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‘What lives in the heart of a Monster?’ asks Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. The answer might have come straight from the ink-dipped, goose quill of Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘Wickedness lies within each heart, waiting only for the proper time and impetus to break free.’

Month after month, year in, year out, I am emailed by students and professionals holding an interest in criminology. They ask numerous questions about serial killers and, most pertinently, ‘In your opinion, Christopher, what makes them tick?’ Well, if I knew the empirical answer to that question I would also be clever enough to be able to get fingerprints from running water – but I don’t, and I cannot.

Of course, there are legions of psychiatrists and psychologists who do claim to know the answer to this question, and I have met a few who have been blessed with the answers to every question. Unfortunately, most of these ‘experts’ have never met a serial killer in the flesh, let alone spent years corresponding with such a person. They are, therefore, despite a string of letters after their names, textbook shrinks, for no one but the killer himself knows what makes him tick.

Of course, it goes without saying that you could never conceive of committing such terrible acts on a fellow human being, so you will never know what goes through a serial murderer’s head. And this also applies to all of the experts out there who claim to know it all, but the only ones who do know are the killers themselves.

So, throughout this book, and using their own words, the killers will tell you, either consciously or subconsciously, what they think made them exactly what they are – what makes them tick, in other words. By doing so, we might be able to form the conclusion that if this is what these monsters think and say today, then retrospectively it must have been more or less the same as they did when committing their crimes. A leopard never changes its spots, they say, so this book will make for very grim reading indeed.

And it is that this point I wish to refer to former FBI Agent John Douglas with Mark Olshaker. Victoria and I highly recommend their book, The Anatomy of Motive, specifically Chapter 3, ‘Magnum Force’.

In a nutshell, and in an attempt to paraphrase the entire chapter, John makes it crystal clear that no matter what dysfunctional, formative upbringing a fully-emerged serial offender might have received, the well-worn ‘nature versus nurture’ (or rather, the more commonly accepted ‘nature and nurture’) debate no longer cuts any ice in criminal courts in the US. Mitigation offered by defence counsel as to why Mr X brutally beat to death Mrs Y – because he did not receive the accepted norm in potty training; he wet the bed into his teens; he suffered a bump on the head as a youngster; his wife dumped him and stole his kids; that he had been instructed by God to kill prostitutes; or had been subjected to pornography, which propelled him into abducting, raping, torturing, killing and then finally to dump the victim as so much trash – all of these ‘mitigating’ circumstances are no longer admissible.

As John Douglas suggests, ‘These killers know, when they commit these crimes, that they are stepping outside the social order … they enjoy killing … they are not insane … they do what they do … they enjoy the hurt they inflict and, in one case, when a teenager forced caustic cleaning fluid down an 80-year-old woman’s throat just to steal a few bucks, and she died in agony, the offender enjoyed another 14 years of life on Death Row – appealing that lethal injection was cruel and unjust punishment.’

Victoria Redstall’s book documents each subject’s life history from cradle to life imprisonment, Death Row, and to the grave. Using the killers’ correspondence and their own words spoken from behind the grim walls and glittering razor wire, comes the basis for Victoria Redstall’s début into true crime writing: Serial Killers: Up Close and Very Personal.

The first chapter in this book concerns itself with a very unusual serial killer indeed. Dubbed by the media ‘The Remorseful Serial Killer’, Wayne Adam Ford’s life’s story is, as he would say, as tragic as the suffering he caused to the prostitutes he killed and butchered. Then he walked into a police station carrying a severed woman’s breast in his pocket, and gave himself up. For the first time, Wayne confesses all from the Green Mile.

The religious and morally salted butter Robert Joe Long eats wouldn’t melt in his mouth, or so he would have the world believe. However, this book exclusively reveals the sexually perverted mind of Mr Long today. Bobby’s shocking correspondence reveals the true nature of a deviant serial murderer who killed eight women, and who allowed one kidnapped woman to go free – an action that predictably led to his arrest and current residency on Florida’s Death Row.

