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Greetings from Columbus!

Spring is just around the corner. How do I know? This is the first week of Spring Training baseball, and I’ve begun wearing my bright orange socks (Go Tigers!). 

News flash: We’re living in strange times. In response to the devastating reality on the ground, I’m choosing to focus my attention on the upcoming baseball season. 

And a few other things… 

As you might recall, in my last newsletter I introduced a new feature: my responses to a couple interesting questions that I’ve been asked by audience members at my book events. I’m continuing with that feature this time around. My responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

1. What was the most difficult part of writing That Beast Was Not Me? 

That’s easy. For me the most difficult part was writing about my exchange of letters with people like Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Susan Atkins, and “Squeaky” Fromme. 

One reason I found it difficult is that I wanted to find the right balance between capturing my correspondents’ unique voices and making their writing comprehensible to the reader. This was especially challenging in the case of Charles Manson, who, despite his obvious intelligence, had only about a fourth grade education. Manson cared little about grammatical rules. He frequently wrote run-on sentences, and he almost never used apostrophes. 

In the end, I resorted to the very lightest kind of editing. I knew that sometimes readers would find Manson’s writing annoying and a bit difficult to comprehend, but I elected not to change much because I wanted readers to encounter Manson as I encountered him. I, too, often found his writing annoying and hard to read. 

The other thing I found difficult about writing these chapters of my book has more to do with the challenge of storytelling. How do you present an exchange of letters without making the presentation seem rote and uninteresting? I tried to flesh out my reporting with contextual details, including details having to do with my real-time reaction to the things I was reading. 

2. How did you handle situations where pre-trial admissions made to you by a criminal defendant had the potential to undermine your usefulness as a defense-side witness? 

That’s an excellent question. It’s one I don’t think I’ve been asked before. First, I need to clarify a few things. 

Frequently, defense attorneys tell their client not to disclose to them any offense-specific details. Their reasoning is that such details aren’t relevant to the task before them, which is to undermine the prosecution’s attempt to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their client is guilty. 

In many (not all) death penalty cases, the defendant insists that he did not commit the crime he’s accused of committing. Remember, the defense attorneys don’t need to prove their client’s innocence, they just need to poke holes in the prosecution’s case. 

A problem can arise when the official defense position is that the defendant didn’t commit the crime – and then in the course of being interviewed (by me), the defendant admits that he’s guilty. 

On the witness stand, I would come across as partisan and uninterested in thoroughness if had to testify that I never even questioned the defendant about events surrounding the crime he is accused of committing (i.e., Prosecutor: “Dr. Smalldon! Are you telling the members of this jury that you never even asked the defendant about the crime he was charged with? How can you claim to have conducted a thorough psychological evaluation?” and so on…). 

So, in anticipation of being called as an expert witness at the sentencing phase of the trial, I made inquiring about the charged offense/s a standard part of my interview protocol. 

An important point to be made is that the defendant has every right to decline to speak with me about the crime/s he is charged with. 

Different attorneys dealt with this issue in different ways. Some attorneys encouraged their client not to discuss the offense during the psychological interviews. There’s nothing wrong with such advice, even though it comes with risks (i.e., jury members might view the defendant’s refusal to discuss the crime as evidence of callousness, deceitfulness, or lack of remorse). Other attorneys – usually the ones who had little doubt that the prosecutors would succeed in making their case – encouraged their client to go ahead and talk with me about the charged offenses. 

A problem can occur if the defense attorneys decide to make a vigorous argument at trial in favor of their client’s actual innocence – and the defendant ends up confessing to me during the psychological evaluation. I’m not an attorney, but I think most attorneys would probably advise their client not to confess under those circumstances.

 I remember an unfortunate situation that arose during one of my earliest capital case consultations. The defense attorneys argued to the jury that their client couldn’t have committed the crime he was charged with (the murder of an elderly woman, inside her home). 

The attorneys called me as an expert witness without first confirming with me what I would and wouldn’t be able to say on the witness stand. Had they done that, I don’t think they would have called me as a witness. The risk would have been seen as too great. 

As it turned out, they did call me. It came as no real surprise when the prosecuting attorney asked me if I’d discussed the alleged offense with the defendant. Obviously, I had to answer honestly and say yes, I did. Naturally, the next question had to do with details of what the defendant told me. 

Unfortunately for the defense cause, the end result was that the jury heard for the first time – from me – that the defendant definitely had committed the crime. 

