Episode 114: The Monsters We Make by Rachel Corbett

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters, Rachel Corbett

Sarah Harrison  00:12

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe to the present, we’re discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world’s most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters  00:33

And I’m your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we’re excited you’re joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Carolyn Daughters 00:57

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Sarah Harrison  01:50

Carolyn, we have Sarah, a nice guest today. I’m very excited.

Carolyn Daughters  01:55

I am too. I started The Monsters We Make quite a while back, and then picked it back up and found it so interesting.

Sarah Harrison  02:05

Yes, I am excited to tell our listener about it a little bit. This is The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling by Rachel Corbett. 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 end danger from studying why people commit murder in the monsters we make. Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in history. She follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims. Oh my goodness, my mouth stopped working. Depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his anti-establishment bombs. Welcome, Rachel. We’re delighted to have you.

Rachel Corbett  03:20

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Carolyn Daughters  03:23

Rachel is a features writer at New York Magazine and the author of You Must Change Your Life, which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing, and she also is the author of The Monsters We Make, which we’re going to spend some time discussing today. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and other publications. She grew up in Iowa and lives in New York City. And to kick off The Monsters We Make, we wanted to have you read a little bit from the book so we can get the tone and tenor of the book.

Rachel Corbett  03:59

Happy to. I’ll read just a couple pages from the introduction of The Monsters We Make. One of the earliest criminal profiles in modern times dates back to the 1940s and 50s, when a terrorist in New York City started leaving pipe bombs in movie theaters, offices, train stations, and libraries. The Mad Bomber, as he became known, sometimes sent newspapers angry missives signed F.P. threatening to bring Con Edison to justice. The search for the Mad Bomber became what was then the biggest manhunt in New York City history. Finally, stunt police officers enlisted a psychiatrist, James Brussel, known in the press as Sherlock Holmes of the couch to help with the case. Brussel came back with a few exceptionally specific predictions about the bomber. He would be of average build, unmarried, middle-aged, Slavic, and probably living in Connecticut with a sister. When you catch him, Brussel concluded, he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit. It will be buttoned. Postage clues eventually led investigators to a home in Waterbury, Connecticut, where a man named George Metesky lived. Just as predicted, he was 54, neither fat nor thin, a son of Lithuanian immigrants, and he lived with his two sisters. The only deviation from the profile was that he was wearing pajamas. Police found handwriting samples in Metesky’s bedroom that clearly matched the bomber’s letters. They told him he was under arrest and to go change his clothes. When Metesky returned from the bedroom, he was wearing a blue double-breasted suit button to the top. Was it magic, or did Brussel invent an ingenious crime-fighting technique that could be taught and replicated.

Rachel Corbett  05:42

[continues reading from The Monsters We Make] Criminal profilers maintain an almost mythological status in pop culture today, but a closer look at the practice reveals a more complicated picture. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly branded criminal profiling a pseudoscience, pointing to a dearth of credible research proving its efficacy. One study found that 87 percent of detectives surveyed in London said they found criminal profiling useful, but that just 2.7 percent of their profiles had actually led to the identification of a perpetrator. Another experiment from 2002 showed that a group of sophomore chemistry students produced more accurate profiles of murderers than homicide detectives did. Profiling, it turns out, is often a quixotic, half-hazard blend of science and fiction, or, as the NYPD’s first police psychiatrist put it, as much an art as a science. Even Brussel turned out to have embellished his mad bomber predictions for his memoir. He left out the many predictions he got wrong, including the bomber’s age, nationality, and whereabouts. In fact, it was a Con Edison office assistant named Alice Kelly who discovered the smoking gun, a threatening letter from a former employee named George Metesky. A boiler had exploded on the man, and toxic fumes led him to contract tuberculosis. When the company denied his disability claim, he started making bombs in his backyard and wrote a letter to the company promising to take justice in my own hands. Kelly recognized the language from the letters Metesky wrote to the press. F. P. It was revealed stood for fair play.

Rachel Corbett  06:42

[continues reading from The Monsters We Make] But does it matter if these stories are largely fictional? Society needs monsters. They remind us of who we are and who we are not. They’re terrifying because they break down the boundaries between what we consider human and inhuman and warn us of what we could become. They change as we do from era to era, place to place. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a blood-sucking count who moves from Romania to London, emerged amid Victorian England’s anxiety over immigrants and sexual deviants. In 17th century Massachusetts, women who strayed from puritanical norms were branded witches. Monsters, free to act on their aggressive or sexual impulses, can also be seductive, opening up portals to forbidden desires. And as long as we need monsters, we need people to catch them. By endowing profilers with the extraordinary power to define who is or who will become a criminal, they simultaneously dictate whom to fear and whom to trust. Yet, for all the obsessing we do of our criminals, we rarely consider the minds of the profilers, and they too have motives often overlooked.

