#title The Monsters We Make
#author Rachel Corbett
#source <[[https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393867695][www.wwnorton.com/books/9780393867695]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-01-14T01:51:20
#topics jurisprudence, law, criminology, forensic science, analysis of Ted's ideas & actions,
#date October 14, 2025
#publisher W. W. Norton & Company
#cover r-c-rachel-corbett-the-monsters-we-make-1.jpg
#isbn 978-0393867695

*** Frontpiece

[[r-c-rachel-corbett-the-monsters-we-make-2.jpg]]

*** Title Page

<right>
The Monsters

We Make

<br>

Murder, Obsession,

and the Rise of

Criminal Profiling

<br>

Rachel Corbett
</right>

[[r-c-rachel-corbett-the-monsters-we-make-3.jpg 70f]]

*** Dedication

<center>
*For my mother*
</center>

*** Epigraph

<center>
There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

**—Arthur Conan Doyle**
</center>

** The Monsters We Make

*** Introduction

<strong>P</strong>olice arrived around 9 p.m. on May 13, 1993.

The small house was white, with navy trim and a boarded-up garage. Number 913. There was a blue truck parked in the yard, and a boy of six sitting in the driver’s seat. Neighbors had called the officers because the boy had been honking the horn for hours. They had heard other noises too. Susie Roberts, who lived next door, heard popping sounds that she thought were her potpourri burners shattering, but when she checked she saw they were intact. Another neighbor had heard hammering from inside the white house.

The boy told the officers that his mother had gone inside a few hours earlier. She never came back out. A social worker with the police called the boy’s grandparents. Officers paced and deliberated in the yard. The front door was locked and they couldn’t see any movement on the main floor; the basement windows were blocked off with Styrofoam.

They’d never dealt with a situation like this before. Vinton was a town of just five thousand people, a quiet farming community built on an expanse of eastern Iowa flatness so far-reaching you could almost perceive the curve of the earth’s surface. The population had stagnated since the 1980s farm-economy collapse, when Iowa Ham shut down along with four of the five farm-implement dealers in town. About a dozen churches remained and little else.

At around 11 p.m., officers circled the house. They closed off both ends of the block with police cars, then turned the streetlights off. The boy and his grandparents waited with the Cashman family, the neighbors on the other side of the white house. Other residents who had been watching from behind their curtains now stepped outside for a closer look. Susie Roberts came out to ask what was happening. An officer told her to go back inside, turn off all the lights, and lie on the floor on the far side of the house. They believed a gunman was inside number 913.

“I wish he’d just let her go,” Mrs. Cashman recalled the boy’s grandmother telling her. “I know he’s just trying to get her to come back to him.” Mrs. Cashman had a bad feeling. *Lady, they’re stringing crime tape*, she thought.

Finally, the cops knocked down the front door. The house was quiet; the kitchen appeared undisturbed. No one was in the attic. When they descended into the basement, they encountered a scene that would stay with police chief Jeff Tilson, as he said, “all my life.” All blood and hair and water. A blond woman, later identified as twenty-eight-year-old Crystal Hawkins, was floating in a rosy pool on the waterbed. A bullet had passed through her skull and punctured the mattress. The water had bloated her body, which was nude, indicating to officers that she’d been dead for hours.

A Doberman pinscher had collapsed at the foot of the bed, also dead from a bullet wound.

The gunman, identified as Hawkins’s twenty-seven-year-old ex-boyfriend, Scott Johnson, was in the closet. Crumpled up, torn open. A vintage .44 Magnum was on the floor next to him. The cause of death was a single bullet wound to the head.

Chief Tilson told the neighbors not to worry. “Get some sleep,” he said. “It’s an open-and-shut case.” The murderer was dead.

The social worker delivered the news to Hawkins’s parents and the boy, her six-year-old son. Mr. Cashman watched the child’s face as he listened. He didn’t cry. The social worker scooped the boy up into her arms, and he clung silently to her jacket as they went to her car. His grandparents thought he’d be better off with the professionals that night.

Around midnight, the Cashman family watched as two body bags were carried to an ambulance. The men struggled with the weight of one of the bags and it dropped to the ground. It was Hawkins, so heavy from the waterlogging they could barely lift her.

A few days later, Scott Johnson was cremated. No one collected his ashes.

<center>
. . .
</center>

I was twenty-two and had recently moved to New York when I came across an old photo of Scott and me. It was a crooked shot taken with a disposable camera the year before he died. He was lying in our front yard, one cheek resting on the grass. Standing on his back, smiling proudly, I am the seven-year-old girl with a messy blond ponytail. I brought the photo up close, trying to search his face for a sign of—something. But his expression was as neutral and vacant as I’d always remembered it. I hadn’t thought of the name Scott Johnson in years. Now I couldn’t stop silently repeating it to myself.

In some ways, Scott looked in the picture exactly as I remembered him. Quiet, melancholic. He was in his mid-twenties, much younger than my father, which had made him seem like a cool older brother. It was the early ’90s and he wore a single hoop earring and rode a skateboard. He played *Mortal Kombat* with my brother and me on his Sega. He was six feet tall, and in my memory, he’s slouched, hands jammed in jeans, wearing a soft, thinned-out T-shirt.

He and my mother first met in a parking lot while they were both leaving a music club in Iowa City. The back door of her station wagon had been swung open and my pink bicycle was missing from the back seat. Scott, who was tall and boyishly handsome, with full lips and blue eyes, spotted it across the lot. After he wheeled the bike back, they chatted for a while and he asked for her number. My mom, recently separated from my father, looked for a pen but neither of them had one. So Scott took a key from his pocket and etched each digit into the glove compartment of his car. After he died, Mom pulled the cover off its hinges and saved it in our basement. It’s still there today.

From then on, Scott was with us pretty much every day. He rose at 4 a.m., slipped on his coveralls, and drove out to the railyard, where he welded train cars for Archer Daniels Midland. The open fields around our house came alive as his Doberman, Astro, formed a pack with our dogs. They’d go hunting at night, returning with road-killed raccoons or deer heads or, once, a neighbor’s potbellied pig. Scott showed my brother and me how to shoot down Coke bottles in the backyard with a rifle, but he never hunted animals. He hated violence. It was one of the many ways he was different from my father. With Scott, we felt safe.

With my father, it had started out small and then escalated. He was a talented carpenter who could build anything, even his and my mother’s dream house in the woods of northern Iowa. But he could just as easily tear it down. He’d punch through a wall or door over a petty frustration; static on the TV might mean he’d knock it over. And when he was so mad that he severed the phone cords, I knew to run to the closet and pray, even though I didn’t know how. My mother tried to protect us during these episodes. Sometimes she’d lead us into another room, turn on music, and dance, or take us to the car to go for a drive. But increasingly, he turned his rage on her.

Scott was there the hot July night my father showed up at our house without warning, not long after my mother had left him. He had shifted his car into neutral and rolled silently down the gravel road so no one heard the rocks crunching under the tires. He parked near the ditch, then got down low and crept through the yard. He looked in the window, saw my mother and Scott, and then punched through the screen.

He went straight for Scott, pinning him to the cushion with one hand and holding a box cutter over him with the other. My mother ran to the phone. She dialed 911 and screamed at the operator: “Rural Route 7, Box 3!” My father leaped off of Scott and ran to her to slash the phone cord. In that instant, Scott bolted out the front door and ran for nearly ten miles, beaten and barefoot, until he reached his trailer park in the next town over.

The next thing I remember is waking up to police officers shining flashlights in our bedroom. I wondered why they were asking so many questions without answering mine: *Where is my mom?*

“We’re looking,” I remember the fat one with the mustache telling me. “Do you know any places where they may have gone?”

I felt the blanket underneath me turn warm and wet. Apparently the cops shared my dread, because after that they drew their flashlights and began walking the miles of fields around our house, looking for a body.

They eventually spotted my dad’s car on the road and pulled him over. My mother was with him, assaulted but alive.

Scott stayed away during much of the court proceedings. My father was sentenced to ten years in prison (though he’d get out early for good behavior). In the meantime, Scott came back and stayed for nearly four years, until a few months before he died.

<center>
. . .
</center>

I had moved to New York to try to become a journalist. I was learning to ask questions, and it was inevitable that I’d begin asking them of my own history. One night, I looked up the Vinton newspaper archives online to see what they might tell me about Scott. His memory was distant now, and there was so much I’d never been told.

Right away, I saw it: “Boy, 6, Locked Out During Murder-Suicide.” The story described someone familiar: a Vinton man, twenty-seven years old, with a Doberman pinscher. But this guy had killed his girlfriend—a woman I’d never heard of—shot Astro, then crawled into the closet to turn the gun on himself.

It came to me slowly that I’d been protected from the truth. All these years, I’d thought Scott had merely killed himself; I hadn’t known until now that he had also murdered a woman. Who was she? And who was the boy? When I asked about it I realized that Scott’s was a crime no one understood, with no apparent motive. Even his suicide note shrugged: “Give my cat to my dad.”

And why didn’t he kill us? After all, he was with us the day he died.

Scott showed up at our house unexpectedly the night before. He and my mother had broken up a few months earlier; he wanted to buy a house in Vinton, and she didn’t want us to change schools. Now he came bearing gifts: for her, a bundle of peacock feathers she’d always liked; his Sega for us. She wondered if it was his way of making amends for the cruel way he’d left: moving out without warning one week, while we were out of town. In retrospect, I see that he had come to say goodbye.

He told my mom he wanted to drop off a few things he’d found while moving out of his house, the one he’d just bought in Vinton. He’d lost his welding job at the trainyard and things were already over with his new girlfriend, Crystal.

She asked him what he was going to do with his house. He shrugged. “Guess I’ll let the bank take it back.”

He told her he didn’t want to be alone that night and she agreed to let him stay on the couch. Before bed, he stretched out with me and watched TV as though he’d never left, and I silently prayed that this time he wouldn’t.

When my mom got up for work the next morning, she looked out her window and saw Astro in Scott’s car. He’d been there all night with the windows barely open. He could have overheated. She knew then that something was wrong.

My brother and I begged her to let us stay home from school. It was nearly 7 a.m. and the bus was coming soon. Could we please spend the day with Scott?

She refused, and I boarded the bus hating her.

After we were gone and she was getting ready for work, she told Scott that he didn’t need to leave right away. He could have the house to himself for the day.

He shook his head and gazed at the floor. “I gotta go pack.”

As she drove down the highway to work, she passed him at the gas station. *I should stop*, she thought. She wanted to tell him everything would be okay, maybe give him a final goodbye kiss. But then she glanced at the clock and knew she’d be late, so she watched him in her rearview mirror until he disappeared.

The next morning, my mother told my brother and me that we wouldn’t be going to school that day. She sat us down on the sofa and said it plainly: “Scott died yesterday.” I remember the taste of metal seeping into my mouth, and then guilt settling in my stomach. *I didn’t even say goodbye*, I thought. I tried to cry but couldn’t, which made me feel even guiltier. Then she explained that the cause was suicide. It was a concept so inconceivable—some people *want* to die?—that I don’t remember anything else after that. In my diary I wrote an especially short entry: “Scott died. He killed himself. He shot himself.”

That night I dreamed I gave Scott a funeral in the field behind our house, dignifying his death with a ceremony. He lay in an open casket, looking peaceful and safe. I saw his secrets all over the grass. They were wildflowers, sweet peas, and violets that I plucked from the ground and tucked into his palms. Then I buried him deep, where the floodwaters couldn’t reach.

<center>
. . .
</center>

When I looked back at the old photo of Scott I tried to recognize the smiling girl whose whole world, its logic and meaning, would soon be reordered. I studied Scott’s face, too, for traces of monstrosity, as if it would make itself visible if I looked hard enough. Was he already a murderer when this photo was taken? When exactly did his heart hollow? It seemed that if I could locate the origins of his violence and touch it—put my hand into the fire—I could protect him, and perhaps the girl, from that same fate.

I spent the next two years trying to understand the crime in the only way I knew how. I interviewed witnesses, requested police records. I met the boy whose mother Scott killed, and went back with him to the house where it happened. I spoke to forensic psychologists about what the crime scene revealed about the order of events that day, and sociologists on why murder-suicide was so common among men in Scott’s white, working-class demographic, in rural landscapes like ours. I analyzed his childhood, his relationships, his formative traumas, trying to identify where it all went wrong.

I’m not sure what I thought I’d find. There was no crime to solve. There was no question about the perpetrator’s identity. As Chief Tilson had said, it was an “open-and-shut case.” And in the end, I came to the unsettling conclusion that I would never understand what he did. His crime would always defy reason. Crystal would never be repaid. Still, I took some comfort in putting form to this horror. I organized all my evidence to write a semblance of the Scott I never knew, the murderer.

Back then I didn’t know the term “criminal profiling,” except for having once watched *Silence of the Lambs*. The psychological chess match between serial killer Hannibal Lecter and FBI profiler-in-training Clarice Starling laid the groundwork for more recent TV hits like *Mindhunter*, about the early days of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, as well as one of the most-streamed shows ever, *Criminal Minds*, whose elite profilers have been predicting predators’ moves for eighteen seasons and counting.

Criminal profilers—also known as offender profilers or behavioral analysts—search for psychological “fingerprints” at crime scenes to make inferences about a suspect’s life and motivations. Sometimes today even algorithms can evaluate evidence to create profiles of suspects. But, despite it being a relatively modern technique, the practice in many ways has its roots in early crime literature, which was where I discovered it.

When I first started reading the classics of true crime in my teens and twenties, I was amazed at how much of it dealt with the kind of senseless, small-town violence I knew. I was particularly drawn to stories that mined the psychology of violence (rather than focusing on the grisly acts), like *In Cold Blood*. Truman Capote articulated what I’d long sensed about the artificiality of concepts like “evil.” By meticulously investigating the early lives of two bungling Kansas robbers, whose quadruple murder earned them the grand sum of forty dollars, Capote shows how two children who could have gone any direction in life ended up as men in the Clutter family home that night. Meanwhile, Gary Gilmore’s disturbingly random murders of two strangers in Utah—followed by his own desire for execution by firing squad—inspired not one but two of the most devastating crime stories ever told: *Shot in the Heart* by Gary’s brother Mikal Gilmore and *The Executioner’s Song* by Norman Mailer.

I would later learn that writers have apparently done *such* a good job of getting into the minds of murderers that law enforcement officials throughout history have enlisted them to consult on their cases. In the early 1900s, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, worked with London police to try to identify Jack the Ripper. Even John Douglas, the legendary FBI profiler whose memoir *Mindhunter* inspired the 2017 TV adaptation, describes his trade primarily as an art: “Our antecedents actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact,” he wrote. He cited Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin as history’s first behavioral profiler, and Sherlock Holmes as the character “who brought out this form of criminal investigative analysis for all the world to see.”

<center>
. . .
</center>

When I look back now I realize I was writing a kind of profile of Scott. I already knew who did it, but who was he? The case didn’t feel resolved. The Vinton police helped me reconstruct the crime scene as I tied together defining themes from his life—his mother’s abandonment, the legacy of suicide in his family, the 1980s farm crisis. However shocked I was by Scott’s fate, it turned out that he fit the profile precisely: More than 90 percent of murder-suicides are committed by men and about two-thirds of the victims are current or former female partners. Recent separation is one of the biggest risk factors, along with unemployment. Guns are almost always the murder weapon. Rural areas have the highest incidences of murder-suicide; in Iowa between 1995 and 2005, they made up nearly a quarter of all homicides. And at least one study showed that the men tended not to have prior abuse records.

But what did all this information tell me? The man in the photo still looked like the same Scott Johnson I always knew; I still couldn’t “see” the murderer. Michelle McNamara, in her investigation into the Golden State Killer—and into her own yearslong obsession with identifying him—writes in her book *I’ll Be Gone in the Dark* that people often asked her why she was so fixated on the killings. She traced it back to the murder of a young woman near her childhood home outside Chicago. The killer was never caught, which only inflated his presence in her mind. “I need to see his face,” she wrote. “He loses his power when we know his face.”

The urge to identify physical manifestations of evil can be traced at least as far back as the beast in the book of Revelation branding worshippers with his mark. In the late eighteenth century, Europeans looked for bumps on skulls to single out would-be criminals; by the nineteenth century, it was their sharp teeth or hooked noses that gave them away. Nazis used medical implements to measure supposedly Jewish facial features. They also found ways to mark nonracialized “enemies of the state,” including homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, by forcing them to wear colored triangles.

Obviously these “symptoms” of criminality were fallacies that led to false convictions, eugenics, and the Holocaust. But when society finally acknowledged that there was no way to spot a criminal from afar, it created another predicament: If you can’t see evil, could you ever feel safe? The Nuremberg trials disturbed many Americans precisely because they didn’t reveal a parade of maniacs. Instead, time and again, coherent war criminals like Hermann Göring took the stand and calmly explained why they had no choice but to carry out the mass extermination of a people. So as society stopped pinning criminals on faces, it started turning to behavioral markers to satisfy its need for prediction and control.

One of the earliest criminal profiles in modern times dates back to the 1940s and ’50s, when a terrorist in New York City started leaving pipe bombs in movie theaters, offices, train stations, and libraries. The Mad Bomber, as he became known, sometimes sent newspapers angry missives, signed “F.P.,” threatening to bring Con Edison “to justice.” The search for the Mad Bomber became what was then the biggest manhunt in New York City history. Finally, stumped police officers enlisted a psychiatrist, James Brussel, known in the press as “Sherlock Holmes of the Couch,” to help with the case.

Brussel came back with a few exceptionally specific predictions about the bomber: He would be of average build, unmarried, middle-aged, Slavic, and probably living in Connecticut with a sister. “When you catch him,” Brussel concluded, “he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit. And it will be buttoned.”

Postage clues eventually led investigators to a home in Waterbury, Connecticut, where a man named George Metesky lived. Just as predicted, he was fifty-four, neither fat nor thin, a son of Lithuanian immigrants, and he lived with his two sisters. The only deviation from the profile was that he was wearing pajamas. Police found handwriting samples in Metesky’s bedroom that clearly matched the bomber’s letters. They told him he was under arrest and to go change his clothes. When Metesky returned from his bedroom he was wearing a blue double-breasted suit, buttoned to the top.

Was it magic? Or did Brussel invent an ingenious crime-fighting technique that could be taught and replicated?

Profilers maintain an almost mythological status in pop culture today. But a closer look at the practice reveals a more complicated picture. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly branded criminal profiling a pseudoscience, pointing to a dearth of credible research proving its efficacy. One study found that 87 percent of detectives surveyed in London said they found criminal profiling useful, but that just 2.7 percent of their profiles had led to the identification of a perpetrator. Another experiment, from 2002, showed that a group of sophomore chemistry students produced more accurate profiles of murderers than homicide detectives did.

Profiling, it turns out, is often a quixotic, haphazard blend of science and fiction. Or, as the NYPD’s first police psychiatrist put it, “as much an art as a science.” Even Brussel turned out to have embellished his Mad Bomber predictions for his memoir. He left out many of the predictions he got wrong, including the bomber’s age, nationality, and whereabouts. In fact, it was a Con Edison office assistant named Alice Kelly who discovered the smoking gun: a threatening letter from a former employee named George Metesky. A boiler had exploded on the man and toxic fumes led him to contract tuberculosis. When the company denied his disability claim, he started making bombs in his backyard and wrote a letter to the company promising to “take justice in my own hands.” Kelly recognized the language from the letters Metesky wrote to the press. (F.P., it was revealed, stood for “fair play.”)

But does it matter if these stories are largely fictional? Society needs monsters. They remind us of who we are—and who we are not. They are terrifying because they break down the boundaries between what we consider human and inhuman, and warn us of what we could become. They change as we do, from era to era, place to place. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a blood-sucking count who moves from Romania to London, emerged amid Victorian England’s anxiety over immigrants and sexual deviance. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, women who strayed from Puritanical norms were branded witches. Monsters, free to act on their aggressive or sexual impulses, can also be seductive, opening up portals to our forbidden desires.

And as long as we need monsters, we need people to catch them. By endowing profilers with the extraordinary power to define who is—or who will become—a criminal, they simultaneously dictate whom to fear and whom to trust. Yet for all the obsessing we do over criminals we rarely consider the minds of the profilers. And they, too, have motives, often overlooked. The best profilers recognize the limits of the practice and use it as just one investigative tool among many, but it can also be manipulated by those who have something to gain by pointing the finger at others. Throughout history, crime has been exploited to demonize entire categories of people and to justify social control. Sometimes this system is unwittingly upheld by well-intentioned police officers; sometimes it’s manipulated by monsters masquerading as protectors, revealing the thin line separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.

<center>
. . .
</center>

The word “profile” comes from the Latin *profilum*, which means to bring forth a thread or outline. Profiles are used in many other fields of inquiry: Journalists choose angles through which to describe subjects of magazine profiles; in the past, physiognomists illustrated faces from the side to show how someone’s inner character could be seen in the line of the nose, brow, or jaw; in visual art, profiles were historically reserved for people of high status—or, in the case of the black silhouette, a subject of a lower profile.

“Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon,” Sherlock Holmes says to Watson in the novel that first introduced the fictional detective. Just as artists make preparatory studies before completing a picture, the “finest study” in Holmes’s opinion is “the study in scarlet.”

“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

A profile, a point of view from a single perspective, always hides as much as it reveals. In retrospect, my searching, sympathetic profile of Scott looks more like my own attempt to take control of a story that had once rendered me helpless. Women by far make up the largest audiences of true-crime media, and it’s not uncommon to hear how some fall asleep watching murder mysteries at night. Some psychologists speculate that the phenomenon has to do with the urge to experience our worst fears from a safe distance; in the mass-market formulas, the perp always gets caught and the woman is saved. But if we’re pacified with fictional feelings of control, are we distracted from more pernicious threats?

While I was focused on locating the origins of violence in Scott’s life, I couldn’t see how much it had come to define my own. With Scott, I could touch the fire without burning down the house. I didn’t have to look at my father, or at how my mother may be alive only because he was pulled over that night or because Scott decided to kill a different ex-girlfriend that day. Or what my life would look like now if we hadn’t been so lucky. Solving mysteries doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the truth; sometimes, they help us survive the stories of our lives.

*** Chapter 1: The Scarlet Thread of Murder

<strong>T</strong>hrough the window of 26 Dorset Street, Arthur Conan Doyle took note of a chair, a bed, and a fireplace. The twelve-square-foot hovel, just off Whitechapel Road, was a “dismal hole,” as a friend with him that day put it, “somber and sinister.” Doyle was examining the scene for clues to an unsolved murder that had taken place in this room seventeen years earlier.

He replayed the sequence of events: Sometime after midnight on November 9, 1888, twenty-four-year-old Mary Jane Kelly entered the narrow, gaslit courtyard on the side of the house. She had been out drinking and perhaps meeting male clients. Right on the doorstep where Doyle now stood was the last place she was seen alive, alongside a young man wearing an overcoat and a felt hat. A witness later told police that Kelly invited the man in, telling him, “Come along, you will be comfortable.”

A neighbor reported hearing a woman scream around 3:30 a.m. But she didn’t think much of it; fights were common in those parts.

The next morning, at 10:45, Kelly’s building manager knocked on her door to collect rent, which was six weeks overdue. No answer came. He went to the window, which had been previously broken during a fight between Kelly and her now-estranged husband, and pushed aside the rag covering it. There he saw a terrible scene.

A pool of blood on the floor; a smattering on the wall. Sheets of flesh piled on the table. And a body, or what was left of one, on the bed.

He ran until he found a police inspector. “Another one,” he told him. “Jack the Ripper. Awful.”

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. . .
</center>

Doyle was in his mid-forties and already the knighted author of the fanatically beloved Sherlock Holmes stories when he visited the East End that rainy spring day in 1905. He met up with his companions for the tour—an actor, a literary critic, a barrister, and a physician—at the Bishopsgate Police Hospital. They were all members of Our Society, a secretive gentlemen’s group that had recently formed to analyze the most gripping murders of the era and the criminal minds behind them. One of its members, Samuel Ingleby Oddie, had managed to secure an exclusive walking tour around each of Jack the Ripper’s five canonical murder sites, led by detectives and the police surgeon who had performed the autopsy on the fourth victim.

Oddie, who went on to become a coroner for the city, wrote in his memoir years later that of all the murders he’d seen, the one on Dorset Street was the most horrific. “I saw the police photographs of the mass of human flesh which had once been Mary Kelly, and let it suffice for me to say that in my twenty-seven years as a London Coroner I have seen many gruesome sights, but for sheer horror this surpasses anything I ever set eyes on.”

Our Society was popularly known as the Crimes Club and its members over the years included academics, the owner of the *Daily Mail*, and scores of writers, including P. G. Wodehouse and Bertram Fletcher Robinson. They gathered over dinner to discuss cases such as the serial poisoner Dr. Thomas Neill Cream; the “Brides in the Bath” killer George Joseph Smith, who drowned three of his wives; and now the infamous Jack the Ripper cold cases. They looked at crime-scene evidence, evaluated the police work, and considered whether the laws had been correctly applied. But they also took into account something the police often did not: the killer’s psychology. Fingerprints and blood tests were not yet available during Jack’s season of terror. But by the time the club formed, its members were learning about exciting developments in forensics, as well as a new field called criminology, which explored the root causes of and responses to criminal behavior.

Most members, including Doyle, had few reasons to visit the East End then. Home to around a million people, many of them Jewish and Irish immigrants, it was separated from the City of London by Whitechapel High Street. To the occasional West Londoner paying a visit, it felt almost like another country altogether, while many in the East End never went to West London at all. There were few opportunities for mixing in Victorian London. “There is no Prater, no Thiergarten, no Champs-Élysées,” a journalist wrote at the time. There was no central place “where all classes flock during the stifling heat of summer in a great city.” And one of the rare times they did meet was during the deadly 1887 class uprising in Trafalgar Square—a midpoint between the West and East Ends—where police beat working-class protesters in what became known as Bloody Sunday. So when news of the gruesome murders in the east reached residents in the west, many viewed the savagery as if it were happening in a distant land.

The Crimes Club members chose a particularly bustling day to visit the neighborhood. It was the eve of Passover and the area’s many Jewish residents had left their tenements and boarding houses to go shopping in such droves that Doyle couldn’t even free an arm to open his umbrella. The author delighted in the chaotic scene: wigged women clutching hens at the Petticoat Lane market, men herding cows through the streets and then dragging them squealing into slaughterhouses. Many of the locals worked in factories and slept in flophouses. The Shakespeare scholar on the tour, John Churton Collins, joked that even *The Tempest*’s disfigured slave Caliban “would have turned up his nose at this.”

Along the way, Doyle and his companions took note of the various escape routes at each murder site, all of them dark and private. The backyard of the lodging house on Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman died, had three possible exits through neighboring yards; there were five at Mitre Square, where forty-six-year-old Catherine Eddowes bled out in a dark corner. That was only four hundred yards away from Berner Street, where the forty-four-year-old housekeeper Elizabeth Stride was killed just hours earlier. Stride’s throat had been slashed but she was left unmutilated, seemingly because a passerby interrupted the attack. Eddowes was not so lucky.

The police surgeon, Frederick Gordon Brown, coldly recounted the details to the group. In just eleven minutes, he explained, Jack the Ripper had cut out Eddowes’s kidney and uterus, as well as part of her colon. Next to her feet he arranged a few “presents”: a thimble, a comb, an empty mustard tin, and a coin. Police had found a bloodstained scrap of apron at the scene, which the killer may have used to wipe his hands. There was also a cryptic message written in chalk on a nearby wall: “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Its author was never identified.

The double murder raised the tally to four victims in a single month and plunged Scotland Yard into a panic. Robert Anderson, its chief of investigations, decided he needed to call for outside help. He wrote to Thomas Bond, one of London’s top forensic surgeons and a regular expert witness for the Crown, who was known for his opinionated testimony and calm temperament during some of the highest-profile murder trials of the day. Anderson asked whether Bond would consider examining the Ripper files and issuing a report.

Bond spent two weeks reviewing the detectives’ notes and forensic evidence from the murders of Polly Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes. Then, in the midst of his research, a fifth woman—Mary Jane Kelly—was killed. When the police arrived at her home, they discovered a situation much like the others. Kelly, too, was a working-class woman living in Whitechapel. Her throat had also been carved open from ear to ear, and nearly all the way through. She’d been posed with her legs spread, slip pushed up to her waist, and she’d been gutted. Several organs, including her heart, were missing; her kidney and liver had been cut out and placed on the bed next to her.

But Kelly’s murder was even more gruesome than the previous four. She was the only victim Jack killed indoors, which gave him more time and privacy to do his butchery. Kelly’s face had been hacked so violently that her nose, ears, and eyebrows were missing entirely; so were her breasts. Her legs and forehead were skinned.

Bond performed the autopsy himself. Comparing the cases, he noticed that, in each, the first cut was to the throat, from left to right. The purpose of course was to kill, and possibly to prevent screaming, but the murderer’s true motivation was the mutilation that followed, leading Bond to conclude that all the women were killed by the same person. He probably used a large butcher or surgeon’s knife, at least six inches long.

The police surgeon who originally examined the body of the second victim, Annie Chapman, determined that “obviously the work was that of an expert—or one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.” But with Kelly, the gashes to the face and body were crude and violent, nothing that suggested to Bond a skilled surgical hand. In fact, the stab wounds indicated that the killer had no understanding of anatomy whatsoever, not “even the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer.”

Given that there were no indications of an accomplice, Bond predicted that the killer was physically strong and middle-aged. He likely had a “quiet, inoffensive” appearance, unlike the ghoulish caricatures printed in newspapers at the time, which would have made more memorable impressions on witnesses. Up to that point, Bond’s assessment was typical for medical examiners at the time. But he understood that Jack the Ripper wasn’t an ordinary killer. There was no discernible motive for the killings, which usually helped lead police to a suspect. So Bond did something different. He began to think beyond how the perpetrator killed his victims, to wonder why he killed them like *this*. What kind of a person would go to such extreme lengths to inflict bodily harm for no reason?

In what is now commonly considered the first known criminal profile, Bond put himself in Jack’s shoes to write his report. Jack would want to blend in, Bond reasoned, so he probably dressed respectably. A cloak or overcoat seemed a plausible choice for the nights of the murders, which would have the added benefit of hiding bloodstains on his clothes. As for Jack’s personality, Bond imagined it would take a man of “great coolness and daring” to grab a woman off the street, kill her before she could make a sound, and then excise her organs one by one, all out in the open for anyone to see. Clearly the killer had a methodical temperament, but he was undeniably also mad, and it was unlikely he would have been able to suppress that side of himself entirely. Therefore, he probably tried to avoid notice by remaining a “man of solitary habits,” Bond wrote, and earned a living through odd jobs rather than a steady occupation, for which he’d have to sustain relationships with other people.

