She has come face-to-face with the country’s most disturbed killers, rapists and mentally ill criminals. Dr Rhona Morrison, like the real-life Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, would spend hours alone with the men and women whose crimes shocked Scotland.
As a leading forensic psychiatrist, her expert evidence could determine an accused person’s state of mind and whether they would face jail, a secure hospital or even be set free.But, as she reveals today, she was rarely intimidated until she became a victim – of an obsessed man who had stalked her without her even knowing.Rhona, 59, who has now written a book about her career – I Don’t Talk To Dead Bodies: The Curious Encounters Of A Forensic Psychiatrist, which comes out in July – said: “I saw literally hundreds of violent offenders over the course of my career.
Some were just to assess sanity and fitness to plead, some were for treatment while in custody and some had committed an offence secondary to mental illness and I would provide expert opinion for the court re: disposal and treatment.“The most violent people were usually interviewed in relatively safe settings.
So it’s hard to articulate the feelings I experienced following the realisation this man had been obsessed with me for about a decade.“He had crossed the invisible line surrounding my professional life, invading my personal, family space.” As a consultant forensic psychiatrist for the NHS and Scottish Prison Service, Rhona ran twice-weekly clinics in the country’s highest security prisons.She not only dealt with TC Campbell, who was later cleared of the Ice Cream Wars killings, but also Farai Chiriseri, who killed her five-year-old son, removing his heart, and the controversial acquittal of mum
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