David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst in for Alison Stewart. She is getting ready to host tonight's Get Lit with All Of It book club event, which starts at 6:00 PM at the New York Public Library. If you have tickets, get there closer to 5:30. It is a full house. We want to make sure you get a seat. If you don't, you can follow along on the live stream. You can just head to wnyc.org/getlit for more information. Again, that is wnyc.org/getlit. Now let's get this hour started with The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession,

and the Rise of Criminal Profiling.

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David Furst: When writer and journalist Rachel Corbett was a young girl, her mother's ex-boyfriend shot and killed a woman, a dog, and then himself. The woman was not Rachel's mom, but Rachel knew the man well. She had seen him just the day before and couldn't sense that anything was wrong. He had never been violent towards her or her mother. Later, Rachel learned about criminal profiling and learned that this man fit most of the major criteria for murder suicides in America.

That realization sent her on a journey to try to understand more about criminal profiling, how it started, how it works, and how effective it may or may not be. Her new book on the subject is The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. Rachel Corbett is going to be speaking tonight at the Greenlight Bookstore on 686 Fulton Street in Brooklyn at 7:30. She joins us now in the studio. Rachel, welcome.

Rachel Corbett: Thanks for having me.

David Furst: You open the book with that very personal story about your mother's ex-boyfriend, a man named Scott, who killed his girlfriend and himself. You knew him well. You had seen him the day before. Can you share more about that?

Rachel Corbett: Yes. Scott was someone who was never violent. He lived with us for a few years, starting when I was age six. I wasn't told about the murder immediately. I knew that he had killed himself, but I didn't know that he had murdered another woman until I was in my early 20s. This was a completely shocking, obviously horrific thing to discover about someone that I had always loved and thought was very gentle.

When I went to look back, I became obsessed with trying to reconcile the reality with the person I knew. I started to look into it like an investigator, almost. I called up forensic psychiatrists. I talked to sociologists. I spoke to the local police. I even met with the boy whose mother was killed. I put together a profile of Scott, in a way. I knew who had committed the crime, of course, but I didn't really understand who he was. I was still trying to piece that together.

Then, like you said, I found that he did fit a profile in terms of these crimes are often committed in rural areas more than urban ones. They happen to be mostly white men, and the victims are usually their current or former female partners. They often have lost their job just before it happens. That was all true for Scott. Learning all of this didn't really make me feel like I really understood him any better. Didn't have a emotional truth or psychological truth. I started to become interested in my own fascination with it. What did I hope to get out of this?

This is actually more of a universal thing than-- So many people love true crime stories and watch the TV show. I started to become interested in what that is, what we're trying to do when we understand the criminal mind.

David Furst: It's a horrific story. It's the kind of incident that makes us want to turn away in shock. At the same time, as you made clear right in the introduction of the book, stories about serial killers and about the criminal profiling masterminds of TV shows and movies are massively popular. We can't seem to get enough of them.

Rachel Corbett: Yes. It's women in particular that watch them, which I think is interesting. There's theories around that, including that this is the thing that scares us the most. Feeling like we can come close to it from a safe distance makes us feel like we understand it. If we understand it, we disempower its grasp on us, or maybe we can even learn tips if we watch it. The problem I have with profiling content media, and in practice sometimes, is that it gives us the illusion of understanding something more than actually educating us about what's going on. In this book, I want to flip that lens and look at what's happening when we are being told how to understand something.

David Furst: Give us a quick definition of what we're talking about here. What are criminal profilers? What do they do? Then, following from that, how do criminal profilers in real life differ from what we see on TV and read about in books?

Rachel Corbett: I think the common way people think of criminal profilers is the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, which came into the fore, really, in the '70s, and Ted Bundy really helped put them on the map. These were the guys who would, rather than just looking at the crime scene for physical evidence, blood spatter, and that sort of thing, they would look for behavioral DNA, they called it sometimes, or psychological fingerprints.

They would look for things like, what is this killer getting out of this emotionally? Was there some gratification enacted? What does the choice of victim say about him or his mind? That's what we usually think of. Although in this book, I also look at profiling in a much broader sense, to look at how the CIA uses it, how it's used in policing currently. Really, the FBI is just one small piece of that history.

David Furst: You talk about in the book how criminal profiling has a lot of its origins in fiction, in particular, the character Sherlock Holmes. Can you talk about that connection between Sherlock Holmes and modern criminal profiling?