Rachel Corbett  08:18

[continues reading from The Monsters We Make] The best profilers recognize the limits of the practice and use it as just one investigative tool among many, but it can also be manipulated by those who have something to gain by pointing the finger at others. Throughout history, crime has been exploited to demonize entire categories of people and to justify social control. Sometimes the system is unwittingly upheld by well-intentioned police officers. Sometimes it’s manipulated by monsters masquerading as protectors, revealing the thin line separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.

Carolyn Daughters  08:50

Cool. Thank you.

Sarah Harrison  08:52

So awesome.

Carolyn Daughters  08:54

I think that’s a great place for us to start with our History of Mystery podcast. We started the podcast with Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and so forth. And we’ve made our way where we currently are in the 1940s. But in starting back there, it brings to mind that as you discuss in The Monsters We Make, the first criminal profilers were fictional, and so before there were real world criminal profiles profilers. We had the fictional ones, and so Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t just create Sherlock Holmes. He also tries to apply or tried to apply Sherlock Holmes’s methods to real crimes, including Jack the Ripper. So, what I want to know is so how did Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle help create this criminal profiler role, and also what works great in fiction doesn’t necessarily work in the messier human world, and so if you could talk a little bit about that, like even with Arthur Conan Doyle trying to identify Jack the Ripper. Like what? What works in fiction doesn’t necessarily work in reality. So can you speak to that a little?

Rachel Corbett  10:10

I started The Monsters We Make with this Edgar Allan Poe. Sorry, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of him and Jack the Ripper because I really liked how it really blends the fiction and reality, fiction and true crime, because that is what you know. People would confuse Arthur Conan Doyle for the detective all the time. They would send him letters about their problems and asking him to solve mysteries for them. And so, when he begins, when the Jack the Ripper case goes cold in London, he and this group of men that he was in a club with called the Crimes Club, they gathered and talk about unsolved mysteries of the day, and he decided that he would apply Holmes’s techniques to this case and see what he could discover about it. He sat down and he said, “I’m going to put on Holmes’s cap and think about it like he would. And he makes some he makes some predictions about who he thinks the killer is. He examines some of the letters that he wrote to the press, alleged letters. We don’t really know how many of them were real or not. And he decides that he thinks this is a very educated person, possibly an American, someone who at least has been has well-traveled. The language doesn’t seem like somebody who is a lunatic or someone completely uneducated, and he gives his reasonings to Scotland Yard, and nothing really came of it after that. Years later, when we found out, well, we know who the killer was now, most likely. You know, is or at least the person who Scotland Yard thought was the killer all along, and just never revealed it to the public, was a man named Aaron Kozminski, who was someone who had been committed to an insane asylum, a working-class Polish immigrant, and didn’t match any of the theories that Arthur Conan Doyle had to originally come up with, but when Arthur Conan Doyle did try to work other cases where he did have where there was somebody accused of something unjustly, or and he was able to actually help in certain cases. But I think his attempt to predict is a lot like all the problems with prediction, which is that you just can’t. We don’t. We really don’t know who commits these crimes based on just very rudimentary clues. I mean, the science, if you want to call it that, has improved a lot since then. But even the profilers, the famous profilers today in the FBI, John Douglas, who wrote Mind Hunter, says that Arthur Conan Doyle was the model for them.

Carolyn Daughters  13:07

They read Sherlock Holmes, they read Auguste Dupin, and Edgar Allan Poe, and so I think that’s telling that it still continues to be this blend of fact and fiction.

Sarah Harrison  13:19

I just say I love as you were describing the part of The Monsters We Make of police pursuit that you had actual sirens popping off in your real life behind you. No, it was perfect. It really set the scene and the mood. You’re right.

Rachel Corbett  13:36

I’m so used to it because I’m in Brooklyn and it’s just like a constant soundtrack. I didn’t even notice.

Sarah Harrison  13:41

Oh, I love it! Like Carolyn, I loved that you started with, and quoted throughout a study in Scarlet, which was our first book club book for Arthur Conan Doyle. You referenced Dupin in Edgar Allan Poe, and Carolyn, I was really interested how you came across Rachel’s book through this literary contest. Can you tell us a little bit about how this came to your attention in the first place, and why we’re reading it?

