In recent years, the public has developed fixed ideas of criminal profiling influenced by books like Silence of the Lambs and popular TV programs like Criminal Minds.

A personal experience with violence led Rachel Corbett, a feature writer at New York magazine, to explore the subject of criminal profiling in the hope of understanding a person she knew and what led him to become a murderer. In The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, & the Rise of Criminal Profiling, she offers a history of the subject from its earliest influences to the present. Her research reveals there is a relation between science and fiction in the subject.

Thomas Bond, one of London's top forensic surgeons and an expert witness for the Crown, drafted the first acknowledged criminal profile on Jack the Ripper. Whether it was accurate is still a matter of opinion. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was among members of a Victorian "crimes club" who were invited to offer insights on the Ripper case in 1888. Their assessment was no more convincing to the public than those of others who claim to have identified Jack over the years.

The efforts of medical science to connect criminality to biology introduced bizarre theories of skull abnormalities (phrenology), physical appearance, racial bias and other indicators more akin to fiction than science.

Henry Murray, a man with a string of degrees in a variety of subjects but none in psychology, would have the greatest influence in the field of criminal profiling over a period of years and down to the present. Murray founded a field of study he dubbed "personology," and in 1943 analyzed the mind and motivations of Adolf Hitler at the request of William Donovan, head of the OSS (forerunner of today's CIA). "The groundbreaking exercise in remote profiling paved the way for others to observe and analyze the behavior of subjects they'd never met," Corbett wrote.

It also opened the door for more government-funded experimentation by Murray and his associates, tinkering that had some dangerous consequences. One of Murray's experiments may have been a factor in the future activities of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.

Corbett also offers insights into Ted Bundy and other serial killers, as well as forensic specialists like Howard Teten and James R. Fitzgerald, stars of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, in this readable study.

The final chapters are the most frightening in the book, not because they focus on serial killers, but because they demonstrate what dangers profiling holds when taken to the most extreme lengths. The focus is on the harassment some ordinary citizens faced when a Florida county police unit targeted their children as prospective future criminals. The intent of "predictive policing" was to prevent at-risk children from becoming lawbreakers. Instead, it appears to have forced some in that direction.

"Yet for all the obsessing we do over criminals, we rarely consider the minds of the profilers," Corbett warns. "And they, too, have motives, often overlooked."