GOLDBERG, Harold

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, William Morrow/HarperCollins, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Journalist.

WRITINGS:

(With Helen Morrison) My Life among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and Entertainment Weekly.

SIDELIGHTS: Harold Goldberg cowrote My Life among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers with Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist who has worked with law enforcement in solving some of the most gruesome and bloody criminal cases of our time. She shares the details of eighty of these, including the most notorious.

They include Richard Otto Macek, dubbed the "Mad Biter," who chewed on his victims' body parts, Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams, and rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long. Other criminals include Rosemary and Fred West, of England, who killed girls and women, and Brazilian child killer Marcelo Costa de Andrade. Morrison also interviewed Ed Gein, who was film director Alfred Hitchcock's inspiration for Psycho, just before Gein's death.

Morrison feels that a serial killer is destined to commit his crimes from the time he/she begins to form as a fetus. She notes that John Wayne Gacy, who killed thirty-three males, had the emotional development of an infant. Gacy asked Morrison to take his brain after he was executed, which she did, along with other organs, for study. Pathologists found nothing extraordinary about Gacy's brain, which Morrison keeps locked in her basement. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book "a scary piece of work, with even scarier implications."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2004, review of My Life among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers, p. 260.

Library Journal, April 15, 2004, Tim Delaney, review of My Life among the Serial Killers, p. 103.

Publishers Weekly, April 5, 2004, review of My Life among the Serial Killers, p. 56.

ONLINE

Nthposition Online,http://www.nthposition.com/ (November 5, 2004), Seamus Sweeney, review of My Life among the Serial Killers.*