Carolyn Daughters  14:16

There is an award called the Dashiell Hammett Prize, and I get sent this year a lot of books, and The Monsters We Make was one of them. And what I really appreciated about it is, it felt different than the other books I was reading, majority of which were fiction, and a couple nonfiction, a couple memoir, but it brought me back almost into academia. I really felt like I was learning something, and it was also couched in very personal terms. So you start, for example, with a story that takes place, I believe. May 13, 1893, and that grabbed me from the get-go. And I’m wondering if maybe you can like take us back to that day and talk a little bit about what happened then.

Rachel Corbett  15:16

The origins of The Monsters We Make come from my own experience with a crime, a murder that was very close to my family. I think that’s why I became so interested in the subject. The story is that when I was a child, my mom dated this man for several years after she and my father divorced, and he was this really, really lovely, sweet guy who became a second father to me. Quiet. He lived with us out in the country for a few years. Eventually, they split up, and shortly thereafter, she kept us home from school today. One day, and told us that Scott had died. He committed suicide, and this was completely shocking and horrifying, of course. And my first understanding of what, first ever learning what suicide was, and life went on. And years later, I’m living in New York, and I’m going to grad school, and for journalism, and I just get curious. And I remember looking him up. I don’t know what I thought I would find, just googling his name in the local papers. And I realized that he there was an article saying that he had actually killed another woman, and then before he killed himself, and that she had a six-year-old son who was actually sitting outside in the car that day when it happened, and that my mother had protected me from that part of the story. So it was. It turned out that it was the woman he immediately started dating right after my mother, and obviously this was completely shocking. This was so out of character. He’d never been violent. There was nothing to suggest that he had this inside of him, and so I went back to investigate everything. It was obviously a closed case. It was a murder suicide, but I wanted to understand why. Were there signs that we missed? Who was this person? It’s the most terrifying thing of all is to think that somebody you think could somehow be a murderer. I interviewed the police. I interviewed forensic psychologists and tried to really reconstruct the crime. And it just left me feeling like I still don’t really get it. And what am I even trying to do? And I think that I was trying to be write a profile of him or profiling myself, and then I just felt like what I didn’t feel like I understood it any better.

Rachel Corbett  17:52

I mean I did understand there were certain facts and details. He did fit a kind of profile. Murder suicide is often done by men who are white in rural areas, who had recently lost a job as he had recently out of relationship, all these risk factors. But like obviously, all those types of things are characteristics of people who don’t murder women. Also, I was like, this doesn’t seem like him, the guy I knew, and I found it very frustrating. But I always was stayed interested in this pursuit to try to understand these things that terrify us the most and the impossible quest that that is. And I think for myself what I ended up concluding in some way was that this was the most helpless I’d ever felt. This experience of this man I loved doing this horrible thing, and as a child, I think I just wanted to take control of the narrative a little bit, like as if I could understand him. I could. The Monsters We Make was my story to tell.

Rachel Corbett  19:03

I could own it, and I think that’s what we do with a lot of true crime stories: is we want something. Especially when women are the biggest audiences of these stories. I think it comes from a place of fear sometimes, and wanting to see things wrapped up, and wanting to feel like we can get inside the minds of murderers in order to feel like maybe we’ll learn something, or maybe we will at least feel like we know something.

Carolyn Daughters  19:32

With true crime and like shows like SVU, Law and Order SVU, like you mentioned, women are in large part the audience, but you also mentioned in The Monsters We Make something that I had heard before and I find fascinating, and it’s that women sometimes fall asleep watching these shows, and they’re often like something really graphic is happening on the screen, and I’m just curious. Like if you could, you know, help explain, like what are we getting from? Hey, it’s I’m tired. It’s late. I have to get up early tomorrow. How about to fall asleep? I watch SVU. Like, what’s going on there?

Rachel Corbett  20:12

I know it’s hilarious, but I think, and I’m someone who used to do that. I used to watch SVU, all of it, and I mean, I think especially with some of those very like formulaic shows, the guy is going to get caught. It’s all going to be tied up with the bow, and there’s something satisfying about it. It’s like you’re coming close to your fear; you’re in proximity to a rape or a murder or something, but you it’s not actually going to happen to you. And as opposed to maybe I don’t know being alone with your thoughts at night, worrying someone’s going to break in your window or something-that’s maybe more terrifying. And I think it is that when we narrativeize things, I think giving it a shape and a form is a way of trying to own it and control it in some way.

Sarah Harrison  20:58

It was an incredibly powerful opening of The Monsters We Make. Like it just gripped me from the beginning when you revealed that oh we just saw him the night before this all happened and how much you cared for him I loved how you then walked through this history and you got to Henry Murray who I’d never heard of before and heard of. I’ve heard of Ted Bundy obviously and the Unabomber, but Henry Murray, who was not the murderer but a profiler, who wrote this profile of Hitler, I believe he got involved with MK Ultra. If I’m keeping the timeline connected in my head, talk to us a little bit about why Henry Murray and what you wanted us to get from his story?

