Sirens | A Southern True Crime Podcast · The Sirens Network

Southern Noir Book Club | Rachel Corbett - The Monsters We Make

·52 min·3 clips

The real problem is the profile can distract from the person actually causing harm.

1. Sirens | A Southern True Crime Podcast focuses this episode on Rachel Corbett's book The Monsters We Make and its critique of criminal profiling. 2. Host Raven Rollins interviews Rachel Corbett, a journalist and author, because Corbett wrote a memoir-investigation about her family history and the profiling industry. 3. The episode asks whether profiling uncovers monsters or helps create them. 4. Corbett describes growing up in Iowa outside Iowa City, being raised by her mother, and later studying psychology at the University of Iowa. 5. She says a professor told her she was a good writer and suggested she could move to New York and write for The New Yorker. 6. Corbett says she first wrote fiction as a child in the closet, but she never wrote fiction as an adult. 7. She explains that a 2016 book on Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke came before The Monsters We Make and showed her interest in long-form work. 8. The book became personal after her editor asked what made her want to write it, and she realized she had to include her own history. 9. Corbett says her mother dated Scott Johnson, who lived with the family and acted like a father figure to her and her brother. 10. She learned in her early 20s that Johnson had killed his next girlfriend before taking his own life, which changed her understanding of the event. 11. Corbett says the scene of a child honking a truck horn while a mother stayed inside became the book's opening because it marks the first fault line in her life. 12. She recounts speaking with police about the room, the shooting, and the child's mother sitting dead while the child waited in the car outside. 13. Corbett says the case forced her to confront how a familiar face can be more frightening than the stranger in the white van. 14. She argues that her interest in true crime came from a desire to understand the psychology of violence and the stories people tell about it. 15. Corbett says she was drawn to Mindhunter, Silence of the Lambs, and FBI profiling stories before realizing how often the science was shaky. 16. She cites the Mad Bomber case and James Brussel's later embellishments to show how early profiling mythology grew. 17. Corbett says a London study found only 2.7 percent of criminal profiles led to identifying a suspect, which she uses to challenge the aura around profiling. 18. She criticizes the FBI's early research on 36 prisoners and says serial killers are often poor witnesses to their own motives. 19. The conversation is interview-driven, reflective, and methodical, with Rollins pressing for specifics and Corbett answering with research, examples, and memoir details. 20. People who like true crime, media criticism, and memoir with research will get the most from this episode. 21. People wanting a lightweight chat about recent cases may want to skip it.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed look at criminal profiling and the myths built around it.

Rachel Corbett's The Monsters We Make takes on criminal profiling and the myths that grew around it. Raven Rollins moves through the cases tied to profiling's rise and keeps landing on the same uncomfortable point: the profiles were often wrong, and the story around them got…

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Why you'd press play

You want the profiling myth, stripped down and argued with.

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