Then there was the matter of motive. Bond considered the possibility that the killer was acting in the throes of religious fervor, or perhaps engaging in a revenge fantasy. But given the sexualized nature of the mutilations, it seemed most likely that Jack was afflicted with a case of “satyriasis,” a condition marked by uncontrollable sexual urges that, here, had manifested in periodic bouts of “homicidal and erotic mania,” Bond wrote.

Bond’s detailed predictions conflicted with those of other experts on the case. Other considerations included a doctor whose body was found in the Thames seven weeks after Kelly’s murder; a local Jewish barber who was known to hate women; a father who sought revenge against Kelly for supposedly giving his son syphilis; an unidentified midwife dubbed “Jill the Ripper”; and a thief who targeted prostitutes at knifepoint, known among locals as “Leather Apron.”

One Crimes Club member, Arthur Diósy, an expert in Japanese culture, suggested police look for a practitioner of black magic who killed women to source ingredients for an elixir of immortality. Another member, Oddie, believed the killer was probably an “insane medical man,” whose mania “culminated in the wild orgy of Dorset Street and was followed by his own suicide.”

The problem with all of these theories was that there was no evidence to support them. Britain’s police force was still relatively young and relied almost entirely on eyewitnesses, all of whose accounts, so far, had been uselessly vague. The frenzied press coverage of the murders further buried police in a flood of false tips. “The difficulty of our work,” one detective told a reporter at the time, “is much greater than the general public are aware of.”

Some officials blamed the community for *its* failure to catch the perpetrator. A few witnesses reported that Jack the Ripper had black hair and “foreign” features, reinforcing a popular belief in Scotland Yard that he was Jewish. But even though the police had knocked on every door in Whitechapel, none of its residents offered up a single suspect. It seemed impossible to Robert Anderson, Scotland Yard’s head of criminal investigations, that not one person living in the communal tenements had ever spotted a man acting erratically, or with bloodstains on his clothes. “It is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice,” he wrote in his memoir.

“One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac” and “that he and his people were low-class Jews.”

Anderson felt that Doyle and the Crimes Club criticized the police too much. He appreciated the underlying message in Doyle’s stories: “to think analytically … to think backward.” But it was not a lesson for police officers. “By none is it more needed than by those who fancy they need it least, our scientific experts and teachers of science,” Anderson wrote.

But as the unsolved case languished year after year, it started to seem as though the police might need Sherlock Holmes after all. By the time Doyle and his club took their tour, some detectives hoped it might lead to a much-needed break in the case.

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. . .
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Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper were in many ways perfect narrative foils: two murder-obsessed outsiders—one good, one evil—prowling the fringes of society. Illustrators even tended to portray them in a similar fashion: from the side, collars up, lurking in the shadows. Jack was identifiable by his signature top hat and knife; Holmes by his deerstalker cap and pipe.

The line between fiction and reality blurred when it came to Doyle, too, who had become synonymous with Holmes in the public imagination. Fans mailed letters to Holmes’s fictional address, 221B Baker Street, asking for help with various conundrums. And, to some extent, the figures merged in Doyle’s own mind: “A man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he has some possibilities of that character within him.” As an ophthalmologist by training, Doyle shared with his amateur detective an exceptional sense of perception. And there were other parallels between the professions. Both detectives and doctors solve mysteries, starting with physical clues—forensic evidence or a patient’s symptoms—and then work backward to identify the cause. They tend to be calm under pressure, are trained in testing hypotheses, and are unfazed by blood and viscera.

The inspiration for Holmes came from both Edgar Allan Poe’s murder investigator Auguste Dupin and Doyle’s former medical professor at Edinburgh University, the renowned surgeon Joseph Bell. Bell served as Queen Victoria’s personal physician whenever she was in Scotland, but what impressed his students most was his uncanny knack for diagnosing patients at first sight. He could even predict their jobs, national origins, and vices with merely a glance. One could often learn more, Bell told students, by seeing than by speaking.

Once, Doyle watched as an unknown visitor stood before Bell in the lecture hall. The professor leaned back in his chair and looked the man over. Then he said: “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”

“Aye, sir,” the man replied.

“Not long discharged?”

“No, sir.”

“A Highland regiment?”

“Aye, sir.”

“A non-com. Officer?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stationed at Barbados?”

“Aye, sir.”

Doyle later wrote about the encounter: “To his audience of Watsons it all seemed miraculous enough until it was explained, and then it became simple enough.”

“You see, gentlemen,” Bell told his students, “the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

Doyle “used and amplified” Bell’s methods to invent Holmes’s famous science of deduction, which allowed the detective to draw conclusions about a person “by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities on his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.”

As Doyle began to draft his new character, he kept in mind Bell’s maxim to uphold “the vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of trifles.” These were the raw materials that would later lead Holmes to cry out, in one story, “Data! Data! Data! … I can’t make bricks without clay.”

In the book that introduced Sherlock Holmes, *A Study in Scarlet*, Doyle wrote that “all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study.”

Bell himself recognized the value of his method for criminal investigations. “It would be a great thing if the police generally could be trained to observe more closely,” he once said. “The fatal mistake which the ordinary policeman makes is this, that he gets his theory first, and then makes the facts fit it. Instead of getting his facts first of all and making all his little observations and deductions until he is driven irresistibly by them into an elucidation in a direction he may never have originally contemplated.”

Sherlock Holmes’s embrace of this philosophy distinguished him as a brilliant detective; it also reflects the shrewdness of his author. “The mere suspicion of scientific thought,” Doyle once wrote, “has a great charm in any branch of literature, however far it may be removed from actual research.”

But near the turn of the century, Doyle was overwhelmed by his creation. “I felt that it was irksome, this searching for plots—and if it must be getting irksome for me, most certainly, I argued, it must be losing its freshness for others.”

In 1893, he decided to kill Holmes off in “The Final Problem,” a short story that sent the detective tumbling off a Swiss cliff during a struggle with his archenemy, Professor Moriarty. Although the popularity of the serialized stories earned their author a fortune, Doyle considered them a lesser intellectual achievement to his deeply researched historical novels. Plus, his interest in true crimes was beginning to supersede that of fiction.

“I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defense, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me,” Doyle wrote of his character’s demise.

Doyle’s fans were furious at the ending. Readers flooded the magazine that published the story with twenty thousand subscription cancellations and sent the author hate mail. “I do not think that I ever realized what a living actual personality Holmes had become,” Doyle later wrote in his memoir. Finally, bowing to public pressure, he brought Holmes back to life in 1903, in a series of stories in which the detective confesses that he had merely faked his death.

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The Jack the Ripper case was one of Doyle’s earliest attempts to apply his detective’s methods to life. Like much of the public, he felt the police had botched the investigation. For one thing, they’d failed to follow a crucial lead: a letter that the killer, or someone pretending to be him, sent to a London news agency on September 25, 1888, just five days before the double murder of Stride and Eddowes. It was signed by “Jack the Ripper”—the first time the alias appeared—and written in red ink. Doyle went to the Scotland Yard museum to examine the document.

<quote>
*Dear Boss,*

*I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal.*

*How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight.*

*My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.*

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*Yours truly, Jack the Ripper*
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*Dont mind me giving the trade name.*

*PS Wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha*
</quote>

Police were skeptical of the letter’s authenticity; they’d already received dozens of hoaxes. But then the “double event,” as the murder of Stride and Eddowes became known, took place and an earlobe missing from Eddowes’s body led police to wonder if it was the Ripper making good on his promise.

To evaluate the letter for himself, Doyle got into character. He explained the process in an 1894 interview: “I am not in the least degree either sharp or an observant man myself. I try to get inside the skin of a sharp man and see how things would strike him,” he said. “I tried to think how Holmes might have deduced the writer of that letter.”

Upon examination, Doyle decided it was authentic. He also identified in it what he believed were several key clues to the killer’s identity. “The most obvious point was that the letter was written by someone who had been in America. It began ‘Dear Boss,’ and contained the phrase, ‘fix it up,’ and several others which are not usual with the Britishers,” he wrote. “Then we have the quality of the paper and the handwriting, which indicate that the letters were not written by a toiler. It was good paper, and a round, easy, clerkly hand. He was, therefore, a man accustomed to the use of a pen.”

Given Jack’s advanced literacy, Doyle assumed that he must have written other letters that could be tracked down. “Oddly enough, the police did not, as far as I know, think of that, and so they failed to accomplish anything,” he wrote. “Holmes’s plan would have been to reproduce the letters facsimile and on each plate indicate briefly the peculiarities of the handwriting. Then publish these facsimiles in the leading newspapers of Great Britain and America, and in connection with them offer a reward to anyone who could show a letter or any specimen of the same handwriting. Such a course would have enlisted millions of people as detectives in the case.”

Perhaps Scotland Yard’s assumptions about the killer’s class had led police astray. Doyle believed the suspect was not only literate but probably lived “somewhere in the upper stratum” of society. And he was among those who believed Jack had a substantial knowledge of surgery; perhaps he was even a doctor. Doyle inferred the killer dressed like a local, or even a woman, to disguise his identity and appear less threatening to his victims, which was all the more evidence that this was an unusually sophisticated criminal.

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The Industrial Revolution had spurred a mass migration of workers to London in the early decades of the nineteenth century. These laborers powered the industries that enriched British factory owners and railway entrepreneurs. But they also populated an impoverished “inner city” in the East End that native Londoners sought to contain from encroaching on “their” territory. These new faces—from China, Italy, Eastern Europe, and rural Britain—ignited fears of a reverse colonization, and confused the old markers of social order that Victorians relied on. Whereas once a Cockney accent was enough to situate a stranger’s caste, now there was a cacophony of unplaceable languages and dialects. Who among these outsiders could be trusted and who was a criminal?

The desire to reinstate a sense of order during this era of rapid social change came amid a revolutionary movement in medicine that had begun viewing criminality as a biological concept. Influential physicians like Franz Joseph Gall, working in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century, and later Cesare Lombroso in Italy, studied the bodies of prisoners to identify physical attributes they shared in common. They argued that these markers could then be used to identify criminals even before they committed a crime.

Gall, who accumulated a vast collection of animal skulls, had his epiphany after noticing that the craniums were always the same shape as the brains. A snake’s flat skull, for example, contained a flat brain. Therefore, one should be able to gain insight into the brain’s anatomy simply by looking at how the skull formed around it. He tried to recall any patterns among the physical traits and personalities of people he’d encountered throughout his life, like how those with the sharpest memories also seemed to have bulging eyes. He extended that logic to surmise, “If the memory betrays itself through an external trait, should not other mental qualities be externally identifiable?”

To conduct his new science of “cranioscopy”—or phrenology, as it later became known—Gall rubbed the bumps and notches of the skulls in his collection until he located two dozen brain “organs” that he believed housed traits such as self-esteem, musical talent, and courage. Mental illnesses could be identified by elevations or depressions in the organs, while criminality might be predicted by the prominence of, say, the thievery region. There was even an organ for murder, a revelation that came to Gall while examining the skulls of carnivorous animals and finding that they all had a large, round protrusion near the ear. He went on to examine the heads of inmates at prisons and asylums to conclude that murderous humans had a convexity in the temporal and inferior parietal region above the ears. The prominence was so distinctive that once, when Gall opened a box of skulls sent to him by a prison physician, he took hold of one and instantly proclaimed, “My god, here is the skull of a murderer!”

Gall went on the road with his skulls to present theatrical for-profit lectures. Phrenology appealed in part because it upheld the traditional social order. Gall’s findings confirmed preexisting beliefs about the innate superiority of society’s most elite members. They had more highly developed craniums and therefore deserved their place at the top, while the lumpy heads of paupers and lunatics reinforced their status at the bottom. To some, it also justified racist beliefs in the biological superiority of certain groups over others, and added fuel to the eugenics movement.

Many modern scientists initially took Gall seriously because he was a supporter of empiricism, the belief that theories should be proved through experimentation and observation. It had given scientists a way to understand behavior as a function of the brain, rather than of the soul, as earlier religious explanations had it. And it challenged the theory, posed by Descartes, of a mind-body duality, arguing that the mind was instead part of the biological matter of the body, while thoughts were the results of neurological signals in the brain. Gall also fit in with a growing trend toward explaining internal processes through external markers, as was occurring in the nascent field of psychology.

But some began to notice that Gall’s methods weren’t all that scientific in practice. He often failed to reveal his sample sizes, and his “objective” results relied on subjective observations. In his speeches he would tell audiences that “it would be easy to add a hundred other cases, besides those I have related.” But since he never published the data, they’d have to take his word for it.

Gall’s sensational pseudoscience went on to inspire the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, who is known today as the “godfather of criminology.” While working as a young army doctor in the 1860s, he had compared the physical attributes of obedient, “good” soldiers with their misbehaved peers and found that the latter could be distinguished by the number and “indecency” of their tattoos. But he believed that such traits could also be found in people’s physical features, if only a trained eye could learn to identify them. He found his proof while conducting a postmortem on a notorious thief who’d died in prison. There was a depression in the skull where there should have been a protrusion, and the man’s cerebellum reminded him of those of lemurs and certain rodents. This led to an entirely new discovery. “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden,” Lombroso wrote in his 1876 book, *Criminal Man*, “the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”

Lombroso, a follower of Darwin, believed that if humans could evolve, they could also regress. Because he thought criminal craniums were more closely related to those of animals than to man’s, he called these human brutes “degenerates.” He continued to identify telltale biological markers that signified the degree to which a person had evolved—or not—from their primate ancestors. “Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheekbones,” and other features “found in criminals, savages and apes,” he wrote. And if animals were violent by nature, perhaps so were these animalistic humans.

Lombroso studied the faces of “primitive” subjects in Asia and Africa and noted a few characteristics that signaled this atavistic type, including hooked noses (like a bird of prey, he said), sloped foreheads, oblique eyes, and dark hair. These features corresponded, he wrote, with a “love of orgies and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.” They also happened to match many of the men in the prisons Lombroso visited, which at the time were disproportionately populated by dark, tattooed southern Italians, whom many northerners already saw as biologically inferior. (Those who were unlikely to be criminals, according to Lombroso, were those who were like him: northern Italian and Jewish.)

The influence of Lombroso’s criminology satisfied a fearful public’s desire to pin faces on crimes and empower everyday people to “diagnose” would-be perpetrators from afar. Even Doyle was influenced by Lombroso’s physiognomy, once describing the evil Professor Moriarty’s appearance in criminological terms: “His forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head.… His face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.”

Lombroso illustrated *Criminal Man* with hundreds of photos and drawings of the faces and bodies of what he called “born criminals”—those whose inherited condition could not be treated or prevented. Lombroso decided “how necessary it was, in studying the insane, to make the patient, not the disease, the object of attention.” By focusing on specific individuals, Lombroso fixed identity squarely at the center of criminality.

Lombroso’s disciple Max Nordau went on to add a category of higher-brow degenerates to the theory. “Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists,” even geniuses, Nordau wrote in his 1892 book, *Degeneration*, which he dedicated to Lombroso. “As regards their intellect, they can attain to a high degree of development, but from a moral point of view their existence is completely deranged,” Nordau wrote. The wavy lines of the Impressionists evidenced a trembling of the eyeball associated with hysteria, while the “false” coloring of Manet’s paintings indicated his “nervous debility.” (Eventually the Nazi Party adopted Nordau’s ideas to justify its confiscation of “degenerate” art from Europe’s galleries.)

If examined by a trained phrenologist, these “higher degenerates” would exhibit the same telltale features as criminals, such as a “gigantic bodily stature” or the “disproportionate growth of particular parts.” The only difference between the two classes was that the criminals needed to “satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil.”

In some ways these high degenerates were even more dangerous than their low counterparts because they wielded influence in society and passed for upstanding citizens. The concept infiltrated the cultural imagination with the release of *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*, the extraordinarily popular book and theater production. Audiences could see the degeneration before their eyes as the respectable doctor unleashed his “ape-like” fury to become the monster Hyde. (Perhaps Doyle had this narrative in mind when he upgraded Jack’s profession from a Jewish butcher to a depraved doctor.)

In the 1880s, a fascination with dualism had taken hold in Europe, and nothing became quite as terrifying as the “split” personality, or a normal person with a face of evil no one could perceive. One of the eeriest qualities of Mr. Hyde was not simply that he was a monster but that no one could fully see him, even in his presence: “He is not easy to describe,” says a man who witnessed Hyde trample a young girl. “There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point.”

Rumors even began to swirl that perhaps Jack the Ripper had paid a visit to the West End to see the show, and that his “diseased brain [had] been inflamed” by watching its lead actor, Richard Mansfield. Then there were others who found Mansfield’s ability to contort himself from the gentleman doctor into his diabolical double so convincing that they accused him of committing the crimes.

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In the more than 130 years since Jack’s murders took place they have been revisited by scores of armchair “Ripperologists,” who’ve offered up dozens of possible suspects. Among them are the artist Walter Sickert, who painted disturbingly accurate depictions of the crime scenes; author Lewis Carroll, who supposedly planted anagram confessions to the murders throughout his writings; Algernon Charles Swinburne, a poet of sadomasochistic motifs; and even Doyle himself—because who else could have invented such a thrilling, episodic murder mystery?

Scotland Yard commissioner Robert Anderson wrote in his memoir decades after the investigation that police had actually identified the culprit shortly after the murders took place, even before Doyle took his walking tour around Whitechapel. He explained that officers had sent an eyewitness—“the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer”—to visit the suspect, during which he was “unhesitantly” identified. “With his hands tied behind his back,” the man was later sent to a workhouse and then committed to an asylum.

Anderson gave only a vague explanation for why police never revealed the killer’s name: “No public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer.” We may never know what those “traditions” were, or why they took precedence over the truth.

But in a roundabout way decades later, Anderson’s book did end up naming the likely suspect. The grandson of chief inspector Donald Swanson, a former colleague of Anderson’s, found an old copy of the book in the 1980s. In the margins, Swanson had written: “Kosminski was the suspect.”

Today, many analysts agree that the killer likely was Aaron Kosminski, then a twenty-three-year-old Jewish barber from Poland who moved to Whitechapel in the early 1880s. Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner, Melville Macnaghten, wrote in an internal memo that Kosminski, who was on the official list of suspects, “became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices,” which apparently meant masturbation. “He had a great hatred of women, especially of the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies.” He also reportedly heard voices and once threatened his sister with a knife. He died in an asylum in 1919, at the age of fifty-three.

In recent years, biochemists examined a silk shawl that was said to have been found next to Eddowes’s body, and which a Ripperologist bought at auction in 2007. They found fragments of DNA on it that matched descendants of both Eddowes and Kosminski. Still, many experts believe that mitochondrial DNA matches are insufficient to prove a suspect’s guilt, and that not enough of the sequences were published to enable a judgment.

In the end it turned out that Doyle’s detective work, like much of Lombroso’s criminology, was better suited for fiction. The killer apparently wasn’t a medical expert, and the “Dear Boss” letter that Doyle had examined turned out to be a hoax, written by a young Canadian woman living in England. She was convicted after investigators discovered copies of the letter in her home.

But perhaps a convincing narrative is what the public needed the most then. The flourishing penny press that had made Jack the Ripper a celebrity ran relentless reminders of the murders. Papers speculated endlessly about his identity, even when there was no new information to report. Perhaps Doyle’s calm, rational detective, who always prevailed in the face of madness, was a solace for the times. But it’s worth remembering that it was the fiction writer Doyle—not Holmes—who tried to name the killer, and the real-life detective who covered it up.

*** Chapter 2: It Must Do Violence

<strong>G</strong>ermany was not a popular holiday destination for most Americans in 1937. The Nazis were in the midst of clearing the forest near Weimar to open the vast Buchenwald concentration camps. Hitler, meanwhile, was plotting his eastward expansion, which, in two years, would trigger the Second World War.

Nonetheless, to the heart of Nazi Germany is where Henry Murray, a prominent Harvard psychologist, decided to take his family on vacation that summer. He went in part to attend the annual festival dedicated to Richard Wagner, whose operas he’d admired for years. He may have also been drawn to the fact that it was held in Bayreuth, the Bavarian town where the composer spent his final years and that was now a summer destination for Nazi Party elites. Murray was fascinated by Hitler’s rise to power, and the festival gave him his first glimpse of the führer in the flesh.

He was surprised to find that Hitler looked “frenzied” and “unimpressive.” He had wide hips, a narrow chest, and thin legs hidden under bulky trousers and boots. His famous eyes, supposedly so spellbinding, were a lifeless gray. “The most significant thing about Hitler’s appearance is his utter insignificance,” Murray later wrote. Here was someone you’d never look at twice, and yet all of Germany was transfixed by him. “How was it possible for such a man to succeed where the mightiest Germans of the past had failed?”

There were rumors that Hitler was under intensive care for depression, insomnia, and nightmares—“probably of persecution,” Murray thought. “To think that the peace of Europe hangs on the electro-chemical system in that cranium!” It occurred to Murray that the German people must also suffer from delusions to worship such a mediocre tyrant. That possibility made the fact of Hitler all the more grave: If such a feeble, charmless man could manipulate millions of Germans into submitting to his will—even to kill—then the West had severely underestimated his threat to the global order.

Murray went home sensing “with horrible forebodings the unmistakable premonitory signs of a collective Faustian explosion.” But he also felt a new sense of purpose and patriotism. “I am not satisfied with psychology now,” he said, deciding that his work had until then existed in a “social vacuum.” From then on, he wouldn’t stop until he unraveled the mysteries of Hitler’s mind, and determined how the US could stop him (and any other fascist leaders who might emerge in the future). Nazism, Murray wrote, must be “attacked until it is abandoned or wiped out.”

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The name Henry Murray isn’t widely known today. But in his time he was among the most influential figures in American psychology. A Jungian acolyte, he introduced psychoanalysis to Harvard and helped found its first psychological clinic, which he would eventually turn into a major research center for secret US intelligence operations.

He was a gentleman scholar with MD, PhD, MA, and BA degrees—all from Columbia, Harvard, or Cambridge—but in fact had no training in psychology whatsoever when he joined the clinic. A colleague once described Murray as “an athlete, an undergraduate student of history, a playboy, a physician, a surgeon, an embryologist, an anatomist, an orthodox psychoanalyst, an unorthodox psychoanalyst, the co-inventor of the Thematic Apperception Test, the director of Harvard’s Psychological Clinic, one of the fathers of the experimental study of personality, our Government’s chief selector of undercover agents during World War II, the prime developer of complex assessment methods in the study of personality, an adoring student and scholar of the life and works of Herman Melville.”

This made him a polarizing figure at Harvard: Some colleagues admired his eclectic intellectual pursuits, while others saw his lack of expertise as quackery. But Murray attracted students like a guru. He lectured in propulsive trains of thought intended to “tickle the senses, and the emotions even more,” he once wrote. He had an “almost shattering vitality,” one student said. “When he enters a room, electrons crackle.” When his classes reached capacity, it wasn’t uncommon for students to spend the term sitting on the floor or standing in aisles. His graduate-student collaborators felt like “bold explorers” working with him, one wrote.

Attraction was an art Murray actively cultivated. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and aristocratically handsome, with a high forehead and long nose. When he met someone new, he greeted them with a firm handshake and asked sincere, probing questions, his warm eyes encouraging them from above his half-frame glasses. People spoke of how he often made them feel like the most interesting person in the room. When he lost interest, on the other hand, his face turned to “granite.”

He could also be cruel, petty, and fragile. One of his former students, the psychologist David McClelland, said Murray was “so super-sensitive” that if he detected even a hint of criticism from someone, it could destroy their relationship. He “hurt people by his constant paranoia, that people didn’t love him enough,” McClelland said, and he liked to play games that “always end up with all the people his own age very irritated.… With younger people it can be extremely damaging.”

Soon after he returned home from Germany, Murray published his magnum opus, the eight-hundred-page *Explorations in Personality*, which solidified the influential new field of study he dubbed “personology.” The book set out to identify each of the many components that constitute an individual’s “total personality.” He broke it down into discrete parts—such as needs, inhibitions, cognitive habits—and through this lens rendered a portrait of the person. The practice, which was inherently impressionistic and unverifiable, operated “somewhere on the continuum between biology (science) and literature (art),” he wrote. The task of analyzing every part of a personality turned out to be so formidable, however, that Murray ultimately managed to present only a single case study in the book—albeit an extremely detailed one—of a twenty-four-year-old engineering student named Earnst.

But this was enough to inspire an even more grandiose ambition: If he could isolate the components that made a person Earnst, why couldn’t he rearrange them into a morally improved version of him? “By what means,” Murray wrote, can a person “be intentionally transformed?”

“Man is today’s great problem,” *Explorations in Personality* begins<em>.</em> He is locked in a battle against his own nature and it has left him “confused, dissatisfied, despairing and ready to regress,” Murray wrote. Hitler was an example of what can happen when man’s worst instincts prevail. But what if man could be “changed—regenerated or developed differently from birth?” Murray wondered.

He was reminded of “the question that bothered Melville: what is a man of good-will … to do with his endowment of aggressive instinct?” Could a man have the same instinctual drives as Hitler, but use them for good?

Even when his ideas were inexplicable, many readers considered them profound. One critic called the *Explorations* “illuminating and baffling”; another found it “striking and bewildering.” Opinions in the twenty-first century remain largely unchanged, with one critic writing in 2008 that the book “offers no systematic theory, no central findings, and no completed project,” and yet is “one of the greatest books ever written on the psychology of personality.” The *Explorations* ultimately cemented Murray’s status as one of psychology’s most original thinkers, and secured his job at Harvard for another ten years.

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To address the problem of Hitler, Murray felt that he needed to understand two things. First was the nature of the nationalist personality that had taken hold in Germany, and second, the cause of the apathetic attitudes in the US toward the threat from Germany. Many Americans were still only vaguely aware of the worsening crisis abroad. The country remained preoccupied with the Great Depression, and it had just passed isolationist Neutrality Acts to prevent the military from intervening in yet another conflict overseas. Very few Americans supported going to war in Europe, and military enlistments plummeted.

“Can this selfish country be aroused?” Murray wondered. He noticed with disgust how many of his Harvard colleagues adopted apolitical or pacifist positions. His students, meanwhile, seemed to live in total “disregard of the existence of evil.” He was not alone in his concern. Murray joined a group of prominent social scientists, including anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who believed in the idea of a “national character,” and they believed that it could be changed. They were members of the new Committee for National Morale in New York, which believed that Nazism was proof of humanity’s innate dark side. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which later became the CIA, commissioned the committee to conduct studies on propaganda. The agency had observed how Joseph Goebbels, as head of Germany’s Propaganda Ministry, oversaw the powerful messaging that had elevated Hitler, defined the nation’s enemies, and rallied the public to his cause. The fact that propaganda, coupled with the suppression of journalism, could manipulate Germans into following Hitler into a genocide revealed the extraordinary degree to which a population’s vulnerabilities could be exploited—and how far behind the US lagged in harnessing these techniques for its own purposes.

One consideration was to form a domestic propaganda agency modeled after Goebbels’s, but with anti-fascist intentions. By emulating Russian- and German-style propaganda, the US could promote its own morals and democratic values. “We must see this war as a prelude to a greater job—the restructuring of the culture of the world,” wrote Mead, who proposed covertly reeducating schoolchildren through radio and film curricula chosen by an intellectual elite. The teachers, meanwhile, would merely take attendance and enforce discipline. The committee was not, apparently, worried about the fact that they, too, were humans possessing the same aggressive instincts they sought to control in others.

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Murray grew up in a wealthy Manhattan society family that sent him to Groton prep, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and Cambridge. His privileged upbringing kept him on a conventional path for longer than he otherwise might have chosen. He attended medical school and completed a prestigious internship in surgery (a field he called “emergency carpentry”), followed by a PhD in biochemistry. In 1916, he married Boston railroad heiress and onetime Debutante of the Year Josephine Rantoul. She was a sensible choice, but she couldn’t sustain Murray’s interest for long. His attraction to her began to wane early in their marriage, as did his passion for his nascent medical career. Instead, he realized that he was more interested in his patients’ emotional suffering than in their physical pains.

He claimed he was exceptionally sensitive “to the sufferings of other people” because he’d grown up with a mother and sister who were neurotic and controlling. But while high society had taught families like theirs to suppress, or at least disguise, their feelings, Murray was amazed to see how his patients put their despair on raw display. This was especially true, he thought, among those who were most alienated from the society milieu that he knew—“the dope fiend, the sword-swallower, the prostitute, the gangster,” he wrote. Through these outcasts, Murray developed an “affinity for the darker, blinder strata of feeling.”

He began spending his days off visiting the immigrant hospital at Ellis Island or the Manhattan detention complex known as the Tombs. He started up a correspondence with a sex offender that ended up lasting for decades. He was also drawn to a beautiful young prostitute at the hospital and paid her funeral costs after she died of syphilis. In exchange for his medical care, some of his patients invited him into their “haunts in the underworld,” as Murray put it. “This was psychology in the rough, but at least it prepared me to recognize the similarity between downtown doings and uptown dreams.”

Murray’s meandering psychological interests eventually found a direction when he met the artist and writer Christiana Morgan, during an intermission of a Wagner opera at the Met in 1923. She was thin, with dark, distant eyes and a sickly pallor that reminded him of the late prostitute. He was attracted to melancholic women, and noted in his journal later that she seemed “profoundly depressed.” She was there with her husband, William Morgan, an old classmate of Murray’s at Harvard.

After their chance meeting, the Morgans invited Murray and his wife over for a dinner party the following month. Murray noticed that Christiana drank and smoked heavily. She wore large jewelry from India and exuded a Waspish confidence that he could see masked insecurities, probably over her unfulfilled professional ambitions. Seated next to Murray, she leaned over and asked him during the dinner whom he preferred, Freud or Jung.

Murray, then still a biochemist studying chemical changes in incubating chicken embryos, confessed he didn’t have an opinion on either. Morgan instructed him to immediately read the writings of Carl Jung; the Swiss psychoanalyst had changed her life.

Shortly thereafter, Murray bought Jung’s book about the functions of consciousness, *Psychological Types*, and it spoke to him, he later wrote, “as a gratuitous answer to an unspoken prayer.” He shared his impressions of the book with Morgan and soon they found in their mutual fascination with the psychoanalyst an excuse to see each other. They enrolled in a philosophy and literature course at the New School, dubbing themselves, along with a few other friends, the “Extravert-Introvert Club” after two of Jung’s categories. Murray vowed to abandon the chickens for good—“lovely as they were, the opportunities for empathy were critically curtailed”—and embark on a new career in psychology as soon as possible.

The intoxication of Murray’s new romantic and intellectual yearnings was tempered by fears over what an affair might do to his family. He still planned to finish his PhD at Cambridge, and his wife and daughter would be joining him in England. Morgan, too, was torn. Though she had admitted to herself that she had fallen in love with Murray, she also sensed her husband’s anguish at their growing relationship, and she had sympathy for Murray’s wife Jo, too, who had by now become a close friend.