Rachel Corbett  21:45

I find him so fascinating. It’s not someone I knew until I started researching this project, and then I was like at one point like I just want to write a whole book about because no like no one really knows who he is. He was a really influential psychologist at the time, the head of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Of course, he actually wasn’t a psychologist. He was a biologist by training, and just taught himself psychology. He read he read a lot of Jung, and this was to really catastrophic effect. He was a very charismatic man who talked his way into situations? He talked his way into the CIA and became one of their head profilers, which was an entirely new thing at the time. This was in the 30s. World War II was starting to break out, and they were really interested in all kinds of truth serums and all sorts of weird projects that to try to contain Hitler, and so they hired psychologists, including Murray, to write a profile or a series of predictions based on his history and his speeches and whatever you could deduce about him to figure out what he would do in various situations? How would he react if he was captured, or how would he react if you know? Would he commit suicide, or would he allow himself? Various scenarios. And he and Henry Murray just found this to be his calling, basically. So he continued working with the CIA even after the war, we don’t know officially whether he was involved in MK Ultra, but it’s certainly he was doing the kinds of experiments that they were, that MK Ultra was part of, and he was doing them at Harvard, which is a school where all of this was happening. I write about this in The Monsters We Make. It’s certainly extremely likely that these were part of it in some way, and one, one his swan song, this sort of experiment that all of his research for years had led up to was this series of humiliation experiments, which was a hot topic at the time, trying to figure out how to break prisoners of war or other enemies, and so he decided that he would try to see how students would react if they had an older, like a law student, read their papers and then berate them. Basically, they would write these extremely personal essays about their sexual fantasies, their parents, their desires, their philosophies about life, and then they would ridicule them like point by point, and this would go on over years, like three years. This happened, and it was, and they would flash a big light in their faces and put like electrodes on them. It was like an interrogation room and one of these students was Ted Kaczynski, who was, you probably know, a very young prodigy. So he was still a teenager. I think he was about 17 when he started these experiments, and he was one of the only working class boys at the school. Really small, vulnerable. He was like an insel. Like he wanted nothing more than to like get a girlfriend, but he never could. And while he’s in these experiments, he starts journaling about these revenge fantasies that he has and how he wants to go into the woods and murder people. How good some release would feel at least, so we don’t know exactly if this caused that, but I mean I think that’s very clear that there’s an association there, and he did target in the end psychiatrists and psychologists and others among scientists and that sort of thing.

Carolyn Daughters  25:43

Exactly.

Rachel Corbett  25:44

And then Henry Murray goes on to do all kinds of other horrible things. But that’s my focus for the purpose of The Monsters We Make.

Carolyn Daughters  25:53

The FBI’s initial profile of the Unabomber was really broad. It was like he’s somewhere between 18 and 53. He has somewhere between a high school diploma and a partial PhD. They got two things right, which I mean any of us could have probably gotten right. He was angry and he was white, but really, ultimately, it was David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother, who months after it was this was published in I think the Washington Post, recognizes the verbal ticks and argumentation style of his brother. So, to what degree is human knowledge about other people outperforming the criminal profiling systems, at least the ones that were in play at the time. If David hadn’t come forth, we might not have identified Ted nearly as quickly, and it was not quick. That was probably the wrong word. After it was after the essay was published nearly as quickly.

Rachel Corbett  27:02

As I describe in The Monsters We Make, they really didn’t have any physical evidence at all because if anything, Ted Kaczynski would plant false evidence in his packages, and so they were on a wild goose chase with him. I interviewed the profiler who’s most associated with capturing Ted Kaczynski, and his name is James Fitzgerald. And in the end, he didn’t use the very broad profile like you said, which was they had they had an army of profilers working on this case in San Francisco and elsewhere, and they just were so the profiles were so variable it was like almost useless. We know all white all bombers in history have been white men basically in this country so that wasn’t very helpful and so when David Kaczynski’s wife actually read the manifesto and she’d never even met Ted Kaczynski, but she’s like, “This sounds a lot like your brother, and he stewed over it, agonized over it for some period of time before ultimately deciding to take to come forward with his theory that this could have been Ted. So the profilers really the profiles were useless in this case. Where they did come in handy was once they had captured Ted. They had, or sorry, once they had identified Ted, they needed a warrant to go actually go to his cabin and search. And so the profiler I mentioned, James Fitzgerald, studied the manifesto and studied all these other letters that Ted Kaczynski had written, which he got from his family, and found linguistic clues between that matched in both in both cases, odd phrasings, and so that was enough to get the judge to issue the warrant. He then developed this field of forensic linguistic profiling, however you want to call it, and that turned out to be the area that he went on to specializing in. So I think profiling means a lot of different things now. It could be geographical profiling. Some are more useful than others, but I think that the way we think about it in pop culture of just like a guy getting into the mine, some FBI agent in a basement, really drinking whiskey and imagining what is like is not usually the one that helps.