A hard lesson learned. Who was more to blame for what happened, me or the attorneys? I’ll leave that question for someone else to answer. I was pretty new to the death penalty arena. I hadn’t yet learned how absolutely essential it was for me to provide the retaining attorneys with a detailed summary of what I would testify to if they called me as an expert witness. But the attorneys should have realized how critical it was for them to know in advance what my testimony would be if they called me to the stand.

• On December 15th, at the invitation of teacher Mara Hoover, I presented to four forensics classes at Granville High School in Granville, Ohio. I first met Mara almost fifteen years ago, when she was teaching in another district and invited me to present to one of her classes. It was great seeing her again, and I loved talking with her students. High school students ask some of the most interesting questions!

• On January 3rd, I appeared at the Whetstone Library in Columbus to talk about That Beast Was Not Me and take questions from the audience. Thanks to Wendy VanScheetz for the invitation, and to Joe for helping to organize the event.

• On January 15, host Charlie Worrell had me as her guest on her podcast called Crimelines. For anyone who might be interested in listening to that interview, here’s a link.

• A little later in January, I sat for a lengthy interview with Grey Everett Smith, who’s a senior at Granville High School. The interview will soon be posted to various social media sites. Grey plans to study filmmaking in college. He has an excellent mentor. His father, Kirk Smith, heads up the videography program at Notre Dame and is an accomplished photographer and documentarian in his own right. That’s Grey decked out in the cool gold outfit.

• Also in January, I traveled to Carnegie, PA, to give a presentation at the beautiful and historic Andrew Carnegie Free Library. Of course Carnegie played a role in the creation of thousands of libraries. However, he only endowed five of them. The library in Carnegie is one of those five. Thanks to chief librarian Walker Evans for arranging this event, and to Mike of Wooly Bear Books in Carnegie for handling the book sales.

• On March 12, I’ll be talking about That Beast Was Not Me at Congregation Beth Tikvah in Columbus. The event was originally scheduled for May, but because of some schedule-related complications it got moved up to May.

• On April 23, I’ll be presenting to the Carnegie-Collier Rotary Club outside Pittsburgh.

• On May 16th, I’ll be a participating author at the Newark Book Fest in Newark, Ohio. Organizer Stephanie Loughman does a fantastic job with this event, and I’m looking forward to taking part.

• On July 25th, I’ll be at the Coshocton Book Fest in Coshocton, Ohio. This is a new event for me. Can’t wait!

Don’t ask why it took me almost 50 years to get around to reading this Beckett biography. I have no answer.

I’ve always thought of Beckett as a strange case, in all likelihood a psychologist’s dream. I wasn’t wrong.

There are so many reasons to care about Beckett and his work. By now, 36 years after his death, he’s widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers (in 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature). He’s known primarily for plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, but he also wrote novels (e.g., Murphy, Watt, Molloy), short stories (e.g., More Pricks Than Kicks), and critical essays. Plus, he acted as the aide-de-camp for the brilliant and mercurial James Joyce, and he was the abiding love interest of Joyce’s mentally unstable daughter Lucia.

Before reading this biography, I didn’t know much about Beckett’s personal story. Now I know that at its center is a man with mommy issues on steroids. The story of the relationship between Beckett and his mother Maria, a nurse, reads like a case study in what’s meant by the phrase “toxic dependency.” In Deirdre Bair’s telling of the story, Beckett hated Maria but could never steer entirely clear of her domineering and highly critical ways. He kept trying to get away and stay away from her — in London, Paris, and other far-flung locales — but she kept drawing him back into her orbit. Every time that happened, their power struggles would begin anew.

All throughout his life, Beckett was plagued by “idiosyncratic” illnesses. Also of interest is the fact that he was married to the same woman, Suzanne, for nearly three decades. Suzanne is a case study in her own right. She was hungry for praise and recognition, but like her husband she desperately wanted to be left alone. She and Beckett tended to be like two ships passing in the night. Their relationship, in some ways mirroring Beckett’s relationship with his mother, was characterized by alternating episodes of disdain and camaraderie.

What about Beckett’s work? Much of it has a dystopian flavor, and it’s often hard to read. Beckett is famous for the gnomic utterances of the characters in his plays. Ask almost anyone to characterize Samuel Beckett’s worldview — and view of life in general — and they’ll respond with words like bleak, despairing, cynical, gloomy, pessimistic, and grim.

