True Crime Serial Killer Books
Ted Bundy's buddy, John Wayne Gacy's pickled brain, and other nightmares
Dec 12, 2006
So many true crime books are published about serial killers that it seems like one of those human predators lurks under every bush and in every lonely alley, not to mention in every parking lot and hiding in your house when you come home. Recently, I did a bunch of research on serial killers because I thought that my next novel was going to have a serial killer in it as a main character. However, I’m now reconsidering writing that book at all, but all that crazy serial killer stuff is still in my head. It’s giving me nightmares. If you want to have some terrible nightmares, here are two books that will get you started.
The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule is one of the seminal true crime books. Ann Rule was an aspiring true crime writer in Seattle, writing up little police reports and volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline, when quite a few young women in the area were brutally murdered. She got a contract to write her first true crime book about the murders. She talked about her contract and her impending divorce to her friend who also worked at the suicide prevention hotline, Ted Bundy.
You can’t make up stuff like that.
This book is fascinating not only for its careful and detailed research of the police work that went into identifying Ted Bundy as the serial killer and not only for the long story of Ted Bundy’s psychology, murders, apprehension, escape, subsequent murders, and recapture, but also for Rule’s personal reaction to Bundy. Even in the postscripts written more than twenty years after the Seattle murders, she still has trouble reconciling the Bundy she knew with Bundy the predator who murdered young women, which he certainly was. It’s a perfectly written, detailed analysis of serial killer behavior when they are not in the act of killing. Evidently, serial killers are just as charming as wife-beaters and pedophiles.
By the way, my own personal note here, if you have kids, please read the Yello Dyno website about pedophiles. It's fantastic information, and it's important that your kids recognize when someone is being too nice to them.
From the personal to the medical, My Life among the Serial Killers by Helen Morrison and Harold Goldberg is a detailed study of the psychology of serial killers by a psychiatrist who met some of the most famous ones and studied them for years, including Richard Macek, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, Bobby Joe Long, and more. Morrison describes each subject’s childhood, psychology, and criminal history.
Many though not all serial killers have lesions or damage to their temporal lobe, the part of the brain that controls impulsiveness and aggression. John Wayne Gacy didn’t. Morrison is sure of that because she autopsied his brain and, indeed, still has it sunk in formaldehyde in a cardboard box in her basement, a gruesome admission that I found strangely reminiscent of serial killers’ retention of “trophies” from their victims, like when serial killers keep decapitated heads in their freezers because they are loath to part with bits of the people they killed.
I also found some of her less sweeping conclusions too facile, such as a Jungian-Freudian diagnosis of serial killers being stuck in the “oral” and infantile stage of emotional development. Freudian stages have been generally repudiated as inaccurate descriptions of the developmental process. She also states that she thinks that there is “a serial killer gene” and that a serial killer irrevocably becomes a serial killer while still a fetus, completely negating the concept of free will or morality and essentially dismissing serial killers of any responsibility for their crimes. I find this irresponsible and intellectually silly. Morrison’s interviews are interesting, and her reaction to serial killers is informative. Morrison and Goldberg also write with an authoritative tone about her theories that may mislead people to think that these are established facts. Though Morrison has interviewed some serial killers, drawing conclusions on this limited sample size is problematic.