Carolyn Daughters  29:29

And that linguistic fingerprint, like that evidence, like I think he said, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. That seems like that’s demonstrable evidence to me versus like inferred personality traits through profiling. As it’s described in The Monsters We Make, it felt actually more textbook.  took the fingerprint and then studied across the database. It felt less like profiling to me.

Rachel Corbett  29:55

That’s a profile itself isn’t admissible in. You can’t just say like just because we think it’s this person or somebody like this person that wouldn’t be. It’s really meant to narrow a feel or at least give you a place to start looking. But the problem is that it becomes evidentiary, I think, for a lot of profiles because it colors there what they’re looking for and it can really make you think that this actually is who the person is, and it can make you look in the wrong places, or even possibly pick the wrong suspect if you really are convinced this is the profile. And that’s where things get dangerous, of course.

Sarah Harrison  30:33

I want to go back to Henry Murray for a second. I was totally riveted in this guy’s section in The Monsters We Make, so I’m just like not going to bed. Reading the next page, so he profiles Hitler. He bizarrely goes rogue, which was an interesting piece to his own profile. It’s like I’m not going to combine this like I’m supposed to with my boss. I’m going to send my profile separately, and then ends up having several things correct about Hitler, and I think you said it was one of the first long-distance leadership type profiles, and yet he does so many demented things, right? So he’s unfaithful to his wife, he’s cruel to his mistress. It’s questionable how she dies. He’s cruel to his students. They do all these terrible experiments on prisoners, and I was wondering, like, where do you see these biographical details about his own problems and cruelty intersecting with his profiling? Like, is it just was it a blind pig can find an acorn every once in a while? He just happened to get these things right. What was what was what should we take from reading all of his biographical details about his own cruelty?

Rachel Corbett  31:56

Well, I think it’s a lot of projection. I mean, I think it’s very good if you if you are a sadist, as I believe he was, what better position in society to take up but somebody who studies sadists, or studies bad guys? It gives you first of all a veneer of legitimacy. No one’s going to come looking for you. It also gives you an excuse to do what you want to conduct at that time conduct experiments. I mean, the irony is overwhelming because of course this is like coming out of the Geneva Conventions and all of these things took place, and then Harvard completely ignored this and said, well, the medical school is not really going to follow these ethics. These rules that have just been established, and so I just think it’s somebody who wanted to enjoyed watching students squirm, enjoyed torturing these people psychologically, and found a very good cover for doing it.

Sarah Harrison  32:58

Do you think his findings are credible at all, or it’s just total bogus. In The Monsters We Make, it was just a cloak.

Rachel Corbett  33:04

The funny thing about Henry Murray is he doesn’t really have any findings. He was just he was so unscientific, because he was not trained in this, and he would write these long books. Some of them fascinating, like the explorations in psychology, but they would-they weren’t scientific enough to have like proper conclusions or scientific method or any proper results. He would just pontificate and muse about different conclusions he would draw. He would have these enormous projects like to study every part of the human personality, to try to identify and make a taxonomy of the entire personality, and he would take one student and say, “I’m going to identify everything about this person, and this project would take him a decade or something like that. And then, of course, we don’t we don’t have those results. That’s not something he could have done anyway, and we don’t really have the humiliation experience. That was the horrific irony of it all too. Is that there was he didn’t provide any conclusions. It was never published. I mean, there are published pieces of it, but not just some of the findings along the way, and of course, if there was anything to learn from it. Harvard sealed the files in like near like around 2000, claiming that they wanted to protect the identity of Ted Kaczynski since he had been identified as one of the one of the subjects. But of course, I think more likely they’re trying to protect themselves and keep this highly unethical study under wraps because we don’t really even know what else we might learn from it.

Sarah Harrison  34:47

What was the reference that Hannibal Lecter was referring in the film to a test. Wasn’t that developed by Henry Murray?

Rachel Corbett  34:57

As I describe in The Monsters We Make, he and his mistress Christian Morgan developed the Thematic A Perception Test, T A T, and you used images of vague images of people in some state, maybe of distress. Could be like a farmer on the field looking worried, or a girl with her hands over these vague scenes, and then you would ask the person describe what they see in it, and then there was a series of conclusions you’re supposed to draw. And in in Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is given one of these, or he says, “Oh, I know this is you want me to answer A, B, or C to show whatever. I forget what he says actually about it. But, yes, he’s referring to that test that Murray developed.

