Forensic Psychologist Shares Decade-Long Career in Provocative Memoir!

Join longtime Ohio forensic psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Smalldon as he launches That Beast Was Not Me: One Forensic Psychologist, Five Decades of Conversations with Killers. Smalldon will be in conversation with Andrew Welsh-Huggins, author of No Winners Here Tonight, the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio.

BUCKEYE CRIME WRITERS is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this program.

In his provocative memoir, Dr. Smalldon tells the story of how, as a naïve undergraduate student, he wandered straight to the middle of Manson Family madness; how he ditched plans for an academic career and instead chose to become a health care executive; how an unknown assailant murdered two of his co-workers when he was an administrator at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus; how he then began efforts to probe the mind games of infamous killers like Ted Bundy, Donald Harvey, and John Wayne Gacy (with whom he corresponded for three years and spent close to twenty hours in a death row visiting room); and how, still reeling from the trauma of the hospital murders, he began a long journey down a third career path, one that would afford him with a close vantage point from which to continue his study of the minds and motivations of murderers.

Over the course of a quarter century, Jeffrey Smalldon obtained board certification in forensic psychology, consulted on close to three hundred death penalty cases in both state and federal court, acted as the court-appointed expert in more than a thousand child custody cases, and served as an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State, where for years he taught a graduate-level seminar called Topics in Forensic Psychological Assessment. Since 1981, he’s called Columbus home. He and his wife Betsy have two adult children and four grandchildren. That Beast Was Not Me is his first book.”

Freelance writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s nonfiction book, No Winners Here Tonight, is the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio. Welsh-Huggins is also the author of seven novels in the Andy Hayes private eye series from Ohio University Press, featuring a former Ohio State University and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator, including the Shamus Award-nominated An Empty Grave. He's also the editor of Columbus Noir, the 101st title in Akashic Books' award-winning series of short mystery fiction anthologies. Andrew's short mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, the anthology The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021, and other magazines and anthologies.

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