Columbus Psychologist Makes a Career Getting Inside the Minds of Killers Like Gacy, Bundy (2024)

Columbus forensic psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon left his hospital admin job to study some of the most violent, frightening killers in modern history.

After somebody walked into Riverside Methodist Hospital in 1983, stabbed two employees 36 times and then vanished, days, weeks, then months passed without an arrest.

Shock and horror were replaced by a wearying numbness, and even a few sidelong glances by co-workers suspicious of one another. As the one-year anniversary of the attack approached, JeffreySmalldon had an idea. The Riverside vice president wrote a letter to convicted serial killer Ted Bundy.

It would dramatically alter Smalldon’s life. How he arrived at this made-for-a-movie, plot-twist moment, and the story of the ensuing 25 years, are the subject of “That Beast Was Not Me,” Smalldon’s memoir publishing on Aug. 6.

The mystery of the Riverside murders, which left others feeling confused and helpless, gave Smalldon a jolt of uncharacteristic clarity. Smalldon, at 31 years old, quit his job at the hospital and enrolled in a doctoral program to study forensic psychology at Ohio State University.

And Bundy wrote him back.

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It was the start of a career spanning hundreds of cases and countless hours spent in maximum-security prisons, probing the minds of some of the nation’s—and Ohio’s—most notorious killers. In 1974, “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders” had captivated the nation. Smalldon was a senior in college.

“I read the book in one night,” Smalldon says. “I was so engrossed in it, and it was a caffeine-fueled binge.”

After class one day, Smalldon chatted with his psychology professor, musing about how a man with a fifth-grade education could manipulate educated, middle-class young adults—people seemingly not unlike himself—to commit nine murders over five weeks in 1969. “He said, ‘Have you ever thought of writing to them?’ ” Smalldon recalls.

So, he did. Manson and fellow killer Susan Atkins were in prison. Locating the others who operated with them, and who received immunity to testify or otherwise avoided serious charges, proved trickier. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was living in California with fellow Manson devotee Sandra Good, “the two foremost zealots,” as Smalldon describes them. Smalldon exchanged many letters with them all.

“It was always with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that I would pick one of those envelopes out of the mailbox,” he says. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, they began urging acts of violence. “I got frightened,” Smalldon says. “I started to think, ‘I’m in way over my head.’ These women aren’t in prison. I don’t know where they have contacts around the country.”

By then, Smalldon was living at home in western New York, preparing for graduate school. His mom was a nurse, his dad an FBI agent who investigated organized crime. In a final round of letters, Smalldon ended the correspondence.

Shortly after, on Sept. 5, 1975, Fromme walked up to President Gerald Ford, pointed a loaded .45-caliber handgun at him and pulled the trigger.

Click.

It didn’t fire. Secret Service agents tackled Fromme. Investigators searched her apartment.

At the FBI field office in Buffalo, a teletype came across “saying they had found this cache of letters from Jeff Smalldon, and the address was the same address on file for FBI agent Jack Smalldon,” Smalldon says. His dad had to explain to his boss his son’s “academic interest” in Manson.

That might have been the end of Smalldon’s dalliance with killers. But nearly a decade later, it all suddenly took on new meaning.

The Riverside Murders

By 1983, Smalldon had abandoned plans to become an English professor and was comfortably settled as a vice president at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus. “And then the murders,” he says.

Just days earlier, the staff had gathered for the office Christmas party. Now, there was a murder investigation, funerals and an an oppressive gloom over the hospital. “For the next year, I hated going to work,” he says. “It was as weird as you would expect. Just this prickly tension in the air.”

But as he reflected on his old letters with Manson, the past and the present collided. “It was like a hand had reached down to create this through line in my life, between two totally discrete chapters that seemed like they would have nothing to do with one another,” Smalldon says.

Writing Ted Bundy

Meanwhile, Smalldon wrote Ted Bundy, who was on death row in Florida. Bundy was connected to several dozen rapes and murders, with a knack for disappearing from brutal crime scenes undetected, like the Riverside murderer had done. “I had this history with Manson and his followers, and wondered if I could engage Bundy’s interest,” Smalldon says.

A little over a year later, Bundy replied with a letter and Christmas card. Bundy apologized for the delay and struck a “professorial” and “pretentious” air with his trademark “grandiose rhetoric,” Smalldon says. By then, Smalldon was busy working on his doctorate.

“I never wrote him back,” Smalldon says. “It didn’t turn into what I had hoped maybe it would, which was a dialogue that might help me somehow understand the tragedy at Riverside.”

In 1986, two FBI agents died in a shootout in Miami with two bank robbery suspects, who also were killed. One of the suspects was the husband of one of Smalldon’s slain co-workers. “So that’s what happened,” Smalldon thought, stunned.

It could be a clue as to who was responsible for the Riverside murders, but not why. “I remembered shaking hands with him at the memorial service we had at the hospital, and offering my condolences,” Smalldon says. The man had been a churchgoer and seemingly stricken family man, holding the couple’s newborn child.

Meeting John Wayne Gacy

While working on his doctorate, Smalldon also wrote John Wayne Gacy, who had sometimes worked as a clown and raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 boys and young men, burying many of them in the crawl space under his house. “I thought maybe I could succeed with him where I didn’t succeed with Bundy,” Smalldon says. “So I wrote him a letter and was sort of shocked he responded immediately.”

