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- [00:07]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm David Fuerst in for Alison Stewart. She is getting ready to host tonight's get lit with all of it book club event which starts at 6pm 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 for more information. Again, that is wnyc.org getlit and now let's get this hour started with the Monsters we murder, Obsession and the rise of Criminal Profiling. When writer and journalist Rachel Corbett was a young girl, her mother's ex boyfriend shot and killed a woman, a, 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 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. And she joins us now in the studio. Rachel, welcome.
- [01:52]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [01:54]
A
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?
- [02:11]
B
Yes. Scott was someone who was never violent. He lived with us for a few years, starting when I was age 6. And I wasn't told about the murder immediately. I didn't know 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. And this was a completely shocking, obviously horrific thing to discover about someone that I had always loved and thought was very gentle. So when I went to look back, I became kind of obsessed with trying to reconcile the reality with the person I knew. And 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. And I kind of 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. So I was still trying to piece that together. And then I, you know, like you said, I found that he did kind of fit a profile of. In terms of, you know, these crimes are often committed in rural areas more than urban ones. They happen to mostly white men, and the victims are usually their current or former female partners. They often have lost their job just before it happens. And that was all true for Scott. But, you know, learning all of this didn't really make me feel like I really understood him any better. Didn't have a kind of emotional truth or psychological truth. So I started to become interested in my own fascination with it. What did I hope to get out of this and what. You know, and this wasn't. This is actually more of a universal thing than. So many people love true crime stories and watch the TV shows. So I started to become interested in what that is, what we're trying to do when we understand the criminal mind.
- [04:00]
A
Well, 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, you know, the criminal profiling. Masterminds of TV shows and movies are massively popular. We can't seem to get enough of them.
- [04:20]
B
Yeah. And it's women in particular that watch them, which I think is interesting. There's theories around that, including that, you know, this is the thing that scares us the most. And feeling like we can come close to it from a safe distance makes us feel like we understand it. And if we understand it, we kind of disempower its grasp on us. Or maybe we can even learn tips if we watch it. But, you know, I think there's the problem I have with profiling content media and in practice sometimes, is that it gives us the illusion of understand something more than actually educating us about what's going on. And in this book, I want to kind of flip that lens and look at what's happening when we are being told how to understand something.
- [05:06]
A
Well, give us a quick definition of what we're talking about here. What are criminal profilers? What do they do? And then, you know, following from that, how do criminal profilers in real life differ from what we see on TV and read about in books?
- [05:22]
B
So I think the common way people think of criminal profilers is the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, which started in the, you know, came into the fore, really, in the 70s, and Ted Bundy really helped put them on the map. And these were the guys who would. Rather than just looking at the. 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. So they would look for things like, what is this killer getting out of this emotionally? Was there some gratification enacted? And what does the choice of victim say about him or his mind? And so 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. And really, the FBI is just kind of one small piece of that history.
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A
Well, 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?
- [06:23]
B
Yeah. 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. And he said that Sherlock Holmes was a model for him. He read all the books, and other profilers say that as well. And 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. And so 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. But 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.
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A
Well, 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?
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B
Well, I think they make them look like they're magic.
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A
Right.
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B
And they're, you know, this incredibly elite squad of people who have a kind of almost supernatural power to get inside the minds of killers. In reality, that's very far from the truth there. 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. So, you know, it's great tv. In practice, it's not quite so effective.
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A
I mean, 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 murder than homicide detectives did. So what does all of that tell us?
- [08:37]
B
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 sort of drumming up this idea of a serial killer epidemic in order to get congressional funding and expand their jurisdiction. And they knew that this was a tactic in Washington that they could use to, you know, take. You know, create a frenzy, generate fear in the public, and then, you know, 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 the new interviews all the time. But, of course, you know, the 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 kind of knew that eventually.
- [09:36]
A
Why do you think that criminal profilers have really captured the public's imagination in popular culture?
- [09:44]
B
I think there's this overlap between. There's just this innate fundamental desire to understand the people who terrify us the most. And I think it's. There's a kind of existential need to feel safe that's overlapping with this epistemic need to feel like we understand that we confirm our beliefs. And these kind of 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. Like, there's certain behavioral markers. You know, it's somebody wets the bed at night as a child. That was once considered a marker of future criminality. So this makes us feel like we understand. But, of course, I think it's taking us further from the truth.
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A
The book is called the Monsters We Murder Obsession and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. We're speaking with the author Rachel Corbett, here on all of it. And 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?
- [11:03]
B
Well, I think I got into it wanting to understand the criminal mind. And I'm a consumer of all these TV shows that I'm critiquing right now. So I came into it very kind of earnestly interested in this field. But the more I researched, I felt like, you know, there's, there's, we need to think about the profilers. I wanted to kind of 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. And sometimes they commit more harm than the people they profile. And sometimes it's unintentional and sometimes, you know, there's examples of very sadistic people using profiling to.
- [11:44]
A
Well, we want to assign magical powers to the people that might protect us from the dangers of the world. Right. But 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. And 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.
- [12:16]
B
Yeah, so it's really come full circle. So phrenology, as I mentioned, was one way to brand someone as a criminal. And 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.
- [12:53]
A
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?
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B
Well, 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 sort of charlatan psychologist at Harvard. I mean, 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. And 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. And I just became very interested in his kind of how he came from no experience at all to writing this kind of fantastical idea of Hitler's mind and predicting for the military what steps they might take to stop Hitler. And then he ended up conducting his own experiments at Harvard on students, one of whom was Ted Kaczynski. So that becomes a thread. Ted Kaczynski was of course profiled later throughout his life. So there's kind of a thread there.
- [14:08]
A
Talk a bit more about those experiments and Ted Kaczynski.