Amid his torment, Murray wrote Jung a letter asking if he could meet with him in Switzerland. To his surprise, Jung agreed. So once Murray arrived in Europe to complete his degree, he traveled to the suburbs of Zurich, where the psychoanalyst had built a stone house on the lake.

When they met, Murray tried to start the conversation by praising Jung’s *Psychological Types*, but this seemed to bore the psychoanalyst. So he changed the subject to tell Jung about a beautiful woman he’d seen on his journey, and how familiar she’d looked to him. This piqued the analyst’s interest and soon Murray found himself confessing his desires for women who were not his wife. He talked especially about Morgan.

Jung recounted a similar dilemma he’d experienced ten years earlier, when a twenty-three-year-old patient named Antonia Wolff arrived on his couch. As in Murray’s description of Morgan, Wolff, too, was mournful and brilliant, and Jung soon made her his assistant. Wolff represented for Jung an archetype he called the “anima,” an unconscious feminine image shaped by all of a man’s experiences of the women in his life, which he then projects onto future lovers. Women do the same thing with an inner man called their “animus.”

Jung shared how he resolved his attraction to Wolff in a way that worked out well, at least for him. Not only did he and Wolff become lovers and collaborators, they even convinced Jung’s wife to accept their relationship and now the three lived in an open triad.

Murray seized upon Jung’s example as the justification he needed to surrender to his desires for Morgan. If one’s truest self exists in one’s fantasies, as Jung argued, then exploring them was the only way to discover who he really was. It gave Murray the decisive push to pursue a new path guided by pleasure and impulse. He was prepared to throw away everything he’d known, trading the prestige of medicine for the “sub-science” of psychology, the social register for the mental patients, his marriage with Josephine for a psychosexual drama with Morgan, and even the ethics of science for a career devoted to cruelty.

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In 1926, the Harvard neurologist Morton Prince, a specialist in hypnosis and abnormal psychology, announced plans to open a psychological clinic. The move would make Harvard “the first university in the world to make any such effort toward teaching the vital or dynamic side of psychology,” Prince said. It was a bold step for the university, but Prince, by then in his seventies, had become a trusted member of the faculty. He was old friends with its president, Lawrence Lowell, and they shared similar academic worldviews as well as a love of sports. (Prince also helped found the Harvard football team.) Born into a wealthy Boston family, Prince personally raised much of the money to fund the clinic, which would focus on “the motivating forces within the personality and the reasons for mental reactions.” Its mission would be to seek answers to “the question, why? Whereas the present academic psychology deals only with the question, what?”

The news came as a surprise to Harvard’s joint philosophy and psychology department, which was staffed predominantly by research scientists who balked at theories of infant sexuality and Oedipal complexes, considering psychoanalysis about as scientific as voodoo. They also did not find Murray a suitable fit for the research fellowship that opened up under Prince. He openly ridiculed the approach of American psychologists, who he thought weren’t particularly interested in the human experience at all. They acted more like physicians, letting themselves be “nailed down to some piece of apparatus, measuring a small segment of the nervous system as if it were isolated from the entrails.”

Plus, he had still never taken a single course in psychiatry or psychology, and had only recently decided to enter the field as a result of his three-week analysis with Jung. Even he admitted that he “was clearly an extremely reckless applicant” for the role. But Murray saw the clinic as his chance to enact the intellectual “rebirth” he’d begun with Jung. He started tracking down anyone he could think of who might have some influence in hiring at the clinic. He worked his connections and even noted on his CV that the 4th Earl of Dunmore was a relative. Perhaps most importantly, he offered to work for free. In the end, good words were put in and, “at the late age of 33, [Murray] was squeezed into the Harvard faculty by some sort of high-hushed finaglings,” as he put it.

It was only after he was hired that most of his new colleagues learned that his PhD was actually in biochemistry—not psychology. They then hoped that at least his research background would make him more scientifically minded than Prince was, but it soon became clear that he was probably even more hostile toward the “exact sciences.” So when Prince announced his retirement in 1928 due to failing health, a panic set in that Murray could be named his successor. Arguing passionately against this possibility was E. G. Boring, an expert in visual perception who had long been locked in a losing battle to wrest the study of human behavior from philosophers and put it back into the laboratory, and Karl Lashley, who specialized in the processing of the cerebral cortex and was equally committed to protecting psychology from the growing threat of psychoanalysis and other unquantifiable theories.

Murray himself admitted that “I was a very obnoxious person” at Harvard, “because I didn’t have any respect for the psychology that was taught and for the people who taught it.” In fact, the only US psychologist he said he admired was actually a novelist: Herman Melville, whom Murray called the “greatest depth psychologist America ever produced.” Once again, he admitted that he was “an extremely risky choice for a lifelong job as a lecturer in this complex domain of knowledge.”

Prince hadn’t been particularly well-liked either. Many of the staff members believed he had bought his professorship, and that he and Murray flaunted their status. They wore their white jackets in the department for no reason other than to remind people, it seemed, that they had MDs. They didn’t show up to the clinic with much regularity and Prince had a habit of bypassing departmental procedures and going directly to President Lowell whenever he wanted something for the clinic.

But despite their best efforts, the rest of the faculty couldn’t argue with one fact: The clinic was nearly broke. Prince had contributed his own salary to keep it going, and Murray had the means to do the same. Ultimately, the decision was up to Lowell, and in 1928, Murray was named director of the clinic.

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“Wisteria outside, hysteria inside,” students would joke as they walked past the clinic’s yellow clapboard house with purple flowers climbing up the sides. The atmosphere there changed radically once Murray came to power. One graduate student reported leaving for a break and returning “to a wholly different world.”

“Everyone was talking about needs, variables, and a mysterious process called thematic apperception,” he recalled. “Strange people were wandering in and out, neither staff, patients, nor students, but simply personalities undergoing study.”

Murray hosted famous friends and acquaintances—Paul Robeson and Bertrand Russell were among the regulars—for luncheons and they’d debate the ideas of the day. But under Murray’s laissez-faire watch, more troubling disruptions also took place. In 1931, a student from Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school for women, was participating in a hypnosis study conducted by one of the clinic’s graduate students. She reported afterward that while she was in a trance state, the graduate student had attempted to sexually assault her. Professor Boring confronted the man and told him he needed to either leave Harvard or face criminal charges. The student left and Murray was banned from overseeing any further hypnosis research on students.

One of Murray’s first orders of business as its director was to hire Morgan as his research assistant. As they fell deeper in love, they turned the clinic into a second home together. They brought in art and antiques. Morgan planted gardens and Murray moved in furniture from his and Josephine’s house. They were as close to living as husband and wife as they would ever be.

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One day a student in Murray’s class raised her hand during a discussion of Jung’s theory of active imagination. She pointed out that her son liked to come up with stories to go along with the pictures in her magazines, which had led her to wonder: Could psychologists, too, use pictures to uncover fantasies in their patients?

It was a brilliant idea, Murray thought, and he took it to Morgan right away. Patients had no trouble disclosing what they knew about themselves already, but they could not reveal what they didn’t know. Morgan and Murray believed that evocative imagery could be a way to inspire storytelling and access the unconscious. They started cutting out black-and-white pictures from magazines, preferring scenes of people in ambiguous, often gloomy, states: a woman slumped over on the floor, a group of workers sleeping in a field, a man covering his face beside a bare-breasted woman. They would ask subjects to look at the images for several minutes and then describe what they thought had happened in each scene. In the end, they settled on eighteen images, six of which Morgan drew herself.

The method, which they called the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), became a book that spent years at the top of Harvard University Press’s bestseller list, and remains in wide use today among therapists and business leaders seeking to gain insight into the minds of their patients or employees. It even appeared in Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel *Red Dragon*, the prequel to *The Silence of the Lambs*, when Hannibal Lecter laughs at a psychiatrist’s attempts to subject him to the exam. “He actually tried to give me a Thematic Apperception Test,” Lecter tells an FBI investigator. “He was sitting there just like the Cheshire cat waiting for MF 13 to come up.… It’s a card with a woman in bed and a man in the foreground. I was supposed to avoid a sexual interpretation. I laughed.”

But their most important collaboration, Morgan and Murray believed, was the yearslong study of their own relationship, which they called a dyad. They analyzed their interactions in obsessive detail in order to write a book about the nature of two-person relations. They role-played at work and adopted new names—Morgan became Wona and Murray was Mansol. They tried to free their ids from repression, dredging their most subterranean fantasies to the surface. Murray dressed in skirts and whipped Morgan. “Could you love anyone but a Sadist?” she recalled him once asking her. “Never will I disobey him,” she wrote. “His word is my law.” They drank drops of each other’s blood and toasted “to the unity of two in one.”

But Murray’s dominant streak wasn’t restricted to the bedroom. As his career was on the rise, he relied more and more on Morgan’s assistance. She subordinated her own interests and helped write his books, not always without resentment. Murray once described their dynamic as “two whirlpools” locked in a power struggle.

Morgan tried to convince herself that Murray *was* her creative achievement. “We all have to do something collective—create something for the world,” she recalled Jung once saying during her own sessions with him. “If a woman creates a child then she is doing something collective for the next generation.” Her calling in life, he said, was to be Murray’s muse. “If you create Murray now—make him a complete man, then you are doing something for this generation.”

The response devastated Morgan: “The fact that to my child, to my husband and to H. I must be a mother,” she wrote in her journal—“I have the feeling that this may be the real awakening consciousness of woman. It makes me feel appallingly alone.”

Yet she continued her relationship with Murray because she was convinced their dyadic research would be the most meaningful work of their lives. And she did so even as her byline fell off their publications, as Murray’s cruelty intensified, and until their dyad ultimately withered to one.

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On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, igniting American vengeance and a newfound sense of patriotism. To Murray, the US Navy’s negligence in preventing the tragedy was “symbolic of the state of the American people.” He admitted that he was actually “enormously relieved” that the news would finally unite the nation to join World War II.

Murray wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposing the creation of a federal department of social science, staffed by researchers like him to advise on public policy. But the president already had something similar in the works. One of FDR’s diplomats abroad, the World War I hero William “Wild Bill” Donovan, had suggested that the US open a new intelligence agency focusing on “psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defense of a nation.” FDR agreed that the government needed a place to conduct this form of “modern warfare,” so he created the Office of the Coordinator of Information—which would later become the OSS and then the CIA—with Donovan as its head.

Donovan had a famously open-door policy, once saying, “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler.” He brought in actors, advertising executives, playwrights, scientists, artists, Barnum & Bailey entertainers, and anyone else with a scheme to stop the Nazis. Donovan entertained plots involving hypnosis, truth serums, blinding vapors, and poisonous snakes. One geneticist proposed exploiting rumors about Hitler’s confused sexuality by injecting hormones into his vegetables in order to feminize his voice. (Donovan green-lit the plan, though it’s unclear whether it ever happened.) Donovan also agreed to an inventor’s plot to fit bats with incendiary devices so they would fly into the eaves of buildings and burn them down. But when the planes dropped the creatures from the sky they merely plummeted to the ground.

Psychologists were a key part of Donovan’s band of outsiders. He was keenly aware of the delusional emphasis Hitler placed on his own “mental power”—more even than on his military power. To exploit this weakness, Donovan believed one had to get inside his head and fight him on his own irrational terms.

Walter Langer, a junior colleague of Murray’s at Harvard who had been a student and patient of Anna Freud’s and had helped her father escape to London during the invasion of Vienna, wrote a letter to Donovan explaining how he believed the US could apply the principles of psychoanalysis to develop propaganda targeted at “the unconscious and irrational forces” in its enemies.

Donovan was intrigued. “What do you make of Hitler?” he asked Langer. “If Hitler is running the show, what kind of man is he? What are his ambitions? How does he appear to the German people? What is he like with his associates? What is his background?” Donovan hired Langer to study these questions and, “most of all, we want to know as much as possible about his psychological make-up—the things that make him tick,” Donovan said. We want “to know what Hitler was thinking before Hitler knew it.”

In 1943, Donovan hired Murray and two other psychologists to join Langer in spending the next several months preparing hundreds of pages of analysis on the mind and motivations of Hitler. They combed through his speeches, writings, and biographical narratives. They tried to predict how he would respond to various military strategies, and what kind of propaganda would undermine his influence over the German people. Of special interest was the question of what Hitler would do if faced with defeat. Would he martyr himself to avoid capture? Would he potentially slaughter his own people in the process?

Psychologists hadn’t heretofore attempted this kind of remote analysis, now a practice more commonly known in the CIA as “political” or “leadership” profiling. They knew they’d never be able to diagnose a subject who hadn’t lain down on their couch as accurately as one who had. But this was as close to Hitler’s mind as they were ever going to get.

*The project was intended as a team effort, but instead of combining his report with Langer’s, Murray turned in his own. He titled the 227-page profile* Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, with Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany’s Surrender<em>.</em>

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Young Adolf was a petite boy who loved to paint and suffered from nightmares, Murray wrote. His father beat the child, while his mother, who was twenty-three years younger than her husband, did little to protect their son. Hitler’s lust for dominance and sense of superiority likely stemmed from these childhood beatings and humiliations. But rather than resent his father, Hitler developed “a profound admiration, envy and emulation of his father’s masculine power and a contempt for his mother’s feminine submissiveness and weakness,” Murray wrote.

Hitler had a defensive tendency to project onto others the wickedest aspects of his own nature. By calling his enemies liars, traitors, and oppressors he sought to distract from those very traits in himself. For instance, Hitler had a habit of staring at people in conversation for longer than felt comfortable, Murray wrote, and he once complained that Jews had “tried to pierce me even with their eyes.” Another time Hitler said that “the outstanding features of Polish character were cruelty and lack of moral restraint,” which were, of course, the most salient features of his own personality. It was possible, then, Murray advised the OSS, to get “a very good idea of the repudiated portions of his personality by noticing what he condemns in others.”

Murray’s report fixated on Hitler’s enigmatic sexuality. He predicted that the sadism Hitler displayed in his public life would manifest in an opposing masochism in his private life. For example, Hitler probably enjoyed having women urinate on him, Murray deduced from a “careful study of 3,000 metaphors” in *Mein Kampf*. This “unconscious need for punishment” would come naturally to someone who refused the everyday acts of submission that keep a civilized society functioning, like apologizing for mistakes and cooperating with others.

Murray not only profiled Hitler in his report but also diagnosed the German people. “What is required is a profound conversion of Germany’s attitude,” he wrote. Under Nazi rule, the Germans seemed to suffer from paranoia marked by delusions of grandeur and of persecution. What they needed, he said, was a physician—one who could gain their trust by impressing them with his “ability, knowledge, wisdom, or perhaps mere magnetic force.”

Many of Murray’s conclusions were unfounded or now seem outdated, such as his belief that Hitler experienced severe trauma from seeing his parents together in bed. But other aspects of the report proved true. For one thing, Murray predicted that Hitler would likely commit suicide before he’d surrender. “As soon as the time comes when repeated offensive actions end in failure Hitler will lose faith in himself and in his destiny, and become the helpless victim of his repressed conscience, with suicide or mental breakdown as the most likely outcome,” Murray wrote. “He will retreat” to his vacation home, “the impregnable little refuge that was built for him on the top of the mountain behind the Berghof.” At the last moment he would kill himself, probably in a “most dramatic” manner, Murray predicted, because he would rather “die, dragging all of Europe with him into the abyss.” (In reality, Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, retreated from advancing Soviet forces to his bunker in Berlin, where they took cyanide tablets and Hitler shot his dog, then himself.)

To avoid his potential martyrdom, which could further galvanize German retaliation, Murray advocated spreading propaganda that portrayed the dictator as a narcissist pursuing personal glory at the expense of his people. Murray also suggested dropping cartoons showing the führer running into the arms of the Soviets. It would be useful for the US to “accelerate Hitler’s mental deterioration,” Murray wrote, and “drive him insane.”

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After Murray finished his report on Hitler, he despaired at the thought of returning to Harvard. His research there had felt valuable before the war, but now it seemed abstract and trivial. He was more at home at war, dedicating himself “to the extermination of Satan,” as he wrote in 1942.

Fortunately, the OSS had been impressed with Murray’s work and, the next year, asked him to come back as captain of a top-secret mission. Murray left Harvard again, and Morgan, “cutting off everything at once.” He was transferred to a camp at an undisclosed location outside Washington, DC, known as Station S (for “secret”). His job was to assess the resilience of prospective spies. How would a new recruit react under pressure? How would they tolerate negative emotions? Would they turn to vices?

As part of this new evaluation system, Murray devised a series of stress tests. In one, he made the men live together in a confined space for days; in another, he shined blinding spotlights into their faces while an interrogator grilled them about their recent activities. Murray and his colleagues wrote in a report that “when an inconsistency appeared, [the interrogator] raised his voice and lashed out at the candidate, often with sharp sarcasm. He might even roar, ‘You’re a liar.’ ” Some recruits fled, some cried. “Some normal men break under the strain of army life,” Murray wrote, others “suddenly get well when lifted out of their own juices by the collective spirit of a fighting unit.” At the end of the evaluation, Murray threw the recruits a party, which turned out to be yet another test—of how well they held their alcohol.

Murray’s assessments became standard instruments for the OSS, and he went on to establish assessment centers across the US, from California to Maryland. In 1944, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and sent abroad to evaluate OSS operatives on the front lines in France and the special forces in China.

When he looked back on the cast of characters in the OSS years later, he admitted that the agency may have hired a few “psychopathic” employees. A field involving as much deceit as spying was certain to attract untrustworthy types.

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The partnership between the OSS and the Committee for National Morale marked the beginning of psychology’s long, uneasy alliance with the US intelligence establishment. By the time World War II began to bleed into the Cold War, the military funded 96 percent of the nation’s federally supported social-science research—so much that professors had effectively become auxiliary military personnel, conducting whatever experiments the government requested, for whatever purposes.

The pressure to advance US “mind control” operations intensified in those years. There were reports that China and the Soviet Union had developed the ability to brainwash a person, to remotely control their decision-making and eliminate their free will. Communists were reportedly so successful at reprogramming US prisoners of war that they could turn a victim’s brain into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control,” as then–CIA director Allen Dulles put it. The CIA committed itself to conducting similar research on subjects, including “de-patterning” and “rewiring.” As a result, studies on interrogation, humiliation, and mind control proliferated at American universities, often with unwitting subjects, and sometimes unwitting experimenters.

In 1947, the CIA became the largest employer of college professors, with Harvard a leading academic partner. By 1952, federal agencies supplied 20 percent of its total operating costs (or $13 million). Murray played a key role in forging the Harvard partnership. He rewrote his syllabi to accommodate national interests. He taught students about morale, psychological warfare, and the relationship between combat and sociology. In return, he received significant funds to conduct government research. With a $60,000 Rockefeller grant he carried out a five-year study analyzing the values and traits of soldier-aged Harvard men that contributed to their morale. The resulting book, *A Clinical Study of Sentiments* (which was primarily written by Morgan), found that the best military men were doers rather than thinkers, and specifically doers with low levels of neuroticism, imagination, and education.

He began teaching a class on the nature of socialization, or how people learn to behave acceptably in society, with his friend Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist who has been called “the CIA’s big man on campus.” Kluckhohn, who had top-secret security clearance from the Department of Defense, had an even more explicit agenda at Harvard: to “shape the research program of the center to the needs of the United States,” according to one FBI agent. So the State Department would identify research areas where the Soviets seemed further advanced and “Kluckhohn would then suggest to a graduate student at the School that he might do a thesis on this particular problem, making no mention to him of the fact that the State Department was also interested.”

In 1952, Harvard received 160 clandestine defense contracts, and over the next decade would see its funding grow from $8 million to $30 million—surpassing the revenue it received from tuition. The CIA transferred funds to researchers through some fifty foundations, some of which were actually fronts created to conceal the money’s source. The CIA called these professors “unwitting agents.”

The next year, the intelligence agency approved a top-secret operation “concerned with the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.” The CIA gave these experiments, carried out in extreme secrecy from 1953 to 1973, the code name MK-ULTRA. Experimenters deployed sensory deprivation, electroshock therapy, radiation, and hallucinogenic drugs, all to brainwash unconsenting test subjects—including prisoners, prostitutes, and other vulnerable populations—into committing horrific acts, including, in at least one case, to kill on command.

Because the CIA destroyed nearly all evidence related to MK-ULTRA after it was exposed, it’s difficult to determine which experiments were done under its auspices. But the program is known to have taken place largely in universities and scholarly foundations, including Harvard, using funds that came directly and indirectly from the CIA.

As part of MK-ULTRA, the CIA hired Cornell neurologist Harold Wolff to conduct torture research in 1953. He set out to understand “how a man can be made to think, ‘feel,’ and behave according to the wishes of other men.” The agency supplied him with its data on humiliation, deprivation, torture, and other methods of indoctrination. He then experimented on one hundred Chinese refugees to see if he could brainwash them into becoming American agents. When Wolff published his findings in 1956, he reported that “pain is most effective as a brainwashing technique when it is tied to hopelessness and humiliation.”

With each increasingly invasive attempt to understand and manipulate their perceived enemies, the examiners began acting more like the offenders. When the US Office of Naval Research wanted to understand how to prevent conflicts between guards and prisoners in the navy and Marines, it funded an experiment by the Stanford social psychologist Philip Zimbardo. In the now-notorious study, Zimbardo assigned some student participants to play guards at a prison and others to play inmates. He gave them uniforms and props; a closet became a solitary confinement cell. It was supposed to last for a week or two but he had to shut the experiment down after just six days because the “guards” began to literally abuse and humiliate the “prisoners.” Zimbardo later admitted that, in carrying out the experiment, he’d also too faithfully assumed his role as “superintendent.”

(Decades later Zimbardo served as an expert witness for the defense of an American soldier convicted of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, arguing that the military commanders were to blame. “All evil begins with a big ideology,” Zimbardo said at the time. “What is the evil ideology about the Iraq war? National security. National security is the ideology that is used to justify torture.”)

After the war, Murray, too, used his generous funding at Harvard to oversee increasingly unethical bodies of research. He served as an adviser on a study with the US Army that gave patients at Harvard’s teaching hospitals steroids in doses that ultimately made them “psychotic or otherwise emotionally disturbed.” He also supervised an experiment that involved injecting adrenaline into “naive subjects to study changes in their subjectivity.”

In the early 1960s, Murray supervised some of Timothy Leary’s psychedelics research, and gave him permission to test psilocybin on undergraduates. (Murray, who was reportedly addicted to amphetamines, was also apparently the first faculty member to volunteer for one of Leary’s mushroom-pill sessions.) “Murray expressed a great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support,” Leary has said. Murray was, in his view, “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation.”

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As Murray’s career with the OSS took him around the world, he no longer felt the “centrifugal” pull toward Morgan he once had. She stayed behind in those years to continue working on their projects, and, Murray wrote, she had taken “a pilgrimage into her own depths.”

The next few years brought terrible suffering for Morgan. First came a nervous breakdown, followed by an emergency surgery to sever her spinal nerves. Then her husband died and she moved to an isolated acreage in Massachusetts, where she built a replica of Jung’s tower in Switzerland. Although Morgan’s tower occasionally served as a hideaway for “Wona and Mansol,” she spent most of her time there alone. Her physical pain and depression drained her of her creative ambitions and her letters to Murray became one of her few connections to the outside world.

Murray told her she should begin writing the book on their dyad. Perhaps he wanted her to use her talents; perhaps he wanted to preoccupy her. He told her how to structure it: She should catalog the different types of human love, describe the behaviors that facilitate or impede it, and write an overview of love as it appears in mythology and literature. For this culmination of decades of passion, intellectual collaboration, and suffering, Murray suggested the title *Dynamics of Interpersonal Relationships*.

“He was capable of using his intellectual, analytical powers to protect himself from her,” Morgan wrote in a third-person narrative of their relationship. “His analysis could tear down and seemingly demolish the delicate and fragile life of their first togetherness.”

Murray knew he was failing Morgan. He wrote in his journal: “Although M. devoted no time to *her* vision, the religion to which they were both committed, Wona devoted years in helping *him* at the clinic, and ended by writing most of their monograph on *Sentiments*.” Yet he conveyed no sympathy, noting that in the end, “she succumbed to her gravest depression, let her mind go to seed, and abandoned her destiny.”

Morgan had taken Jung’s advice and devoted herself to becoming Murray’s anima. Even though they both recognized the unfairness, she clung to the hope that he might one day correct it by coming to her side. “Man could worship woman as image in a stained glass window, as a sovereign deity of Chartres,” she wrote. “That was easy and required no change in his modus vivendi. The aim of man has always been to use woman for his own creativeness. But was it possible for M. to change his whole orientation so that his energies would be subordinate to hers. Could he permit himself to be used for *her* creativeness?” Perhaps at that point she still believed it possible.

By her later years, Morgan had all but stopped trying to reach Murray. They both took other lovers. She still longed for him, but knew that expressing it only drove him further away. He had been attracted to Morgan’s depression when it resembled something mysterious, not when it came to feel like a responsibility.

But then, in 1962, Josephine Murray died abruptly and Henry, then sixty-nine years old, suggested to Morgan that they marry at last—on the condition that she quit drinking.

Elated, she immediately told her son the good news. But time passed and Murray didn’t take any steps toward planning a wedding. Morgan tried to reawaken their passion in 1967 by suggesting they take a trip together to the Virgin Islands. The sunshine and sand did appear to awaken Murray’s romantic longings, but not for Morgan. Instead, Murray sent a graduate student he’d recently met—a woman twenty-seven years younger than himself—a bouquet of flowers during their trip. Morgan sensed his drifting away and they got into a fight. Morgan had struggled to become an archetype in a Jungian myth and ended up feeling like nothing more than the disembodied concept. She reached for a drink and didn’t stop.

The next morning she woke up with vomit in her mouth and Murray’s repulsed face next to her. “You’re disgusting,” he told her.

Morgan got up and dressed. Murray stayed in bed while she left the room. Finally he got up and noticed a book lying on the dresser. It was opened to a page with a poem by their mutual friend Conrad Aiken. Next to one passage, Morgan left a handwritten note that said: “To be read over my grave.”

<verse>
*O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh!*
*When we are dead, my blest beloved and I,*
*Embrace us well, that we may rest forever,*
*Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.*
</verse>

Murray went outside but Morgan was nowhere to be found. He saw a little bundle on the beach and went to unwrap it. Inside was the emerald ring he had given her thirty years earlier. He looked out to the lagoon below the cottage and saw her drowned in two feet of water.

Or at least that’s one version of the story. Murray often revised his account of her death, telling some people that they were swimming together and she fainted, others that he’d fallen asleep while she’d gone out. In one instance he said that he dragged her to shore and performed CPR.

He attempted to have her vision drawings collected in a book, but failed to find a publisher. He never tried to publish the book she’d written about their dyad, based on hundreds of pages of notes she’d taken during the last decade of her life. She had titled it *What Joy!*

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Murray went on to marry the graduate student, Caroline “Nina” Fish, a few years into his retirement. He devoted many of his final years to writing a biography of Herman Melville, which, like many projects he started, he never finished. Besides the TAT, the most enduring contribution Murray made to the field of psychology was his assessment of Hitler. The groundbreaking exercise in remote profiling paved the way for others to observe and analyze the behavior of subjects they’d never met.

Murray’s Hitler analysis is “considered one of the very first, very real attempts at leadership analysis,” which is the term now used for the CIA’s psychological profiles of world leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Vladimir Putin, said Carmen Medina, a former CIA deputy director of intelligence.

But Murray’s most consequential legacy has nothing to do with a contribution to psychology. At the end of World War II, the US Army and the American Medical Association adopted principles for ethical research from the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg trials had shown the barbaric scale of Nazi experimentation on human subjects by physicians like Josef Mengele, and the lack of explicit ethical regulations that had governed the medical community until then. The principles require, for example, experimenters to obtain informed consent from subjects and to avoid any unnecessary suffering.

The Harvard Medical School did not adopt the code, nor did the CIA. One Harvard advisory board member argued that “valid, informed consent may be difficult to obtain.” It wasn’t until 1962 that the university agreed to implement the principles for its contracts with the army, but still only as guidelines rather than as rules. The refusal to adopt the code allowed Murray to conduct his final study at Harvard.

Murray reprised a version of the stress tests he’d done with potential spies at Station S, but this time the experimenter would be more intimately involved in creating the distress. “I had a wish to develop my theory in which two people (not just one personality) are incorporated into one system, a dyadic system.” Positive dyads—energetic, loving, sexual unities—could be taken as models for creating a more peaceful human race, he believed. On the other hand, unloving, unreciprocated, hateful dyads could shatter a person, and a society.

With this last experiment, Murray’s aims had reached their most extreme. “National Man must become World Man very quickly if atomic energy is to be held in control,” he put it in a letter to Josephine. He was returning to the question he posed in *Explorations in Personality*: How could man be “changed—regenerated or developed differently,” and “by what means can he be intentionally transformed?” Brainwashing, sleep deprivation, hallucinogens—all were subjects of interest in the era of MK-ULTRA. Murray chose humiliation.

While he never completed his book with Morgan on a loving dyad, Murray conducted multiyear experiments on students to observe the “degree of anxiety and disintegration” he could provoke during “a stressful dyadic proceeding.” From 1959 to 1962, he enlisted undergraduates to divulge deeply personal details about their lives and then used the information to humiliate them.

Murray acknowledged that psychological experimentation was “loaded with dynamite: and pregnant with possibilities for the disintegration of character.” And some of his subjects ultimately reported excruciating experiences. But he believed that the scientific study of emotions could not avoid one essential fact: “It must necessarily do violence to human feelings.” A subject is “stripped and assimilated to a typological category” and will witness his or her “vital moments, once warm and passionately felt, become transformed into a cruelly commonplace formula.”

Murray’s colleagues didn’t know the purpose of the humiliation experiments, nor were any conclusions ever published. They probably couldn’t have been, because Murray, flouting principles of scientific objectivity, often inserted himself into the encounters. One former colleague, Henry Riecken, told the author Alston Chase that “one could hardly call the exercises” in the study “ ‘experiments.’ ” And Murray himself “was no scientist.” Yet with his humiliation project he may have finally achieved his goal—the total transformation of a personality—in at least one young man. But it would be decades before anyone would see it.

*** Chapter 3: The Hare and the Hunter

**A** crowd was already gathering outside the prison’s razor-wire fence when Dorothy Lewis pulled up to the gate in 1989. Grandparents, children, cops, and students alike were setting up camp to celebrate the next morning’s execution. Tailgaters drank beer and held signs that read “Burn Bundy Burn” or “This Buzz Is for You.” Some wore pins of “Old Sparky,” the affectionate name for the Florida state prison’s sputtering, sixty-five-year-old electric chair. They banged on fry pans and served Bundy Barbecue and Bundy Fries. Others dressed up in executioner hoods and Ronald Reagan masks.

