THE MONSTERS WE MAKE

A charged look at murderers and the artful thinking that brings them to justice.

Raised in rural Iowa, Corbett could have been a statistic at an early age—either as a victim or an orphan—given that a young man her mother dated killed another girlfriend and her dog; he “then crawled into the closet to turn the gun on himself.” In adulthood, Corbett, a gifted storyteller, returned to the case, spending two years investigating both that crime and the behavioral analysts, aka criminal profilers, who study crime scenes and, from the clues they identify, attempt to assemble profiles of the perpetrator. With the girlfriend’s killer, they had plenty to work with, since murder-suicide is common in white, rural, working-class communities, with 90% of the crimes committed by men, two-thirds of the victims “current or former female partners,” and many of the crimes spurred by an alienating event such breaking up or being fired. Though shows such as NCIS and Law & Order present profiling as a science, Corbett, along with many of its practitioners, holds that it’s an art, with one profiler telling her, “Our antecedents actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact.” Thus Conan Doyle—whose fictional Sherlock Holmes owes much to a medical school professor with an almost supernatural gift for divining a person’s life history from a glance at his or her appearance—was enlisted to help track down Jack the Ripper. Corbett’s long discussion of that infamous case—with its surprising identification of the real killer—is a tour de force, though less so than her provocative charge that Ted Kaczynski, humiliated in a college psychology exercise, may have been driven to his infamous mail-bomb campaign to avenge the slight.

A highly readable, endlessly revealing primer on the homicidal mind.