It was the first of some 50 letters from 1986 to 1989. Along the way, Smalldon made two lengthy and memorable visits with Gacy on death row. Not yet a licensed forensic psychologist, Smalldon was surprised when prison guards left them alone for hours at a time. Together, they perused Gacy’s scrapbook and paintings. They ate candy and chips from a vending machine. At one point, Gacy pulled out and lit a cigar, and offered one to Smalldon.

In hindsight, Smalldon says, it was foolishly reckless.

“I had never been in the same room before with someone known to have committed murder when I went to visit Gacy for the first time. Never. Let alone in the same room with someone who had killed at least 33 boys and young men. So I was green, naïve, and I know now that I could have gotten myself killed,” Smalldon says. “There were no guards anywhere close. I was totally unsupervised.”

Gacy’s hands were cuffed, Smalldon says, but “it would have been very easy to slip those over my head.” It was risky “in ways I didn’t fully appreciate,” he says.

An Ohio Death Penalty Case

As a newly licensed forensic psychologist, Smalldon landed his first death penalty case in 1990. Eddie Vaughn was a giant of a man with a sickening history of violence.

“When I first went to meet him, they acted like he was Hannibal Lecter. They wouldn’t even let me talk to him through bars—that was seen as too dangerous,” Smalldon says. “I could only talk to him through a little narrow strip in a metal part of his cell door.”

In 1972, Vaughn had brutally raped an 18-year-old girl and terrorized her family. In 1984, he murdered his wife’s 90-year-old grandma. Now, he faced trial for killing a prison teacher, a beloved woman who had developed a rapport with Vaughn at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. “He had taken a metal binding strip from a notebook and used it as a knife to slit her throat,” Smalldon said.

The trial was moved from Scioto County to Hamilton County because of pretrial publicity and the impossibility of selecting an impartial jury from small-town Lucasville, where many worked at the prison and everybody knew the victim. Unsure what to expect, Smalldon was nonetheless surprised by Vaughn.

“He was soft-spoken, polite, deferential,” Smalldon says. “I didn’t talk down to him. I did, as I always did with every criminal I ever evaluated, introduce myself as Jeff, not Dr. Smalldon. Which is something a lot of forensic psychologists would probably criticize me for doing.”

“I felt like Eddie Vaughn really responded to that,” Smalldon says. It was “a major takeaway for me ... I was learning on the fly in a very high-profile case.”

Smalldon’s job wasn’t to sympathize with Vaughn, which he certainly didn’t, or excuse the grisly murder. His role was to evaluate Vaughn, to research his personal history, to shed light on how he had become such a damaged human being—in a lengthy report and, more importantly, in testimony to 12 jurors who would decide if Vaughn lived or died.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the jury recommended a life sentence, not a death sentence. Smalldon received the news from Vaughn’s attorney. “She said, ‘Jeff, you better get ready. Your phone’s going to start ringing off the hook.’ She said, ‘You’re going to have more death penalty work than you know what to do with.’ And she was right.”

Ohio Serial Killers

In 1992, Thomas Lee Dillon, who had randomly shot and killed five men in Ohio over several years, was arrested outside a Tuscarawas County convenience store. Dillon was identified and captured after one victim’s mother wrote an open letter in the newspaper. Dillon took the bait. He replied anonymously, but it led police to him.

It was Smalldon’s first serial killer case. A city employee, a husband and the father of a 10-year-old son, Dillon’s darker, true identity as a murderer had been “pretty well camouflaged,” Smalldon says. Before long, he was reveling in notoriety, granting extensive media interviews and leaking Smalldon’s psychological evaluation to The Columbus Dispatch.

In 1996, Smalldon evaluated self-proclaimed prophet Jeffrey Lundgren, who was appealing his death sentence for the “Mormon cult killings” in Kirtland, Ohio. One by one, a family of five was lured to a pre-dug grave. “The last one, the youngest child, was offered a piggyback ride to the barn,” Smalldon says. “As cold-blooded as you could imagine.” At sentencing, Lundgren “thundered for about seven hours, like he was delivering a sermon,” and “explained the Biblical rationale for why he felt justified in killing these children,” Smalldon says.

After the murders, Lundgren and his followers fled to a remote forest, where Lundgren claimed another man’s wife as his own.

Six years later, Kathy Lundgren, who had abandoned her own family to be with him, remained devoted. She sat down with Smalldon at a McDonald’s, the Lundgrens’ 6-year-old daughter playing nearby. “She was very friendly and greeted me—very well dressed, well groomed,” Smalldon says. “A friendly, engaging person.”

Before wrapping up, Smalldon asked about the bumper sticker on her car: “It’s not a choice, it’s a child.”

“I said, ‘In light of the crimes Jeff was found guilty of, I just thought there’s some incongruity there.’ And she laughed. She said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ She said, ‘I know. People ask about that, but Jeff and I are very, very opposed to the murder of innocent children.’ And I said, ‘Well, don’t you think a lot of people would think that the three Avery children were innocent?’ And she said, ‘Oh, they probably would, but those people haven’t studied the Bible like Jeff has.’ ”

This story appeared in the August 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.