Rachel Corbett – Where the Story Begins
Your book begins on May 13, 1993, when you were six years old. Can you take us back to that day and tell us what happened?
You knew Scott as a kind and protective person who seemed very different from your father. Years later, you learned that before taking his own life, he had killed his girlfriend and his dog. What was it like to discover that the story you’d grown up with wasn’t the whole story?
You spent two years going through police records, interviewing witnesses, and trying to understand Scott. At one point you describe studying his photo for some visible trace of monstrosity. Did you feel that if you looked closely enough, there had to be an explanation?
Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Mystery Tradition
The Tea, Tonic & Toxin podcast and book club has discussed The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter, along with A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles. The first criminal profilers were fictional. Rachel Corbett, how did Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle help create the idea of the criminal profiler?
You write that profiling is often a “quixotic, haphazard blend of science and fiction.” Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t simply write Sherlock Holmes; he tried to apply Holmes’s methods to real crimes, including Jack the Ripper. What happens when a method that works great within the controlled universe of fiction gets applied to messy human reality?
Sherlock Holmes begins with a clue and reasons backward toward a person. That’s immensely satisfying to readers. Has detective fiction taught us to expect real crime to be similarly solvable—that every behavior must ultimately point toward an answer?
Rachel Corbett – Thoughts About Henry Murray: When the Profiler Becomes the Monster
Henry Murray is one of the most fascinating (and disturbing) people in the book. He helped pioneer personality assessment, profiled Hitler for the U.S. government, and then subjected his own Harvard students to deliberately humiliating psychological experiments. Murray’s Hitler profile helped establish remote psychological profiling, yet his own research crossed extraordinary ethical boundaries. Talk a bit about this phenomenon where people study dangerous or destructive behavior while themselves causing harm?
Murray’s work leads into the disturbing relationship between psychology, intelligence agencies, and programs like MK-ULTRA. Was there a point in your research when the history of profiling became larger and darker than the story you initially thought you were writing?
Ted Kaczynski and the Unabomber
Ted Kaczynski was subjected to Henry Murray’s experiments as a Harvard student and decades later became the target of one of America’s most famous profiling investigations. Rachel Corbett, what did you make of this intersection between Kaczynski and Henry Murray?
The FBI’s initial Unabomber profile was very broad—an angry white man between 18-53 with anywhere from a high-school education to a partial PhD. Ultimately, David Kaczynski recognized his brother as the probable author of the manifesto. In criminal investigation, does intimate human knowledge can outperform elaborate profiling systems?
A linguistic fingerprint is critical to the case, particularly Kaczynski’s distinctive phrasing (“You can’t eat your cake and have it too”). How is forensic linguistics fundamentally different from psychological profiling? (demonstrable evidence vs. inferred personality)
Ted Bundy and Our Fascination with Serial Killers
Ted Bundy remains prominent in American culture. How did he become such an important figure in the mythology of criminal profiling? Why do we repeatedly turn certain murderers into celebrities?
Dorothy Lewis argued that even people who commit horrific crimes deserve serious psychological examination and that understanding them is not the same thing as excusing them. Why is that distinction so difficult for people to accept?
Thoughts from Rachel Corbett About True Crime, Law & Order, and Copaganda
Talk about copaganda and popular shows like Law & Order SVU. Why do you think so many of us find stories about murder and true crime comforting enough that people fall asleep watching them? (Women make up the largest true crime audience. They can experience their greatest fears from a safe distance.)
Having written this book, has your own relationship with mysteries, crime fiction, or true-crime entertainment changed?
From Profiling Criminals to Creating Them
The final section of the book takes an important turn. Profiling is no longer simply about finding someone who committed a crime. Predictive policing attempts to identify potential criminals before they’ve committed one. Rachel Corbett, you tell the story of Bobby, who was repeatedly targeted by police as a teenager. What did his story reveal to you about what happens when a profile stops describing someone and starts determining what happens to them?
The risk factors used by the Florida program included circumstances children couldn’t control (an incarcerated parent, domestic violence, family instability). Are we in danger of turning evidence that someone needs help into evidence that someone is dangerous? (The sheriff’s source material recommended therapy & support for vulnerable children because it led to better outcomes, yet that recommendation was omitted from the policing manual.)
Where Rachel Corbett Lands
A profile is literally a view from one side. It reveals something but conceals something else. Is it fundamentally impossible to create a profile of another person? Even with enormous amounts of information, how much are we inevitably imposing a story on that person?
Your book begins with a six-year-old girl confronted with something incomprehensible and eventually expands into this enormous history of our attempts to explain and predict human violence. Toward the end of the book, you recognize that your investigation of Scott may also have allowed you to avoid confronting something even closer and more frightening: the violence of your own father. You eventually decide that your father is “a mystery to let be.” Was it hard to accept that some mysteries can’t (or shouldn’t) be solved? Was writing The Monsters We Make at all cathartic for you?
