As Belgian child murderer Marc Dutroux starts his life term in prison, psychiatrist Helen Morrison, author of My Life Among The Serial Killers, talks to Hannah Stephenson about her experiences of working with some of the world's worst murderers.

TO a casual observer, the elegant Dr Helen Morrison, in chic cream suit and pearl earrings, neat blonde hair and perfectly manicured nails, would look at home among any group of high society ladies who lunch.

She has a lovely family home in Chicago, has been happily married for 25 years to a brain surgeon, runs a psychiatric practice of her own and has two sons, on whom she dotes.

But away from Helen's idyllic home environment she enters a much darker world where death and depravity reign - that of the serial killer.

Dubbed the real-life Clarice Starling, Helen has spent 400 hours in the company of some of the world's most notorious serial killers, trying to find out what makes them tick and if there is any common pattern to their profile.

She assists police with investigations on an informal basis, but her role is not that of a police officer, she stresses, but to find out what makes a serial killer.

Helen has seen the horrific pictures of their victims, visited blood-spattered crime scenes, been called as an expert witness in trials and spoken at length to mass murderers and their families, on occasions putting herself in danger.

During one spooky episode, a murderer she'd been visiting in prison - who liked to chew on his victims' body parts - phoned her when she was staying at a nearby hotel and told her he was in a phone booth outside her room.

He wasn't, of course, but she did find herself nervously going to the window and peeping through the curtains to check. She never discovered how he knew where she was staying.

"That's what's so frightening. Serial killers have the ability to con people into giving out numbers. One of the guards may have given it. The incident did terrify me."

ANOTHER murderer, John Gacy, who killed 33 young men and buried many of them under his house in a suburb outside Chicago, sent a crazed Christmas card to her home address, which was unlisted.

As well as American subjects, she has also studied the cases of the Gloucester "House of Horrors" couple Fred and Rose West and of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.

There must be less gruesome jobs a woman of Helen's status could tackle. So, why does she concentrate on serial killers?

"I don't know if it's a morbid curiosity, but I have always been a curious person and I am utterly fascinated by them. They are so different from anything I've seen," she says.

In the basement of her home in Chicago, beyond the bicycles and hockey equipment, she has a plastic container which houses Gacy's brain, donated to her by his family after he was executed in 1994. It's hidden in an old cardboard box so her kids don't see it and she hopes it will help with research into the mind of the serial killer.

"I wanted to study it. I have slices of his organs too, heart, liver, lungs, pancreas and intestine, skin, and they're all in the basement as well," she says.

She only told her sons, now 18 and 11, the nature of her work earlier this year. Before then, they just thought she was a psychiatrist. She will not allow them to read her latest memoir, My Life Among The Serial Killers, until they are 21.

"They were very matter-of-fact about it. The younger one thought it was really interesting, but I won't let him read it for a few years yet."

Even now, her mailbox is a magnet for cranks. She regularly receives letters from prisoners, psychotics and other oddballs who have found out what she does, and much of the text is threatening.

Her real life with the serial killers she meets is a far cry from Agent Clarice Starling's dealings with the deadly Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs, which Helen says is far too simplistic and unrealistic in setting.

"It's much more clinical than that. When you visit a prison, you go through the gauntlet of being searched and told you can't bring in certain things and it can be quite intimidating," she says.

WHEN she interviews the deranged killers who have wreaked havoc on society, they are not handcuffed or restrained in any way and often the guards leave the room, leaving Helen alone with them.

On one occasion, she was visiting a prisoner on Death Row in Texas for the first time and the guards just left and locked the door behind them.

"I do feel vulnerable," she admits. "I can't predict what they are going to do, as I could with somebody who's psychotic and I can watch their facial expressions change and the madness come into their eyes. I can't do that with serial killers.

"What I have learned to do over time is completely shut off any emotion that I have because it's infectious."

Yet she's never been attacked by any of her subjects, although on one occasion, a serial killer came into the room with a towel draped over his shoulder, which was pretty threatening as he'd killed a number of women by strangling them with a towel.

She coolly told him they would be disposing of it before their interview commenced.

Being a psychiatrist, she says she is well trained to block out the horrors she sees daily when she walks through the front door to her family, although if she's had a prolonged period in the company of one of her subjects, she'll try to take extra time out before she goes home.

"You have to be able to separate what you see and what you do from what happens at home. I've learned to put up boundaries. It's not easy and I have to work at it.

"But I don't have nightmares, which I thought I would. I have dreams about other things but not about serial killers."

To block the horrors from her mind when she's at home, she's an enthusiastic cook.

"I make jam, preserves, soups and I get involved in domestic things. That's therapy for me."

However, certain things in everyday life may trigger a thought of something horrific she has come across in her work.

"A particular cut of roast that looks like a muscle has momentarily stopped me in the past, but then I just put it away. But it does happen, particularly when you realise that a lot of these serial killers do use their victims for food."

* My Life Among The Serial Killers, by Helen Morrison with Harold Goldberg (Wiley, £16.99).