Rachel Corbett: Yes. In fact, John Douglas, who's perhaps the most famous profiler for the-- He wrote Mindhunter, which the show is based on. He says that our antecedents actually go back to crime fiction as much as crime fact. He said that Sherlock Holmes was a model for him. He read all the books, and other profilers say that as well. In fact, in the late 1880s, when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the first Sherlock Holmes book, it was the same time that Jack the Ripper started killing women in Whitechapel.

Arthur Conan Doyle actually tried to-- He worked with some of the police to try to solve the mystery. He tried to put on Sherlock's hat and think about who might have done this thing. He didn't get it right. I think I love this story because it really shows that interplay between fiction and true crime and how they've always been very, very linked, actually.

David Furst: Shows like Mindhunter, you mentioned, and Criminal Minds, they center on criminal profilers and have been incredibly popular over the years. How do you think these shows have influenced our perception of what a criminal profiler does and how effective they are?

Rachel Corbett: I think they make them look like they're magic, and they're this incredibly elite squad of people who have a almost supernatural power to get inside the minds of killers. In reality, that's very far from the truth. There's one study done in London that found that only about 2.7% of criminal profiles actually led to the capture of a suspect. It's great TV. In practice, it's not quite so effective.

David Furst: I want to mention that study. You cite it right in the beginning. That one study found 87% of detectives surveyed in London said they found criminal profiling useful, but that just 2.7% of their profiles led to the identification of a perpetrator. You also cite an experiment from 2002, and this one's fantastic. It shows a group of sophomore chemistry students provided more accurate profiles of murderers than homicide detectives did. What does all of that tell us?

Rachel Corbett: I think it tells us that we need to think about what profiling is really doing and why it remains so popular, both then and now. In fact, there's an example I talk about where the FBI agents in the Behavioral Science Unit were very open, actually, about how they were drumming up this idea of a serial killer epidemic in order to get congressional funding and expand their jurisdiction. They knew that this was a tactic in Washington that they could use to create a frenzy, generate fear in the public, and then the public would be satiated with their own solution, which they presented as these mindhunters, these profilers who they put out in the press all the time. They had them do interviews all the time.

Of course, most of the serial killers that have been captured are for unrelated crimes or were later identified through DNA. The profiles haven't really led to much, and they even knew that eventually.

David Furst: Why do you think that criminal profilers have really captured the public's imagination in popular culture?

Rachel Corbett: I think there's this overlap between-- There's just this innate fundamental desire to understand the people who terrify us the most. I think there's a existential need to feel safe that's overlapping with this epistemic need to feel like we understand-- that we confirm our beliefs. These are in conflict as well, because we can't tolerate the idea of not knowing what threats are or not being able to see them.

We've always tried to see them in the-- Long ago, it was phrenology, we thought we could see criminality through the bumps in the skull. That's evolved now. There's certain behavioral markers. It's somebody who wets the bed at night as a child that was once considered a marker of future criminality. This makes us feel like we understand. Of course, I think it's taking us further from the truth.

David Furst: The book is called The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. We're speaking with the author Rachel Corbett here on All Of It. I wanted to get-- What was your mission when you set out to write this book? Maybe you weren't quite sure what that was going to be. Maybe you needed to explore this issue, but what did you want to set out to do with this book?

Rachel Corbett: I think I got into it wanting to understand the criminal mind. I'm a consumer of all these TV shows that I'm critiquing right now. I came into it very earnestly interested in this field. The more I researched, I felt like we need to think about the profilers. I wanted to turn the lens on that, flip the gaze a little bit, because the profilers are also people who have motivations, and we don't think about what they are. Sometimes they commit more harm than the people they profile. Sometimes it's unintentional, and sometimes-- There's examples of very sadistic people using profiling to--

David Furst: We want to assign magical powers to the people that might protect us from the dangers of the world. Right? In many of the scenarios that you cite throughout history in this book, at best, a lot of these so-called experts, these criminal profilers, it turns out to be pseudoscience in a lot of cases. At worst, there are plenty of examples throughout history of people using some form of profiling to fill in the blank, including demonize entire ethnic groups.

Rachel Corbett: Yes, so it's really come full circle. Phrenology, as I mentioned, was one way to brand someone as a criminal. It tended to be in, say, Victorian England, when the industrial revolution spurred all this immigration, criminals were, perhaps unsurprisingly, people who had African features or Asian features. Today we don't use their physical features, but we use things like predictive policing, other forms of algorithmic profiling, that sort of thing, where the people being profiled end up looking a lot similar to the ones 150 years ago.

David Furst: When you started working on the book, was there someone in particular that you really wanted to interview to try to better understand the work of a criminal profiler?