Florida courts had issued Ted Bundy three death sentences, first in 1979 for the murder of two Tallahassee college students, and then in 1980 for killing a twelve-year-old girl. But his execution date had been delayed for a decade while he exhausted his appeals. “I’ll buckle up when Bundy does,” read bumper stickers of locals frustrated with the state’s enforcement of seat belt laws but not, apparently, the death penalty for convicted serial killers.

If the revelers knew that Lewis, a prominent Yale psychiatrist, was passing through the prison gates, the party might have turned into a riot. Two years earlier, she had testified for Bundy’s defense that he hadn’t been competent to stand trial when he was convicted of the 1980 child murder, and that his death sentence should therefore be overturned. She presented the court with a detailed diagnosis of Bundy’s bipolar disorder. The mania was obvious, she said, to anyone who watched him representing himself on trial: grinning in a Seattle Mariners T-shirt, rambling, and calling himself to the stand for a “cross”-examination. Once, he filed for a “motion for a change of menu” because he was tired of eating grilled cheese sandwiches every day. He was having so much fun, he even called his girlfriend as a witness and proposed. (She said yes.) He was “high as a kite,” Lewis testified. “I don’t even think Mr. Bundy was competent to accept or reject a plea.”

The judge disagreed with Lewis. Bundy was “a diabolical genius” and “the most competent serial killer in the country,” he said in his decision. He singled out Lewis and the defense for its “exercise in sophistry, because I don’t really feel that anybody that was in this courtroom, seriously, seriously, questions Mr. Bundy’s competency.” Now, on the eve of his execution, rumors were swirling that Lewis might show up and again declare Bundy incompetent, this time to receive the death penalty.

Over the years, Lewis has urged courts to spare the lives of some of the most notorious murderers in modern history: DC sniper John Allen Muhammad, the Genesee River Killer Arthur Shawcross, John Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman, and the neo-Nazi Klansman Joseph Paul Franklin. Bundy’s prosecutors brought three psychiatrists of their own to the prison ready to contradict her just in case she tried.

In fact, Lewis had no intention of “saving” Bundy. She’d come because it was probably her last chance to solve the greatest mystery of her career. One of the country’s preeminent experts on violence, the Supreme Court twice cited Lewis’s early studies of violent youth in its decisions to outlaw the execution of minors—first for children under sixteen, then later for those under eighteen. Her studies showed that serious offenders tend to suffer from a toxic trifecta—neurological dysfunction, mental illness, and childhood abuse. Bundy didn’t meet that criteria, however. He was intelligent and sociable; a former law student and Young Republican who claimed to come from a loving Christian home. She still couldn’t understand what may have caused behavior as sadistic as his.

Bundy told Lewis he wanted her to be one of his two final interviews because he was tired of all the other requests he received. Writers just wanted salacious details to sell books; detectives wanted only to locate bodies. Lewis, on the other hand, was interested in Bundy alone, and so was he. She would draw him diagrams of the brain, noting the location of the amygdala and its role in aggression. Once, he called her when he was having panic attacks in the prison infirmary and she helped calm him down.

“Everyone else wants to know what I did,” Bundy told her. “You’re the only one who wants to know why.” Why he was “consumed by something he didn’t understand,” as one detective recalled him saying. Why he had gone from a teenage Peeping Tom to a murderer of at least thirty women. Why he targeted college students with long brown hair and bludgeoned them with crowbars and clubs. Why he sexually assaulted them while they died and sometimes lay with their corpses for hours. Why he sometimes kept their heads.

Lewis, too, wanted to know why. She had dedicated her career to advancing the study of violence beyond religious or psychoanalytic understandings and into the “harder” sciences, such as neurology. Historically, when psychiatry weighed in on criminal behavior, it blamed it almost entirely on drug abuse, bad parenting, and the occasional sociopath. But her research established links between brain disorders and aggression, urging society to think of violence as a medical problem as well as a social one. As a psychiatry resident in the 1960s she decided to stop reading the “anecdotal and impressionistic” literature of psychoanalysis and set out to design some of the first scientific experiments on violent offenders. She convinced the director of the Yale Child Study Center to let her observe delinquents at the New Haven juvenile court instead of the normal—or, to her mind, boring—preschoolers whom fellows usually observed as part of the curriculum.

At the court, she searched out scars in her clients and drew out stories of horrific abuse. She started with their medical histories and was struck to find that the overwhelming majority of the delinquents had suffered injuries and impairments. Some seemed to have learning disabilities. They certainly looked very different from the cold, conniving sociopaths on TV. She found herself, rather, “in the company of a pathetic crew of intellectually limited, dysfunctional, half-mad losers,” as she wrote in her 1998 memoir, *Guilty by Reason of Insanity*.

She developed a hunch that there were links between the juveniles’ brain functioning and their violent behavior. So she asked an esteemed neurologist at Yale, Jonathan Pincus, to examine them. At first he balked, reminding her that the question of a connection between brain syndromes and violence had long been settled: There was none. But Lewis managed to persuade him to at least try.

To his surprise, neurological damage turned up almost across the board. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he told Lewis. “I’ve never seen so many neurologically impaired kids together in one place at one time.”

When Lewis and Pincus first shared their findings, “people thought we were crazy,” she says. One colleague called them “a traveling road show.”

The pair continued their collaboration for years, with Pincus testing reflexes and motor coordination in violent patients while Lewis searched for bruises and traumas. In 1979, Lewis turned down a prestigious position at Cornell University, where she recalls faculty meetings catered with quiche lorraine and white wine, in favor of a job at the Bellevue Hospital Prison in New York. The dining options were humbler, but she could continue her research on violence.

In 1986, she and Pincus published a study on fifteen death-row inmates finding that they had all suffered head injuries as children; two years later, another paper showed recurring patterns of childhood abuse and neurological defects among juvenile inmates. They repeatedly presented with three traits: brain dysfunction, psychotic tendencies, and a history of childhood abuse. Taken alone, no one of these attributes is a predictor of violence. But together they can activate a combustible chemistry, one that Lewis believed might make it impossible for a person to control their violent impulses.

If, for example, a boy is hit in the head and it causes damage to his frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls inhibitions, he might more freely act on his aggressive impulses. And if he suffered abuse, which can engender rage, he might have more of those impulses than other children. He might also develop hypervigilance, a heightened state of alertness that, for children in abusive homes, is a protective adaptation. But it can progress over time into paranoia, potentially leading someone to fight a threat that isn’t really there.

Today Lewis is one of the few psychiatrists willing to testify on behalf of some of the most vicious criminals in the world because she believes that the sicker the crime, the sicker the person, and that society has no right executing the mentally ill. “Everyone knows that a serial killer who eats his victim, even a teensy piece of his victim, is crazy,” Lewis wrote in her memoir. “But somehow, by adopting purely moralistic and unmeasurable definitions of insanity and forcing psychiatrists to make use of them, the legal profession forces us to reach some pretty peculiar conclusions.”

She sees in murderers the helpless children they once were, and the brain-damaged, mentally ill adults they often became. It gave her some sympathy for these “poor miscreants,” whom she has often described with adjectives like “befuddled,” “bedraggled,” or “awkward.”

What kind of society could justify—even relish in—the execution of its most troubled people? And if psychiatrists take the Hippocratic oath to first do no harm, then “how the hell,” she wonders, can they declare a person fit for execution? “How can you be a doctor and testify to that?”

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When Lewis entered the “death house,” as the prison’s high-security building for condemned inmates was known, she found Bundy sitting hunched over the table in an orange T-shirt. He looked disheveled and flustered.

Lewis was petite, with oversized glasses and a short, sensible haircut. She often wore skirt suits and turtlenecks. She took a seat beside Bundy and noticed a bitter smell emanating from him. It wasn’t like body odor, she thought. And then she realized “I was smelling terror.” Bundy finally realized that he was going to die.

He spoke into his handcuffed fists and mumbled the question everyone had been afraid of: Would she consider finding him incompetent for execution?

That was impossible, she told him. He had a legal background, had confessed to his crimes, and had fought his death sentence for years; it was clear that Bundy understood his sentence and why he’d received it—the two qualifications rendering him competent in the eyes of the law. Bundy said he understood and went on to sit with Lewis for the next four and a half hours anyway.

She wasn’t allowed to order an MRI or other neurological exams that she’d normally use to examine patients, so the best use of her time was to urge him to speak honestly about his childhood, and hope for a lapse in his usual performative normalcy. What seemed most concerning to Bundy was not being seen as evil as much as it was being seen as a freak.

She knew that Bundy’s mother, Louise Cowell, gave birth to him at twenty-two in a shelter for single women and left him there for three months. She returned only after her father, Sam, ordered her to go back and retrieve the baby. For years, Sam pretended to be Ted’s father and Louise acted as his sister. The truth eventually came out, but Ted never learned who his biological father was.

He insisted to Lewis and others that his confused parentage had no effect on him. “I can’t understand why everyone wants to make such a big deal out of that,” he once said. He and Louise both maintained that Sam had been a wonderful father to them both.

Other family members recalled a very different version of Sam Cowell. He was, they said, extremely violent; he beat his wife and abused cats and dogs on the family’s farm. Meanwhile, Ted’s grandmother—Louise’s mother—was severely depressed and had been treated with electroshock therapy. Ted’s aunt said that she and other relatives sent the boy and Louise to live in Washington in order to escape Sam. The aunt had realized something was very wrong with Ted when, at just three years old, he brought kitchen knives up to her room in the middle of the night, lifted the covers, and laid them around her in the bed.

“At age *three*,” Lewis later said. “I’ve seen kids, I’ve seen a lot of murderers, but I’ve never …” She trailed off.

To her surprise, Bundy said early in their conversation that “I don’t dispute your feeling that there’s some kind of precursors, environmental precursors.” He recalled a childhood memory of his family’s farm, when he had accidentally spilled some grain outside the chicken coop. Sam saw the chickens go running to feast on Ted’s mess and he flew into a rage, screaming at the boy that he was a failure.

Bundy also recalled that sometimes Sam killed the chickens by yanking their heads off with his bare hands. The revelation was a small but significant crack in Bundy’s unwaveringly loyal portrayal of Sam. Years later, when Lewis decided that everything she had thought she understood about Bundy was wrong, this memory would come back to her as a telltale sign.

But for now, a line of people and a camera crew were waiting outside the door, and Lewis was told it was time to go. Bundy’s fate was up to the Supreme Court now, which would rule on his final emergency bid for a stay of execution before his scheduled execution the next morning at seven. She wished him good luck and shook his hand. Bundy bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Without thinking, she reached her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

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In his second interview that day, with the evangelical broadcaster James Dobson, Bundy told a very different story. With Lewis, he sought answers, but now he purported to understand everything about himself. Dobson, wearing a suit and tie, sat across from Bundy at a table. He started out puzzling over where the once-promising law student’s violent compulsions came from: “You were not physically abused. You were not sexually abused. You were not emotionally abused,” he said.

“No. No way. That’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation, because I grew up in a wonderful home,” Bundy said. “Two Christian parents who did not drink, did not smoke; no gambling, no physical abuse or fighting in the home.”

“But as a young boy,” he went on, “I encountered, outside the home again, in the local grocery store, the local drugstore, the soft-core pornography … and from time to time we’d come across pornographic books of a harder nature, more graphic you might say.”

Pornography “helped mold and shape” his behavior, Bundy said. He pointed out that FBI research had shown that it was the most common interest serial killers shared. Now he wanted to warn America that pornography could inflame the violent sides of men. “I think people need to recognize that those of us who have been so much influenced by violence in the media—in particular pornographic violence—are not some kinds of inherent monsters,” he said. “We are your sons, and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today.” Dobson couldn’t have hoped for a better endorsement for his budding campaign against pornography, with its “heavy emphasis on violent homosexual and lesbian scenes, on excrement, mutilation, enemas, oral and anal sex.” Bundy not only advanced Dobson’s conservative agenda, he raised the profile of his fledgling fundamentalist organization, and money for its coffers. Focus on the Family went on to sell $1 million worth of videotapes of the Bundy interview, much of which it gave to anti-abortion and anti-pornography groups.

At the end of the conversation, Dobson turned to viewers and asked, “What does this discussion mean for you?

“Just this: Remember that pornography is dangerous. It can warp the mind and destroy sexual intimacy in marriage. Stay away from it. A monster is crouched behind that door.”

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Ted Bundy’s rampage across the US made a mockery of local police departments. Despite his reputation today as a master manipulator, Bundy wasn’t a particularly discreet criminal. He once forgot to clean out his car after a murder, leaving his girlfriend to find women’s underwear, surgical gloves, and a meat cleaver among his things. In 1974, Bundy abducted two women from a Washington state park in broad daylight, in front of bystanders. Witnesses told investigators they’d seen a man with a tan Volkswagen Bug—a memorable car to take to a crime scene—approaching multiple women that day. He introduced himself as Ted.

As soon as police released that information to the public, Bundy left Washington for Utah and enrolled in law school. There, he killed a seventeen-year-old girl and, in the same day, tried to abduct another young woman, who escaped. The next year, police pulled him over for loitering outside the home of two young women in suburban Salt Lake City. He initially tried to flee, but the officers apprehended him and found a ski mask, handcuffs, and torn bed sheets in the car. They arrested him for evading a police officer and let him go the next day. Bundy then moved on to Colorado, where he killed three more women.

It seemed like police had finally caught him when, in 1977, he was charged with first-degree murder of one of the women in Colorado and for the attempted kidnapping of the woman who got away in Utah. But police still failed to contain him. During a preliminary court hearing in Aspen, Bundy, who was representing himself, asked to visit the building’s law library to research his case. While the deputy was standing guard at the entrance, Bundy lifted open a window and jumped out from the second floor.

He fell twenty-five feet and went running toward the mountains, only to be caught driving a stolen car six days later. He was returned to jail—and immediately began crafting a new escape plan. For six months he barely ate so he could lose enough weight to squeeze through a small duct in his cell. He removed the grate, which wasn’t secured, then crawled through the air shafts to break into a jailer’s apartment. He stole some of the guard’s clothes and then walked out the front door.

He was at large for nearly a full day before guards realized he was missing, giving him enough time to catch a bus to Chicago and later Florida, where he committed three more murders.

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In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the FBI trained its agents like a paramilitary force. Jobs in law enforcement gave Vietnam War veterans opportunities to make use of their combat skills, including in newly established SWAT teams that used assault rifles, grenade launchers, and other military-style weapons. Trainees were sent to the Quantico military base in Virginia, which was not yet home to the modern academy complex that stands there today. They attended classes in cinder-block structures and practiced firing pistols on shooting ranges. They slept in barracks, eight or so bunks to a room.

At this point, “the FBI was almost completely uninterested in murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other criminals who prey on their fellowmen,” wrote the pioneering FBI profiler Robert Ressler in his memoir. These cases were usually relegated to local police, and were turned over to the FBI only if the perpetrator crossed state lines. But even those referrals were rare because police in one state didn’t share records with police in another, and so they tended to investigate each crime in a silo. This failure to connect crimes across jurisdictions later became known as “linkage blindness,” and it came painfully to light in the wake of Bundy’s cross-country killing spree, which might have been stopped if police had connected any of the nearly identical murders in Washington, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Florida.

The FBI’s involvement in serial-murder cases largely came about in the years after Howard Teten, a six-foot-seven former marine, joined the Bureau. He worked his way up to FBI forensic specialist in the early 1960s, while at the same time earning a master’s degree in social psychology. “Here I am at school, taking courses in abnormal psychology, criminal psychology—and [also] working crime scenes on a daily basis,” he later recalled, “and I’m beginning to see parallels.”

Teten wasn’t convinced that murderers were necessarily driven by obvious motives like money, jealousy, or, say, an alcohol-fueled brawl as conventional wisdom held. These certainly weren’t the factors driving serial killers like Bundy. Teten believed that one could learn more about perpetrators by looking for their psychological incentives. So he scoured his crime scenes not just for physical evidence but also for evidence of the perpetrator’s personality—their behavioral DNA. What victims did they choose? What was unique about their style? Were any fantasies enacted? Answering these questions would tell an investigator what kind of person to look for.

In 1970, Teten enlisted his officemate, Patrick Mullany, who had a master’s degree in educational psychology, to co-instruct a course about the criminal mind at the FBI Academy. They would divide it up according to their expertise: Mullany would lecture on psychological disorders; Teten would follow up with a discussion on the types of crimes people with those disorders might commit. The class was a hit, and in 1972, the pair helped officially form the Behavioral Science Unit, affectionately known as the “Psycho Squad.”

“We had what the psychiatrist was missing: street knowledge,” Mullany later wrote. But the fledgling division still had a long way to go before it was taken seriously, even within the Bureau.

“Much of the FBI at that time, as well as the law enforcement world in general, considered psychology and behavioral science as they applied to criminology to be so much worthless bullshit,” the profiler John Douglas wrote in *Mindhunter*.

Even as the FBI opened its new, expanded, upgraded academy in 1972 with a gym, auditorium, dorm towers, and conference rooms, the behavioral analysts were stationed sixty feet underground, in a windowless former bomb shelter. They were “out of sight out of mind,” as one former agent put it. They posted a sign outside naming themselves the Fugawae Tribe, as in *where the fuck are we*?

Bundy helped put the squad on the map. His habit of escape and interstate flight ultimately prompted the FBI to assist with the manhunt. The Bureau placed him on its Top Ten Most Wanted list in 1978 and plastered towns with posters of his face, noting that he sometimes stammered when upset and could fake a British accent. Teten, along with Robert Ressler, wrote a profile of Bundy. After studying his patterns, they summarized his modus operandi, warning that he would likely visit colleges, ski resorts, and other places populated by young people, and would most likely approach attractive women with long hair parted in the middle.

In February, a few nights after he murdered twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach, Bundy was driving on the highway past Pensacola, almost to the Alabama border. A police officer ran his plates and saw that the car had been reported stolen. He pulled Bundy over and they immediately got into a scuffle. Bundy leaped for the officer’s gun but was overpowered. In the car, police found the IDs of the two college students who had just been murdered at Florida State University.

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The battle to define Bundy and the origin of his violence was at the center of an escalating culture war that would reshape American law enforcement and the criminal justice system. On one side were religious conservatives like Dobson, who saw Christian family values as the best prevention for evil, and the death penalty as its cure. On the other were scientists like Lewis who advocated for psychiatric interventions over punishment. The conflict was encapsulated on an episode of Fox pundit Bill O’Reilly’s show in which he sparred with Lewis, pressing her to admit that a person who kills another person is “evil.” Lewis refused: “Evil is not a scientific concept.”

Lewis’s plea for a more medicalized approach to criminality came amid a growing conservative backlash to the progressive triumphs of the 1960s—the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the desegregation of southern schools—and a tough-on-crime platform would become central to the Republican Party’s new approach.

As Black voters flocked to the Democratic Party, Republicans tapped white southerners who felt the civil rights movement had gone too far. Many of them were evangelical Christians, like Dobson, whose best-selling 1970 book *Dare to* *Discipline* encouraged parents to beat their children and argued for a return to a pre-1960s social order. Republicans joined forces with fundamentalist figures including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson to reframe the social problems they cared about—like drugs, homosexuality, and pornography—as political causes.

Together, they fomented a moral panic on an unprecedented scale, linking “deviant” progressive causes with sexual sadism and violence. Was it a coincidence, they asked, that Ted Bundy’s campus rapes were taking place at the same time that “promiscuous” feminists won the rights to abortion and birth control? Or that the *DSM* removed “homosexuality” as a disorder just as John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer began preying on boys? To fight these new forces of evil, America needed not just a strong leader, Republicans argued, but a strong Christian.

In an early speech that famously launched his political career in California, Ronald Reagan challenged the Left’s apparent willingness to “accommodate” evildoers. “They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple,” he said, “if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our heart is morally right.”

To blame crime on poverty or disadvantaged childhoods—issues that often require government spending—was to misunderstand man’s “permanent” and “absolute” nature, which is sometimes good and sometimes evil, according to Reagan. “The solution to the crime problem will not be found in the social worker’s files, the psychiatrist’s notes, or the bureaucrat’s budget; it’s a problem of the human heart, and it’s there we must look for an answer.”

Reagan campaigned on a pro-capital-punishment platform to win the election for governor of California against Democrat Pat Brown, who had flip-flopped on the issue. He brought that strategy to the White House, too, where during his two terms as president the number of federal death-row inmates nearly tripled: from 691 when Reagan first took office, to 2,250 when he left. It became a core policy issue of the Republican platform in election campaigns across the nation—often with Bundy as a poster boy. In 1970, 50 percent of Americans supported the death penalty; by the end of the Reagan presidency that number was up to 80 percent.

In a 1989 campaign ad, Florida governor Bob Martinez bragged that he’d signed ninety death warrants during his tenure—including Bundy’s—and vowed to continue until he could “clear out death row.”

When Bundy’s final lawyer, Polly Nelson, was in Florida ahead of her client’s execution, she “turned on the TV, and, on every channel, I heard ‘Ted Bundy,’ ‘Ted Bundy,’ ‘Ted Bundy,’ ” she wrote in her memoir. “It was election time in Florida and every candidate was running against Ted Bundy.”

Nelson watched candidates debate that night “and the very first issue mentioned by every single one of them was how much faster he would kill Ted Bundy than his opponents would.”

An FBI agent recalled that on Bundy’s last morning alive he was reading the Bible and listening to the people outside chanting “Burn Bundy, burn Bundy.” He turned to the agent and said, “And these people say I’m crazy?”

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Thirty years after Bundy’s execution, I visited Lewis at her Tudor-style home in New Haven, Connecticut. The living room looked like it had been ransacked. The furniture was engulfed in loose sheets of yellow legal paper, scrawled edge to edge with notes. Books about brain science and mass incarceration, crammed with rainbows of Post-it notes, were piled up on the coffee table. Across the room was a collection of skulls, almost perfect replicas from australopithecine, *Homo erectus*, and other early hominids, which, Lewis explained, she’d convinced a museum in Kenya to sell to her. Taped over the TV was a sheet of paper with a handwritten Bob Dylan lyric: “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”

“This is all Bundy over here,” she said, pointing to several big plastic tubs brimming with manila folders labeled “TB Journals,” “Important TB Literature to Review,” and “Most Important TB.”

“Most people probably don’t have that much about their patients, and this is pretty much just one patient.”

Lewis, now in her eighties, has returned again and again over the years to her notes and letters on Bundy, driven in part by her failure to help him make sense of his psychological condition in his lifetime. “He wanted desperately, even the last time I saw him, to know what was wrong with his brain,” she recalled. “I feel like I almost promised him.”

But she also remains dedicated to his case because she feels she got it wrong the first time. “There was a whole area I missed.” Only now, decades after his death, has Lewis changed her mind about her original diagnosis of Bundy.

She pushed aside a heap of papers on the sofa so we could sit down. One of her two cats, named Eurydice and Precarious, climbed up onto my shoulder. Lewis prefers her cats hairless, she said, because “I like to see their musculature.”

Lewis grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her sister and parents, who had immigrated from Russia. They played news of World War II on the radio around the clock. Her mother volunteered for a nonprofit that relocated Jewish children rescued from concentration camps. The Nazis were so present in Lewis’s childhood that Hitler “felt like a neighbor,” she said. It was as if one day Hitler could just walk in the door of their Central Park West apartment with a gun and shoot her.

Even though she knew very well what happened to Jewish people like her in Hitler’s gas chambers, when he committed suicide in 1945 she didn’t feel happy as everyone else seemed to be. With him dead, no one would ever know what made him do the terrible things he did. Then, as the news shifted to the Nuremberg trials after the war, Lewis found herself sympathizing with the accused Nazis she saw on TV. The innocent people they had executed were already gone, and now it was these men who were staring down death. “I empathize with the moment in time,” she told me. “I always empathized with the one who was being tortured or murdered”—which happened to now be the Germans.

She identified with them in other ways too. In grade school, Lewis’s classmates picked on her, as did her older sister. At night she lay in bed worrying about what would happen if she lost control and acted on her desire for revenge. What prevented her from taking a meat cleaver from the kitchen and hacking her sister to death? And then what would become of her? She’d end up like the Nazis on TV. The question stayed with her for years: What made Hitler act on the terrible impulses she merely felt?

Lewis worries that, in another life, she might not have behaved any differently than the Nazis. “If I had been raised in Nazi Germany and the thing to do was have a brown shirt and be in a Hitler Youth corps and go shoot Jewish people, I worry that I would have been such a goody-goody that I would have gone along with that,” she said.

Lewis had brought down an old box from upstairs that was filled with notebooks from 1955, her freshman year at Radcliffe College. Most of them were from a single class: Social Relations, which she’d signed up for on a whim. She’d kept the notebooks all these years because the class had changed her life. It was an “introduction to the world,” she said.

Lewis majored in French, but she became curious about Social Relations because everyone she knew was talking about it and trying to get in. She sat in on the first lecture and found that the professor “was magic.” Dr. Henry Murray was tall, handsome, and brilliant. He didn’t so much lecture as free-associate from one fascinating topic to another, darting from Antigone and Patroclus to Freud and Camus. He lectured that first day on the “scientific personality.” Lewis read aloud from her old cursive notes that a scientist, as he explained it, was characterized by curiosity, concentration, and a desire to categorize, name, and make symbols. Scientists “make languages” and explore their surroundings. Like children, they are drawn to “covered places,” and to “see behind and underneath the surface.”

“This is where I began my life,” Lewis said. It exposed her to Freud and psychology for the first time. “I blame this course for my going into medicine.” After that initial class, Lewis approached Murray, who was co-teaching the course with his colleague Clyde Kluckhohn, to plead her case for joining. She was amazed that he agreed. She didn’t know at the time that Murray was about to begin grooming students for a series of deceitful and cruel experiments. She now wonders if there was an ulterior motive behind Kluckhohn randomly asking her to lunch one afternoon. Was he evaluating her aptitude for experimentation? Why else would he invite her, a “nobody freshman”? she wondered.

The lunch was bizarre. She noticed that he seemed sad and stooped over.

“He said to me something like, ‘How is life?’ ”

“I said, ‘Difficult.’ Then I asked him, ‘How’s life?’ and he said, ‘Difficult.’ ” Lewis knew that word may have carried more weight for Kluckhohn. A few months earlier, his twenty-one-year-old son had taken a gun and shot a woman on the street from his hotel window, for no apparent reason. All of campus was talking about the murder trial. (The younger Kluckhohn, claiming it was an accident, was convicted of manslaughter; Lewis wondered about the possibility of psychedelic use.)

Lewis and Kluckhohn shared a tense, awkward meal at a campus café. Then she left, wondering why it had happened at all. “I can’t think of why else he’d take me to lunch except that he was sizing me up,” she said. “I never realized how close I came.”

Looking back today, she says of the class, “I was lucky to take it—and lucky to make it out.” She wonders whether Murray’s experiments, had she not eluded them, might have been the thing to trigger the aggressive impulses she had long feared in herself. Would she have wound up like one of her clients? Would she be a psychiatrist today or would she be on the other side of the prison cell?

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The year after Bundy’s first conviction, in 1979, John Wayne Gacy was found guilty of murdering thirty-three teenagers and young men in the Midwest. At the same time in Atlanta, someone was strangling dozens of children to death—and police didn’t have a clue who was responsible. It seemed a serial-killer epidemic had taken hold in America.

Reagan and his Justice Department saw the headlines as an opportunity to expand federal powers. After the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972 it was revealed that the former FBI director had run an expansive, illegal, yearslong domestic surveillance program to harass and blackmail his political enemies and leftist activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. Now in disgrace, the agency needed a new way to show the public just how urgent and necessary federal law enforcement was.

In the early 1980s the Justice Department raised the flag on this new and bizarre crime wave. It reported that serial killers were claiming the lives of four to five thousand people every year, the majority of whom were women and children. In fact, that figure was wrong, according to historian Philip Jenkins, because lumped in with it were other, unrelated categories of murder. A more accurate estimate is four or five hundred deaths per year. But the numbers went uncorrected.

It was then that the department suddenly found a use for the outcasts in the FBI’s basement. In a dramatic press conference alerting the public to the growing threat of serial killers, it trotted out these keen-eyed “mind hunters,” presented as savant-like agents capable of capturing the most heinous and elusive offenders. Research from the Behavioral Science Unit showed that the rate of unsolved homicide cases was rising in the US, largely due to this undetectable new type of killer who was driven by the sadistic pleasure of inflicting pain on the innocent. “Many of these people are not obviously mentally ill and will look as normal as the person next door,” Roger L. Depue, then chief of the Behavioral Science Unit, told *The New York Times.*

A follow-up story announced even more alarming claims. “Something’s going on out there,” Justice Department official Robert O. Heck told the paper. “It’s an epidemic.” He estimated that there were about thirty-five serial killers currently on the loose, which meant that each one would have claimed an average of 114 lives each. The argument was bolstered when the drifter Henry Lee Lucas confessed—falsely, it later turned out—to killing anywhere between two hundred and six hundred people.

Contemporary killers made Jack the Ripper look tame, Heck told the *Times*: “He killed five people. We talk about the ‘Boston Strangler,’ who killed 13, and maybe ‘Son of Sam,’ who killed six. But we’ve got people out there now killing 20 and 30 people and more, and some of them just don’t kill. They torture their victims in terrible ways and mutilate them before they kill them.”

“Most are very, very intelligent,” Robert Keppel, a former homicide detective who worked on the Bundy murders in Washington, added in the *Times*. “They seem to be able to leave little or no evidence at the crime scene that would lead us to them.”

Serial killers were prolific because they were far more mobile than previously thought, experts said. They took advantage of law enforcement’s linkage blindness, traveling from town to town, state to state. At a 1983 Senate hearing dedicated to the serial-murder problem, Ann Rule, a true-crime author who wrote a memoir about her friendship with Bundy, testified to the extreme mobility of serial killers such as Bundy and Lucas.

“They travel constantly,” Rule said, “they are trollers.… While most of us might put 15,000 to 20,000 miles per year on our cars, several of the serial killers I have researched have put 200,000 miles a year on their cars,” which would mean a killer drove 550 miles every single day. (In reality, research shows that the majority of killers stay close to home, “often preying on a particular victim population, much in the way that the original Jack the Ripper carried out his attacks in a small area of East London,” Jenkins wrote.)

At the Senate hearing, Depue singled out the successes of the FBI’s growing profiling team, which was by then producing nearly six times as many profiles as it had been three years earlier. He also claimed that the profiles led to the identification of fifty murderers and 126 rapists, all cases that were previously considered “unsolvable.” The program was so successful that local police departments started flooding the FBI Academy with requests to have their officers intern for its profilers.