Gary Ray Bowles is a hustler and serial killer of six homosexuals. Candid, often cheeky and smiling, Bowles tells his life story from the cradle to his grim cell, just a short walk from his place of expected – and probably thoroughly deserved – execution, which will take place in Florida.

Robin Gecht? Allegedly one of the evil ‘Chicago Rippers’, this is a different issue altogether. But I have to allow Victoria Redstall to tell his story in her own way, for it might well be the case that Mr Gecht is innocent – to some degree.

This book is truly ‘falling into the abyss’ time. I can assure you it is not a nice place to be, so I issue a disclaimer here to avoid being sued. In the smallest of print, I state that this book contains very graphic content – so no nightmares, please.

Gilles de Rais, Albert Fish, Richard Trenton Chase, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Javad Iqbal Mughal, Andrei Chikatilo, Joachim Kroll, Denis Rader, Theodore Robert Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Alessio Bianchi, Jack the Ripper and countless more from this ‘Legion of the Damned’ … only the generations separate these stone-cold names, whose terrible deeds remain indelibly preserved, like some sick and twisted entities, in the amber of our collective societal consciousness because of the massively violent and calculated nature of their heinous crimes.

Serial killers, both men and women – along with a few of confused gender – represent social monstrosities of the most terrifying variety; not to you and me, of course, who view them as some kind of beastly, homicidal objet d’art, but to those who fall foul of them in lonely places and far from the prying eye. They are human predators – in some cases cannibals in a figurative and, often, literal sense – and are, therefore, uniquely subversive to society’s carefully-constructed behavioural tenets.

They frighten us because they are part us, part monster, humanoid in form. They are without social conscience that, for many, defies humanity. They are morally dead. But they capture public attention because they terrify the neighbourhoods in which they trawl and prey on victims. They elicit a sort of through-the-peephole curiosity, so much so their behaviour is so gruesome that the media and motion picture industries feed off their crimes with the same gluttonous ferocity as starved vultures feeding from carrion – our beloved dead. They personify the human capacity for evil for they are the stuff of our worst nightmares. And their stories put bums on seats in cinemas around the world.

But what of the author of this book – Victoria Redstall? Here we find a very special lady indeed, and when Victoria and I were first introduced – by none other than serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson – I recognised, from the outset, that she had a remarkable talent.

Above all, Victoria is a master of communication. She has knowledge of the human psyche far beyond her years. Her outgoing, champagne-fizz personality belies a deep-thinking, calculating authority on serial murderers which, today, has almost no equal. Let me say that she is ‘the new kid on the block’.

After meeting Victoria, Charlotte Wheeler – producer of the acclaimed TV series Born to Kill – said, ‘Victoria can certainly talk, yet she walks the walk. Victoria’s communication skills with serial killers are extraordinary. She does exactly what it says on the tin.’

Victoria has the knack of gaining exclusive access to the most heinous serial killers in the US today. Not even agents from the FBI’s BSU are able to interview these murderers, nor can the cops, if the killer refuses access. I can verify this because several of my own books are required reading for BSU students, at Quantico, Virginia.

Of course, you would love to learn the secrets of her trade, wouldn’t you? But the door to that room is firmly locked. Nevertheless, I can say that the clues to her success rest in the complete package that makes up Victoria Redstall: charming, compassionate (when the need demands), tenacious, never a quitter, patient, a good listener … yet a stone-cold, deadly interrogator all at once. This is the ‘package’ I refer to.

Mindful of the terrible human suffering her subjects have caused, Victoria has a glittering career in criminology ahead of her and, after you read this book, nightmares will surely follow. Yet while you are tucked up in bed, somewhere out there, perhaps at some moonlit and Godforsaken crime scene, or sitting face-to-face with a homicidal maniac in his damp cell, you will hear the voice of Victoria Redstall. And, in her own on-camera words, she says, ‘My name is Victoria Redstall. I never leave a stone unturned. I am not frightened of anything, and I will not stop until I get what I want.’

I consider it a signal honour to have been invited to write this foreword to her first book.

Christopher Berry-Dee,

Southsea, Hampshire, UK, 2011