out of her fiction. A second essay collection, The White Album (1979), affected me in much the same way that Slouching Toward Bethlehem had.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, Didion never wrote a clumsy or careless sentence.

Evelyn McConnell’s book can serve as a sound introduction to Didion and her work, especially for readers who are not already acquainted with Didion’s output as an essayist, novelist, reviewer, and screenwriter. Each chapter is organized around a thing (e.g. typewriter, highball), a theme (e.g. man, girl), or a place (e.g., morgue, diner) that figures prominently in Didion’s writing. Whatever the chapter’s title, it serves as a jumping off point for McConnell’s reflections on Didion’s life, relationships, obsessions, and writing.

Readers will learn about Didion’s Sacramento roots, her conservative political leanings, her astute powers of observation, her intellectual restlessness, her lifelong attraction to dark subjects, and her extraordinary talent. As McConnell points out, many of her admirers consider Didion to have been “a writer’s writer, a master of her craft.

Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders
by Courtney Lund O’Neil (Citadel Press)

If you’ve followed the case of serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, you know of the key role that was played by a teenage girl named Kim Byers, who worked alongside fifteen-year-old Rob Piest, Gacy’s final victim, at Nisson’s Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois.

On December 11,1978, Byers was on the job when Piest disappeared after telling her he was going outside to talk with a contractor about a job that would pay better than the one he had at Nisson’s. As it turned out, Gacy kidnapped him from behind the store, murdered him at his Norwood Township house, then dumped his body in the Des Plaines River (Gacy had run out of room in the crawlspace beneath his house).

Byers’ role? She’d placed a film developing stub in the pocket of Piest’s jacket earlier that day, not long after she’d borrowed the jacket so that she would be warm while working the store’s front register. The police later found the jacket and the receipt inside Gacy’s house – and thus began the final unraveling of Gacy’s carefully curated life as a well-camouflaged, twice-married father of two –and the murderer of at least thirty-three boys and young men.

Postmortem is a memoir written by Kim Byers’ daughter, Courtney. It’s basically the result of Courtney’s prolonged journey to the heart of her mother’s story, with an emphasis on the many ways in which the Gacy murders affected Kim and her family, as well as other members of the Des Plaines community.

I could complain that O’Neil’s book contains a fair number of  grammatical and syntactic errors – but that would be to miss the point. The book stands as an important addition to the many other books that have chronicled Gacy’s vile career as a sexual sadist and murderer.

On a personal note, I spent approximately 20 hours with Gacy, stretched across 4days, in a death row visiting room at the Menard Correctional Facility in Chester, Illinois (1986-1987). During one of my visits, I asked Gacy about Piest’s jacket, and about the film stub that the police discovered inside his house. He allowed that while it may have been true that the police found the jacket and receipt in his house, no one could ever know for certain how they ended up there (“Hell, Jeff, other people who worked for me went in and out of that pharmacy – so who even knows how the jacket and receipt got to the house? Besides, I didn’t even spend much time there”).

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed
by Maureen Callahan (Little, Brown and Company)

Many book critics have excoriated Callahan for making the allegedly disingenuous claim that there’s nothing “ideological or partisan” about her vigorous takedown of Kennedy family members like the former president; his spoiled, highly self-involved, and often gratuitously reckless son, JFK, Jr.; his philandering brother Teddy, who almost certainly lied about some important aspects of his role in the infamous Chappaquiddick drowning death of his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne; his philandering father Joe; and his nephew Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who happens to be President Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

 These critics claim that Ask Not is, in fact, baldly partisan, an attempt to highlight the very worst shadow-selves of these members of the famous Kennedy clan. Whether the critics are right, you be the judge.

 I’ve long been a dazzled, and perhaps slightly dazed, fan of Jackie Kennedy. My fandom has made accommodations for her deliberate and arguably cynical construction of The Camelot Myth in the aftermath of her husband’s death. It’s true, too, that in most ways I’ve tended to side with JFK, Jr,. against his many critics, mainly because I always viewed him as almost preternaturally handsome, admirably independent and down to earth (a “good guy”), and capable of great charm. I also saw him as an A.D.D.-afflicted but generally well-meaning and endearing doofus.

 For present purposes, I’ll only say that I recommend this book to anyone who senses the need for a corrective of some sort, the kind of perspective that might help them to assess the Kennedy men, who have often had their cringeworthy character flaws all but erased in favor of hagiographic accounts focusing on their idealism, their beguiling presence on the national and international stages, their extreme wealth, their evident concern for the have-nots in American society, and their progressive policy initiatives.