Rachel Corbett: Of course, I wanted to interview FBI profilers, which I do in the book. The person that actually really got me interested in this whole subject was Henry Murray, a charlatan psychologist at Harvard. He was a physician, not to say he was a complete charlatan, but he didn't have any psychological experience when he joined and actually led the Harvard Clinic. He was the first person to profile a foreign dictator. He profiled Hitler for the CIA, and that's now a practice they do often with people like Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin.

I just became very interested in how he came from no experience at all to writing this fantastical idea of Hitler's mind and predicting for the military what steps they might take to stop Hitler. Then he ended up conducting his own experiments at Harvard on students, one of whom was Ted Kaczynski. That becomes a thread. Ted Kaczynski was, of course, profiled later throughout his life. There's a thread there.

David Furst: Talk a bit more about those experiments and Ted Kaczynski.

Rachel Corbett: Yes. Henry Murray conducted a series of experiments. He had wanted to understand what could make an anti nationalist personality. He thought he could engineer personalities and make someone more universally oriented. Instead of doing that, he conducted all these cruel, unethical experiments on his own students or on undergraduates. The ones that Kaczynski participated in were humiliation experiments. They were designed to determine how you could break someone through different means. This was humiliation.

For three years, Kaczynski underwent these experiments, and there are some transcripts in the book from those sessions where they ridicule his looks. He was a 16-year-old prodigy when he entered Harvard. He already stood out a lot. He was already very alienated from his peers. Then he went through this for years, and around that time started having the revenge fantasies, thought about moving to the woods, and of course, later targeted psychologists among the people he bombed.

David Furst: You're not going as far as to say "because this, then this."

Rachel Corbett: No, because everything is many factors involved. I think he had lots of other issues going on, but I do find it difficult to imagine that didn't have some effect on his mind.

David Furst: We're speaking with the author, Rachel Corbett. The brand new book is The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. We'll continue this conversation in just a moment. This is All Of It on WNYC.

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David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. We're speaking with the author Rachel Corbett about her new book, The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. You're going to be speaking tonight at the Greenlight Bookstore at 7:30. When you started working on this project, was there perhaps one assumption that you may have had about criminal profiling that then ended up really being challenged during your work?

Rachel Corbett: I think that I came into this wanting to understand the criminal mind, just like the profilers say they do. It comes from my own interest in my childhood. I think I felt like, by doing so, I could control the narrative, probably in my own life. This was a situation in my childhood that had made me feel completely helpless. I think by being able to tell a story about it, I unconsciously felt like I would take the story back.

That's really what-- I think this urge to narrativize crime is so powerful in society because it gives us a feeling of control. There's nothing more mentally challenging than feeling like it's just impossible to understand. Somebody just did something because they're crazy, or that's the essence of unpredictability.

David Furst: That you couldn't have seen it coming. "I should have looked for clues." You talk in the book about staring at a photo of Scott, you and him together, frolicking in the grass, and just staring at it, trying to see what could you learn from it?

Rachel Corbett: Yes, it's this feeling of wanting to be able to see it. I just thought, like, "Is there something in his eyes? Is there something in his face that could have foretold this horrible thing?" Of course, we can't see it. This feeling that it'll lose its power if we can see it, but it's not there.

David Furst: Is there a case you can tell us about that really did rely on profiling to catch a criminal?

Rachel Corbett: Unfortunately, my research just doesn't bear it out. I get asked this sometimes, and I wish I had a better story, but the truth is, it just doesn't really work. I think it can help sometimes with maybe narrowing the field down a little bit. Like with Kaczynski, for example, there was no physical evidence. There was really no way-- It was a needle in a haystack. They thought we'll maybe start with white men who are educated, because that tended to be what-- White men are pretty much all the bombers in American history. Also, they knew he was educated by the control he had over the bombs. Also, of course, the manifesto later.

David Furst: Some of that sounds helpful, right? What is the process for developing a profile? Some of it is just assembling some basic clues and trying to cut out certain things that you-- Dead ends that you don't want to go down.

Rachel Corbett: Yes, some of it is just using basic psychological data on what types of people have committed crimes in the past. Might tell you something about who's going to do it in the future. It would be helpful, probably, if the investigators, detectives, worked with psychiatrists and research scientists back in the data, overlapped this data, because they were already compiling much of this information at the time that the FBI was starting from scratch, using their own experiences to generate taxonomies. They didn't really work together. In fact, they never really liked each other very much on the two sides. That was always a conflict.

