cover image The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling

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

Rachel Corbett. Norton, $28.99 (236p) ISBN 978-0-393-86769-5

Journalist Corbett (You Must Change Your Life) delivers a fast-paced history of criminal profiling from the Victorian era to the present. The narrative combines riveting accounts of such infamous murderers as Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy with sharp insights about the rise of the public’s fascination with criminal psychology, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of pinning down killers by predicting their behaviors. Bundy, Corbett asserts, helped put the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit “on the map,” as its profile of the killer was widely distributed in service of a nationwide manhunt. She points to Harvard professor Henry Murray’s profile of Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, as one of the most influential examples of “leadership analysis,” or criminal profiling of world leaders. (Murray crops up again in the case of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who was a subject of his psychological experiments at Harvard.) While Corbett acknowledges profiling’s appeal, for both law enforcement and the public, she zeroes in on its limitations and potential abuses, like controversial “predictive policing” algorithms used by U.S. police forces to determine where crime might happen and who might commit it. Such evenhandedness permeates the account, elevating it above pulpy indulgence. Readers of true crime will be fascinated. (Oct.)