In truth, Beckett’s work contains plenty of absurdist comedy and even occasional dollops of optimism, though optimism of a strained, muted kind. It’s not like Beckett was performing handstands of joy in response to his meditations on the human condition. But he still marveled at human beings’ ability to persevere through suffering.

At 650 pages, this monumental study of Beckett’s life and work requires a significant investment of time. It’s well worth it.

Douglas Preston will be a familiar name to most readers of true crime. He’s a celebrated writer of fiction, but he’s also the author responsible for writing The Monster of Florence, which details his personal involvement in the search for a serial killer thought to be responsible for the deaths of sixteen victims between 1968 and 1985. In 2013, he published Trial By Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case as an eBook.

Crime Ink is an imprint of Penzler Publishers, associated with The Mysterious Press. As I understand it, this “best of” book is the first in a planned series. All the included stories had to have been published in calendar year 2025.

I enjoyed reading each of the thirteen stories that are included in this volume. They’re all well-written and engaging. Plus, they delve into a wide range of subjects, including on-line “incel” culture, the pioneering crime investigation specialist Frances Glessner Lee, the serial killer who roamed among members of the late-70’s punk rock scene in LA, problems with treatment programs designed to “rehabilitate” convicted sex offenders, a preposterous murder-for-hire scheme in Texas, and the CrimeCon convention that attracts true crime afficionados and a range of “experts’ from all over the world.

My favorites among these articles? Probably the piece featuring Kerri Rawson (the daughter of the serial killer known as BTK), Jon Benet Ramsey’s father, and Gabby Petito’s family; the one about the many problems associated with polygraph examinations; and the short but unforgettable piece that tells the story of how two nudists in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco disarmed a “crazy kind of pirate guy” who was threatening a man with a blowtorch.

In the latter article, a man named Lloyd Fishback was one of the nude disarmers. My favorite line? “Fishback declined to comment for this story as the nudist values his privacy.”

Just when you think there can’t possibly be room for any more Dylan biographies, along comes veteran provocateur Ron Rosenbaum with a 2025 book he characterizes as “a kind of biography.”

Rosenbaum’s Things Have Changed isn’t really a biography at all. Instead, it’s a contrarian, highly idiosyncratic attempt to take the measure of Dylan’s “cultural impact” over the course of more than six decades.

There’s an obsessive, often tedious quality about Rosenbaum’s writing. It’s likely to annoy most readers. A close copy editor could have helped the problem.

Rosenbaum simply can’t stop himself from repeating, over and over and over again, words and phrases like “magnetic fields” (Dylan grew up in iron ore country in northern Minnesota), “whole other level” (a phrase he uses so many times, and in so many different contexts, it becomes tiring), “exceptionalism” (Rosenbaum sees Dylan as a towering genius, a songwriter exponentially more gifted than any of his contemporaries, including such luminaries as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell), “Jesus freaks stole his soul” (Rosenbaum remains enraged by the fundamentalist Christian “cult” who took advantage of Dylan during a period of emotional vulnerability and turned him into a scolding, self-righteous Christian for a period of about three years in the early-80’s), and “argument with God” (a problem Rosenbaum calls “theodicy” and places at the very center of The Dylan Project, broadly defined), and “that thin, wild mercury sound” (which is what Dylan told Rosenbaum he thought he had achieved around the time when he recorded Blonde on Blonde in the mid-60’s).

In many respects, I found this book a tough slog. It’s dense with fairly obscure allusions to ancient Greek and Roman texts, quantum physics, and Jewish theology.

In some places, the writing is just plain bad. Consider this sentence, which appears on page 25: “Not sympathy for the Devil of that contemporaneous Rolling Stones song represented life’s winners.” Huh?

Proceed at your own risk (of being bored half to death). There are many other Dylan books that are far more worth your time than this one is. One of those is Howard Sounes’ Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. Another is Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Ballad of Bob Dylan. There are lots of others.

Just in case you’re in need of a reminder about the very real dangers lurking on the internet, perhaps this is the book for you. Almost the Perfect Murder, by Paul Williams, was a bestseller in Ireland.

The book tells an unspeakably sad story. An intellectually challenged, emotionally unstable young childcare assistant named Elaine O’Hara was murdered in 2012 by a Dublin architect named Graham Dwyer. Dwyer’s trial in 2015 revealed lurid details that caused the press in Ireland to call O’Hara’s murder one of the most shocking crimes in Irish history.