A Backward Glance

I’ve never forgotten the two times when I crossed paths with members of Paul Thane Griffin’s family. At the time of these encounters, which both occurred in the mid- to late-1990s, Griffin’s wife and daughter resided in Worthington, Ohio.

Sue Griffin and her daughter were two of the surviving victims of spree shooter Jerry Hessler, who, in November 1995, killed their husband and father, respectively. He also killed three other people, including an infant named Amanda. When Hessler was indicted with death penalty specification, his attorneys retained me as their psychological expert.

During Hessler’s murderous rampage, he showed up at the Griffin family’s front door, spoke with Mr. Griffin for a few minutes (by way of context, the Griffins’ other daughter had rejected Hessler’s romantic overtures some ten years prior), then gunned him down where he stood.

The two Griffin family members who I wound up meeting and interacting with had every reason to view me with disdain — or at least skepticism. At the sentencing phase of Hessler’s trial, I testified at length, not to excuse or justify Hessler’s actions, nor to advocate for Hessler or argue any position with respect to the death penalty, but to educate members of the jury about Hessler’s long history of mental and emotional problems.

 In short, my job as an expert witness was to tell them what I’d learned as a result of my extensive interviews with Hessler’s mother and brothers, and my review of thousands of pages of records documenting Hessler’s educational, vocational, medical, and psychiatric history. Another part of my role was to inform the jury of my diagnostic impressions of Hessler.

All that by way of saying that the stage was set for Paul Thane Griffin’s widow and adult daughter to view me as a critical part of “the defense’s presentation,” put on at the sentencing or “mitigation” hearing of Hessler’s trial. Of course Hessler’s attorneys had hoped that after listening to my testimony (and the testimony of some lay witnesses), the jury would settle on a life sentence as opposed to the death penalty. (In the end, the jury settled on death.)

When I finished my testimony and stepped down from the witness stand, the judge called a brief recess. During the recess, Mrs. Griffin approached me, shook my hand, and told me she thought I’d been an excellent witness. She said she understood that I had a role to play in the case involving her husband’s killer, and she emphasized that it didn’t really matter to her whether I was in court at the request of the defense or the prosecution.

We chatted amiably, and that was that. I remember thinking that Mrs. Griffin’s graceful and objective assessment of my role in the trial of her husband’s killer was surely one of the most important things that had yet occurred in my career as a forensic psychologist.

A year or two after Hessler’s criminal trial, the Griffin family, along with a number of other plaintiffs, sued the State of Ohio, contending that a number of state-employed mental health professionals had dropped the ball when they sanctioned Hessler’s release from a local psychiatric hospital just months before he went on his killing spree.

For that case, I was retained as an expert witness by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. In other words, I’d be offering testimony that the plaintiffs’ attorneys hoped would contribute to a finding that the State of Ohio had been negligent in how they handled Hessler’s treatment and release from the hospital.

During a break that occurred while my testimony was ongoing, Mrs. Griffin and her one daughter invited me to join them for lunch at a nearby restaurant. Again, I was amazed by their display of kindness and equanimity.

While we were eating our lunches, we talked about the Hessler case but avoided getting into any details about Hessler’s murder of Thane Griffin. It’s not like there was any lingering mystery about who’d killed him. Our conversation was casual and familiar, not exactly intimate but not at all stilted either. These were two people who accepted me as someone who was, once again, just doing my job at the center of the legal process that was playing out as a result of Jerry Hessler’s tragic killing spree.

 I’ve never forgotten my interactions with these two members of the Griffin family. They were striking examples of grace-in-action. During the twenty years that followed, I returned to the memory of these interactions whenever I needed reminding of my core identity as a professional working on death penalty cases, and when I needed reminding of at least one version of myself that victims’ families saw when they viewed me through the prism of their grief. (Needless to say, not all victim families saw me in the same way the Griffins did.)

I’m sending best wishes for the year 2025. 

–Jeff 

 

P.S. For a month after my December 17 surgery, I wasn’t allowed to drive. That was especially hard because my car is where I usually screen new music and listen to old favorites. I’m happy to say I’ve outlived the no-driving mandate. To celebrate, I’m going to recommend a couple of great songs to those of you who might wish to add a little music to your day. 

First, I urge you to check out the Grant-Lee Phillips song, “Strangest Thing.” It speaks to the gold, diamond dust, and good fortune that — for  those with eyes to see — are just waiting to be discovered beneath the noise and distractions of everyday life. 

Another song I urge you to check out is Mark Erelli’s “You’re Gonna Wanna Remember This,” from Lay Your Darkness Down. I get a lump in my throat every time I listen to Erelli’s poignant reflection on the need for all of us to pay attention and preserve the images of the people and experiences that mean the most to us.

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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