David Furst: Yes, interpersonal relationships is always complicated. Now, the roots of criminal profiling, it really all did start with Sherlock Holmes with Jack the Ripper in Victorian England. Can you talk more about that and how investigators on that case used this early form of profiling to try to narrow down the potential suspects?

Rachel Corbett: There was a police surgeon called Thomas Bond who wrote what is commonly considered today the first criminal profile, or at least that we know of. What he did was he looked at the autopsies. That was his main job. He also, in this case, started to think about what kind of a person Jack might be. He came to some conclusions about how he might dress, because he thought, well, this is someone who blends in. He commits these crimes right in the middle of the public square. He's probably not walking around with blood spatter on him. He probably wears a cloak or something dark and something nice. Then he thought he must be a man who has very cool temperament, very calm, because, again, he does this in public.

He thought he'd be a man of odd jobs, not so much steady employment, becausse he was probably a bit strange or eccentric to have these inclinations, and he had a whole list of ideas about what this person could be. That was a different way of thinking for investigators, especially at that time when they didn't have anything to work with. There was no fingerprints. There obviously wasn't DNA. They really had to rely on hunches and imaginative speculation. You can imagine how this would grow out of that.

David Furst: It's a massive case that everybody knew about. There's huge attention and constant-- Well, the media back then, not what it is now, but still a lot of massive attention and pressure to come up with a criminal.

Rachel Corbett: Yes, the penny press was flourishing then. There was pictures of him everywhere as a ghoul, terrifying the public, and they're still doing it today. John Douglas of the FBI wrote a profile not so long ago of Jack the Ripper. They're still trying to predict who he was to this day, it's never ended.

David Furst: It's not a closed book.

Rachel Corbett: No, I mean, some people have strong feelings about who did it, but it will always be contested, probably.

David Furst: Also in the book you talk about attempts to predict future criminality through something called intelligence-led policing. Can you talk about that? How is this connected to criminal profiling?

Rachel Corbett: Yes. Now we're using data to inform our predictions about who might be criminals. A lot of times that includes things like your past arrest records or what neighborhoods are hotspots for crime. I look at one case in Florida, which had really horrific outcomes, where they were profiling children to find out who might become a criminal in the future based on things like they having an incarcerated parent or seeing domestic violence in the home. Of course, these are things they have no control over themselves as children, but they were being marked and targeted for policing because of these factors.

Then, of course, sometimes they would get caught for marijuana possession or something that maybe many young teenagers do, but they would get put into the system, it would take them out of school. Then the case that I follow, ultimately, the boy, after eight years of this or so, ended up going to prison, entering that pipeline.

David Furst: We're speaking with the author, Rachel Corbett. The new book is The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. After working on this book, have your thoughts changed a lot about criminal profiling, or have you hardened your thinking? Overall, where does it fall for you? Do you think criminal profiling does more harm than good?

Rachel Corbett: I just think we need to be very aware of who's doing the profiling and why, and think more about what they may be getting out of it. Is it something that authorities are using to create fear, and then they're distracting us from what, actually? When you point the finger at someone as a criminal, is there something you're gaining out of it? Many times people can, in doing the pointing, cover up, they're saying, "Look away, don't look over here, look at that person." It's a way to scapegoat certain problems. Also, if we're pacifying ourselves with these feelings of control when we watch TV shows, what are we actually maybe missing in terms of other threats that might be more real?

David Furst: Does it ever work? Is it still worth trying?

Rachel Corbett: I think the research part of it makes sense. I think that making predictions is dangerous because they're really nothing more than our pre-existing expectations in many cases. The policing part of it is complicated. Obviously, we need both. I think that we need to be careful about who we're policing, actually taking that next step in action. Should it stay in the realm of research and social services, or do we really transition that over to the cops?

David Furst: Just a final question. I know you touched on this earlier, but what does our obsession with true crime stories and these shows that focus on criminal profiling tell us about ourselves?

Rachel Corbett: I think that they tap into something for many of us that we want to feel like we understand something so profoundly incomprehensible, something so ineffable. We need to feel like we know something that we just cannot know. This will probably-- that's why they do so well for so long. They can just keep churning them out because it's an urge that never gets satisfied.

David Furst: That's great because they can wrap it up in 30 minutes or 60, which is wonderful.

Rachel Corbett: Exactly.

David Furst: Rachel Corbett, thank you so much for joining us today. The new book is The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. You're going to be speaking tonight at the Greenlight Bookstore, that's located at 686 Fulton Street in Brooklyn. It's happening at 7:30. Thanks once again for joining us today on All Of It.

Rachel Corbett: Thank you so much. It's been fun.