O’Hara’s background makes for tough reading. She was bullied at school, and throughout her teenage years she was hospitalized for psychiatric care on multiple occasions. Her diagnoses included major depression and borderline personality disorder. To complicate matters further, she had asthma, diabetes, and dyslexia.

She went missing in August 2012. Eventually, it was determined that she had gone to the cemetery where her mother was buried. Her car was found nearby. About a year later, two anglers found a bag in a reservoir that contained handcuffs, clothing, a gag, and multiple sets of restraints. Three days later, a dog trainer who regularly walked her dogs in the foothills south of Dublin discovered human bones. The police confirmed that they belonged to Elaine.

What makes this story a compelling cautionary tale is the revelation that about five years before her death, Elaine had begun visiting fetish adult websites. She was drawn to fantasies of sex that included bondage, violence, and knives.

During the time when she was exploring her sexual fantasies online, she made contact with a man whose Gmail address identified him as fetishboy. As it turns out, he was a quiet, modest-seeming architect and family man named Graham Dwyer. He had no criminal history. The police investigation into his background revealed “nothing of note.”

Dwyer fantasized about using a knife to stab a woman during sex. At one point he messaged O’Hara, “I want to stick my knife in flesh while I am sexually aroused….I would like to stab a girl to death some time.” On another occasion he messaged her, “My urge to rape, stab, or kill is huge. You have to help me control or satisfy it.”

Much of Williams’ book is devoted to an exploration of how the emotionally very vulnerable O’Hara got seduced into participating with Dwyer in his BDSM fantasies. She never knew that he would actually kill her.

I often cringed while reading Almost the Perfect Murder. It was heartbreaking on nearly every page. On the other hand, it tells an important story that should serve as a cautionary lesson for parents and others who might not fully realize the dangers that are present on the so-called dark web.

Just a day or two following my first two-day visit with John Wayne Gacy on death row at the Menard Correctional Facility in Chester, Illinois, Gacy wrote to tell me that I looked “a lot younger” than he thought I’d look. I was thirty-three at the time, working on my PhD at Ohio State.

During my visit, I’d paid $5 for a corrections officer to take two photographs of Gacy and me. Gacy told me to take the one I liked best, he’d keep the other one.

Gacy’s preferred victim group consisted of boys and young men between the ages of 14 and 30. The majority of his 33 known victims were in their teens and early-20’s. By telling me that I looked younger than he thought I’d look, Gacy was essentially placing me inside the age range of the victims he tortured and killed.

A weird aspect of my interactions with Gacy – four days across two separate visits – was my awareness that during our time together, he was likely fantasizing about incapacitating me with chloroform, restraining me with handcuffs, tightening (then loosening, then tightening) a garotte around my neck, sexually assaulting me, and killing me. It was unsettling to be thinking those thoughts in real time while I was engaging with Gacy.

Once I left Illinois and headed home to Columbus, a Polaroid photo of Gacy and me remained in Gacy’s possession, a souvenir of my visit.

I knew for sure that he would use the photograph as a trigger for his sexual fantasies, and as a stimulus for masturbation.

What could I do? Not much.

Until next time,

–Jeff

P.S. Here are a couple of song recommendations for those of you who are interested in song recommendations.

In March, I’ll be seeing long-time favorite Alejandro Escovedo at Natalie’s, an intimate live music venue here in Columbus. In preparation, I’ve been re-listening to a lot of Escovedo’s music. Here’s one I love, “Irene Wilde” off his Bourbonitis Blues recording. As a young glam-punker, Escovedo was a Mott the Hoople groupie, so it came as no surprise that he would choose to cover this gem written by Mott frontman Ian Hunter. I’ve never heard Escovedo do it live. Maybe this time. Here’s a link.

In early-April, I’ll be seeing Bob Dylan for the first time in my life. My daughter Lacey, another music fan, is going to be my date (lucky me!). I’ve been an avid Dylan follower for roughly six decades. It seems absurd that I’ve never seen him perform live. Anyway, I’ve been listening to a lot of Dylan lately, getting ready for the show. A song you may or may not know is “Mississippi,” from his album Love and Theft (perhaps you know the covers by Sheryl Crow, the Chicks, and others). “There’s only one thing that I did wrong/I stayed in Mississippi a day too long.” Here’s a link.