Sarah Harrison  35:40

Do you think Henry Murray set the field back, or did he propel forward a field that really didn’t deserve it?

Rachel Corbett  35:50

That’s an interesting question. I, I mean, I think the legacy of these leadership profiles, like what he did with Hitler, has been useful in some ways, they’ve gone on to do them now for many for Putin and Saddam Hussein and various leaders. They’re less freewheeling than Henry Murray’s. Henry was making up all these ideas about Hitler’s sex life and what he likes or doesn’t like, and it was just like it’s story time. But I think in in later years the CIA has tried to come up with dossiers where they know something about their children or they like to talk about soccer. So ask them about this or don’t ask them about this and all these aspects of their personality. Maybe some based more in reality and maybe some predictive, and so I think that could certainly be useful for interactions with these foreign dictators. But some of them are published too. You can read like the profiles. I think Saddam Hussein and some of the others. But again, it depends on how much you really know. I think that the idea of examining someone from afar is very, very difficult, if not close to impossible.

Carolyn Daughters  37:09

You mentioned that you hadn’t come across Henry Murray until your research. I think for The Monsters We Make, at some point, did like the research and writing of this book get darker and more complex than what you maybe envisioned at the outset, where it was personal, your childhood history with Scott, and really like understanding the whole picture, if such a thing is even possible of another person, and then you’re learning about Henry Murray, and you’re delving into Kaczynski and Ted Bundy, and like, did at the outset where this book was gonna go?

Rachel Corbett  37:48

No, not at all. I mean, actually, at the very beginning, I was just interested in criminal profiling as like an idea. What? How does that work? Seems cool. Like I don’t know what are they what are they learning in there? How are they doing it? And then I quickly realized that it’s there’s not as much to it as you might think, and then I just became fascinated by these people who are profilers because so often they’re charlatans, or and I just kept thinking like these are the people who are tasked with identifying the murderers among us they must be getting it wrong a lot which it turns out they do and that I really wanted to flip the lens. We’re so obsessed with criminals but who are these people this is an extraordinary powerful thing to be able to just walk around and say I think it’s this guy or that guy or this type of person, and  I think like Henry Murray, it’s a good mask for certain people to actually be the bad guys, and I think where the book went ultimately is where the book and the last chapter of The Monsters We Make is where the full expression of this idea, which is when you have this really horrible sheriff deciding he’s going to profile children in his community and believes that a certain set of characteristics will determine if they’re going to be future criminals, and he proceeds to harass and police them as such. So you get a real view of how which comes first the criminal or the profile, and what happens when we ignore, we just take this expertise for granted, this very pseudoscientific data that he was using to create these ridiculous profiles of kids.

Carolyn Daughters  39:37

It’s creating criminals to some degree. I mean, at some point, Bobby has Robert is his father, and there’s been like 80 some odd police visits at the house. Bobby has been in detention for 20 some odd days. He was in jail for about a year during his teenage years, and his father, I think, asked, and it may have been an interview with you, but he says, “Who do you think his friends are? Like who? After a while, like this is, you’re almost creating this person. You’re creating their community. You’re creating their strange or warped trust system with people who maybe have also been through a similar system or have similar complicated backgrounds, and so that was a really interesting section there. And what is it about Bobby’s story where you wanted to create this chapter focused on him? Did you identify with this profiling or labeling with his childhood? Did you identify it at all with your own?

Rachel Corbett  40:39

I think there’s probably something to that. I think Bobby’s story in The Monsters We Make is subjectively heartbreaking, but I really, really felt for this kid, and that was a very hard thing for me to write. And I spent some time with his father down in Florida where they lived. I think because with this policy, you can be labeled basically a future criminal if you have not committed any crimes at all, but say there’s violence in the home, you’ve witnessed domestic violence, all these things that would have certainly labeled me somebody at risk for becoming a future criminal. And instead of getting him therapy or a hug or something of a mentor, they just enhance do this enhanced policing, which is just basically pure harassment. They show up like you mentioned at all hours of the day and night, and I just think like what it’s like what my life would could definitely become, had it not gone that way, and he’s no longer able to graduate high school because he spent so many days in juvie. You can’t have that many truancies, and you don’t so you don’t have a diploma. So then he’s out of jail and he can’t work, and his friends are these other guys in jail. I mean, what do you think is going to happen? How is he going to make a living? The crazy thing about this whole story is that a lot of it is on the police body cam videos, so I have like hours and hours and hours of these horrific exchanges where the police are in the very beginning he’s asking for help he’s saying like I think I might want to be a police officer someday like what is it like and they’re just like shut up, kid. Like we’re not the nice guy. We’re gonna teach you how to be and by the end of it he just sees them and he just turns around and puts his hands behind him, his back ready to be cuffed. I mean he just becomes the character that they’ve decided he would be. You know those ages. I think it starts at 15 to seven. They’re such vulnerable years, and you just see them shape this innocent kid. Really, it’s horrible.

