Retired forensic psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon, who has lived in Columbus since 1981, reviews in fascinating and often creepy detail the encounters he has had with serial killers over the decades.
Smalldon, whose mordant sense of humor gives the book an edge not typical of true-crime stories, early on relays the story of a time near his retirement when his daughter confessed that sometimes she had wondered if he was a serial killer himself.
When he assured her that he wasn’t, she said, “But that’s exactly what you would say if you were one.”
“That’s my girl,” he said.
But maybe the more pertinent question is how Smalldon managed to avoid becoming the victim of a serial killer. In his teens and 20s, self-admittedly naïve, ignorant and vulnerable, he placed himself in the path of one killer after another.
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Smalldon, whose father was an FBI agent stationed at various places around the country, was riveted by killers from an early age. Though he started on a path to become an English professor and then spent a few years as a hospital administrator, he finally switched gears to forensic psychology, receiving a Ph.D. at Ohio State and going on to work on the cases of almost 300 killers in Ohio and around the area.
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But that was later. Much of the volume focuses on letters Smalldon exchanged as a young man with killers and their associates. As an undergraduate at Valparaiso University in the 1970s, he took an abnormal psychology class, and his professor casually suggested that it might be fun to write some letters to Charles Manson, then imprisoned, and the members of his “family,” who weren’t.
Smalldon did, and carried on a correspondence with Manson for years, with Manson maintaining “that beast was not me,” petitioning for money and telling Smalldon, “you’re my kid, my son, my love.”
Smalldon also exchanged numerous letters with Manson’s followers with the result that when Manson devotee Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was arrested for attempting to assassinate former President Gerald Ford, the investigating officers found a cache of letters from Smalldon in her apartment.
An attempt to strike up a pen-pal relationship with Ted Bundy proved less successful, though Bundy did write him a letter closing with the cryptic instructions “Take Care. Watch yourself. Travel light. Peace, Ted.”
In 1983, Smalldon was working as an administrator at Riverside Methodist Hospital when his job and his interest in crime intersected, as two medical researchers in an area of the hospital supervised by Smalldon were murdered in a crime that remained unsolved for years.
“Their deaths created a link between my past and my present. And they changed my life,” he wrote, leading him eventually to leave his job and pursue a career in forensic psychology.
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He would go on to evaluate killers who may be familiar to those who have followed crime in Ohio for the past few decades, including sniper serial killer Thomas Lee Dillon; nursing assistant and orderly Donald Harvey, who killed at least 37 patients and others in Ohio and Kentucky; and Columbus-based Alva Campbell, about whom Smalldown said, “If there were a contestant called ‘Build-a-Bogeyman,'” Campbell “would be the odds-on favorite to win.”
Anyone with even a passing interest in Ohio true crime, or in the working of the mind of a forensic psychologist, will find much to savor here.
At a glance
Smalldon will appear in conversation with Andrew Welsh-Huggins at Gramercy Books, 2424 E. Main St., Bexley, at 7 p.m. on Aug. 13. Tickets are still available for $5, but are being sold quickly.
“That Beast Was Not Me” will be released on Aug. 6 and is available on Amazon for preorder. Gramercy will be among the many bookstores selling the story, as well, once it is released.