Depue explained that what set profilers’ work apart from that of psychologists was their focus on the “how” more than the “why.” They also had better access to the crucial behavioral clues left on-site. “Traditionally, behavioral scientists have not done this careful analysis of the crime scene in their research efforts to understand the homicidal personality of the serial murderer,” Depue told the Senate. “This omission might be comparable to interviewing a great artist to gain insight into his creative personality without ever examining his actual art work.”

Some of the most prominent members of the Behavioral Science Unit went on to jointly publish a paper pointing out that there have been two categories of profilers in history: mental health professionals, who take a psychiatric approach, and law enforcement officers, who take an investigative approach. They were described in the language of the ongoing culture wars, with the overeducated elites on one side and the gut instincts of those who knew the street on the other. The profilers argued that the latter approach was superior because of its simplicity. It was based on “discrete, verifiable concepts and behavior. It does not rest solely on controversial statements of motivation derived from a complex theory of subconscious motivation.”

But on the inside, some agents were starting to grow skeptical. “To me, some of the profiling gurus in Quantico sounded better in front of a camera and microphone than in their real life interactions with investigators,” retired special agent Jim Freeman wrote in a book about his career at the FBI. And homicide investigator Paul Lindsay said that he had “bought into the myth” when he joined the Bureau in 1972, but grew disenchanted by the media circus that had engulfed the Behavioral Science Unit by the 1980s. Since then, he’d come to see profiling as “voodoo” and believed it often led to self-fulfilling prophecies. “I mean, how many serial killer cases has the FBI solved—*if any*?”

Many of the era’s most notorious murderers, including Jeffrey Dahmer and Joel Rifkin, were arrested for unrelated crimes. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, responsible for the deaths of at least forty-nine women, was caught only due to advances in DNA testing, which matched him in 2001 to hair and saliva samples of a woman he’d murdered in 1987. Meanwhile, Dennis Rader, the Kansas serial killer who was dubbed BTK for his bind-torture-kill modus operandi, killed ten people between the mid-1970s and early 1990s; he was caught in 2005 after sending a news outlet a floppy disk of his writing that was traced back to him through metadata.

Detective Keppel once sarcastically recalled, “We couldn’t wait to hear what gems of wisdom would come from the BSU’s agents, most of whom were only self-proclaimed experts in murder investigations and had never investigated one lead in an actual murder case.”

Even Robert Ressler himself admitted that inciting public panic was an intentional FBI strategy to gain support: Construct a crisis, then offer oneself as the only solution. “In feeding the frenzy,” Ressler wrote in his memoir, “we were using an old tactic in Washington, playing up the problem as a way of getting Congress and the higher-ups in the executive branch to pay attention to it.”

After building up public fear and then trust, the FBI made its case for expansion. To address the “pressing need to conduct research into the personality of the serial murderer,” it needed more funding and a broader jurisdiction. The Justice Department agreed and issued grants for FBI profilers to use interviews they had conducted with thirty-six convicted killers in prison to create taxonomies classifying them in categories such as “organized” or “disorganized” murderers. After public pressure, the Senate granted the FBI its request for nearly $3 million to scale up the Behavioral Science Unit. It would use the funds to establish the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime as a profiling hub to target “the most baffling and fearful of the unsolved violent crimes.”

Shifting more authority to the feds, the center would oversee a new network of crime data supplied by local police departments and analyze it for common patterns and links. The creator of this database, LAPD veteran Pierce Brooks, told the Senate that he wanted to have crime-scene photos transmitted by satellite to Quantico so the BSU agents could “begin developing their suspect profiles immediately, even before the written reports arrived.”

The FBI estimated it would cost $1 million to get the database, known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), up and running. One senator responded that the cost was “not the ideal,” but Brooks offered a compelling counterargument: ViCAP would have stopped Ted Bundy.

While Bundy was killing women in Washington, he left police an abundance of identifying information. “They have the first name Ted, they have a description of the car, and they have a composite drawing of the suspect,” Brooks said. If that data had been submitted to ViCAP, by the time bodies started turning up in Utah, “personnel would have matched up the reports almost instantly and alerted the agencies involved. It would have been a task then, to identify and apprehend the killer. Many lives would have been saved.”

President Reagan personally announced the funding for both initiatives in 1984.

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In 1988, women started disappearing in Rochester, New York. A serial killer was kidnapping sex workers, then raping, mutilating, and cannibalizing them before dumping their bodies in the Genesee River. It happened at a rate of about two per year at first, then accelerated to one a month. Soon, a woman was dying every week.

The FBI profiler Gregg McCrary was called to the scene to draw up a profile of the suspect. “You’re looking for a guy in the same socioeconomic strata, maybe one click above the prostitutes,” he told police. He would be a regular john, someone they trusted. “He works a menial job that affords him enough time at night that he can be off and be with these hookers.… He’s probably in a relationship with a woman, lives in the area, drives a lot.”

Police called him the Genesee River Gorge Guy because the bodies all appeared in the river or its tributaries. On Thanksgiving Day in 1989, someone called in with another sighting of a body by the river. But this one, twenty-nine-year-old June Stott, wasn’t like the other bodies they’d found. “She’d been eviscerated with a long linear laceration from the top of her chest, between the breasts, down to the vaginal area, and some intestines were exposed,” McCrary said. The body revealed a behavioral clue, too. “The lividity”—the way the blood settles—“was all wrong.” It was clear that her body had been moved postmortem—someone had flipped her over. This was a killer who revisited his crime scenes.

So the next time the murderer struck, the officers covertly monitored the scene. Eventually they saw a tall, heavyset man standing on a bridge nearby. When they stopped him, they learned he was a parolee named Arthur Shawcross. He’d already served fifteen years for raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl back in 1972, and had confessed to the murder of a ten-year-old boy.

At his highly publicized trial in 1990, the defense team had a seemingly impossible case. Shawcross pleaded not guilty (by reason of insanity), but didn’t deny killing the eleven women. This wasn’t even his first murder trial. What juror would have mercy on this monstrous man?

The defense called on Dorothy Lewis. When she examined Shawcross, she discovered that he had brain scarring and a cyst on his right temporal lobe, which can cause seizures. In their interviews, Shawcross said he had confessed to the murders because he had found himself on more than one occasion waking up at the scenes of the crimes, but he couldn’t remember committing them.

A seizure disorder might explain the amnesia, Lewis thought—but not the violence. Then, one day in session, Shawcross raised his voice into a high, shrill pitch and said his name was Bessie. It was his mother’s name. Sometimes Bessie instructed him to kill, Shawcross said, and sometimes she scolded him for misbehaving.

During Lewis’s psychiatry training at Yale in the 1960s, multiple personality disorder, as it was then known, was not considered a legitimate diagnosis. Some psychiatrists saw it as an outright hoax, used by murderers trying to manipulate gullible psychiatrists like Lewis into declaring them insane.

The disorder had already entered the cultural zeitgeist, however, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s *Psycho* (in 1960) and the best-selling book *Sybil* (1973). Some professionals blamed *Sybil*, the story of a woman and her dozen personalities, which turned out to be fake, for a spike in diagnoses that followed in the 1980s and ’90s. The psychiatrist Joel Paris declared it an “epidemic of overdiagnosis.” He wrote that dissociative identity disorder, as it is now known, “offered a drama of trauma, followed by redemption through psychotherapy.”

He and other critics accused overzealous clinicians of imposing alternate personalities onto vulnerable patients. So eager to prove their own hunches, these therapists unwittingly planted false memories, sometimes through the use of hypnosis, which makes a person more suggestible. Patients, too, may not contradict the diagnosis if they want to please the clinician, or reap its potential legal benefit.

Yet the more Lewis immersed herself in the study of violence, the more she saw the unmistakable signs of dissociation again and again: in a teenage girl who didn’t know why she had stabbed her best friend at school; in a delusional seventeen-year-old boy who sometimes remembered raping and murdering an elderly nun and sometimes didn’t.

Lewis hypnotized Shawcross to try to open up access to Bessie and her memories. After spending time with him in that state, it became clear to Lewis that his mother had severely abused him as a child, including at least once sodomizing him with a broomstick. Lewis checked his medical records and saw that he’d been hospitalized twice in childhood for paralysis from the waist down and an inability to walk.

Lewis’s testimony was disastrous even by her own account. She had thought the defense attorneys were going to present the evidence of Shawcross’s brain cyst and scarring, but they didn’t. “Dorothy comes in with the cyst in the temporal lobe [theory],” McCrary recalled; “the problem was she was the only one who could see it.”

Without any scientific evidence for Shawcross’s condition, Lewis was left asking jurors to simply believe that this three-hundred-pound man sometimes turned into a woman named Bessie and killed people without remembering a thing.

Shawcross was found guilty and sentenced to 250 years in prison.

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Lewis’s first interview with Bundy, when she had diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, took place a few years before the Shawcross episode. After her encounters with dissociation, she started seeing him through a new lens. She recalls how Bundy once described having conversations with another part of himself, and how he often spoke in the third person. Both were habits of dissociators.

Joe Aloi, an investigator at the Florida public defender’s office, told one of Bundy’s lawyers that sometimes when they were together in his jail cell, Bundy would transform into a completely different person. “He had a bunch of boxes in his head, see, and he could open one when he wanted to, he could open an insane one when he wanted to.”

According to Lewis, early, ongoing abuse is the leading cause of severe dissociation. A child who is victimized by one of their parents often faces a crushing dissonance between their need for the caregiver for survival, and their need to protect themselves from that same person. This conflict can split a child’s sense of self, enabling them to break from reality during episodes of extreme stress. In those states, some say it feels like the abuse is happening to someone else, or that the other self is stronger than they are, more equipped to endure the pain.

Some dissociators describe feeling like they’re watching themselves from the outside; others say they notice the shift happening in their bodies first, as if they’re physically turning into another person. Some become stronger or weaker, or more like a man or like a woman. Often, the dissociator compartmentalizes these experiences into a separate consciousness, known as an “alter,” and then doesn’t remember it at all.

Dissociative states exist on a continuum, Lewis says, ranging from “zoning out” during a meeting to the full-blown dissociative identity disorder, in which the mind splits into distinct personalities that can take control all on their own. Bundy didn’t necessarily have the disorder, Lewis believes, but his altered states were distinct enough that he sometimes described his urge to kill as “an entity” that spoke in a low, cruel voice. Another of Bundy’s interviewers, Stephen Michaud, described it as “a sociopathology in which the ‘entity’ was both in and *of* the killer, not some alien presence or second self, but a purely destructive power that grew from within.”

Lewis also recalled another sign, which came just after he was sentenced to death in his second trial. Bundy, being led out of the court, yelled to the press: “They still haven’t convinced me that I did it.”

But the most compelling piece of evidence came years after Bundy’s death. His ex-wife gave Lewis a collection of his old letters. As she flipped through them, she noticed that Bundy’s signature changed from page to page. And at the bottom of one, it was signed with a different name altogether: Sam. “It blew my mind,” Lewis said.

It was only then that she realized she’d made “a real mistake.” She started to read the letters more closely and found that “Sam” appeared several times. In one remarkable instance, Bundy was writing about how hungry he was, but then interrupted his own train of thought and wrote, “Patience, Sam, dinner will be here soon,” she recalled.

Bundy appeared to be slipping in and out of a personality named after his grandfather. “That he dissociated there can be no question,” Lewis said, “and the typical thing is to make the abuser one of your personalities.” Even though victims may feel rage toward their abuser, it’s “almost never” acted out against the parent, Lewis said, “because the parent is the protector as well. It gets displaced onto other people.” Bundy’s ongoing denial of Sam’s abuse, despite other family members’ accounts, fit this pattern. “He *loved* his grandfather, he was a paragon,” she says. “Isn’t it interesting that Bundy signs Sam—why doesn’t he sign his uncle Jack?”

Lewis believes she once met this Sam. It was the only time in her decades of interviewing serial killers that she feared for her life. She and Bundy had spent all that morning sitting at a table across from each other in a cramped concrete cell. She was so engrossed in their conversation that she lost track of time. Around noon, her stomach grumbled and she looked to the soundproof glass window to signal to the guard that she was ready to break for a snack. But he wasn’t there.

Suddenly she noticed the configuration of the room: Bundy’s seat was near the door while her chair was backed up against the wall. The guard had gone to lunch, along with the rest of the administrative staff. She was penned in a room alone with the world’s most notorious serial killer. She had never felt afraid of Bundy, but suddenly this person looking at her didn’t seem like Bundy.

“You were saying?” she asked, pretending not to have noticed the missing guard. Bundy’s demeanor turned stiff and aloof. He was often moody—sometimes acting manic, sometimes affectless—and he changed his story all the time. But this was different. He made an abrupt declaration: “The man sitting before you never killed anyone.” It sounded to her like a warning: *Don’t question me*. He had already described the murders to her in depth, but she decided not to disagree.

In retrospect, she said, “I think it was a very different man sitting across from me than the person I had interviewed the day before.”

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Bundy’s looks made it almost impossible for some people to see him as a killer. “Everybody wanted this ‘Ted’ to be someone you could pick out,” said Kathleen McChesney, a lead detective on the Washington murders. “He wasn’t that way.”

Bundy knew it. When police went looking for a suspect, “which one are they going to pick?” he once said. “The law student with no criminal background or are they going to go after the guy with the arrest record for robbery, you know the types, the real weirdos. People don’t realize murderers don’t come out in the dark with long teeth and saliva dripping off their chin.”

Even when indisputable evidence piled up against him, some still couldn’t fathom him as a killer. “There must have been some terrible mistake,” a *New York Times* reporter wrote in 1978, when Bundy was found guilty of raping and bludgeoning to death two women. “Here was a young man who represented the best in America, not its worst. Here was this terrific looking man with light brown hair and blue eyes, looking rather Kennedy-esque, dressed in a beige turtleneck and dark blue blazer, a smile turning the corners of his lean all-American mouth.”

The judge, too, had a hard time reconciling the two sides of Bundy. He had just sentenced him to death for the “extremely wicked, shockingly evil” murders of two Florida sorority sisters—which, he noted, were “the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain and utter indifference to human life”—yet he admitted in the same breath to feeling genuine warmth toward Bundy. “You’d have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner,” he went on. “Take care of yourself. I don’t feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that.”

On the other hand, Bundy’s monstrosity made it impossible for some people to see him as human. To the crowds cheering on his death outside the prison, he was pure evil. Bundy recalled a reporter in those days describing him as “an emotional robot, nothing inside.”

At first Bundy seemed insulted. “Boy, how far off can he be! If they think I have no emotional life, they’re wrong,” he said.

But the monster in him was pleased. “They see me as *part* of a human being, so they don’t know what the other part is capable of—and that’s terrific. They won’t be able to anticipate.”

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At Radcliffe, Lewis wrote her senior thesis on the uses of light in Paul Valéry’s poem “La jeune parque” (“The Young Fate”). A couple of weeks before it was due, she was sitting on her bed rereading the poem when a line jumped out at her: “The charming neck seeking the winged huntress.”

It was a surprising reversal—the neck, perhaps the most vulnerable part of the body, offered itself to the predator. She also spotted a second reversal in the same phrase, in the “winged huntress.” Usually, “it is the prey that is feathered,” Lewis said.

The line reminded her of Freud’s theory about reversals in dreams, where people and situations appear as the exact opposite of what they are in real life. Turning something into its opposite is a way to protect oneself from a frightening or dangerous feeling. A professional triumph, for example, might be followed by a dream of humiliation for someone who is unconsciously afraid of success, or walking up steps might give the sensation of going down. “It’s a ‘topsy-turvy’ world,” Freud said. “In the dream, often enough the hare shoots the hunter.”

That image, the reversal of the hunter and the hunted, has stayed with Lewis to this day.

“I knew every light image in that poem, but who cared?” she thought. She couldn’t continue to write that thesis. She went to her adviser and he agreed to give her two extra weeks. She threw away everything she’d written and began thinking back to what she’d learned in her freshman-year class with Henry Murray.

Valéry’s poem followed structures of Freudian logic. It starts with the female protagonist falling in and out of sleep. Soon images begin to appear to the woman and then disappear. Lines rupture and trail off. Thoughts relate and then disconnect. The famously complex poem doesn’t make much logical sense, but it follows an intuitive emotional narrative. The character is conflicted over her sexual longings and the guilt that follows them. So she waits. She burns. And then she splits.

“I saw myself seeing myself,” the protagonist says.

Valéry had expressed in verse the “divided self” of a Freudian dream state. “She is like two (sometimes three) different people,” Lewis would write of the narrator in her thesis.

“In psychiatry, when people dissociate you often hear that they feel they’ve gone up to the ceiling and they see themselves,” she says. “Dissociation is so much like what Valéry was writing about. ‘Je me voyais me voir.’ You’re more than one person.”

The reversal of the hare into the hunter sounded a lot like what happens in the stories she tells about the lives of her murderers, I tell her.

“Of course,” she says. “And I’m chasing them.”

*** Chapter 4: Mind Games

<strong>T</strong>he room was empty except for a few chairs, a mirror, a spotlight, and a video camera. When one of the twenty-two Harvard undergraduates participating in the experiment walked in, he wasn’t told what the study was about, just that he was going to have a debate about some of his beliefs.

All he knew was what appeared on the initial call for participants: “Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems (parts of an on-going program of research in the development of personality), by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?” The study had the deceptively prosaic title of “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.” To participate, he simply had to share a few of his most closely held values in an essay, and engage in a discussion about them.

Except that was all a lie. Instead, once accepted, students were asked to submit hundreds of pages of personal essays and fill out dozens of invasive questionnaires. They were instructed to divulge details about their gastrointestinal functioning, their parents’ sex lives, the age they first masturbated, their sexual fantasies, any trust issues, and what they’d be willing to die for.

When a student came into the clinic a researcher strapped electrodes onto his head and attached a cardiotachometer to monitor his pulse and respiratory rates. He shined a harsh light onto his face like in a police interrogation. Then, an older law student came in and started berating the undergraduate’s essay point by point. He ridiculed his intelligence and made sophisticated arguments to undermine his value system. He attacked him in “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” ways with the ultimate goal of making the student “withdraw” his statements, according to the study’s creator, Henry Murray.

“I had a sensation somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair,” one student with the code name Cringle later said. Then, “Wham! Wham! Wham!” came the insults, “and me getting hotter and more irritated and my heart beat going up.… There I was under the lights and with movie camera and all this experimentation equipment on me.”

“I remember being shocked by the severity of the attack, and I remember feeling helpless to respond,” another student, known as Locust, later recalled. “What is the point of this? They have deceived me, telling me there was going to be a discussion, when in fact there was an attack.”

Some students endured the insults in silent shame, others exploded in anger. One even responded violently, nearly starting a fist fight with the interrogator. “I remember responding with unabating rage,” recalled a participant nicknamed Drill twenty-five years later.

Each session was filmed and then played back to the student to relive the original humiliation as well as experience the new one of watching himself lose control. When the movies were replayed a week later “the experience had not yet faded from or weakened in their memory,” according to a researcher in the study; “indeed the movie intensified the emotional reactions easily because they still endured.”

One student, dubbed Illsley, described the mortification he felt watching himself on screen: “Oh, God. I get—you can hear my accent. I just think it was horrible. I mean, I just was tied in knots; all I could do was stutter.… I don’t want to talk about it. Too embarrassing to talk about it.… I’m mad at all of you to make such a spectacle of myself. I don’t want to continue with these tests anymore.”

When the recordings were played back a year and a half later, Illsley’s first response was that it was still “very painful” to watch. Others reported that seeing themselves in such a degraded state fundamentally changed them. Some consciously started to suppress the hand gestures and tics they saw in themselves; others simply “wanted to forget.”

It was another lie that the study would require only two hours a week for one school year. In reality, many students spent two hundred hours at the clinic over the course of three years, from 1959 to 1962.

In some cases, they were passed around to graduate students to use as subjects in their own projects. One remorseful researcher later told author Alston Chase, “We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?”

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Despite the unscrupulous means, the experiment’s underlying motivation was idealistic. Murray, steeped in theories about the fascist personality through his work with the OSS, wanted to understand and engineer new, cooperative personality types. He used his part of a $456,000 federal grant, given to his and a dozen similar experiments at Harvard in 1959, to “discover all that can be known (more than has ever yet been known) about 20 or more stressful, dyadic episodes.”

He knew his studies came with risks, but this utopian project required “transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history,” he wrote.

But what transformations did he really enact?

In the case of the experiment designed to humiliate Harvard students, Murray intentionally sought out vulnerable personalities, like one shy seventeen-year-old student who ranked high in Murray’s alienation metrics. The young prodigy, one of the only Harvard boys to come from a working-class family, later recalled that he had been “pressured into participating in the Murray study against my better judgment.” Murray dubbed this quiet and obedient participant Lawful.

When Lawful showed up for his sessions, the researcher insulted his looks and intelligence. He told the boy that the ideas in his essay were “insipid” and “asinine.” The results concluded that Lawful had the most severe reactions to the sessions of any of the students. He and his experimenter displayed the most disagreement and mutual criticism. “Lawful—low, underlying resentment and contempt,” Murray wrote in the margins next to his scores.

As this went on over three years, Lawful began to have nightmares and revenge fantasies. He dreamed of becoming “an agitator, rousing mobs to frenzies of revolutionary violence.” Lawful developed an intense fear of mind control and dreamed about fighting back against his tormentors. But he didn’t have the courage to turn those fantasies into action because, as he later wrote, “I was too strongly conditioned … against any defiance of authority.”

Instead, Lawful plotted a liberation through escape, by living alone in nature. A decade after the Harvard study concluded, Lawful wrote from his cabin in the woods that “continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in the extinction of individual liberty.” It wasn’t enough to philosophize about it, he said; enlightened members of the public had to adopt “a program of concrete action.” His first attempt was to form an organization devoted to halting all federal aid to scientific research. But soon, by the late 1970s, inspired by environmental radicals, Lawful turned to more direct, violent approaches.

Lawful started mailing pipe bombs to professors, psychologists, and scientists, eventually killing three people and injuring twenty-three over nearly two decades. The Unabomber, as the FBI would dub him, truly believed that “the system” was slowly starving Americans of their freedom, and they needed to be shaken out of complacency. Much has been written about Ted Kaczynski’s madness, some undoubtedly true, but given his experience at Harvard, his fears about science and the government were founded in reality. The CIA *was* conducting mind-control studies at universities and he *was* the unwitting lab rat of one of its experimenters. And in his monomaniacal pursuit to prevent techno-tyranny, Kaczynski wasn’t so different from Murray, who similarly believed that healing society required human suffering. Murray said his work would eradicate monsters, but instead, it made one of himself, and possibly of a teenage boy.

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The first bomb appeared in 1978, outside the science and engineering building at the University of Illinois Chicago. A woman spotted a package in the parking lot, stamped and addressed, and assumed someone had dropped it without noticing. She mailed it to the return address, an engineering professor at Northwestern University.

When the man received the long wooden box, on which the word “OPEN” had been carved, he was immediately alarmed. His name in the return address was not written in his handwriting. He called in a university safety officer, who decided to open the tiny wooden door. The movement triggered a nail to collide with a cluster of match heads, which ignited the pipe bomb inside. A fairly primitive device, it left the officer with only minor injuries to his hand.

One year later, again at Northwestern, a graduate student picked up a cigar box that had been placed on a table inside the university’s Technological Institute. As he opened it, the box exploded and started a fire in the room. The bomb, again, caused the victim only minor cuts and burns.

In both cases, campus police notified the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The two young agents assigned to the bombings investigated briefly, but when they didn’t turn up any leads, they closed the case. No one notified the FBI until six months later, after the bomber made a much bolder attempt.

On November 15, 1979, the smell of smoke filled the cabin of an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, DC. Pilots heard a thud and the internal pressure dropped. The crew rerouted for an emergency landing. Had it taken even ten minutes longer, everyone would have died from smoke inhalation.

The FBI’s chief bomb expert, Chris Ronay, raced to the tarmac as soon as he was alerted. When he reached the plane, airport security workers were hauling out a large mail container from cargo. It was smoking. Inside Ronay found a cottonwood box containing the remnants of a simple bomb, made from four C batteries, a juice can, fireworks, and a barometer to measure pressure changes due to altitude. It was intended to explode once the plane reached a certain altitude but it only partially detonated. It was such a unique, clearly handcrafted bomb that Ronay wondered if there had been any other reports of similar devices that he could compare it to. He sent a description of the bomb around to other agencies and crime labs to ask whether it sounded familiar.

One of the ATF investigators from the Chicago campus bombings responded, inviting Ronay to come examine their evidence. It turned out that all three bombs included parts like hand-machined screws, plumbing pipes, wooden dowels, and lamp cords. Ronay concluded that they were all constructed by the same person, whom he dubbed the “junkyard bomber.” When the FBI officially took up the case, it named it UNABOM, short for “university” and “airline” bomber.

The delay in linking those first three bombs was the first major mistake in the investigation. The case suffered many of the same bureaucratic setbacks and interagency communication lapses that had impeded the hunt for Ted Bundy. The Postal Inspection Service had jurisdiction over bombs sent through the mail, while the FBI handled university and airline bombings (the campus police made a mistake in referring the first two bombs to the ATF). None of these agencies tended to communicate, giving the Unabomber time to hone his craft.

“Everyone seems to think that we were aware of these bombs in chronological order, which we were not, and I believe strongly that this was one of the contributing factors to the case not being resolved earlier,” special agent Max Noel said years later.

The Unabomber’s increasingly sophisticated craftsmanship made him, as Ronay put it, “one of the most creative and elusive serial bombers ever encountered.” He stripped the casings off batteries to remove serial numbers. He soaked stamps in soybean oil and saltwater to remove fingerprints. His screws and other materials were either homemade or so commonplace that they could be traced to any junkyard or big-box store in the country. When he went to mail a bomb, he disguised himself with hair dye and wore bulky jackets; sometimes he stuffed his nose with tissue.

Over the next seven years, authorities could do nothing but watch as bombs exploded at campuses across the US—at the University of Utah, Vanderbilt, and Berkeley—and at aviation-related sites, including a Boeing plant and the home of the United Airlines president. Otherwise, the targets were seemingly chosen at random. And with each passing year, the bomber appeared more determined to make his mark.

Four devices went off in 1985 alone, leading the FBI to declare it the “Year of the Unabomber.” One tore off a Berkeley student’s fingers, another was defused before detonating. A third targeted the University of Michigan psychology professor James V. McConnell, who famously advocated using sensory deprivation, drugs, hypnosis, and psychological manipulation to gain “absolute control over an individual’s behavior” and “reshape our society drastically.” McConnell’s assistant was with him and opened the package, disguised as a dissertation manuscript. Shrapnel tore through his fingers, and both men suffered hearing loss.

By the end of the year, the Unabomber achieved his first kill. On a winter afternoon, thirty-eight-year-old Hugh Scrutton walked out the back door of his computer-rental store in a Sacramento strip mall. In the parking lot he saw a block of wood with nails sticking out of it. When he went to pick it up, it exploded. Splinters and nails pierced his heart while the blast flung him ten feet through the air. Mall employees rushed outside as he cried for help. Scrutton’s assistant tried to administer CPR, but it was no use. He was dead within thirty minutes.

When the bomb examiners arrived they found components like those they’d seen in previous devices: the same solder, wires, stripped-down batteries, and a metal tag mysteriously imprinted with the letters “FC.” This bomb, too, had been sealed inside a beautifully crafted wooden box. There was no question whose work it was. The FBI labeled Scrutton’s death “UNABOM Event Number Eleven.”

Investigators in Sacramento raced to interview the owners of one hundred cars in the mall’s parking lot. They used a new database to cross-check the names of three thousand people staying in the area against those of students at universities with which the Unabomber might have affiliations. No matches turned up. Agents asked every survivor who had received a bomb to fill out a questionnaire with hundreds of items: Where do you get your hair cut? Where did you go to grade school? High school? What was the zip code? In the end, the only discernible parallel among the targets was that they were highly educated white men.

The FBI had tried to keep its investigation of the unknown bomber under wraps until Scrutton’s death, after which it became impossible not to answer to the public. Reporters began pressing agents on why they still hadn’t caught the culprit, or even identified a viable suspect. What was the motive? How did he choose his victims? They had no answers.

“As each day passed in 1985, the intensity of the investigation grew until there was diminishing supply of credible leads to logically follow,” wrote special agent Jim Freeman, who led the FBI’s Unabomber task force. “Gradually at first, but then accelerating with the passage of more time, the task force followed the path of least resistance and dissolved itself as the trail grew cold.”

The bomber went silent for seven years. Many came to suspect that he’d finished terrorizing the nation. Perhaps he’d blown himself up, authorities speculated, or gone to prison for another crime. Perhaps he’d retired. “Serial killers get old too, and they get tired,” FBI special agent James R. Fitzgerald said. Sometimes they get married and have kids.

But then, in 1993, the bomber broke the peace with two blasts that went off in quick succession, severely injuring a geneticist and, two days later, a Yale computer science professor. At the same time, the bomber announced his return with a letter to *The New York Times* that was signed by “a group calling ourselves FC,” which stood for “Freedom Club.” They promised “a newsworthy event” in the near future.

The FBI investigation, jolted back to life, faced two formidable problems. First, how to unite an army of federal authorities whose agencies were not used to collaborating; and second, how to solve a case with virtually no evidence. Over the eighteen years the Unabomber was at large he easily outwitted the FBI’s new superintelligent computers and 150 full-time investigators supplied with a $50 million budget. Agents had so many suspects they had to develop new software to sort the thousands of names. They set up an 800-number tip line and offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the Unabomber.

The bomber played mind games with the FBI, planting cryptic messages and red herrings to waste their time. Once he taped a single strand of hair to the wire joints in a bomb; investigators rejoiced at discovering their first-ever piece of DNA evidence—only to later discover it was a pubic hair that he’d collected from a public bathroom.

Another time he left the imprint of a note on the margins of a letter he wrote to *The New York Times*. The FBI chemically processed the paper and revealed the indented words, invisible to the naked eye, that read: “Call Nathan R wed 7 pm.” Agents tracked down twelve thousand Nathan R’s around the US. “But one by one, they were all eliminated,” Freeman said. It was yet another stunt by the bomber to throw them off track. “No high-profile FBI case that I could recall had lingered and festered on the vine like UNABOM.”

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In 1995, “FC” sent several media outlets a fifty-six-page essay warning about the cataclysmic threat technology posed to humankind. He believed the “elites” had developed modern conveniences like computers, television, and pharmaceuticals to seduce, sedate, and ultimately control the public. Tech gadgets were tools of psychological manipulation, providing users a false sense of gratification while distracting them from the technocrats’ true goal: to turn them into human automatons, serving the whims of the ruling class.

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system,” he wrote.

It was too late for mere insubordination. Industrial science was already muzzling anyone who questioned the system. Psychiatrists, for example, peddled antidepressants to cure legitimate feelings of alienation, while sex and violence on TV provided proxies for desires people no longer lived. The only remaining escape was to “go off the grid” into nature. Freedom in American society was no longer possible. “The process of deindustrialization probably will be very chaotic and involve much suffering,” the manifesto read.