Sarah Harrison  42:50

There was so much tragedy brought out in The Monsters We Make. I have to go back again. Not exactly to Henry Murray, but one of the things that keeps coming up, and maybe along the line of Carolyn’s question about what you discovered, MK Ultra is still in the news, and albeit I don’t know, but I think with all of the Epstein files coming out, that was causing a big kerfuffle about was he involved in that? What was your research into that program like? To me, it’s probably one of the most disturbing programs our country has ever participated in. What was the darkest thing you found out? Did you write the darkest thing, or was there more?

Rachel Corbett  43:37

Well, first of all, I didn’t know there were theories about Epstein’s association with MK Ultra.

Sarah Harrison  43:41

Yes, some of the victims claim to have been part of the program and everything.

Rachel Corbett  43:47

Of course, who knows these days? But who knows?

Rachel Corbett  43:53

I don’t know what the worst thing about it is. I mean, I really was focusing on it mostly through the lens of how Harvard was being funded by the CA is including partly by these, by this program and Henry’s or Henry Murray’s possible association with it. I know they were experimenting on sex workers. I know that people were taking huge amounts of drugs and then disappearing. I know that there was just horrible things. I think they were injecting people with like I don’t even know the date. You probably know more than I do, but it seems like there’s an endless amount of I mean unimaginable cruelties that went on, and I’m sure so much that we don’t know about because they’ve destroyed those files. We don’t really know.

Carolyn Daughters  44:49

Go ahead, please.

Rachel Corbett  44:50

I mean maybe not MK outdoor experiments like the Stanford prison experiment all these.

Sarah Harrison  44:56

Oh, that’s messed up.

Rachel Corbett  44:58

Just things where they were like there’s just no rules of participant safety or the boundary between. I mean, that study’s so fascinating to me because it’s again the reversal of the profiler or the psychologist and the victimizer. When you actually make yourself a prison guard that’s supposed to enforce it on students, turns out you start to act like that. So taking on these roles is such a dangerous thing even to do.

Carolyn Daughters  45:30

How much can we know about another person? Like where have you landed by the end of The Monsters We Make, or even from the book to today? Maybe there’s more evolution in in your thought, but at the end of the book, without going into all the details, we want people to read. But you talk about how maybe some mysteries can’t be solved or shouldn’t be solved. And so, as a journalist, is that hard for you to accept? How are where are you in that process now?

Rachel Corbett  46:00

Yes, because I started The Monsters We Make to get answers. I really want answers, and certainly there are things we can learn. There’s lots of data about the types of people who commit different types of crime, and I think that a lot of it is totally valid and reasonable. And that’s interesting. It’s just when you try to apply it to specific people. That’s where things go bad because you really can’t know an individual on that level by applying data. And I think that obsession with knowing things we just can’t know is what drives this constant churn of true crime media and stories because it’s like, if we really understood it, we wouldn’t need to keep consuming it, and it wouldn’t keep scaring us so much. I think that you ultimately don’t know if some guy you’re sitting next to in the subway is a murderer or something. There’s just no way to actually see it, and I think the book is really contending with this idea that we can mark or see or identify in somebody else this telltale sign or  in the old days it was a physical manifestation like if you had a bump in your skull phrenologists would say that makes that placement would show you a murder or whatever certain ethnic characteristics would be a sign. So we’ve been doing it forever, and now instead of picking out certain physical clues, we pick out behavioral clues or details that we might say belong to a certain class of people in this country because we want to control that class, and then you might find the data to back it up. But I think that is where we are, and I think we keep doing it over and over again for hundreds of millions of years because we just can’t actually know the answers to the things we so desperately want to know, and we’re just going to have to live with that fear a little bit.

Sarah Harrison  47:57

Unbelievably, we are closing in on time, but you just mentioned phrenology, which brought to mind one of your character-not like characters, but people-in your book that I wanted to ask you about. So, in the section on Ted Bundy, which again was absolutely gripping, there was this woman, Louis, the psychiatrist, who was quite sympathetic to him and many other murderers, and she got involved in this like study of head trauma. And I believe her partner was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That sounds too much like phrenology. We’re not going there. But he did actually find head trauma in so many of these criminals. Can you talk a little bit about Lewis and her research and what’s going on here?

