A subject that has fascinated — and sometimes misled — the public for decades is criminal profiling. From Jack the Ripper to the Unabomber, profilers have been portrayed as brilliant detectives who can read a killer’s mind — but how much of that is real, and how much is myth?
Award-winning author and journalist Rachel Corbett explores that question in her new book, The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. Drawing from history, psychology, and her own personal connection to an act of violence, Corbett traces profiling’s origins in Victorian England to its modern-day digital form — and reveals what it tells us, and what it hides, about human behavior.
Rachel Corbett discusses the roots of profiling, its evolution through the FBI era, and what happens when science, storytelling, and our desire for control collide.