FC demanded that either *The New York Times* or *The Washington Post* publish the article in full. If they acquiesced, the violence would stop; if not, “we will start building our next bomb.”

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James R. Fitzgerald, known in the Bureau as Fitz, has been fascinated by criminals and predators since he was a child growing up in Philadelphia. He read every Sherlock Holmes story and dressed up like the heroes from TV Westerns. He loved watching nature shows to observe how the carnivores’ instincts guided them to their prey. Years later, when he worked as a plainclothes police officer in a suburb of Philadelphia, he noticed that human predators displayed similar responses right before they struck. He would watch as they looked for their marks; “their eyes would be darting” around, he said. “I could watch through binoculars and say ‘alright—his eyes—he’s gonna hit any minute. Get your car over there on the west side. I’m in the middle.’ ”

After eleven years working with the police, where he was frequently stuck on a low-level graffiti beat, Fitz decided to join the FBI. He started out in 1987 in the New York City field office, first on the bank-robbery unit and then the gang squad, all the while commuting back and forth from Pennsylvania. On the side, he earned a master’s degree in human organization science, which came in handy when his supervisor mentioned that the headquarters in Quantico was staffing up with eighteen new criminal profilers. It was an enormous hiring spree for a unit that typically only ever brought in one or two new guys at a time. Fitz saw it as an opportunity to put his background in organizational psychology to use, and to get out of New York.

About six weeks after he applied, Fitz got the promotion to join the Behavioral Science Unit. At his going-away party, a colleague drew a caricature of Fitzgerald with a caption that read, “Wonder if I’m gonna meet any celebrities at BSU?” Pictured beside him was a straitjacketed Hannibal Lecter in a hockey mask from the recently released film *Silence of the Lambs*. Fitz didn’t know when he left for his three-month profiler training in Quantico that John Douglas, who was the real-life inspiration for *Silence of the Lambs* special agent Jack Crawford, would be his teacher, and that the book’s author, Thomas Harris, had sat in on Douglas’s classes as research.

At the academy, Douglas often projected examples of the profiles he’d written over the years, including the Unabomber’s. There was no “profiling” textbook then, but experts came in to lecture on the various psychological abnormalities and depravities they specialized in. FBI agent Ken Lanning spoke about child predators, for example, and forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz on autoerotic fatalities.

Fitz learned to determine whether a perpetrator left a crime scene in an organized or disorganized state, and whether anything appeared intentionally staged. And while it was important to note the modus operandi—the method by which a crime is carried out—it mattered less to profilers whether the criminal used rope or duct tape as the weapon than whether such a choice indicated a particular form of emotional gratification. One of his favorite classes was special agent Susan Adams’s “Statement Analysis,” on how to read between the lines of what suspects said in interviews.

To celebrate the end of his training, Fitz went on vacation to the Jersey Shore with his wife and three children. That’s when he got the call. His unit chief had rung him to say that there had been a request from the San Francisco division for a profiler to assist on a major case. John Douglas was retiring and they needed someone new. It would just be for thirty days. “Would you be interested?”

What Fitz didn’t know is that the FBI had recently established the centralized UNABOM task force in San Francisco, where some of the bomber’s letters had been postmarked, and that its leaders were growing frustrated with the lack of useful psychological profiles on their “unsub,” or unidentified subject. “It’s incredible at this stage of our investigation that we haven’t been able to get a comparison of behavioral characteristics between the very few serial bombers in the history books,” such as the “Mad Bomber” George Metesky, Freeman said, “with that of our Unabomber.” Unlike killers who came into contact with their victims personally, bombers may not even know who their victims are. They seemed to be “a different animal” entirely.

The FBI profiles thus far tended to state the obvious, or put forth the same theories one could glean from basic deductive reasoning: that the bomber was a white male—as was pretty much every serial bomber in American history—and that he was probably an angry person. Other parts of the profiles differed so widely that it was impossible to draw any conclusions: They variously placed him anywhere between eighteen and fifty-three years old, and his education level somewhere between high school and partial PhD. “What can an investigator really use in any of this?” one agent wondered.

Over a period of about fifteen years, Douglas had written various profiles of the bomber with a few more specifics. He noted at one point that most perpetrators start their criminal careers at around twenty-five years old, but the Unabomber was sophisticated, so he was probably more like late twenties or early thirties. Douglas also looked for an “emotional signature”: What satisfaction did the perpetrator get out of the crime? In the case of the Unabomber, it would probably be found somewhere in his earliest bombings, because criminals are at their most emotionally raw when they’re first triggered. In this case, those were at universities, leading Douglas to predict that the bomber was a failed academic.

Fitz knew that, as a rookie, his supervisor on the call wasn’t really asking. And anyway it was the honor of a lifetime to step into Douglas’s shoes, so he agreed to the transfer, not yet knowing that he’d be joining—and playing a pivotal role in—the longest-running, most expensive case in FBI history.

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Ted Kaczynski and his brother, David, recall very different childhoods. The sons of Wanda and Theodore Kaczynski Sr., both of Polish heritage, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Turk, as their father was known, made sausage for a living and was a self-taught intellectual. He read voraciously and invited friends over to discuss books and current events. Wanda had similar inclinations; instead of reading children’s books to her sons, she often read them *Scientific American*. When the family briefly moved to Iowa for Turk’s job, Wanda completed her college degree and became a schoolteacher.

David, who is seven years younger than his brother, describes Wanda and Turk as “loving, supportive” parents who took the boys on camping and museum trips and served on the PTA. Ted, on the other hand, remembers his father as depressive and remote, and his mother as “crabby and irritable.” After David was born, the family fought all the time, according to Ted, and he in particular was subjected to emotional and verbal abuse.

By most accounts, Ted was a polite, well-behaved boy, who excelled at school and was adored by teachers. One of them said Ted had “one of the greatest contributions to make to society” of all her students; another praised his “respect for law and order.” He said his troubles started in the fifth grade, when he scored at a “genius” level on an IQ test. The school advised his parents to skip him ahead a year. The guidance counselor assured them that Ted was mature enough; a personality test had suggested he was very well adjusted and “could be whatever he wanted to be.”

To Ted, however, this was devastating news. He said that it ripped him away from his crush, Darlene, one of the only girls who flirted with him in his entire life. He even wrote from prison years later that their “love undoubtedly would have worked out in the end if circumstances hadn’t separated us.” In his new class the older girls didn’t notice him at all. Unfortunately, the boys did. “I was often subjected to insults or other indignities by the dominant boys. My attempts to make advances to girls had such humiliating results that for many years afterward, even until after the age of thirty, I found it excruciatingly difficult—almost impossible—to make advances to women,” he wrote. Already introverted and small for his age, Ted was now a ten-year-old runt among rapidly growing seventh graders. “I quickly slid down near the bottom of the pecking-order, and I stayed there until I graduated from high school.”

Over time, he started acting out more at home. His mother took note of his increasingly volatile temperament: rude one moment and then kind and gentle the next<em>.</em> It got worse when, at the start of his sophomore year, Ted’s school again found that he was outpacing his peers academically and recommended he skip another grade.

Ted excelled at math, played the trombone, learned German, joined the chess, coin, and biology clubs, and yet took almost no pleasure in his accomplishments. His parents, he said, didn’t either, choosing to focus more on the A’s he didn’t receive than those he did. They also blamed him for failing to form friendships, calling him too “aloof.” Ted came to see his greatest strength—his intellect—as the root of his “frustrated rage.”

Ted graduated from high school just as he turned sixteen. He left his teachers filled with hope for their hometown prodigy as he headed off to Harvard. “One of the best students I ever taught,” Ted’s government instructor said of him. Ted was less optimistic about where he was in life: “By the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak,” he said. Tragically, the humiliation had only just begun.

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Kaczynski’s first year at Harvard started off surprisingly well. Upon taking the medical exam required of all incoming freshmen, the university physician deemed him physically and emotionally healthy. “Talks easily, fluently and pleasantly,” he reported, “likes people and gets on well with them.… Exceedingly stable, well integrated and feels secure within himself.” For a while, Kaczynski even seemed to turn his shyness into an advantage. He threw himself into his studies and finally began to draw confidence from his intelligence. “I got something that I had been needing all along without knowing it, namely, hard work requiring self-discipline and strenuous exercise of my abilities,” he wrote. “Feeling the strength of my own will, I became enthusiastic about will power.”

But then in his sophomore year, he was moved into Eliot House, which one yearbook described as the dorm for Harvard’s most “pretentious” and “aristocratic” students. And rather than living in the suites with living rooms and multiple bedrooms on the lower floors, Kaczynski was assigned with other scholarship students to the tiny solitary rooms on the top floor, in what were previously the servants’ quarters.

“There was a good deal of snobbery at Harvard,” he later wrote. Describing the legacy students and his other privileged classmates, he said “their speech, manners, and dress were so much more ‘cultured’ than mine.” They wore knee socks and Brooks Brothers jackets, while he owned just two pairs of pants.

Kaczynski felt the indignity of his status keenly. “The house master often treated me with insulting condescension. He seemed to have a particular dislike for me,” he recalled. Indeed, when Kaczynski requested the written evaluations he needed in order to renew his scholarship each year, the house master always inserted disparaging comments about him. The first time, he wrote that Kaczynski’s “chief activity” as a sophomore “is to have grown a wispish beard and to practice the trumpet” (it was actually the trombone). The following year, he wrote that Kaczynski’s “midyear performance of three A’s and a B begin to justify the curious act of imagination that got him here.”

Kaczynski spent more and more time in his messy room, no bigger than his log cabin in the woods would be, solving math equations and then throwing the crumpled-up scraps of paper into an overflowing wastebasket. “When my first attempts to make friends met with a cool reception, I just gave up and became solitary,” he wrote.

One of the men in Kaczynski’s dorm was the young psychologist Kenneth Keniston, who worked as a fellow and as a research assistant to Murray. He was writing a book about alienation—a disposition that was becoming a hallmark of the national mood at the time. It was the idle comfort turned to malaise that defined films like *Rebel Without a Cause* or the novel *The Outsiders*. Keniston explored how a generation of disaffected young people had come to reject traditional norms, jobs, and institutions in a kind of aimless revolt against technological society. (Keniston’s 1965 book, *The Uncommitted*, about the alienating effects of technology, was among those found in Kaczynski’s cabin after his arrest.)

It’s not known exactly how Murray enlisted Kaczynski in his experiment. The initial call for participants appeared in a flyer posted in Murray’s psychology class, which Kaczynski never took. Murray and his team at the clinic started sorting the seventy students who did volunteer into groups. They selected a dozen whom they considered to be of “average” well-being. They also looked for a few who fell into each of the two opposing extremes: social outcasts—those who “avowed alienation, lack of identity, pessimism, etc.,” as Murray put it—and those who displayed “optimal physical, mental, and social well-being.” It’s possible that Keniston noticed the alienated young Kaczynski and played a role in recruiting him for the experiment.

In a prescreening, Kaczynski ranked at the furthest end of the alienation spectrum. All the other participants in the study were older and came from well-to-do families. One’s father was an architect, one a professor, another owned a factory. Only Ted’s father worked for a factory. “Of course there were people there from all walks of life, but apparently the system there was run by people who came from the ‘right’ cultural background,” Kaczynski wrote. There was perhaps no better example of this than Murray himself, who had used his name and family wealth to buy his way to the top of the clinic and shape it in his image. Keniston, meanwhile, was “a member of the house master’s inner clique,” Kaczynski wrote, and the son of a renowned Harvard-educated linguist.

Kaczynski has said that Keniston, whom he spent time with during the experiment, pretended not to know him in public. “Two or three times when I met him at Eliot House I said ‘hello.’ In each case this psychologist answered my greeting in a low tone, looking off in another direction and hurrying away as if he didn’t want to stop and talk to me,” Kaczynski recalled later in a letter to his mother. “I’ve thought this over, and the only half-way plausible [explanation I can think of for this behavior] is that this man didn’t want to be seen socializing with someone who wasn’t dressed properly and wasn’t acceptable to the clique of which he was a member.”

It’s not clear why Kaczynski continued to participate in the experiment. But the modest stipend it provided may have been one incentive. Another was the promise of a party at the end of the study with the women at Radcliffe College. David said that their mother probably also encouraged Ted because she hoped the psychologists would help him with his social skills. She didn’t know that he had been chosen precisely for his vulnerabilities, and for the purpose not of healing him but breaking him.

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On a March evening in 1960, Kaczynski arrived for “Dyadic Session <verbatim>#12.”</verbatim> An interviewer identified in a transcript as Quinn Cherry exchanged an essay about his personal philosophies on life with one that Kaczynski, then seventeen, had written.

Kaczynski chose to write about the philosophy of morality. “I can’t see any objective basis for accepting any set of values, any philosophy, etc. rather than any other,” he wrote. Anyone who dictates how another person “should” behave is merely expressing their own emotions. “There is no morality or objective set of values.”

Murray sorted the student papers into three categories, ranging from those with the least developed arguments, with “vague or unformed philosophies,” to the most persuasive efforts, or those that expressed “goals which conceivably can be lived by.” Kaczynski’s paper fell into the first group—and his interrogator set out to make that clear.

The experimenter overseeing the session, identified only as Dr. W., began by adjusting the bright lights and then sounding the buzzer for the session to start. Once the tape was rolling, Cherry asked Kaczynski, gently at first, to clarify certain points in his argument. Then he asked Kaczynski if anything was unclear about his own essay, to which Kaczynski replied, “Well, uh, a lot of things.”

Cherry cut him off: “Don’t go gunning at me now,” he warned. “That comes later.”

“I ought to warn you that I do not have a very favorable impression of you as a result of reading your philosophy,” he told Kaczynski.

“First,” he said, there was Kaczynski’s idea that reality is subjective and that the philosophy of “sense data” cannot be proved true. “This is essentially an asinine point of view.… I think if you took the trouble to have the … intellectual honesty or something to go and read a book on epistemology, you’d perhaps see … where your logical processes have broken down completely.”

Then he moved on to Kaczynski’s claim that an individual owes nothing to society—an “insipid remark” and an “immature” view, Cherry said. “Your convictions tend to be all wet.”

“Although you did a great deal of breast beating, à la Tarzan, about strength and individuality,” he went on, “I’ve sensed an overriding sense of ah, I don’t know really whether I’d call it weakness or fear.… It just sort of permeates your entire philosophy.… You don’t seem to me to have the courage of your convictions.”

Kaczynski asked him how he would “prove that sense data are true.”

Cherry again suggested that Kaczynski go read a book on epistemology. Then he added: “If a person is as egocentric, conceited … as you are, it would seem to me that you should prize intellectual honesty although I didn’t see very much of it in your philosophy.”

Kaczynski tried to redirect the debate back to its substance, saying, “You haven’t given me any arguments or reasons.”

Cherry ignored him. “On this avoiding of society, or of society is a bad thing, is that why you’re growing a beard?”

“No,” Kaczynski said.

“I mean, are you conforming with the non-conformists?”

“No, I’m not conforming with the non-conformists.… I mean, really, this isn’t really a beard yet.”

“You’re darn right it’s not.”

“I’m well aware of that. But now, you’ve been just applying a lot of labels in attacking me, you have not given any logical reasoning.” …

“Oh, Mr. Kaczynski, I don’t know if you’ve been following it or not. But I think they’ve been quite apparent.” …

“You haven’t really criticized my views except in that you’ve applied labels. You have not analyzed them in any way and attacked them logically.”

“Well there isn’t too much to analyze, Mr. Kaczynski. It’s a lot of garbage. If that’s another label, then make the most of it, but that’s just about what I think that your philosophy is and the paper it’s written on, it suggests an equally pragmatic use for it.… I think it was a fine paper before you put your philosophy in it. I’m sure it was high-grade bond.”

“Now you’re getting completely out of the logical or intellectual tone of discussion.”

“What’s the matter, can’t you defend yourself?”

They took another break and then the experimenter changed course to allow Kaczynski to address Cherry’s essay.

“Devastate me with your sophomore wisdom and logic,” Cherry said.

Kaczynski responded that he read the paper “several times with care,” but found it consisting of “a lot of wishful thinking.” All Cherry made were “statements of belief and feeling.” Cherry’s belief in God, for instance—could he present evidence for His existence?

“I believe in God,” Cherry said.

“Wishful thinking, in other words.”

“If you want to degenerate to that level, call it wishful thinking.”

“Well I’m not degenerating any lower than—Freud, for example, he said the same thing, in essence.” …

“You sure you feel you’re in good company?”

Finally, Kaczynski gave up: “This isn’t even a discussion.”

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On September 13, 1995, the publishers of *The Washington Post* and *The New York Times* held a meeting with FBI director Louis Freeh and attorney general Janet Reno to decide whether or not to print the manifesto. Some agents were against publication because they believed the document was yet another calculated distraction. Others thought publishing it wouldn’t do any good because the bomber wouldn’t be able to stop himself, even if he wanted to.

“He’s a bomber and will continue to bomb,” said psychologist and special agent Kathy Puckett. There was also the fear that ceding to a terrorist’s demands would encourage copycats.

Others were in favor of publication. Perhaps it would lure the bomber out to buy a newspaper. Fitzgerald believed someone in the public might recognize the manifesto’s many “unusual lexical features,” such as the numbered paragraphs and old-fashioned descriptors like “broad” and “negro.” He took the bomber at his word that he wouldn’t kill again because he clearly took pride in his work. He always identified his bombs with the “FC” signature, and his letters with a nine-digit number so authorities would know it was him: There was an integrity there, however morally relative, Fitz thought.

Ultimately, Freeh and Reno agreed that the essay should be published. On September 19, *The Washington Post* printed a special insert with the headline “Industrial Society and Its Future.” FBI agents stationed themselves with telephoto lenses to photograph and follow every customer who bought the paper in San Francisco the day it came out. Despite running background checks and surveilling some of them for weeks, not one would turn into a suspect. For months, tips came across the transom, were checked out, and went cold.

The FBI fielded some fifty thousand calls in the wake of the manifesto’s publication. None led to their man. Then, after five months, an attorney contacted an FBI agent in Washington, DC, with an interesting lead: A client of his in Schenectady, New York, believed the manifesto may have been written by his brother.

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David Kaczynski hadn’t been in touch with his brother for years. Ted, after graduating from Harvard at twenty, had gone directly on to earn a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. There, his unfulfilled romantic longings continued until they morphed into something more confusing. He later recounted experiencing “several weeks of intense and persistent sexual excitement involving fantasies of being a female.” He began to seriously consider a sex-change operation, and made an appointment with a campus psychiatrist for a referral. He planned to bluff about his motivation—which was sexual gratification, rather than gender dysphoria—to convince the doctor. But in the waiting room Kaczynski began to feel embarrassed and had second thoughts. When the session started he lied that he was having anxiety over the possibility of being drafted into the military. He left the office overwhelmed with shame and rage. Then he had a revelation:

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*As I walked away from the building afterwards, I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do and I felt—humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn’t care if I died. And so I said to myself, “why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.” What is important is not the words that ran through my mind but the way I felt about them. What was entirely new was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone. My very hopelessness had liberated me because I no longer cared about death. I no longer cared about consequences and I said to myself that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring, irresponsible or criminal.*
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He still had this plan in view when, a few years later, he accepted a job offer from the University of California, Berkeley. It made him, at twenty-five, the youngest professor the school had ever hired. He was not an especially well-liked teacher, but he was a brilliant and prolifically published mathematician who had solved problems no one else could. In fact, he’d proved so many theorems that there weren’t many left in his specialty, “boundary functions,” a field so esoteric that even his math professor at Michigan once declined to describe it, saying, “I simply do not see a way” to make it “readable to the intelligent layman.”

So it was a shock to the Berkeley faculty when Kaczynski, just two years into his tenure-track job, announced his resignation. The dean tried to convince him to stay, but Kaczynski was resolute. He never intended to stay at Berkeley at all. He took the job only in order to earn enough money to move to the wilderness, where he would embark on his true life’s work.

The Christmas after he left Berkeley, Kaczynski wrote in his journal that he intended “to murder a scientist—as a means of revenge against organized society in general and the technological establishment in particular.” Even just the thought of committing murder had a soothing effect on him.

Ted and David had loved taking camping trips together both as children and as adults, sometimes spending months in the wilderness. When Ted left Berkeley, David had just graduated with an English degree from Columbia University and moved to Montana to take a job at a copper company. Ted came to visit and they eventually decided to buy an acre and a half of land together about four miles from the town of Lincoln. David eventually moved on to other places—at one point to Iowa and then to New York—and Ted stayed in Montana to homestead the land. He built a cabin and got by on just $200 a year doing odd jobs for neighbors. He had no electricity or running water and cherished his self-sufficiency: fishing, planting vegetables, barbecuing rabbits and porcupines. “A young man goes through the power process by becoming a hunter,” he would later write in the manifesto, “hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food.”

But he found that society still sometimes intruded upon his solitude: An airplane would fly overhead, or a neighbor would cut logs in his sawmill. “I have been troubled by frustrated hatred much less than usual. I think this is because, whenever I have experienced some outrage (such as a low-flying jet or some official stupidity reported in the paper), as I felt myself growing angry, I calmed myself by thinking—‘just wait till this summer! Then I’ll kill!’ ”

In 1978, Ted visited his brother, then living in Chicago, and planted his first bomb, in a parking lot at the University of Illinois. He was frustrated that he couldn’t find any coverage of its explosion. “I am proud of what I did. But I wish I had some assurance that I succeeded in killing or maiming someone,” he wrote in his journal.

Ted ended up staying for a few months and working for David in a foam-rubber factory. He met a young woman at the plant with whom he went on two dates before she ended their brief relationship. She said it was because they had “nothing in common,” but Ted took it personally, claiming she had used him “as a toy” to stroke her ego. Ted felt so slighted by her rejection that he wrote her a letter saying that the last time he saw her, he had “intended physical violence of a serious nature.” Instead of acting on it, however he posted crude limericks about her “defective figure” around the factory. David fired him immediately and Ted returned to the woods.

After that, Ted began writing furious letters home to his parents, what David likens to “emotional bombs.” Ted threatened to cut them off, but still relied on his parents for occasional money and supplies. He created strict lists of items his mother was allowed to send, including dried fruits and nuts. When she violated the rule, he scolded her: “You sent me a Readers’ Digest,” he wrote once. “Look, stupid, how many times must I tell you not to send me magazines.” When David, who had gone on to become a social worker, told Ted that he’d fallen in love with a woman named Linda Patrik and planned to marry her, Ted responded by offering to buy him a dog collar for Christmas and then instructed him to never write again.

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David honored that request until 1995, when Patrik heard that the Unabomber manifesto was coming out in *The Washington Post*. Patrik, a philosophy professor, thought its subject matter sounded familiar. She had never met Ted, but she knew about him from the many letters he’d sent David over the years. She approached her husband and put her hand on his knee.

“Has it ever occurred to you, even as a remote possibility,” she said, “that your brother might be the Unabomber?”

David couldn’t believe what she was saying. It was insulting. His brother had mental health issues but he wasn’t dangerous.

She continued on, however, pointing out how often Ted had railed against technology, and he had been a professor at Berkeley, where one of the bombs was planted. “If the Unabomber’s manifesto is ever published, would you at least read it and tell me what you honestly think?”

David finally agreed and, a month later, went with her to a library to look it up online. She observed his face while he read. His adrenaline raced. He conceded that there were some views that sounded like Ted’s, but they weren’t enough to convince him. If it was Ted’s voice he was reading, “it came to me muffled through thick layers of dread and denial,” David later wrote.

But then he got to a passage where his “jaw literally dropped.” There was a phrase he’d never heard anybody say before except Ted: “cool-headed logician.” Ted had used it years before to inform David that he was not one.

Now David faced an agonizing decision: What to do with the possibility that his brother might be the Unabomber? Whom to tell, if anyone? What if he told the FBI and Ted turned out to be innocent? He pictured the FBI’s deadly siege at Waco. Would Ted ever forgive him if he found out it was he who made the call?

David decided to write Ted a letter saying he was worried about him, that he missed him and wanted to pay a visit. He hoped that if he got a response he would find in it some sign of his innocence. Instead, he received a distressing reply:

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I am not “suffering, sick or discouraged,” and I don’t know what “indications” you think you have that I am so. But if you want me to get sick, all you have to do is keep trying to communicate with me, because I just get choked with frustration at my inability to get our stinking family off my back once and for all … I DON’T EVER WANT TO SEE YOU OR HEAR FROM YOU, OR ANY OTHER MEMBER OF OUR FAMILY, AGAIN.
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David and his wife hired a lawyer to contact the FBI on their behalf, offering to anonymously turn over some of Ted’s old writings to compare to the manifesto.

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Just before Fitz left for San Francisco, he met with a retired Georgetown University linguist who had read the manifesto. Fitz’s statement analysis class at the academy had introduced him to new frontiers of pronouns and verb tenses, and he was eager to hear how a professional might approach the case. The linguist offered some impressively specific predictions about the manifesto’s author, including that he had not only lived in Chicago at some point but grown up there, and he was now between forty and sixty years old.

Fitz reported the findings back to the task force and offered to use what he’d learned to analyze other aspects of the bomber’s writings. The Bureau agreed; the manifesto was now the focus of the investigation. Fitz boarded the plane in 1995 with stacks of case files and printouts of the fourteen letters the Unabomber had sent to victims and news outlets thus far. He began analyzing all thirty-five thousand words of the manifesto for unusual turns of phrase, regionalisms, acronyms, and other linguistic clues. He read it over and over before something stood out to him. The writer’s grammar was meticulous, but a rare mistake appeared in paragraph 185, the oddly transposed expression, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

A few months later, after Fitzgerald had returned home from San Francisco, he received a call from Terry Turchie, the task force’s assistant special agent in charge. Turchie asked Fitz to get to a fax machine. He would be sending over a twenty-three-page document written in the early 1970s, and he wanted Fitz to compare it to the Unabomber manifesto. He couldn’t tell him anything more than that for now.

When the document arrived, Fitzgerald was instantly struck by the first sentence: “In these pages it is argued that the continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in the extinction of individual liberty.” The similarities between the documents continued from there—corresponding word choices, themes, and phrasings. There were even identical pairings of words: A reference in the manifesto read, “It presumably would be impractical for all people to have electrodes inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by the authorities”; the 1970s text described people experiencing “physical control of the emotions via electrodes and ‘chemitrodes’ inserted in the brain.”

There was no doubt in Fitzgerald’s mind that the papers were written by the same author. In fact, the older document read almost like an outline for the manifesto. Fitz called Turchie back and told him, “You’ve got your man.”

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Now retired, Fitz lives part-time in a gated community near Chesapeake Bay. He still fields a lot of cases, though mostly for film and TV. He was executive producer of A&E’s *Killer Profile* and a consultant for several years on *Criminal Minds*, which was at one point the most-streamed show on TV. “They grasp the idea of what profilers do,” Fitzgerald said of the series, but they stick to a formula: Every case is solved in forty-two minutes, divided into five acts; by the second act, a promising suspect comes forward only to be a false lead; then, at the end, the profilers have to save one last victim, who is almost always a pretty girl or young woman. (“If they make older women the victims, or men, the ratings just weren’t as good,” Fitz said.) Fitz had also appeared on camera as a forensic linguist in a docuseries about JonBenét Ramsey, whose murder he investigated, and in an Oxygen show about the death of two-year-old Caylee Anthony.

When I visited him on a spring afternoon, he wore a summery yellow plaid and his hair loosely combed back. He showed me around the amenities—a golf course, tennis courts, pool, and a club room, where he would sit for an interview the following weekend for a documentary about an unsolved 1970 child murder.

A few days earlier a Nebraska mother had written to him desperate for help finding her twelve-year-old autistic son who had gone missing. “ ‘I know you captured the Unabomber and you know how to look for people,’ ” he recalled her writing. “It was really a heart-wrenching email to read. I get something like this a few times a month.”

Fitzgerald’s work on the Unabomber case had recently been turned into a miniseries called *Manhunt*. The actor Sam Worthington played Fitzgerald as he pieced together clues that would help lead to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski. Some of Fitzgerald’s colleagues complained that the Hollywood portrayal embellished Fitz’s role in the case, which it did (as Hollywood usually does).

Yet others felt the credit was due. “Fitzgerald was depicted in the show as the quiet achiever, he didn’t believe his work was anything sensational,” said the criminologist Wayne Petherick. “But his linguistic work was the most accurate profile of the Unabomber.”

It set him apart from the Behavioral Science Unit’s more traditional methods at a time when they were coming under closer scrutiny. Some agents had raised doubts internally about the merits of profiling, while researchers began publishing studies challenging its efficacy.

Surveys of police departments in England and the US at the time found that officers believed profiling was useful in their investigations. But data didn’t necessarily back those perceptions up. One meta-analysis of experiments from the 1990s to early 2000s found that profilers who examined crime-scene evidence and then made predictions about the lives of the perpetrators fared only as well as, and sometimes slightly worse than, nonprofilers given the same information. At the same time, journal articles came out debunking the use of the Behavioral Science Unit’s signature organized-disorganized typology, and found that profilers relied on outdated beliefs linking behavior to personality traits.

In 1997, the Behavioral Science Unit dropped “science” from its name and became the Behavioral Analysis Unit. John Douglas wrote in *Mindhunter* that he had wanted to get rid of the old title in order to take “the BS out of what we were doing.” (Fitzgerald was out of town during the renaming and when he came back, he told the team, “I don’t think it’s grammatically correct.” It should have been the Behavior Analysis Unit. Too late, they told him, “we already got a pass through Congress and we already have it on the wall.”)

At the same time, many agents were starting to leave “profiler” out of their job titles to avoid an association with racial profiling, a problem just coming to national attention in the wake of an ACLU report showing Black drivers were stopped by police at far higher rates than white drivers, even when they made up a smaller proportion of the population. Today, profilers are more commonly known as criminal investigative analysts.

Some of the shows Fitz has consulted on are still grounded in 1970s stereotypes of profilers. But as he began to tell me the story of his role in the Unabomber manhunt, it became clear that the reality of his work was far more complicated.

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Fitzgerald returned to San Francisco again to help investigate the FBI’s new suspect. He learned that the author of the 1970s essay hadn’t appeared on any suspect lists before. He was a fifty-three-year-old former college professor who lived in a cabin in the Montana mountains. And there were scores of other letters, short stories, and other pieces of writing to analyze, dating back to 1968, thanks to his brother David and their mother Wanda, who believed providing the old texts would help exonerate Ted. Fitz’s job over the next six weeks was to compile all his linguistic findings into a report to submit to a judge for an arrest warrant.