- [14:12]
B
Yeah. So Henry Murray conducted a series of experiments. He had wanted to understand what could make an anti nationalist personality. He thought he could sort of engineer personalities and make someone more universally oriented and. But instead of doing that, he conducted all these cruel, unethical experiments on his own students or on undergraduates. And the ones that Kaczynski participated in were humiliation experiments. So they were designed to determine how you could break someone through different means. And this was humiliation. So for three years Kaczynski underwent these experiments. And there are some transcripts in the book from those sessions where they ridicule his looks. And he was a 16 year old prodigy when he entered Harvard. You know, he already stood out a lot. He was already very alienated from his peers. And then he went through this for years and around that time started having the revenge fantasies, thought about moving to the woods and you know, and of course later targeted psychologists among the people he bombed.
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A
You're not going as far as to say because this then this.
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B
No, because everything is many factors involved. You know, 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.
- [15:35]
A
We're speaking with the author, Rachel Corbett. The brand new book is the Monsters We Murder Obsession and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. We'll continue this conversation in just a moment. This is all of it on wnyc. This is all of it on wnyc. We're speaking with the author Rachel Corbett about her new book, the Monsters We 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?
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B
So I think that I came into this wanting to understand the criminal mind, just like the profilers say they do. And I was. It comes from my own interest in my childhood. And I think I felt like I could, by doing so, I could control the narrative probably in my own life. You know, this was a situation, my child, that had made me feel completely helpless. And I think by being able to tell a story about it, I, you know, unconsciously felt like I would take. Take the story back. And that's really what I think. This urge to narrativize crime is so powerful in society because it gives us a feeling of control. You know, there's nothing more sort of mentally challenging than feeling like it's just impossible to understand. Somebody just did something because they're crazy or, you know, that's the essence of unpredictability.
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A
And that you couldn't have seen it coming. I should have looked for clues. And 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?
- [17:36]
B
Yeah, it's this feeling of wanting to be able to see it. Like, I just thought, like, if I. Is there something in his eyes? Is there something in his face that could have foretold this horrible thing? And of course, we can't see it. And this feeling that it'll lose its power if we can see it, but it's not there.
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A
Is there a case you can tell us about that really did rely on profiling to catch a criminal?
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B
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. So they thought, you know, we'll maybe start with white men who are educated, because that tended to be what? Well, white men are pretty much all the bombers in American history. And also, you know, they knew he was educated by the control he had over the bombs. And also, of course, the manifesto later.
- [18:43]
A
So some of that sounds helpful, right? You know, what is the process for developing. For developing a profile? Some of it is just assembling some basic clues and trying to cut out certain things that you. You know, dead ends that you don't want to go down.
- [18:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, some of it is just using sort of basic psychological data on what. 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, sort of overlapped this data, because they were already compiling much of this information at the time that the FBI was kind of starting from scratch, using their own, you know, their own experiences to generate taxonomies. But they didn't really work together. In fact, they never really liked each other very much on the two sides. So that was always a conflict.
- [19:35]
A
Okay, well, yes, interpersonal relationship is always complicated. Now, the roots of criminal profiling, it really all did start sort of with Sherlock Holmes. Right. 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.
- [20:01]
B
So there was a police surgeon called Thomas Bond who wrote what is commonly considered today the kind of first criminal profile, or at least what that we know of. And what he did was he looked at the autopsies. That was his main job. But he also, in this case, started to think about what kind of a person Jack might be. And he came to some conclusions about what he might dress, 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. So he's probably not walking around with blood spatter on him. He probably wears a cloak or something dark and something nice. And 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, because 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. And 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. So they really had to rely on hunches and imaginative speculation. And so you can imagine how this would grow out of.
- [21:15]
A
And it's a massive case that everybody knew about. There's huge attention and constant. Well, you know, the media back then, not what it is now, but still a lot of massive attention and pressure to come up with a criminal.
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B
Yeah, there was a. The penny press was flourishing then. There was pictures of him everywhere as a kind of ghoul, you know, 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.
- [21:51]
A
It's not a closed book.
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B
No, I mean, there's people. Some people have strong feelings about who did it, but it will always be contested, probably.
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A
Also in the book, you talk about attempts to predict future criminality through something called intelligence led policing. Can you talk about that? You know, how is this connected to criminal profiling?
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B
Yeah. 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 sort of 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. And 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. And in the case that I follow, ultimately the boy, after eight years of this or so, ended up going to prison. Sort of entering that pipeline.
- [23:14]
A
We're speaking with the author, Rachel Corbett. The new book is the Monsters We 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 kind of hardened your thinking overall? Where does it fall for you? Do you think criminal profiling does more harm than good?
- [23:39]
B
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. And it's a kind of way to scapegoat certain problems. And so. And also if, you know, 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?
- [24:20]
A
But does it ever work? Is it still worth trying to.
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B
I think the research part of it makes sense. I think that making predictions is dangerous because we often. They're really nothing more than our pre existing expectations in many cases. And the policing part of it is complicated. I mean, obviously we need both. But I think that we need to be careful about who we're policing, you know, 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?
- [24:58]
A
And 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?
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B
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. And we, you know, why we need to feel like we know something that we just cannot know. And this will probably that's why they do so well for so long. They can just keep churning them out because it, it's a, it's, it's an urge that never gets satisfied.
- [25:43]
A
And that's great because they can wrap it up in 30 minutes or 60, which is wonderful.
- [25:47]
B
Exactly.
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A
Rachel Corbett, thank you so much for joining us today. The new book is the Monsters We 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.
- [26:06]
B
Thank you so much. It's been fun. NYC now delivers breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening. By sponsoring our programming, you'll reach a community of passionate listeners in an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship wnyc.org to learn more.