In her latest book The Monsters We Make, author and journalist (and Iowa native) Rachel Corbett deep dives into the dark history of criminal profiling, our collective appetite for true crime entertainment and her own personal history with, as she puts it, “an early father-figure [who] committed an unconscionable act of violence.”
In their review of The Monsters We Make, Little Village contributor K. Twaddle calls it a “nonfiction masterclass,” in which “Corbett quietly offers a warning to the crime junkies of the world: criminal profiling, while fascinating, is an imprecise science with vast consequences if used improperly.”
While true crime media is nothing new — from the “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax” rhyme to the Unsolved Mysteries theme music that still gives me chills — the genre has seen a programmatic boom in the last decade. The first season of Serial kicked off a true-crime podcast renaissance. Making a Murderer did the same for Netflix, culminating in countless hours of docuseries and lurid dramatizations, like the deeply problematic Monster(s) series. These and other media have created a multi-billion dollar industry that’s inextricably tied to the criminal profiling field.
Criminal profiling is, as an article in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry explains, the methods “…used by criminal investigators to aid the identification of certain criminal characteristics, such as patterns of behaviour and personality, through the analysis of the crime scene, modus operandi as well as victimology.” It is a field that, for all its proliferation in popular consciousness, has some… rather shaky foundations.
In anticipation of an upcoming conversation at Iowa City’s Prairie Lights Books with fellow New York Magazine features writer Kerry Howley, Little Village talked with Corbett about the central marketing conflict behind the book, true crime fan clubs and how she hopes to flip the focus from those who are profiled to profilers themselves.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Please introduce yourself and explain a little bit of your background.
I’m from just outside of Iowa City. Originally grew up and went to Hills for elementary school and then West High in Iowa City. Went to the University of Iowa, (Psychology and Women’s Studies, which was a thing back then. I don’t think it’s a thing anymore.) Then I moved to New York to be a writer. That was 2005.
I moved here and then worked a lot in the art world. I have covered art historically. So this book is definitely a detour for me, but I have this, like many people, this obsession with true crime. I’ve always been troubled by it and also into it, I’ve watched all the shows. I know most of them are really bad, and I think about, why do I want to watch so much of this content?
So the book deals with that. And then I have this personal story of a murder that was close to my family. I think my own fascination with that case started making me think about what is behind this obsession. I wanted to understand the mind of a murderer that I happen to know very well, but it extends beyond my story. We think we can get inside the psychology of Ted Bundy, and what I keep finding is the frustrating reality: often we can’t. We can learn things. Some things are true, some things are not true.
When your book came through a colleague at the office just started listing their grievances against criminal profiling. I told them, “No, this book gets into that.”
That’s the conflict of the book. Because, of course, the publisher is like, “Let’s market this as true crime, baby! Like, we’re gonna sell, you know?” And I’m like, a lot of people are gonna be really disappointed with that framing when they open it. It’s actually very critical of this thing. It’s a more macro view of the phenomenon.
It’s obviously much needed. Especially here in America, it’s always been in popular culture, right? But even within the last 10 to 15 years, from the first Serial season to the latest Netflix obsession. It’s like, you have Gen Zers with Ted Bundy posters.
There’s fan clubs. If you’ve ever been to a crime convention, those are crazy. Like it’s people dressing up as their favorite murderers. But Crime Junkie and My Favorite Murder are two of the biggest podcasts and they’ve both come out in the last decade. So I think you’re right in that timing. I don’t know if it’s the podcast boom coinciding with true crime, or which happened first, but they definitely seem correlated.
Let’s take somebody who is a casual true crime fan. They watch stuff on Netflix or listen to a podcast, and they come across this book and this reading at Prairie Lights. Is there anything that you would want them to know?
I think the book is really two things. It is for people who like true crime, because there’s stories about Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper and Ted Kaczynski and some of the most famous serial killers in history. I gravitate towards those people, because I’m fascinated by their stories. And I hope that I tell their stories in new ways or reveal new things about them. But it’s also a book about criminal justice and how profiling isn’t just a tool to try to understand the mind of a killer, but it’s also a tool that’s been used and abused by law enforcement as a tool of social control.
So the FBI created this serial killer crisis, hatched it and trumped it up. It really wasn’t that big of a crisis. Then they said, we have the solution for this problem that we made up, which is profilers. Then they use profilers to capture the public imagination. This was the original “mind hunters.” Then they use that to expand their jurisdiction, to get federal funding from Congress. Once there’s a problem and everyone’s afraid of it, they want to fund it. So it has a pretty dark, strange history, and so I hope that people are interested in both sides of that story.
It makes me think of “copaganda” and how we’re so used to these cop shows, but there is this propaganda parallel with forensics in mainstream media, like your CSIs.
Exactly, and it’s a distraction from real threats that are happening. And even perhaps threats at the hands of those [profilers], not all of them, but sometimes. While Palantir is building profiles of all of us for the government, we’re not paying attention to that, but we’re watching profiling shows about profiling other people. But my book is as much about the profilers as it is about the people who are profiled. I hope that it flips the gaze a little bit to look at the whole phenomenon. What is profiling? Is it real? Does it work? What is it good for? When does it work? I think there are some useful cases, but a lot of misuses too.
Moving backwards a little bit, because you talked a little bit about it, but I’m really fascinated that this book has that personal element to it, too. It’s not a memoir, but there are these autobiographical elements where you’re connected to this murder. Was that particularly challenging to get some of your own personal experience onto the page?
It’s something that I have been dabbling with for years now, this story I mentioned. I wrote something about it, but then decided that it was all a kind of sublimation or something, that what I was writing was the straightforward “true crime” attempt to understand [the people involved]. It wasn’t working out as a piece of writing, or really as an exercise in terms of understanding this guy who’s dead now. Then it became this grappling with my own interest and my own obsession with that.
Of course, it’s not pleasant to — I’m not really someone who writes about myself. I actually wrote the whole book first. Then my editor came to me and said, “We should do an intro.” He sent me prompts: “What were you thinking about?” “Why did you want to write this book?” And I asked myself, and I was like, well, honestly it probably goes back to this story in my life. We hemmed and hawed about it forever. I debated whether I should put it out there, and certainly my family doesn’t all love it, and so that’s been a lot of negotiation. But it really is the truth in terms of what brought this book out into the world. So we’ll see. I hope for the best. It’s very exposing, and it does make reviews that much scarier, because it will feel like someone’s reviewing my life if they mentioned that part in the book.
Can you talk a little bit about your Prairie Lights event? You’re going to be in conversation with a friend who’s also a writer.
Yeah, what’s so funny is my colleague, Kerry Howley at New York Magazine, we’re both features writers at New York Magazine, but she lives in Iowa City. And I actually haven’t met her yet, because I’ve only been at New York Magazine for just under a year, and she teaches at the University of Iowa in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She’s on staff at the magazine, just remote. So when I saw that she was living in Iowa City, I was like, “Oh, I have to ask her if she wants to do it. I love her writing. She’s amazing.”
Prairie Lights is just my hometown bookstore, and I didn’t do an event there for my first book, so I’m excited, because that’s where I would go all the time when I lived in Iowa City. It’s like, I can’t believe this is only happening now. Finally I’ve made it in my hometown. [Laughs]