He found hundreds of comparable expressions between the letters the Unabomber had sent and the earlier documents by Ted Kaczynski, including many more references to mind control. While the manifesto called education a tool for “controlling the child’s development,” an earlier Kaczynski paper said educators were interested in “molding the personality of the child and superintending his emotional development.” He often cast doubt on scientists’ claims to want to “benefit humanity.” But no matter how many of these examples Fitz submitted to the assistant US attorney, he was told they weren’t enough for an arrest warrant, or even a search warrant. He still needed to find the “linguistic smoking gun”—and even then their case would be tough. At that point, there was no case law where language-based evidence had been used to obtain a warrant. He would have to find something truly unique.

One day, Fitz was leaning back in his chair in his office with yet another Kaczynski letter in hand. It was a draft of a response he had written to the *Saturday Review* about an article on privacy. “We will be sacrificing some of the materialistic benefits of technology, but there just isn’t any other way,” he wrote, and then a crossed-out line read: “We can’t eat our cake and have it too.”

Fitz lurched for the manifesto, tipping his chair over in the process. He hit the floor, the pages in hand, and sat there flipping through them until he found it. Indeed, there it was near the end, the same inverted aphorism: “As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society—well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

Fitz called for a meeting with the heads of the task force to present the “linguistic fingerprint” he’d discovered. He was sure it irrefutably linked Kaczynski to the bombings. “We’ve not only found our suspect, we’ve now nailed him to the wall,” Fitz told the group. The US attorney finally agreed. It should be enough to at least convince a judge to allow a search of Kaczynski’s cabin. It would take about a month, the task force reasoned, to compile all their evidence and prepare the affidavit for the federal judge in Montana.

But then FBI Director Freeh received a call from Dan Rather. There had been a leak and the news anchor was planning to go on air that night with information about a Unabomber suspect in Montana. They pleaded with him to hold off in exchange for an exclusive; Rather agreed to give them seventy-two hours.

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Just before sunrise on April 3, 1996, a team of SWAT snipers suited up in white camouflage suits to blend in with the winter woods. Kaczynski’s house stood at the base of a circle of pine trees. They surrounded it from a distance while a US forest officer and two undercover agents proceeded with a plan to trick Kaczynski into coming outside. The officer called out his name from the yard and the front door cracked open. A filthy, bearded, and irate man stuck his head out.

As they approached him at the door, the officer told Kaczynski that his two companions were from a gold-mining company and they needed to locate the stakes marking the boundary lines of his property. Could he come show them? Kaczynski said he would go get his jacket, but as he turned around to go back inside, the forest officer grabbed him and yanked him back out. One of the undercover agents leaped forward and bear-hugged both men. Kaczynski fought to free himself, but then the other agent drew a gun, pointed it at his face, and said, “We’re with the FBI and have a federal warrant to search your cabin.” Kaczynski stopped struggling.

The search didn’t take long. Agents found scores of bomb parts, a handwritten copy of the manifesto, thousands of journal pages detailing the crimes, and even a live bomb, packaged and ready to be mailed.

Fitz flew to the Montana Rockies a few days later to start going through the evidence and help prosecutors build their case. He walked down the hillside, past a “Private—No Hunting” sign, toward the tiny cabin. He found the landscape lonely and intimidating, and saw now why people call places like this “the middle of nowhere.” The term described a spiritual and emotional space as much as a geographical one, he thought. It was clear to him that Kaczynski had built his small one-room cabin, not more than ten by twelve feet, “for one purpose and one purpose only—to be alone.”

When Fitz opened the door he was relieved to find he was the only person there. “I wanted to experience, even temporarily, what the former inhabitant experienced for decades, most of his adult life, inside this place.”

Kaczynski had kept it tidy by building shelves that wrapped around the walls. He kept his bomb-making materials on one shelf and binders of his writings on another. Hundreds of books encircled the room. He seemed to read just about everything: Greek mythology, George Orwell, wilderness-survival manuals, psychological research, and, of course, guides to explosives. There were several studies about the psychology of twins separated at birth, Fitz recalled, leading him to wonder if Ted was trying to understand why his and David’s lives had diverged so sharply.

Fitz began to pore over thousands of pages of Kaczynski’s journals. He learned that Kaczynski admitted to himself early on that wrath—not concern for society—was his true motive. In the spring of 1971, seven years before he planted his first bomb, he wrote in his journal:

<quote>
My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it. Of course, if my crime (and my reasons for committing it) gets any public attention, it may help to stimulate public interest in the technology question and thereby improve the chances of stopping technology [before] it is too late; but on the other hand most people will probably be repelled by my crime, and the opponents of freedom may use it as a weapon to support their arguments for control over human behavior. I have no way of knowing whether my action will do more good than harm. I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the “good” (whatever that is) of the human race. I act merely from a desire for revenge. Of course, I would like to get revenge on the whole scientific and bureaucratic establishment, not to mention communists and others who threaten freedom, but, that being impossible, I have to content myself with just a little revenge.
</quote>

It’s not clear who exactly he sought revenge against, or when his grievance with technology developed. Advancements like personal computers had indeed fueled a sense of alienation among some people, and Kaczynski was certainly sensitive to the emotion. But he spoke of technology primarily in terms of its manipulative effects. He’d become convinced that he’d never be psychologically free; at least crime was a way to rebel.

He had once told David in a letter, “I don’t believe I could ever commit a serious crime. Knowing my attitude toward psychological manipulation of the individual by society, you can imagine how humiliating it is for me to admit to myself that I have been successfully manipulated.”

But for someone who claimed to hate scientists, Kaczynski acted like one himself, often describing his work in the language of the scientific method. He called each of his attacks an “experiment” and meticulously documented his bomb-building methodology, as well as the final results of detonation and his conclusions. His journals showed the cold assessments he drew from each experiment. Of the mechanics of the bomb that permanently damaged the hearing of psychologist James McConnell, for example, Kaczynski wrote: “Deflagrated, did not detonate. Must be either pipe was a little weak or loading density of explosive a shade too high at failure.”

Occasionally, Kaczynski expressed a flicker of guilt over hurting someone. It happened once in 1985, after a young air force captain named John Hauser picked up what looked like a black binder from a table in Berkeley’s computer science building and it ignited in his hand, shattering his entire arm and tearing off several fingers.

When Kaczynski learned of the maiming he wrote in his journal:

<quote>
Must admit I feel badly about having crippled this mans arm. It has been bothering me a good deal. This is embarrassing because while my feelings are partly from pity, I am sure they come largely from the training, propaganda, brainwashing we all get, conditioning us to be scared by the idea of doing certain things. It is shameful to be under the sway of this brainwashing.
</quote>

When he felt this way he would remind himself that “there was no logical justification for morality”—the same belief he’d professed decades earlier during the experiment at Harvard. Ever since, he had been battling against his own obedience—perhaps whatever traits had led Murray to nickname him “Lawful” in the first place. He had learned to mentally trade places so that he became the experimenter whose theories “must necessarily do violence,” as Murray had put it. Kaczynski later wrote:

<quote>
Recently I camped in a paradise like glacial cirque. At evening, beautiful singing of birds was ruined by the obscene roar of jet planes. Then I laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling an airline pilot.
</quote>

Kaczynski wrote another chilling account while documenting his discovery that he had achieved his first murder with the bombing of Hugh Scrutton:

<quote>
Experiment 97. Dec. 11, 1985. I planted a bomb disguised to look like a scrap of lumber behind Rentech Computer Store in Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20, the “operator” (owner? manager?) of the store was killed, “blown to bits,” on Dec. 12. Excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing. 25,000 reward offered. Rather flattering.
</quote>

Kaczynski might have appreciated the “humane” nature of Scrutton’s death because he had nothing against the man personally—nor any of the other thirteen victims he ultimately killed or injured during his seventeen-year bombing career. Agents would learn that he’d never met any of them. He selected his targets as symbols of pursuits he loathed—science, big business, psychology—and saw their deaths and injuries as collateral damage in a revolutionary movement, so far with a membership of one.

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While Kaczynski awaited trial in 1997, his lawyers tried to track down the transcripts from the Murray experiment at Harvard. They suspected that the humiliation sessions might have traumatized the teenager in ways that permanently damaged his psyche. Although Kaczynski, whose crimes were extraordinarily premeditated, was likely to be found legally sane, sowing doubt about his mental health could help prevent the death penalty.

The lawyers didn’t get far, however. “Harvard kind of slammed the door in their faces,” David Kaczynski told me. The center that housed Murray’s archives and datasets declined to give Ted’s lawyers much of the documentation they sought.

“The assessment arrived at by the psychologists would be very useful in determining how people saw my personality, but,” as Ted later wrote in his memoir, *Truth Versus Lies*, “the Murray Center at Radcliffe College has refused to release any of the psychologists’ conclusions to my attorneys; and most of the individual psychologists involved have declined to cooperate with the investigators, who to my knowledge have obtained no information concerning any conclusions that were drawn about me. One wonders whether the Murray Center has something to hide.”

Kaczynski’s “Lawful” code name was leaked in public, which led Harvard to permanently seal the study’s records in 2000—purportedly to protect his privacy. It’s not clear what, if any, contributions Murray’s three years of humiliation research made to the field of psychology. At times, Murray himself seemed confounded by his quixotic experiments. “Are the costs in man-hours incurred by our elaborate, multiple procedures far greater than any possible gains in knowledge?” he wondered in a 1960 paper titled “Brief Summary of Baleen Research.” The study with Kaczynski involved “over 1,000 variables,” Murray wrote, and sought to become nothing short of “the most accurate, significant, and complete knowledge and understanding of a single psychological event that is obtainable.”

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We’ll never know the degree to which Murray’s experiment may have played a role in the making of the Unabomber. But David believes it was devastating for his brother. It was during this period that he first started noticing changes in Ted. Once, when Ted came home during a break from school, David was eager to discuss with him all the new books he’d been reading. But Ted, with unusual cruelty, “ridiculed my ideas,” he said. Another comment that has stuck with David for years is the time when Ted said, “Dave, really smart people tend to have a sadistic streak.”

“When I think back,” David said, “perhaps that was what was being done to him.” Increasingly, Ted fixated on shameful experiences from his past. He wrote letters excoriating his family for all the ways they had humiliated him over the years, like the time his mother yelled at him for leaving his socks out on the floor instead of putting them in the hamper.

“It was something I wouldn’t think of as humiliating, but he did,” David said. “The metaphor that’s come to me is, if you can imagine what it would be like if our physical bodies didn’t have the capacity to heal, every slight scrape and we’d be walking around like figures out of a horror film. Ted’s psyche was like that. He has memories of things that happened years and years before. He was someone who could never heal.”

According to David, Ted told his lawyer that he stayed in the experiment for years because he “wanted to show that I couldn’t be broken.”

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Kaczynski said that the Harvard experiment was a “highly unpleasant experience,” but denied that it had any negative effect on his mental health whatsoever. While that may be true, it’s also true that he was desperate to be seen as sane. It mattered to him more than anything—including life itself. Kaczynski had long worried that he would be treated as a “sickie” if he ever got caught; that was how the system discredited dissidents.

Shortly after his arrest, Kaczynski agreed to meet with a neuropsychologist because he believed it would prove his sanity. She tested his brain functioning and found mild deficits in the frontal and cerebellar motor functions, as well as impaired cognitive processing. She also administered a series of psychological evaluations, including Murray and Morgan’s Thematic Apperception Test. His responses came back laced with themes of domination, which, along with the intense fears of technology he expressed in the manifesto, indicated to her a possible diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Kaczynski, furious, refused to undergo any further evaluations. Nonetheless, the defense asked for the opinion of another psychiatrist, who, without meeting Kaczynski, argued that his extreme hatred of psychiatry was itself further evidence of schizophrenia.

The prosecution’s psychiatric expert, Park Dietz, told *The New Yorker* in 1998 that Kaczynski’s journals were “full of strong emotions, considerable anger, and an elaborate, closely reasoned system of belief about the adverse impact of technology on society. The question always is: Is that belief system philosophy or is it delusion? The answer has more to do with the ideology of the psychiatrist than with anything else.”

At the same time, David Kaczynski, hoping to save his brother from the death penalty, was building a case in public to prove his brother’s insanity. David went on *60 Minutes* with his mother, who recounted how Ted was hospitalized for a week as an infant and deprived of human touch. She remembered seeing a harrowing photo of him strapped to a table, and how he came home afterward “completely limp.” She’s always believed the trauma was behind Ted’s difficulty connecting with other people.

All of this, to the extent that he knew about it, enraged Kaczynski. Remembering that he had undergone Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test at Harvard, he asked a lawyer to retrieve the old results and send them out to be scored by an evaluator who didn’t know the subject’s identity. A psychology professor at Michigan State University looked at it and gave Kaczynski a 0 out of 10 on the schizotypal spectrum and just a 2 on the psychopathy spectrum. To Kaczynski, the result proved his sanity. To others, it proved only that he may have been sane once, but at some point something—or someone—had broken him.

When Kaczynski learned that his lawyers, too, were building a “mental status” case on his behalf, he wrote a letter to the judge saying that he “had been tricked and humiliated,” and that “I would rather die, or suffer prolonged physical torture, than have the [defense] imposed on me in this way.”

He asked the judge to allow him to fire his lawyers and replace them with an attorney who had offered to defend him on the basis of his ideological beliefs. He wanted his ideas—not his psychology—to have their day in court. The judge denied his request, telling him that it was too late to change lawyers now, and that the defense strategy was up to his legal team, not him. It was Kaczynski’s worst nightmare: His fate was up to psychiatrists. On one side were those calling him insane, and on the other were those saying he should die. After the judge’s decision, Kaczynski attempted, unsuccessfully, to hang himself in his cell.

He made one final plea, asking the judge to allow him to represent himself. But again, he was rejected. Kaczynski promptly pleaded guilty and, in doing so, avoided a trial that would be focused on his mental state. In response, federal prosecutors asked for life imprisonment rather than seeking the death penalty.

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Years later, when Fitzgerald was in Colorado Springs to give a presentation to the Air Force Academy, it occurred to him that he wasn’t far from the ADX Florence supermax prison. He decided to put in a request with the warden for permission to interview Kaczynski, explaining that it would be valuable research for the FBI.

Kaczynski would probably recognize Fitzgerald’s name from the legal proceedings, so he doubted he’d agree to the meeting. But, to Fitz’s surprise, a call came back confirming the interview. Fitz spent the next month preparing questions. He thought again of the nature shows he’d watched as a kid, of predators in the Serengeti, and wondered “what types of ‘tells’ ” he could learn from Kaczynski. Maybe it wouldn’t be as obvious as the animals, with their eyes darting back and forth, but there must be some physical manifestation of the “evolutionary process of becoming a successful serial bomber.” If he could see it, maybe he could “reverse engineer what created this creature.”

On the day of their meeting, Fitz and a fellow profiler were about an hour into the drive to Florence when he received a call from the prison. The meeting was off. Kaczynski had left a message: “Unfortunately, Fitz, I can’t meet with you. Some other matters came up. I’m simply too busy today.”

Fitz laughed. An inmate serving a life sentence in solitary confinement was too “busy.” Kaczynski got the last word.

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In fact, Kaczynski actually *was* busy during the two and a half decades he spent in prison. He published books and amassed a dedicated following of anarchists and radical environmentalists. He maintained a robust correspondence with many of them.

In 2021, Kaczynski was diagnosed with rectal cancer and transferred to a medium security facility in Butner, North Carolina, for treatment. Two years later, he began refusing chemotherapy. His oncologist noted that he seemed depressed and referred him for psychiatric evaluation. A month later, Kaczynski, at eighty-one, tied his shoelaces to a handicap rail in his cell and hanged himself.

His books immediately shot up on Amazon’s bestseller lists. *Anti-Tech Revolution*, from 2016, laid out a road map for activists fighting technocratic social control. In many ways, the ideas are similar to those in his 1995 manifesto, but Kaczynski updated them with a few contemporary concerns. He noted, for example, how police were now empowered “to track down participants with the help of images from surveillance cameras, face-recognition technology, and records of telephone traffic. More importantly, the replacement of humans by machines in the military is proceeding apace.”

In a chapter titled “The Development of a Society Can Never Be Subject to Rational Human Control,” he cautioned against the growing reliance on data-driven technologies. “Even the most minute inaccuracy in the data provided can totally invalidate a prediction about the behavior of a complex system,” he wrote. “It is safe to assume that the development of a modern society is necessarily chaotic in at least some respects and therefore unpredictable.”

*** Chapter 5: The Seeds of Criminal Activity

<strong>O</strong>ne day after work in 2015, Robert Jones pulled into the driveway of his home in the Tampa suburbs to find a half dozen police officers circling his front door. They were talking to his fifteen-year-old son Bobby, a lanky skateboarder with brown hair that hung near his eyes.

*Oh no*, Robert thought, *What did Bobby do?* He took a deep breath and approached the officers. They introduced themselves as members of a special unit of the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. They had come to the house, they said, to teach Bobby a lesson about respecting the law.

Robert was confused. Was Bobby in trouble?

No, they told him. Not yet. Their unit was focused on crime *deterrence*. They were there to deliver a warning from the sheriff. He was “absolutely sick and tired of juveniles committing crimes in Pasco County,” one of the officers said. The family had moved to town only a few weeks earlier, but Bobby’s past criminal record had already come to their attention. The officers were putting the Joneses on notice that things were done differently here. They were under strict orders from the sheriff to, as an officer put it, “attack these kids and make sure they know to stay in line, or else we’re going to put them in jail.”

The message seemed a bit dramatic, Robert thought, especially coming from six cops. But maybe this was some kind of scared-straight strategy that would resonate with Bobby. He had been expelled from his previous school for smoking marijuana and getting into a fight with another student. Robert thought that being out of school had caused Bobby to spiral because then, on a day when he would have otherwise been in class, Bobby and his friends were arrested for allegedly stealing a gun from a house. Robert had done his best to keep the boy out of trouble, but as a single father of four he couldn’t always be there. He was happy to hear the police reiterating a message he’d long been trying to teach, even if it was a little extreme. “To me, it sounded like validation,” he told me.

So when the officers asked Robert if they could enter the house and speak to all his children, he welcomed them. But within seconds of entering, they drew their flashlights and Robert said he watched as they flung open his drawers and cabinet doors. Additional officers started pulling up in squad cars and piling into the house. “There were eight, now there were twelve, then fourteen, they just kept coming,” he said. They funneled into the bedrooms, too, where the children were.

Robert recalled the chaotic scene: “I got one kid being interviewed in the back by three cops who are grabbing things and putting them in their pockets. The other three are in the living room being consulted by eight other cops. I’ve got two cops in my bedroom.” Robert didn’t know what they were looking for, but it was clear to him now that they weren’t there to help.

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A few days later, the officers came back and arrested Bobby. It turned out that during their search—to which Robert maintains he never consented—they had taken some empty plastic baggies from Bobby’s room and three tested positive for trace amounts of marijuana. Bobby was held at the Pasco County juvenile detention center for twenty-one days awaiting his hearing. The judge threw out the marijuana charge, but the arrest still cost him his start at the new school, which allowed only nine consecutive absences, Robert said. He wouldn’t be allowed to return.

Over the next few months, the officers, often six or ten at a time, continued to show up at the Joneses’ home. They came at all hours of the day and night, sometimes three times a day. If Bobby was home they’d interrogate him about who he’d been hanging out with and where they’d gone. If he wasn’t home, they’d ask Robert and the other children to report on Bobby’s whereabouts.

At first, he grudgingly cooperated. Robert is tall, heavyset, and half Vietnamese. “I automatically know because I’m brown how to act,” he said. But he was starting to get angry, too: Why were they treating his son like he was guilty of a crime? Bobby had already been held accountable for his previous offenses, and he hadn’t been convicted of anything since. Eventually the Joneses stopped answering the door. But then the police started banging on windows and shining flashlights through the curtains.

Robert began to believe that if Bobby wasn’t going to commit a crime, the police would manufacture one. Officers roamed around the yard searching for signs of wrongdoing. Once, they picked up the children’s bicycles in the driveway and cross-checked them against descriptions of bikes that had been reported stolen in the police database. (They weren’t a match.) Another time they took out a ruler, measured a dandelion in the yard, and issued Robert a citation for overgrown grass. They gave him another one for parking his Jet Skis incorrectly in the driveway. In one bodycam video, two cops debated whether, if you looked from a certain angle, the porch light obstructed the house number: “We can get him for that,” one decided.

Robert said he never received many of these tickets, and soon the police started arresting him for missing the court dates. He said it became a pattern: He would go to jail, pay the bond, and then go home and stay there until police came up with another pretext for a citation. In all, he was arrested five times, none of which resulted in a conviction. Officers ultimately arrested Bobby fifteen times, often on marijuana charges that, each time, the judge threw out. But by then the damage was done. Each of Bobby’s arrests cost him 21 days in detention while waiting to see a judge—meaning he spent nearly a year locked up, alongside drug dealers and violent offenders, before he turned seventeen. He was never found guilty of a crime.

On what Robert said was the officers’ eighty-eighth visit to the Joneses’ house, in 2016, he was arrested again, this time with guns pointed at him. Upon his release, he packed the family up in a U-Haul and fled Pasco County in the middle of the night. Bobby never finished high school. He earned his GED in the detention center that had become his second home.

“And who do you think his friends are now?” Robert said.

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What Jones didn’t know was that Bobby had been targeted by a new program called intelligence-led policing (ILP). The analytics-driven mission of the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office sought to stop crime before it happened. It was premised on research showing that a minority of offenders commit the majority of crimes. The department cited the statistic that, in Pasco County, just 6 percent of the population committed 60 percent of the crime, which is comparable to figures in many other parts of the US. By focusing on these bad seeds, it was believed that crime would decline faster, using fewer resources.

In a guidebook on ILP and other innovations, the office explains that the philosophy dates back to 1829, when Robert Peel founded the London Metropolitan Police Force. The goal was “to prevent crime and maintain order” during a period of labor protests and Catholic unrest. Peel requested that Parliament grant him an army-like force of three thousand officers to help keep the peace. He hoped that their mere presence would serve as a deterrent to would-be criminals. Less than a decade later, the US adopted a similar model in Boston, which was soon followed by the creation of police departments in New York and Cincinnati. But, over the years, technological advancements such as phones, radios, and the 911 emergency line transformed modern-day police into crime responders, and pushed prevention to the sidelines. While it was widely believed that courts and prisons would instill a fear of punishment that would deter criminals, reality has not borne that out, the guide says.

The solution, according to sheriff Chris Nocco, who took the helm of the office in 2011, was to harness the technology of the information age to bring back a nineteenth-century objective. A Philadelphia native, Nocco got his start working for the city’s public school police before moving to Florida, where he worked for the highway patrol and later switched to a career in Republican politics. He served as deputy chief of staff for Marco Rubio when he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and as a field director for George W. Bush’s campaign in Broward County. His wife, Bridget Nocco, is a prominent Republican fundraiser who helped the little-known businessman Rick Scott win his campaign for Florida governor. After Scott took office, he appointed Nocco, then thirty-five, as sheriff.

Nocco’s agenda would empower officers to precision-target “problem people” and “problem places” and, in his words, “take them out.” Officers would spend more time in high-crime neighborhoods, where they predicted misconduct was most likely to recur, and charge career criminals—those most likely to reoffend—to the fullest extent of the law. These kinds of proactive measures have become the norm in many police departments, but Nocco went further. He hired former military intelligence analysts and changed the department’s motto to “We Fight as One.” When some community members complained about the mercenary tone, the sheriff’s office posted a strident defense on Facebook: “We will not raise the white flag to those who attempt to destroy our community. And when we say fight, we will absolutely fight against those who want to ruin lives.” In 2018, the sheriff’s office won a $700,000 Justice Department grant to fund its intelligence division.

Nocco illustrated his approach in videos for the public that were illustrated with green waveform imagery, giving the impression of a scientific framework but without explaining what data or algorithms he might use to implement it. An internal manual on ILP, however, broke down how officers can identify community members in whom “the seeds of criminal activity” lay. These were the people most likely to turn into “serious, violent and chronic offenders”—and many of them were children.

It cited social-science research showing that most juvenile offenders came from abusive, neglectful, or otherwise disadvantaged upbringings. It referenced a 2013 study showing that 40 percent of juvenile offenders had previously witnessed violence at home, and that 80 percent had an incarcerated parent. (The manual omitted mention of that same paper’s conclusion, which was a recommendation to invest in therapy for such children because, it said, doing so proved more cost-effective than policing, produced better outcomes for children, and deterred more crime.)

To guide officers in “identifying at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime,” it put forth a scoring system. Some of the factors were related to possible evidence of a criminal past, such as arrest records or gang activity. But children could also get points for receiving bad grades, missing school, or socializing with “delinquent friends.” They could even get them for circumstances entirely out of their control, such as having an incarcerated parent, being a victim of abuse, or witnessing household violence. Adding up these traumas could help officers predict which children were most likely to become “prolific offenders.”

The manual acknowledged that police didn’t typically have access to this confidential data on juveniles in their communities. Laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits schools from disclosing student records without parental consent. But in Pasco County, “fortunately, these records are available to us,” the manual said.

The schools, which paid the sheriff’s office $2.3 million a year to staff them with resource officers, turned over the data voluntarily. The superintendent argued that it was justified because the data was being used for “official law enforcement purposes,” as he told Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi of the *Tampa Bay Times*, which exposed the sheriff’s practices in 2020. The Florida Department of Children and Families also offered up to police its vast database on child welfare and abuse histories. It was intended to assist officers investigating abuse and missing-child cases, but the sheriff’s manual instructed deputies to use it to identify juveniles who’d suffered “adverse childhood experiences.”

The sheriff’s office said that its partnership with the schools was an attempt to reduce information “silos,” the kind that caused officers to miss red flags in the lead-up to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The office has repeatedly asserted that it has never engaged in predictive policing; nor is ILP “in any way, shape, or form the ideals or implementations projected in the film *Minority Report*,” it said in a statement. It added that deputies did not focus on all twenty thousand children labeled at-risk by the school district, but rather on only a few hundred who had a history of “criminally-related interactions” with law enforcement.

Those individuals were then eligible to appear on a secret list of “prolific offenders,” and eligible for enhanced police targeting. Prolific offenders were in a class alongside sex offenders, who would “bear the consequences of their criminal ways through relentless pursuit, arrest, and prosecution.” Juveniles on the list were always to be tried as adults because “the longer they are incarcerated, the less opportunity they have to commit crime.”

Parents were not notified when their children were placed on these lists. Robert Jones said that each time Bobby was arrested, the officer had a choice of checking one of two boxes on the paperwork: “diversion” or “prolific offender.” That’s how he eventually learned that his son had made it into the sheriff’s “top five”—and why he was required to spend all those months in detention, rather than awaiting his court dates at home.

The sheriff’s office advised officers to seek nonpunitive solutions, too. “When possible, we must explore all alternatives to arrest,” the manual said. For example, school resource officers were often the first to identify vulnerable youth and should “offer services in an attempt to get these juveniles back on track.”

But, in Nocco’s district, resource officers proved responsible for some of the most aggressive policing in the county. In 2020, two were shown on bodycam footage threatening to shoot a high schooler as he pulled out of the school’s driveway because, they believed, it was an unexcused absence. The teen argued that his mother had already called in his orthodontist appointment. But they insisted that, if he kept driving, “you’re going to get shot.”

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One afternoon while Robert was visiting his son at the detention center he spotted an old friend, Tammy Heilman, sitting at the next table over. It turned out that she was also there waiting to see her teenage son. She told Robert that the cops had been harassing them relentlessly. They came knocking on her door every day. Recently, they went to her neighbor’s yard to peer over her fence, then fined her $2,500 when they saw she had chickens.

Robert couldn’t believe it. He told Heilman about the thousands of dollars he’d paid for ordinance violations as minor as overgrown dandelions or failure to affix house numbers on his rental property. “Oh they do that to me all the time,” he recalled her telling him. She’d been ticketed for having a cinder block in her yard, and for not posting her address on the mailbox.

Jones and Heilman traded horror stories back and forth: “I’ve been arrested five times,” Robert told her.

“I’m a felon,” Heilman said.

“What the fuck, you’re a felon?!” Robert said.

Until then he’d had “a hard enough time believing myself what’s happening to me, and now she’s one-upping me every time.”

Heilman told him that after months of door knocks, arrests, tickets, and at least one bogus call to child protective services—the officer admitted on the scene that he was “only doing it as a big fuck you” to Heilman—she lost her temper. An officer knocked on her screen door one day and she smacked the handle. The door flew open and hit the deputy standing next to him. It’s not clear from the video that it was intentional, and the man wasn’t injured, but she was convicted of felony assault of a police officer.

Until then, Robert felt like he had been going crazy. Perhaps he *was* a terrible father, he had started to think. When he had tried to explain to friends and family what was happening, they seemed suspicious—police don’t just arrest people for having overgrown grass. Heilman’s story finally validated him.

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In the 1980s, the criminologists George Kelling and James Wilson proposed a remarkably simple way to reduce major crimes. All police had to do was focus on making small improvements in their communities, like keeping the streets clean, and misconduct would drop across the board. The theory, which became known as “broken windows,” was that cracking down on petty infractions like vandalism and public urination restored a sense of public order. Research had shown that crime decreased in these communities, and increased in neighborhoods filled with visible signs of neglect, like broken windows.

When William Bratton, a brash, bookish police superintendent in Boston, learned about the theory, he wrote that it “articulated and put into beautiful words what I had found from experience.” Bratton had earned the moniker “Lord Dots” for his habit of covering maps with colorful stickers representing various categories of crime sites, and then looking for patterns. So when Kelling, who consulted with the New York City transit department, came to him with an opportunity to make a career move, Bratton didn’t mind that it would probably be a terrible job.

The role, as head of the city’s transit police, would involve taming the subway system, then filled with graffiti, urine, muggers, and panhandlers. It would be a “horror,” Bratton said. He recalled how on one visit to New York he saw a man with his mouth pressed against a turnstile, trying to suck out jammed coins. He accepted the offer on the spot.

“This was an interesting period in policing because the big-city chiefs opened up their doors to the research community,” Bratton wrote in his 1998 memoir, *Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic*. They “let these social scientists, who ten years earlier they would have locked up for demonstrating outside the Chicago convention, into their station houses to interview prisoners and rifle their files.… And, in an extremely conservative and intentionally isolated profession, the idea of the professionally informed and educated police chief began to emerge.”

The major “broken window” of the transit system, to Bratton, was fare evasion. Turnstile jumpers weren’t the worst of criminals, but they were so common that some stations operated as if they didn’t charge a fare at all. Bratton tested the theory, running sweeps day and night. Police lined up rows of arrestees in the station, serving as a warning to others. Within a couple of years, transit crime plunged an astonishing 40 percent.

