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November 18, 2025 156 mins
True Crime Tuesday presents The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling with Writer/Columnist/Author, Rachel Corbett!

Criminal profiling―the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us―holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history.

Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students―including the future Unabomber―by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern “predictive policing” policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted―to devastating effects.

With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.

On Today's True Crime Tuesday, we talk to Rachel about whether criminal profiling is a science or an educated guess!  We also get into the cases in the book involving Ted Bundy, The Unabomber, Henry Murray, and then we talk extensively about Pasco County, Florida and their profiling program trying to prevent criminals from developing a career before they even get started ala Minority Report!

Get your copy of "The Monsters We Make..." here:  https://bit.ly/4r10kPT

PLUS AN ALL-NEW DUMB CRIMES/STUPID CRIMINALS W/JESSICA FREEBURG!

See the video of the Florida man who fell through the ceiling and straight into the arms of a SWAT officer here:  https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/video-florida-man-falls-through-ceiling-into-the-arms-of-swat/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

Check out Jessica Freeburg's website and order her new books:  https://jessicafreeburg.com/books/

and check out Jess on Tik Tok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@jessicafreeburgwrites

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