Goldberg Harold - My Life Among the Serial Killers

During the course of my investigations as a forensic psychiatrist, I have profiled and/or interviewed more than eighty serial killers. When I speak to them or to members of their families, it is always my policy to have each of them sign a legal release form that allows me to use what they tell me for scientific purposes. Some of the letters and interviews from the people I have profiled appear in this book. Theyre presented here not for the purpose of titillation but to help the reader understand the theories that I put forth in this book.

T he downtown Chicago summer night was filled with the wind-spun perfume of nearby roses and freshly mown lawns. My children were in bed, the youngest sleeping soundly with dreams of magic and Harry Potter, and the oldest sleeping the hard sleep that comes after playing three periods of ice hockey. Across the street, a young couple walked hand in hand, and their laughter echoed as they passed out of view. My neighbors pulled up in their car and I waved to them. Dressed to the nines, theyd just celebrated their wedding anniversary, and they waved back as they moved inside their house. As their door closed and the neighborhood fell completely silent, I began to think about my own life and the fact that my children and my neighbors knew only in the most general terms what I do in my professional life. Our friends recognize that I am a psychiatrist who deals with very difficult cases, and perhaps its better that they dont know any more than that. My two boys dont know why I sometimes leave for weeks on end, not yet. What I do is so very far removed from this thriving, affable neighborhoodthe satisfaction we get from planting oak saplings with the community association, the occasional elegance of charity galas or the operathat most everyone would be shocked to hear about it.

After a few minutes, I went inside our four-story brick house, a nearly perfect place that was my husbands grandfathers home and office where he practiced medicine for decades. In the back of the first floor is a former examination room that now serves as my work space when Im at home. Its walls are coated with tin, still there from years gone by. Its the history here, the cheerful medical attention given to the neighborhood for over eighty years by the good doctors, that inspires me. I pulled from a beige-colored folder some pictures of a child, a girl not only murdered brutally but also battered nearly beyond recognition. Sometimes I dont think I can take the sight of one more photograph of an innocent whose life has been so senselessly taken.

In preparation for a keynote address to a coroners group, I jotted down some notes onto a legal pad about the number and location of each wound on her lifeless body. Nearby were wire mesh baskets, with reams of other notes, replete with the pictures of other girls and boys, all murdered. This is not uncommon work for me. It is what I do, and I believe it is what I was meant to do.

Admittedly, it is not the work that most would choose, but I am what people now call a profiler, three short syllables that have given my professional research life a determined focus and purpose. For the past thirty years, longer than I care to remember, I have been privy to the most devious inner workings of serial murderers, and I have been compelled to traverse both the country and the world in a kind of solitary, endless journey to discover who they are, where they are hiding, and why they kill. Sometimes I think I know too much about them, certainly more than just about anyone in the world. But even as my knowledge of multiple murderers increases each day, my great fear is that I will never know enough.

I am not a profiler in the way youve seen on television. A few years ago, Ally Walker starred as the smartly dressed Samantha Waters in the CBS television series The Profiler . Waters said she worked via thinking in images, picturing killers through colorfully edited montages in her mind in a kind of extrasensory perception that helped her track down serial murderers. While she could never exactly control her visions, they always seemed to arrive at precisely the dramatic moment that moved the story forward into that most crucial element of prime-time televisionthe commercial. As for me, I am not clairvoyant in any way. Unlike Sam Waters, I do not see detailed, cinematic flashes of what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. And although some people have called me The Real-Life Clarice because of the books and movies The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter are the stuff of fiction. In Thomas Harriss novels, Hannibal develops an emotional bond with Clarice that belies a twisted, sick love, but love nonetheless. In reality, the caveat in working with serial killers is that they are completely, utterly inhuman.

As a forensic psychiatrist with a health law degree, my job is grounded in careful science and in reasoned theory. After speaking at length to more than eighty of them, I have found that serial murderers do not relate to others on any level that you would expect one person to relate to another. They can play roles beautifully, create complex, earnest, performances to which no Hollywood Oscar winner could hold a candle. They can mimic anything. They can appear to be complete and whole human beings, and in some cases are seen to be pillars of society. But theyre missing a very essential core of human relatedness. For them, killing is nothing, nothing at all. Serial murderers have no emotional connection to their victims. Thats probably the most chilling part of it. Not only do they not care, but they also have no ability to care.

With serial killers, I never quite know whom Im dealing with. They are so friendly and so kind and very solicitous at the beginning of our work together. Ive been swept up into their world, and that world, however briefly, can feel right. Ive often thought, Is this person the right person? Is all the work Ive donepainstaking research, scientific collection of data, complex theorizingsimply wrong? Maybe I missed something. Theyre charming, almost unbelievably so, charismatic like a Cary Grant or a George Clooney (although they rarely are as handsome). They treat me as if I am their kindred spirit.

However, when I sit with them for four to six hours at a time, solid, without interruption, everything changes. My interviews are crafted to seem like talks, easy conversations. Ive learned that a serial murderer cant maintain his solicitous role for any period of time past two to three hours. At this point I can begin to strip away the superficial layer of affability to reveal a dark, barren core.

He begins to fidget, sigh, tsk, clear his throat, roll his eyes, look around. Small beads of sweat form on his forehead. Finally, he begins to become annoyed, begins to break down. What hed rather I do is sit there patiently and become a repository for his endless thoughts and ramblings. Yet through a combination of indulgence, tolerance, listening, and constant indirect questioning, I will always get him to say more than he wants to say. It can take months for a breakthrough, and when it comes, theres nothing more electrifying, nothing more satisfying.