Talking with Serial Killers
During my decades as a researcher I spent some years carrying out profoundly draining interviews with respondents who were grappling with deeply emotional issues relating to loss and grief, so 
I know a little of the personal cost to the listener of engaging with great damage and disturbance. Even so, I can only imagine the trauma of sitting opposite serial murderers who have repeatedly carried out the most sadistic and barbaric crimes against innocent victims. Christopher Berry-Dee, a world-renowned investigative journalist, has interviewed at length over 30 of the world’s most notorious killers, and recorded some of their stories in Talking with Serial Killers.
His modus operandi involves building up a relationship with a killer over many years of correspondence until they begin to trust him, researching their history, and meeting with as many people as he can who know/knew the offender. With dangerous individuals such as these, this inevitably means negotiating a path through a lot of red tape.
For each case, I take an in-depth approach, spending an enormous amount of time getting to know the unique qualities of each individual, rather than depersonalising them with generalities based on their crimes. While I develop an empathy for my subject, I always take care not actually to sympathise to the extent that their dramas start playing in the theatre of my own mind. It is a constant balancing act between identification and analysis.
His analysis evokes strong responses. It’s deeply disturbing to read of police inability to track these criminals despite a trail of numerous assaults and murders, or their failure to follow up on inconsistencies and blatant lies. The unscrupulous standards and incompetence of some officers or lawyers took my breath away. It was equally chilling to hear about young women and girls hitch-hiking and accepting lifts from strangers, of naive and vulnerable learning-disabled young people being caught in the nets of these murderers, and perhaps worst of all, to read of serial murderers being released to kill again … and again … and again.
The detail is sickening and certainly not for the faint-hearted.
One rather feels that even Stephen King could not better that scene in one of his horror novels.
Each killer has a chapter devoted to them, relating the background and relationships which were instrumental in forming their characters. Their crimes are recorded from multiple sources including their own descriptions and admissions, but particularly fascinating for me were the sections giving psychiatric, medical and forensic explanations for why these murderers performed in certain ways.
So, who were these villians, and what singles them out as exceptional amongst killers – the world’s most evil murderers as the strapline has it? A few basic details must suffice for this post.
Arthur John Shawcross took the lives of 53 human beings; Henry Lee Lucas confessed to at least 190, although it’s commonly agreed that he exaggerated the number.
John Martin Scripps travelled internationally, and with cold-blooded efficiency, killed innocent strangers using butchering techniques learned in prison to dispose of their bodies, and then went on shopping sprees using their credit cards. He was only 36 when he was executed in Singapore.
When Michael Bruce Ross was convicted after 11 brutal sexual assualts and 6 murders, all carried out before his 28th birthday, the state had to debate the relative merits of consecutive life sentences versus execution by electric chair, because the latter would involve costly repair work on the long disused chair itself, and redecoration of the witness viewing area and death house suite!
The multiplicity of errors and lies and unethical/illegal behaviours amongst the police, lawyers and legal fraternity in the case of Ronald Joseph DeFeo Jr, accused of killing 6 members of his family, makes for such confusing reading that, despite the author’s analytical reporting, I was unclear in the end just who had done what. And yet a man’s life is at stake here.
Similarly there seem to be serious flaws in the case against Daniel Clark, accused of killing a number of prostitutes more correctly attributable to his co-accused Carol Bundy. Witnesses and attorneys were bribed or coerced; statements and evidence tampered with or withheld or ‘lost’; alibis ignored. Bundy, herself totally untruthful and most certainly guilty, was given a deal to testify against Clark in return for her own life.
It was somehow particularly difficult to read the story of a woman, Aileen Carol Wuornos. Only about 2% of the USA’s felons who have been condemned to death are females. Abandoned as a baby, abused as a child, regularly beaten with a studded belt, a mother at 14, married to a man 49 years her senior, Wuornos was given to fits of uncontrollable rage. In just over a year she scattered a trail of middle-aged male corpses (at least six) across the main highways of central Florida, shooting each of them several times, leaving their naked bodies many miles away from their abandoned cars, robbing them of all their possessions. It was loyalty to her lesbian lover that made her finally confess.
Kenneth Allen McDuff didn’t just kill over 15 victims; he savaged them in unspeakable ways – savagery that turned the stomachs of even veteran police officers.
And so it goes on. Tales beyond imagining, minds depraved way beyond our comprehension. Collosal sums of money are needed to ensure these ultra-dangerous individuals are securely detained and safe from harm by themselves or other inmates. The average stay on Death Row is 11.3 years. In California alone there are up to 500 inmates awaiting execution at any one time; in Texas that figure is over 450.
A disturbing and challenging book by any standard.
Letters from Helfenberg The serious challenge for 2025