Conversations with Dead Serial Killers - Paperback

by Ashley Lister (Author)

"A clown can get away with murder."
John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown.

Derek Turner makes his living as a psychic. But, when he makes his first genuine contact with the spirit world, it is an encounter that starts him on a pathway to holding conversations with dead serial killers.

Someone is recreating the most infamous crimes of the world's sickest serial killers: including Jack the Ripper, BTK, Charles Albright and Ed Gein. Derek learns that it's within his power to either profit from this situation or bring it to a needed conclusion and prevent further unnecessary deaths.

But profit can be a compelling argument.

Blending the reports from true crime stories with the lies from a professional psychic, Conversations with Dead Serial Killers explores the danger and obscenity that comes from glamourising murderers.

From the Book:

The thing that few people appreciated about Ed Gein was his skill as a seamstress. Clive had sat through every episode of the Great British Sewing Bee and, whilst the finalists on that show invariably produced some nice-looking creations in the last episode of each series, and sometimes that was when they were working with awkward fabrics such as taffeta or broderie anglaise, none of them had (yet) been challenged with creating something original from human skin. To Clive's mind it was an injustice that everyone looked at Ed Gein's work (the belt made from nipples, the lampshade made from Mary Hogan's face, and the chairs, fully upholstered, in human skin) and all they saw was the Grand Guignol horror that came from murder, the desecration of graves, and the violation of corpses. No one appreciated the man for his craftsmanship and finesse with a needle and thread.

Clive sat back at his desk, surveying the screen that held his notes on Gein and wondering how close his latest book was to being ready for publication. There were hundreds of biographies covering Gein, describing him as the Plainfield Butcher, the Plainfield Ghoul and the Grandfather of Gore, and explaining how he had been the role model for fictional monsters such as Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates in Robert Bloch's Psycho, and even Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.

Clive's approach to the biography had been different. Rather than go on about the lawlessness and illegality of Gein's actions with the usual ghoulish voyeurism with regards to murder, grave-robbing and skin-removal, Clive wanted to celebrate the Ed Gein that the history books had overlooked. Gein was a hard-working labourer. Gein was a loving son who aspired to be just like his mother. And Gein was a diligent researcher who had studied subjects as diverse as the Nazis, cannibalism and, if his well-thumbed copy of Grey's Anatomy was any indicator, human biology.

Not that Gein was the only subject of the biographies he had written. Clive had published one volume on the comforting bedside manner of Dr Harold Shipman foregrounding the under-reported benevolent side of the world's most prolific serial killer. He had also written about the forbidden romance between Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and wanted to write about the passion that kept Fred and Rose West together. Importantly, and it was a consistent theme throughout all of the books he was writing, Clive wanted to talk about the fact that some of these 'notorious killers' had managed to grow up unassuming and normal despite the trauma of abusive childhoods. He knew they'd grown up unassuming and normal because neighbours, witnesses and others involved in testifying against these people, always described them as being 'unassuming and normal'.