Hello and welcome to a crime lines bonus episode. I was going to take this week off as I am shifting

from the 12 days of crime lines missing person series to our usual type of content.

But I do have a bonus episode for you in this off week. If you've been here a while,

you know that once or twice a year. I will do an author and or

podcast or interview as a bonus episode. But interviewing isn't really my thing, and interviews

aren't what my audience is here for. But I do get a lot of PR inquiries for books, and sometimes

they're not even true crime related.

So if I'm being perfectly honest, I've largely stopped even opening the emails from

PR people. If I know someone who wrote a book, they can just text me and I'll get them on my

show, but otherwise, it's just not what crime lines is about.

So all of that to say, the way Dr. Jeffrey Smallden snuck through is that he wrote a book I actually wanted to read. The book title is, That Beast Was Not Me, One Forensic Psychologist,

Five Decades of Conversations with Killers. And the book was even better than I thought it would be, one forensic psychologist, five decades of conversations with killers.

And the book was even better than I thought it would be,

probably because Dr. Smallden's first life plan was to become an English professor.

So he actually knows how to write well and to write an engaging narrative nonfiction.

I read a lot of true crime books, and this is unfortunately not a requirement to get published, so it's always a relief when it is pulled off.

I mentioned Dr. Smaldon's career path because it took a minute for it to lead him to forensic

psychology, though the interest was always there.

He was the son of an FBI agent, and while he was still an undergrad, as you will hear about

in our interview, he started to write to members of the Manson family to figure out how they ended up where they did, and they wrote back.

But it wasn't until years later when a double homicide occurred that took the lives of two of

Dr. Smaldon's coworkers, that he decided to pursue forensic psychology in order to understand the minds of murderers. In his book,

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