The Monsters We Make by Rachel Corbett

The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling

By Rachel Corbett

WW Norton 2025

Rachel Corbett begins her puzzling new book The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling with an account of the moment when murder touched her own life: she was living in Vinton, Iowa in 1993 when her mother’s former boyfriend, Scott Johnson, killed himself, his dog, and his girlfriend Crystal Hawkins. Thinking back on how much she and her brother had enjoyed spending time with Scott, she reflects, “And why didn’t he kill us? After all, he was with us the day he died.”

According to her, this bizarre tragedy set her on a path not only to understand why Scott did what he did but also, more broadly, why all killers act the way they do, and whether or not it’s possible to predict those actions. She learns, for instance, that Scott fit the general profile of the main actors in murder-suicides: the shooter a recently-unemployed man, the victim a former lover (the dog thrown extra, apparently), the location rural, and so on.

It's the setup for a book about the history of criminal profiling, a profoundly flawed exercise that’s nonetheless brought about some interesting thinking regarding murder-suicides, family annihilators, and of course serial killers. But instead of this, The Monsters We Make starts to take odd, seemingly unrelated detours, first to Jack the Ripper, then to Hitler and the Nazis, and most elaborately to two serial killers, Ted Bundy, who killed at least 30 women in the 1970s, and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and injured two dozen others in a bombing campaign that lasted from 1978 to 1995.

There’s little or no thread connecting any of this. LAPD veteran Pierce Brooks tells the US Senate that the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) could have provided police with enough information to catch Bundy, for instance. “They have the first name Ted, they have a description of the car, and they have a composite drawing of the suspect,” he commented, noting that if this data had been submitted to ViCAP before the Utah part of Bundy’s extended killing streak, “personnel would have matched up the reports almost instantly, and alerted the agencies involved. It would have been a task then, to identify and apprehend the killer. Many lives would have been saved.”  

It’s an odd statement, part wishful thinking and part insulted professionalism, and it’s by no means certain. Apart from anything else, those “personnel” could have failed at their task. Plenty of police departments in possession of similar amounts of information about suspects had failed before then and have continued to fail since. Bundy was famously caught in a routine traffic stop.

And Ted Kaczynski, despite giving personnel decades with of clues, was equally famously caught when his own brother happened to read his ranting manifesto and thought, “that sounds like just the kind of crap my brother used to say.” Corbett goes into great detail on Kaczynski’s past, his involvement with the CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA program, and his various grievances, but throughout, her accounts of the man sound almost sympathetic. We’re told, for instance, that the Christmas after Kaczynski left Berkley, he wrote longingly in his journal about his intention to murder a scientist “as a means of revenge against organized society in general and the technological establishment in particular” – to which Corbett adds, “Even just the thought of committing murder had a soothing effect on him.”

Odd comments like that recur throughout the book, as Corbett looks at the psychological, sociological, and even physical factors that can go into the mix that might ultimately create a serial killer:

If, for example, a boy is hit in the head and it causes damage to his frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls inhibitions, he might more freely act on his aggressive impulses. And if he suffered abuse, which can engender rage, he might have more of those impulses than other children. He might also develop hypervigilance, a heightened state of alertness that, for children in abusive homes, is a protective adaptation. But it can progress over time into paranoia, potentially leading someone to fight a threat that isn’t really there.

The reversion of agency (the boy is hit, the boy is abused, the boy goes through rough homes, the boy develops a psychological affliction, all passive, all wounds against a straining but outmatched innocence, all somebody else’s fault) will remind readers of the book’s title and should remind them of its subtitle, particularly in light of what turn out to be the two main focuses of the narrative, since not much of the above hypothetical progression applies to either Kaczynski or Bundy, neither of whom fit any kind of profile imagined for them by experts guessing in the dark. Kaczynski was an ice-minded sociopath long before MK-ULTRA got its hands on him and remained in complete self-control for the rest of his life. And Bundy? The best that a mountain of monographs and a battery of tests could come up with for this sane, handsome, charismatic guy was that he simply liked killing people. These two serial killers work entirely against the idea of criminal profiling, as do most serial killers.

But maybe there’s a method to Corbett’s strategy after all. As uneven as The Monsters We Make is, it insists on exactly the kind of nuance its alleged main topic almost always flattens. Maybe, in the end, this book is for Scott Johnson.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News