Rachel Corbett  48:47

Yes, she’s another fascinating character discussed in The Monsters We Make, in my opinion. She’s a Yale psychiatrist trained as a child psychiatrist and became really interested in juvenile violence. And this was work nobody wanted to do. So she was doing studies, and she found that over and over again these kids had suffered head injuries and often were victims of abuse. And so she convinced this neuroscientist colleague of hers to actually scan the brains, and she not to her surprise because this was her theory, but to everybody else in the field’s surprise, they found in almost every single case there was some kind of trauma. It could be, it could have been an injury. It could be the assist in a particular part of the of the frontal lobe, which controls your impulse control, or there was a learning disability, a profound disability in that way, something in every one of them. So she came up with this theory that there’s  a set of traits that are present in all the violent offenders she studied, which was a history of childhood abuse, something in the in the brain, and. Usually, a kind of coping or predisposition toward paranoia, or the feeling of which is often the result also of abuse. So she ends up becoming like the go to psychiatrists for death row inmates. She examines Ted Bundy, all Like all of the like the hit all the hits the guy who killed John Lennon and all of them and she generally finds this over and over again but the one who got away the one she could never really understand was Bundy because he always claimed to have a perfect family, no history of abuse, and she just couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was in him, and he  famously lied all the time. So she examined him a few times, and then he obviously died a long time ago, and she to this day, when I went to visit her in New Haven, her house was filled with all these boxes of files labeled like Ted Bundy, Ted Bundy Two, Ted Bundy. Like she’s still trying to figure it out. This goes back to what I’m saying about this obsession with knowing something. He’s gone. We’ll never really be able to ask him. This is why she was such an opponent of the death penalty too, because she said, how are we supposed to study these people if they’re dead? So she, I won’t give it away, but she comes up with this very interesting theory about what really was behind Ted Bundy’s, my murderous mind. It’s pretty, it’s bizarre, but maybe there’s something to it.

Carolyn Daughters  51:45

I want to find out, Rachel, what you’re working on next because it’s been a while since you’ve talked about The Monsters We Make. The paperback’s coming out this fall, like so. You’re working on other stuff. Tell us what you’re doing.

Rachel Corbett  52:00

Well, right now I’m just working on my job. I’m a features writer at New York Magazine, which is a very full time job. So right now I’m just doing that. I do all sorts of general interest stories for them. So I did just do a big crime story for them recently, but it’s also I cover anything, art, business, business, whatever is a good story that I can find. So that’s what I’m doing now. I don’t have another book in the works yet, but I’ll get there. It took me 10 years between the two books, so oh wow, that’s the main thing.

Sarah Harrison  52:39

It is a great book, and I wanted to actually ask you about your other one. You must change your life. Can you mention that a little bit?

Rachel Corbett  52:47

It’s a totally different subject. It’s about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who’s famous in this country for letters to young poet. We’ve heard of that, and he was a young poet who moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Rodin, who was already like an old famous genius sculptor at the time, and he learned to write poetry by looking at sculpture visually. He tried to apply Rodin’s techniques of close observation of the tiny details, and he started to write that way, and developed a new modernist style of poetry that became what he was most famous for in his later life. So it’s very different, but I think it’s similar because I’ve realized that I really like stories about two person relationships. The new book about crime is each chapter is like a profiler and somebody profiled and how they shape each other’s life and decisions. And the book was about these two artists and how they change the course of their work for each other.

Sarah Harrison  53:56

Awesome. Where can people go to see more of you, get more of your work. Follow you on anything.

Rachel Corbett  54:03

Well, you can buy t anywhere you buy books, Amazon if you must, or whatever. The bookstore, and I’m on social media. Rachel R E C A G L N as in Noel, my middle name Corbett. I’m that. That’s me on Instagram and on Twitter X, and I have a website Rachel-Corbett.com, and New York Magazine.

Carolyn Daughters  54:34

Awesome. Well, we recommend that everyone read The Monsters We Make. It’s fascinating. Yes, names that I hadn’t thought about in years, like Ted Bundy and Ted Kaczynski, and it really kind of brought back that history. And it’s also a personal story wrapped in a personal story that I found fascinating as well. So thank you.

Rachel Corbett  54:57

Thank you so much. This was really nice. Thanks.

Carolyn Daughters  1:03:52

Thanks so much for listening to this episode on The Monsters We Make by Rachel Corbett. Please help other mystery lovers find our show by subscribing or with a like, a share, or a rating. It’s totally free, and it means the world to us.

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Carolyn Daughters

Thanks for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. Until next time, Stay Mysterious.