The monsters we make

The monsters we make Murder, obsession, and the rise of criminal profiling

Rachel Corbett, 1984-

Book - 2025

"A taut, riveting work of true crime that tells the strange story of criminal profiling from Victorian times to our own. Criminal profiling--the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological "fingerprints" of the monsters among us--holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society's most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history. Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the... Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy's execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students--including the future Unabomber--by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern "predictive policing" policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted--to devastating effects. With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it" -- Dust jacket.

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Subjects
Criminal behavior, Prediction of > History.
Criminal investigation > Psychological aspects.
Murderers > Psychology.
TRU002000.
PSY014000.
TRU007000.
TRU010000.
True crime stories.
Genres
TRU002000
PSY014000
TRU007000
TRU010000
True crime stories
Published
New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Rachel Corbett, 1984- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
235 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN
9780393867695
  • Introduction
  • The scarlet thread of murder
  • It must do violence
  • The hare and the hunter
  • Mind games
  • The seeds of criminal activity
  • Epilogue
Review by Booklist Review

In popular culture, criminal profiling is portrayed as a near-magic tool to catch serial killers by understanding the psychology of a criminal. But its history is much more complicated than TV shows like Criminal Minds depict. Framed by author Corbett's personal connection to domestic violence and murder, this book is a well-researched analysis of the evolution of criminal profiling. Corbett examines the Jack the Ripper investigations, Harvard psychologist Henry Murray's unethical experiments on personality change, Dorothy Lewis' research into violence and neurology, the Unabomber investigation, and the devastating impact of the rise of profiling at-risk youth to theoretically prevent future criminality. She also traces debates about whether criminal tendencies are inherent pieces of personality. The upsetting final chapter looks at the Pasco County Sheriff's Office's harassment of Robert Jones and his family as part of an "intelligence-led policing" program in the mid-2010s. Corbett succeeds in questioning the reliance on profiling in policing and ultimately, the stories we tell ourselves about who is a monster and why. A thought-provoking read for a culture obsessed with true crime.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Corbett (You Must Change Your Life) delivers a fast-paced history of criminal profiling from the Victorian era to the present. The narrative combines riveting accounts of such infamous murderers as Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy with sharp insights about the rise of the public's fascination with criminal psychology, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of pinning down killers by predicting their behaviors. Bundy, Corbett asserts, helped put the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit "on the map," as its profile of the killer was widely distributed in service of a nationwide manhunt. She points to Harvard professor Henry Murray's profile of Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, as one of the most influential examples of "leadership analysis," or criminal profiling of world leaders. (Murray crops up again in the case of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, who was a subject of his psychological experiments at Harvard.) While Corbett acknowledges profiling's appeal, for both law enforcement and the public, she zeroes in on its limitations and potential abuses, like controversial "predictive policing" algorithms used by U.S. police forces to determine where crime might happen and who might commit it. Such evenhandedness permeates the account, elevating it above pulpy indulgence. Readers of true crime will be fascinated. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A charged look at murderers and the artful thinking that brings them to justice. Raised in rural Iowa, Corbett could have been a statistic at an early age--either as a victim or an orphan--given that a young man her mother dated killed another girlfriend and her dog; he "then crawled into the closet to turn the gun on himself." In adulthood, Corbett, a gifted storyteller, returned to the case, spending two years investigating both that crime and the behavioral analysts, aka criminal profilers, who study crime scenes and, from the clues they identify, attempt to assemble profiles of the perpetrator. With the girlfriend's killer, they had plenty to work with, since murder-suicide is common in white, rural, working-class communities, with 90% of the crimes committed by men, two-thirds of the victims "current or former female partners," and many of the crimes spurred by an alienating event such breaking up or being fired. Though shows such asNCIS andLaw & Order present profiling as a science, Corbett, along with many of its practitioners, holds that it's an art, with one profiler telling her, "Our antecedents actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact." Thus Conan Doyle--whose fictional Sherlock Holmes owes much to a medical school professor with an almost supernatural gift for divining a person's life history from a glance at his or her appearance--was enlisted to help track down Jack the Ripper. Corbett's long discussion of that infamous case--with its surprising identification of the real killer--is a tour de force, though less so than her provocative charge that Ted Kaczynski, humiliated in a college psychology exercise, may have been driven to his infamous mail-bomb campaign to avenge the slight. A highly readable, endlessly revealing primer on the homicidal mind. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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