The Confidante of Killers: Review of God’s Not Here, Only Devils [BOOK]

In RECOIL Issue 76, we interviewed criminologist Laura Brand. She’s spent years delving deeply into the psyches of serial killers to help the public understand what goes on inside evil people. It’s a careful dance that involves establishing comfort with personalities that are both highly manipulative and extremely intelligent. 

One of the worst being Lawrence Bittaker, who with his partner, Roy Norris, acted out their sexual sadism and murdered several women in the late 1970s. God’s Not Here, Only Devils recounts Brand’s time with Bittaker and the bond she developed to earn the trust of a psychopath to try and see things through his eyes.

You’ve probably heard that old urban legend about men wandering aimlessly in a van picking up and murdering hitchhikers or abducting women off the street. Guess what? It’s not a myth. Bittaker and Norris helped popularize that tale on the streets of Southern California. They planned it carefully inside prison walls while awaiting release. 

Upon being paroled, they got a van, soundproofed it, removed interior door handles, and fitted it with restraints and weapons of torture. They then began roaming the South Bay area for random targets that appealed to their fantasies. 

The 411

At just 26, a young Brand enters San Quentin’s Death Row to interview a killer who rivaled Hannibal Lecter’s intellect, obsession with control, and awareness that he had information others needed. While others may have gone into a similar situation with predictable questions, an academic agenda, and unrealistic expectations of transparency, Brand takes a different approach. From their initial encounter, we see Brand’s style is unconventional, calculated, and entices men who are adept at exploiting vulnerability to open up. 

God’s Not Here, Only Devils relives Brand’s encounters with a madman and gives the reader a direct line of sight into Bittaker’s motives. Throughout the book we shift gears between Brand’s explanations of psychological disorders, the pathology of serial killers, and prison dynamics. It also ventures into her childhood, what she felt during her interviews, and even having to cope with a murder that had been committed within her own family.

Where your pulse will really quicken is in reading Bittaker’s recollection of meeting Norris during a period of incarceration, their scheme to commit rape and murder upon release, and the details of their heinous crime spree until they were recaptured. Bittaker’s words are succinct and poignant, relayed to Brand like someone who thinks he belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of killers. If you want to know what the thinking of predatory people sounds and feels like, this book will give you a tour of how primal, remorseless, and demented serial offenders truly are.  

The Verdict

Brand is truly a chess prodigy playing in a game with seasoned grandmasters. She understands the nature of these beasts probably better than many of them understand themselves. “To defeat a sadist was to starve a sadist and their food was fear, I never fed them,” she says. It’s clear that Brand challenged the expectations the men she assessed had of her. She doesn’t look, sound, or act like your typical research analyst who’d probably be perceived by inmates as cold, unrelatable, and overly academic. Because of that, convicted killers respected her enough to confide and even wrote to her to express sympathy during times of her personal struggles. 

The book is articulate, brisk, and easy to digest. It reveals the true depths of how methodical and calculating men like these are, how skilled they are at assessing others’ instincts, and the fact that they’re evil to the core. God’s Not Here, Only Devils is an unflinching look into how Brand dared to get disturbed men to be authentic and trust her with information they wouldn’t share with others. She didn’t get there by trying to compete intellectually. 

She did it fearlessly and honestly—challenging them in a way that appealed to their egos—that longing for understanding they lacked in their lives and compensated for through violence. It shows the reader how wickedness hides itself among us and is often exacerbated by the very system supposedly designed to correct it.  

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