The success in the subways soon landed Bratton the top job in US policing, commissioner of the NYPD. He brought his research-driven approach with him, mandating meetings between crime analysts and officers to share information gathered during patrols. He named Jack Maple, who, like Bratton, covered his walls with crime maps—Maple called his “Charts of the Future”—as chief strategist. A young, tech-savvy officer named Eric Adams, a future mayor of New York City, helped analyze the trends. The department dubbed this use of “computer statistics” CompStat. They observed that crimes tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods and decided to focus their energies there.

Bratton again oversaw a major drop in crime, this time by 39 percent in New York City. Whether that can be attributed to Bratton’s policies, however, is hotly debated; other cities that didn’t use broken-windows policing saw comparable drops in crime at the same time. Regardless, his influence was just beginning.

After the US failure to anticipate Al Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001, Bratton and Kelling immediately saw parallels between the operational flaws in national security and those they’d seen in the NYPD. The solution, they told government officials, was the same in both contexts: Act small to prevent big. Counterterrorism agencies should apply the broken-windows theory by cracking down on smaller Homeland Security violations, like forged immigration documents, increasing the likelihood of ensnaring terrorists in the process. Just as the presence of police officers in subways had seemed to deter criminals in New York, so too might “cameras, random screenings, and sophisticated sensors” ward off dangerous border crossers.

Local police should also play a much bigger role in the fight, they said. Cops were at the front lines of communities that FBI agents never set foot in. “To fully realize the potential of local police in counterterrorism, we first need a philosophical shift, as occurred in criminal policing during the 1990s. Instead of merely reacting to individual ‘incidents,’ police must proactively solve general problems,” Bratton and Kelling wrote in a paper. The result was a new data-sharing network among federal, local, and state agencies, with dozens of hubs around the country known as fusion centers. Bratton, who went on to become chief of the LAPD in 2002, established the first fusion center in Los Angeles County, housed within FBI offices. The centers were initially focused on counterterrorism, but over time expanded to focus on all crimes.

But as Patriot Act laws eased surveillance restrictions, the definition of “suspicious” activity expanded. Threats could now include Twitter users posting the hashtag <verbatim>#BlackLivesMatter;</verbatim> one officer filed a report when he overheard men who “appeared Middle Eastern” or “Arabic” say the word “jihad.” The early geographical profiling that Bratton had deployed at the NYPD with his colorful maps was mutating into a more explicit form of racial profiling. And now these biases were being coded as intelligence, gathered in the name of counterterrorism, and circulated among the highest levels of law enforcement.

In 2008, Bratton and Sean Malinowski, then an LAPD lieutenant, argued in the journal *Policing* that officers should use probability modeling to forecast crime trends over time—a strategy they dubbed “predictive policing.” The LAPD worked with academics to develop models to predict both person- and place-based crime. It brought in UCLA anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham, who had developed mathematical models to measure, for example, how civilizations throughout history have adapted to harsh climates. The army had recently awarded him a research grant to apply his statistical modeling to a very different kind of harsh environment: Iraq.

Brantingham discovered that an algorithm developed for one purpose—mapping the spread of disease, say—could be applied to a very different one, like patterns of violence in war. Behaviors in hunting among ancient humans, it turned out, looked just like those of modern-day car thieves. And the habits of earthquakes, in which aftershocks typically followed the main event, matched those of gang activity, in that murders were often followed by a retaliation. With the LAPD, Brantingham repurposed earthquake-forecasting methodologies to analyze police data on past crimes in Los Angeles and then fed them through a machine-learning algorithm to predict where they’d occur next. When implemented, it led to a 7.4 percent reduction in crime volume on police patrols.

Brantingham and a colleague patented the algorithm and tested it with the Santa Cruz Police Department, which said it saw a 19 percent drop in burglaries. A few months later, Brantingham incorporated the predictive analytic company PredPol and sold its software to police in Seattle, Atlanta, LA, and beyond. (Other cities, such as New York, developed their own predictive algorithms.) In 2011, *Time* magazine called predictive policing one of the fifty greatest inventions of the year.

That was the year Nocco introduced ILP in Pasco County. It was inspired in part by NYPD’s CompStat, he said, which had been shown to reduce wasted time and resources. Nocco pointed out that businesses use market research to target their products to core consumers, so why should policing be any different? “Our market is crime and criminals, and we are in the business of crime prevention and reduction,” he wrote. “So it should make sense that we should direct our limited resources at the top utilizers (prolific offenders, repeat victims, hot spots, and organized crime groups) of our services in order to produce the greatest impact to our bottom line.”

But just as the strategy was getting underway in Florida, PredPol came under fire—Santa Cruz banned it—and “predictive policing” became a term no one wanted to touch. While PredPol said it did not use race, class, or other identity markers to inform its software, it still targeted low-income areas and communities of color for policing far more often than wealthier and white neighborhoods. One study found that PredPol led Oakland police to target areas with high numbers of ethnic minorities twice as often as predominantly white neighborhoods. (Brantingham has agreed that racial bias is a valid concern, but in his own evaluation of predictive policing, he found that it did not occur.)

The *Tampa Bay Times* found that Pasco County’s ILP did not disproportionately target any one racial group over another, and Nocco has said that it is “a philosophy that is blind to a person’s race, gender, creed, sexual orientation, or any other aspect of an individual’s life.” But it was found to target higher numbers of children with disabilities such as autism, and in 2024 a Justice Department investigation found that the public schools had been improperly referring these students to law enforcement.

On the surface, one might reasonably conclude that certain neighborhoods do in fact have higher rates of crime and therefore justify higher levels of policing. But while algorithms appear to provide objective solutions, they’re programmed with policing data that can be anything but. The inputs that classify an area as high crime may come from old arrest figures that are artificially elevated—perhaps they come from the era of stop-and-frisk, now repudiated as a constitutional violation, for example, or from excessive marijuana charges, which penalized Black Americans at nearly four times the rate as their white counterparts, who used the drug in equal measure. It’s more accurate to say that algorithms reflect policing patterns rather than crime patterns.

Sociologist Sarah Brayne, who embedded with the LAPD for her 2020 book, *Predict and Surveil*, noticed how officers started speaking in the language of their databases: “They describe people as ‘female whites’ or ‘male Blacks,’ ” she wrote. “What we measure affects what we look for and read as important.” While algorithmic clues about potential perpetrators don’t amount to probable cause in the eyes of the law, they still inform who gets investigated, and can sometimes convince officers—consciously or not—of a person’s guilt before there’s evidence.

“The people most likely to receive false convictions,” said ACLU attorney Phil Mayor, “are those with criminal records.”

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Robert Jones lives in a neighborhood of pruned palm trees and houses painted in beiges and peaches. On a warm February day, he greeted me at the door wearing shorts and a Nike T-shirt, a tribal tattoo showing below the sleeve. Inside, the house was decorated with Buddha figurines and Asian art. Like his mother, Robert is a practicing Buddhist.

It was Super Bowl Sunday and the rest of the family would be joining later in the day to watch the game. His wife, Donna, was out buying ingredients for enchiladas.

We sat down at a table on the back patio accompanied by the sound of steadily trickling water. Robert explained that his old house in Holiday was by the beach and he missed it so much that he’d installed a fountain over the pool to recreate the effect.

Finding that house—a corner property with two palm trees out front and a golf course in back—felt like “the answer to our prayers,” he said. It even came with a key to a private beach. He imagined looking back on the summer of 2015 and thinking how he’d finally made it: “I own two Jet Skis, I got kids, I live on the beach.”

Robert leaned back in his chair by the pool and locked his arms across his chest. The terrible irony of the whole situation, he said, was that he’d moved to Pasco County because he believed an education would save his son from trouble, and that was the first thing police took away. When Bobby was initially expelled and referred to an alternative school, “I said no fucking way.” Bobby still got straight A’s, Robert said; he’d just fallen in with a bad crowd. Attending a school filled with other troubled kids would just exacerbate the problem. “I wanted them to be surrounded by smart people,” Robert said of his kids, “because I know they’re going to become products of their environment.”

Robert’s father had a PhD in physics; his sister is a doctor. Robert always wanted to become a lawyer, but his wife got pregnant with their first child right out of high school, so he took a job in a tile shop and eventually opened his own business. The marriage started to fall apart and shortly after their youngest daughter, Kylie, was born, they divorced.

Then one day when the children were supposed to be with their mother, he got a call from a woman saying that she had the kids. She told him that their mother had brought them there for what was supposed to be one night, but that was a week ago. No one could reach her. Suddenly Robert became the sole guardian of four children, between the ages of one and seven. He was handy, so he bought a condemned house, which was what he could afford, and started fixing it up. In the meantime, the family stayed in a motel. “I remember sitting there crying, outside of a $50 motel, watching my girls sleep in one bed and my boys sleeping in another, thinking, ‘I worked my entire life and this is all I got to give them?’ ”

At the same time, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis hit and his tiling work dried up. He took a job at a racetrack gas station in Miami for a while, commuting hours back and forth each day. Then one day Bobby, then nine, came home from school and quizzed him on a lesson he’d just learned: “Dad, how many planets are there?”

There’s nine, he told him.

“No, dad, there’s only eight.” Pluto had been downgraded to a dwarf.

Robert realized then that he needed to finish his education. “Honestly, that was one of the reasons that pushed me.”

Robert earned his bachelor’s in paralegal studies from Florida State University and then went on to score 162, well above average, on the LSAT. After Bobby got expelled Robert started looking for towns with both a high school and a law school. Pasco County was probably best known as the place where undercover agent Donnie Brasco ran a sting operation against the Florida mafia in the 1980s, which led to the indictments of mob boss Santo Trafficante and Pasco County Sheriff’s Office captain Joseph Donahue. But it had everything Robert needed: the house by the beach and schools for him and Bobby.

Robert began his application around the time the officers started paying their visits. The first time he was arrested it was for ordinance violations; then it happened again after police looked through his window and saw what they thought looked like a teenager smoking a cigarette. (Robert says it was an employee in his thirties.) Officers called the Florida child-abuse hotline and arrested Robert for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

When Robert got to the “character and fitness” part of the application, one of the questions asked whether he had ever been arrested. “It was horrible,” he said. He had to disclose how many times it had happened and what the outcomes were. He said the sheriff’s department can take years to file a “disposition”—or the official result of an offense, such as an acquittal or conviction—and none had been completed so far for his arrests. “I got a phone call from the administration office at the school asking me what was going on,” he said. He told them the truth, “but from their point of view, there’s no disposition and no end.” His application was denied.

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One evening, a group of officers knocked on his daughters’ bedroom window, shining flashlights in and demanding to speak with their father. The girls ran to the closet to hide and FaceTimed Robert, who wasn’t home at the time.

“There’s a bunch of cops and they’re all staring through the window,” the girls told him. What should they do?

“I’m looking at them through FaceTime,” he told me, his voice rising with rage. “There’s like eight guys in the girls’ bedroom window like this”—Robert rapped his knuckles on the table. “They were like, ‘We see you in the closet, little girl,’ and they’re huddled down, the two of them next to each other.” They were terrified.

Robert ran to his car and started racing home. On the way, he did something odd.

Before telling me what happened next, Robert interrupted himself to say that there’s one thing he wants people to understand about what happened to him. “When you have nightmares, they’re about boogeymen or scary creatures. They’re not about cops. Cops are the good guys,” he said. “They’re the guys you call when something is wrong.”

That’s why, on his way home, Robert dialed 911. He told the dispatcher that there were men pounding on his young daughters’ window. The person on the other line made a call and came back to Robert to reassure him that officers were already on the scene.

“They forwarded me to the cop that was banging on the window,” he said. “What do you do? You can’t even wake up!”

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In 2019, twenty-one former employees filed a lawsuit against the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. Among other issues, they alleged that they had been fired or retaliated against for refusing to carry out orders they felt were harassing citizens. They alleged that Sheriff Nocco and his top brass were “intoxicated with power and will physically abuse, intimidate, incarcerate, extort, and defame in order to ensure their absolute control and ensure a reign of terror both within the Pasco Sheriff’s Office and throughout Pasco County.”

They explained that a special unit in the office called STAR, short for Strategic Targeted Area Response, was responsible for targeting people like the Joneses. Each week, civilian analysts generated a list of “prolific offenders,” whom STAR teams were then deployed to approach “anytime and anywhere, for the expressed purpose of harassing them, their families and their associates,” according to the complaint. The goal was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue us.”

One corporal who was assigned to lead a district STAR team in 2015 said he was ordered to visit offenders, their families, and their associates “at all hours, numerous times a day.” He was also instructed to use code enforcement to ticket them “for anything they could find.” The corporal went along with the plan and, a year later, was promoted to sergeant. Another officer, who refused to participate, was punished, according to the lawsuit. (The sheriff denied the allegations and the case was dismissed in 2021.)

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office declined my request for an interview with Nocco, and it did not respond to a list of specific allegations from Jones, other targeted residents, and former officers. In a statement, it cast doubt on the reliability of these sources because they have either significant arrest records or other “issues” with the office “stemming from their own choices and actions for which they have been held accountable.”

In 2020, the libertarian law firm Institute for Justice contacted Robert to see if he was interested in suing the sheriff for violating his Fourth Amendment right—to be secure “against unreasonable searches and seizures”—among other constitutional breaches.

Robert looked up the lawyer, Ari Bargil, and saw he had represented a man in a nearby town who’d received $30,000 in fines for overgrown grass. Through the case, he began to discover how many other people in the county had gone through the same thing he did.

There was Lachelle Carpenter, whose son Matthew was put on the sheriff’s list when he was fourteen. After repeated stays in juvenile detention, Matthew showed signs of severe depression and was placed on suicide watch. After that, he was moved into a residential program, where he showed remarkable improvement. When he returned home, he continued with therapy, earned his GED, and got a job.

“I was so proud,” Carpenter told me. And yet Matthew’s reform didn’t seem to matter to the officers. They kept knocking on the family’s door around the clock, demanding to know the details of Matthew’s every move. They demanded answers from him even after he had his tonsils removed and couldn’t speak. The department knew about the sixteen-year-old’s psychiatric history, but “they wouldn’t leave us alone. They never stopped coming,” Carpenter said. “I don’t think he could take it no more.” In 2018, Matthew took his own life.

The following year, Dolly Deegan also lost a targeted son. Tyler had committed several nonviolent crimes, seemingly to fund an opioid addiction he’d developed after injuring himself in a serious accident. After officers put him on the list, she said, they began showing up demanding information, calling his name from outside using a bullhorn, and threatening to fine Deegan if they believed she was lying about Tyler’s whereabouts, even though he was an adult. They impounded the family dog and Deegan racked up $3,000 in tickets for overgrown grass and other ordinance violations. The police targeted Tyler for three years, until his death in 2019.

Jones, Deegan, Heilman, and another resident, Dalanea Taylor, who was herself put on the list when she was a minor, jointly filed a federal lawsuit in 2021 over what they say are scores of violations of their constitutional rights. They initially asked the judge to put a stop to the sheriff’s tactics.

“The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to be secure in one’s home and to be free from arbitrary and suspicionless police tactics,” their complaint read. “The government cannot punish you—or your friends or your family—for crimes you haven’t committed.”

Former congressman Matt Gaetz was the only Florida Republican who publicly criticized Nocco: “I don’t care that this is being done by a GOP Sheriff,” he tweeted in 2021, and suggested that the governor, Ron DeSantis, should consider ousting Nocco. “Its awful to harass citizens because you think they may commit crimes, hoping to make their lives miserable.”

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, instructed the sheriff’s office to “immediately pause” its intelligence-led policing program so that it could investigate complaints. Nocco argued that Jones’s lawsuit was moot because the department was already phasing out its prolific-offender check-ins.

Nocco, running unopposed, was elected to his fourth term as sheriff in 2024. He has consistently secured annual budget increases at far higher rates than those attained by neighboring counties. Under his watch the newly expanded county jail grew vastly more profitable—though it, too, is a site of ongoing controversy. In 2016, Nocco defended a corrections corporal who stuck a gun through the food-tray slot in a cell door and shot a thirty-year-old army veteran who was having a schizophrenic episode. (The man sued and Nocco and his colleagues ultimately settled.)

And in 2022, a nurse working for the private-equity-backed healthcare company that Nocco hired to lower the jail’s costs was caught reusing insulin needles on diabetic inmates, including one who was HIV positive.

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Watching the bodycam videos of police interacting with the Joneses over the course of a year, one sees an unmistakable change in Bobby. In the early days of the check-ins he is shy and eager to please the officers. Once Bobby sat by while cops who identified themselves as part of a unit that “tracks down the worst of the worst people”—rifled through his drawers. “I was thinking I might want to be a cop someday,” he told them.

The officers didn’t respond.

On another check, a deputy warned him not to be flattered by the attention: “This isn’t for you to go get street cred, brag that we’re at your house.”

“Oh hell no,” Bobby replied, “you’re not the first cops to come here. They’ve been here like fifty times.”

“I know, but my unit, we’re the kind of unit that will be on you and you’ll never even know we’re here, which means we’ll catch you doing something wrong,” he replied, “and these little petty friends you got that are keeping you out all hours of the night—”

Bobby softly interrupted: “A lot of people don’t realize that I don’t have friends.”

The cop didn’t respond.

“You want me to elaborate?” Bobby asked.

“No no no,” the officer said, going back to his lecture: “What I’m saying is, you can have friends, you just gotta pick friends who do the right thing.”

It appeared that the officer, trained to make threats and gather evidence, didn’t know how to respond off script. The judgment on Bobby already seemed rendered; the only person left to convince now was Bobby himself.

Once, when Robert was being arrested, the officer loudly announced, “Little Bobby Jones is bringing this on this house.” Another time, they arrested Bobby’s girlfriend while she was over. As she was riding with the officer in the police car on the way to the station, he showed her a laptop with her photo next to Bobby’s name. “Because you’re associated with him, you’re gonna be on this page for a while,” he warned her.

Eventually, Bobby stops asking questions and keeps his head bowed during checks. He speaks only when spoken to. On one visit, a crew of officers in bulletproof vests arrived at the house asking Bobby, standing shirtless in the yard, why he wasn’t in school that day. He said he had been there and that the school’s attendance records would prove it. “I can tell you what I did today in every class,” he said.

“All right sir, you’re under arrest,” the officer said. It’s not clear whether it was because Bobby had disagreed with him or because he was lying about his attendance (or why either of those would be crimes).

Bobby didn’t hesitate. “Yes, sir,” he said and turned around, his hands already behind his back to be cuffed.

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The last time officers paid a visit to Robert’s house they came with a warrant. It was around 6 a.m., just as he was leaving for work. By this point, his wife had moved out and was living in a nearby condo, fearful that she’d be arrested too. As Robert walked to his car, the officers pulled their guns. They handcuffed him and sat him on the grass in his front yard.

“You’re messing around with an aggressive sheriff,” one said to him. “Sheriff Nocco is not playing any games.”

They searched the house, or, as Robert said, “ransacked” it. They took the family’s laptops, cell phones, tablets, and jewelry, claiming it had all been stolen. Robert said he offered to show them receipts from Best Buy for everything. “If I wasn’t in handcuffs, I can show you that,” he said he told them. But they apparently didn’t want to hear it. “They wanted this shit to be stolen,” he said. (By the time he got a court order for the return of his possessions, he says, he was told that many of the electronics had been “lost.”)

After the search, the officers told Robert that the house was such a mess they were going to charge him with felony child neglect. After he was released from jail, Robert saw his mugshot and the allegation on TV.

“I moved, and I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “I left and I said I’m not going to be a lawyer. That was the end of that ride.”

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When I visited Robert in 2022, Bobby was working a telemarketing job in Tampa. Robert wasn’t sure if he’d be joining for the Super Bowl or not because driving made him anxious; he was constantly getting pulled over. Even in another county, Bobby felt he was still being singled out. “Don’t forget,” Robert said, “Pasco County had no idea who we were until Pinellas County had let them know.”

Court records show that, indeed, Bobby was frequently pulled over in the years after he moved out of his father’s house. At least seven times those stops resulted in infractions, including for failing to have his driver’s license on hand and for failing to change lanes for a car on the side of the road. A couple of those stops led to additional charges, such as possession of marijuana. Once, when Bobby was pulled over for a suspected DUI, he called his father to the scene. Robert claimed that the officers recognized him from having spoken out against the sheriff and, according to him, said, “We don’t need any YouTube stars around here.”

Robert doesn’t deny that Bobby uses marijuana, but it’s also true that other young people Bobby’s age are guilty of the same low-level crimes and are not routinely stopped and searched by police, detained, and derailed from receiving an education. The sheriff, Robert believes, is “creating criminals.”

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The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office described its intelligence-led philosophy as an advanced, evidence-based strategy designed to meet the needs of twenty-first-century policing. But while the means may change from era to era, century to century, efforts to profile and predict criminality produce overwhelmingly consistent results.

The sheriff’s history lesson in the ILP guidebook credited London’s Robert Peel, seen as the founder of modern policing, with pioneering its deterrence-based philosophy. In fact, there’s an earlier antecedent in America. In the early 1700s, government-sponsored slave patrols fanned out across the South, hoping their presence would intimidate enslaved people and keep them from running away or from organizing. Those who did rise up often were violently murdered and made examples of. Patrollers enforced curfews, checked permission slips of anyone on the move, and separated families. After the Civil War, the patrols turned into police departments that continued to track the behavior of freed slaves.

Even in the North, racism played a role in shaping early policing. The 1890 census, the first to count Black Americans born after slavery, revealed, according to one demographer, that “the criminality of the negro exceeds that of any other race of any numerical importance in this country.” Of course that could be true only if the officers had patrolled people of all communities equally and jailed them on the same terms, which they plainly weren’t. “Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority,” historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has written.

In Cesare Lombroso’s Italy, the crime problem also concentrated among darker-skinned, lower-class communities. Once, when a jury had little evidence upon which to find a suspect guilty of murder, Lombroso urged conviction anyway. “Upon examination I found that this man had outstanding ears, great maxillaries and cheek bones, division of the frontal bone, premature wrinkles, sinister look, nose twisted to the right,” he said, and “a large picture of a woman tattooed upon his breast.”

Lombroso used the term “born criminal”; Nocco described those “destined to a life of crime.” In both cases, they used bogus data to convince others of their unique ability to “see” criminality, a tactic reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s century-old literary advice: “The mere suspicion of scientific thought or scientific methods has a great charm” in fiction, he wrote, “however far it may be removed from actual research.” It’s impossible to know how Bobby’s life might have turned out had he not been subjected to ILP. It’s also not clear how arresting, insulting, and detaining him would have helped.

“The problem with predictive policing is the policing part,” says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. Analytics to identify at-risk youth can be useful to guiding policy making, he says, but too often funding has gone to police instead of better-equipped social service agencies.

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A few months after my visit, in the fall of 2022, Bobby’s girlfriend got pregnant. As his three siblings were all heading to college, Bobby suddenly needed to provide for a family with only a GED. Telemarketing wouldn’t cut it. “Not one person he knew graduated from high school,” Robert later told me. “The only people my son knew were the people that he was in [detention] with, and somebody came up to him with the possibility of making money.”

That winter, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the DEA to organize a sting operation against Bobby. According to Robert, an undercover officer asked Bobby to sell him an ADD medication that contained methamphetamine. They met in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Bobby instructed the man to retrieve the drugs from the gas cap of his car. At first, Bobby brought him a small quantity, but then the officer began asking for increasingly large amounts. Eventually, Bobby delivered a batch containing fifty grams of methamphetamine, which pushed him from a lower possession drug charge to the more serious “intent to deliver.”

In his mugshot, Bobby glares at the camera from beneath a blunt black haircut. A tattoo of a diamond with a pair of wings on each side stretches across his neck. He faced up to 120 years in federal prison, but pleaded guilty in 2024 and was sentenced to five years. Although the court recommended he be imprisoned near his family in Florida, he was sent to a medium-security correctional facility in North Carolina, where Ted Kaczynski died in 2023.

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In late 2024, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office settled the lawsuit with Robert Jones, Tammy Heilman, and the two other plaintiffs. It admitted that its tactics “substantially interfered” with their Constitutional rights and paid them $105,000 collectively. Their attorney said he hoped the move would send a message to law enforcement agencies everywhere that, “in the United States, we punish people after they’ve been convicted of a crime. We don’t punish people because we’ve decided they might commit a crime in the future.”

The settlement didn’t feel like justice to Robert. Although it was validating, and nice to win back some of the more than $30,000 he had accrued in fines, it did nothing for Bobby. “My son is still in prison due to the pipeline they created,” he said. And he doesn’t believe Nocco has really discontinued his practices. Jones’s attorney, Ari Bargil, says the sheriff is just calling people on the list by a new name, “focused offenders,” and hasn’t done away with random check-ins. Rather than using a “crude algorithm,” Bargil says, the new initiative “is purely subjective and applied based on data analyzed by [the sheriff’s] still-very-much-active intelligence-led policing division.”

And despite its admission of wrongdoing, the sheriff’s office made clear in a statement that it wasn’t sorry: “We will never apologize for keeping our community safe and holding those who victimize our community accountable for their actions.”

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While he was in detention as a teenager, Bobby started writing music with some of the other inmates and later put out albums under the name Klout. In videos he has wisps of a moustache and he and his friends, other adolescent-looking guys, jump around laughing. They flash prop guns and cash like hip-hop stars on TV. Bobby rapped about the usual things musicians rap about—weed, women, money. But his lyrics often describe his personal legal ordeal too: how he wants to see his friends freed from “the system,” his guilt over the stress he’s caused his family, and his feelings of alienation (“Never really was close to my peers,” one chorus goes, “my future’s unclear”). A friend commented on a song he posted on Instagram in 2020, when Bobby was twenty-one, encouraging him to keep it up. “Rememba like it was yesterday we was in the cell working on ya first song.”

According to Robert, Bobby blames only himself for his imprisonment. “He’s not mad at the sheriff’s department,” Robert said. “He’s not mad like he very well could be.”

Shortly after Bobby went to prison in 2024, his girlfriend gave birth to their second child, a boy they named Robert Jones V. She and their children have since moved in with Robert, who says he’s “going to take care of them as long as I got a roof over my head.

“But it brings us into a whole new issue: We live in Pasco County.” Robert, his wife, and three younger children moved back during the pandemic, after multiple offers to buy houses elsewhere fell through. “These kids, if they stick around, will be going to the schools in Pasco County.”

*** Epilogue

<strong>T</strong>he true crimes in my life are intertwined. I could tell the story of Scott Johnson at the beginning of this book because it’s the one I could see most clearly. But that story is equally about my father, whose transgressions are tolerable only from a step removed. I wanted to know them without having to look. Scott became a screen, a safe way to study the violence and masculinity around me, without having to see it in the man I loved most.

Most of the memories I have of my father are from the years of Sundays spent visiting him in prison. Even though I didn’t yet know what he had done to get there, I understood what prison was and who it was for. The razor-wire fence declared a boundary between criminals on one side and those who needed protection from them on the other.

On the first visit, I didn’t recognize the thin man the guards presented as my father. His beard and shaggy hair were gone; so was the shape of his body, hidden underneath an oversized orange jumpsuit. We would sit with his parents at a table in a visitation room with other families. I would see fathers clutching their children in overly long hugs, breathing in their smells. At night in bed I would picture metal bars and a cot in his cell, and how frightening it would be to sleep there. Once, I felt so guilty I tried to mail him my allowance, only to have it returned as contraband.

In elementary school, I met with a guidance counselor, who I heard use the term “at risk.” I never understood who was at risk of what, but if I had grown up in Pasco County, it probably would have meant I was the risk to others. And I would have believed it. Even without police officers speculating about seeds of criminality, the fence already stood in my mind. It permitted two vantage points of the story that defined my life and obstructed any other ways of interpreting it.

To me, my father was a hare, caged and alone in prison. It was unfair of police to put him there. Of course, police were also heroes who had saved my mother’s life. And my father *was* a monster, which is to say a contradiction. Horror stories are filled with hybrids—Jekyll and Hyde, the living dead—and he was no different. The more I tried to picture him from one angle, the less I could see.

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Science has shown that suicide can be “contagious” within communities and families. The act is only unthinkable, apparently, until it is thought. That seemed to be true for Scott. His suicide was preceded by those of his uncle and his grandmother, perhaps priming him to see it as a practical solution for life’s extremities. I similarly grew up feeling like I was the recipient of a cruel inheritance, and that it was a debt I’d always have to repay.

Then, when I was twenty-five, my father died of a failed liver transplant. I hadn’t seen him in seven years. At the hospital the day before, I lay beside him and told him I was thinking of writing a book. Maybe he’d be in it. I still thought I could understand him then. But this book—the one I actually ended up writing—is in stead my struggle to understand the problem he represents in me. In profiling, we see people as we need them to be, even if it blinds us to the ambiguities of reality.

The next day, I held his hand until his breathing stopped. My unanswered questions died with him then. He would remain to me an outline, like a ghost or an indentation on the bed. Sometimes I’m tempted to fill in the blanks, but then I remember that whatever parts of him are left to perceive will mostly add up to a reflection of me. So I’ve decided he’s a mystery to let be.

*** Acknowledgments

Thank you to my family—to my mother and brother for going through life with me and enduring my writing about it, and to Bob for showing me for thirty years what an extraordinary thing a father can be.

Thank you to my agent Larry Weissman, as well as Sascha Alper, for your feedback, friendship, and support over the years. And to my editor at Norton, Matt Weiland, for trusting me, calmly managing chaos, and making every draft better. Laura Hohnhold, one of my very first editors, encouraged my early thinking on this subject nearly fifteen years ago.

Ben Lorr has seen this book take shape from day one to year five. I am endlessly grateful to you for generously reading early drafts, for seeing what I can’t, and for the inexhaustible patience and kindness you’ve shown along the way.

Many other friends contributed to this book, as readers, listeners, and sources of inspiration, especially Natalie Frank, Lauren Belfer, Whitney Alexander, and Carol Szymanski. And a heartfelt thank you to M.C.; your presence is everywhere in these pages.

Finally, I’m indebted to the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation for granting me a transformative fellowship that provided precious time and resources to finish this book.

*** Notes on Sources

**** Introduction

I read several books that informed my thinking as I wrote the introduction, including *Monster Theory: Reading Culture* (1996), edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Rachel Monroe’s book about why women are drawn to tales of murder, *Savage Appetites* (2019), and Michelle McNamara’s investigative memoir, *I’ll Be Gone in the Dark* (2018).

I quote from John Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s 1995 book, *Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit*, in discussing the literary origins of criminal profiling, as well as the first Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes book, *A Study in Scarlet* (1887). Malcolm Gladwell reported on the role of the Con Ed clerk Alice Kelly in the capture of the Mad Bomber in his 2007 *New Yorker* article “Dangerous Minds,” and it was originally reported in the *New York Times* article “Edison Employee Shuns Reward” on February 9, 1957.

Data on the efficacy of criminal profiling comes from the paper “Investigative Experience and Accuracy in Psychological Profiling of a Violent Crime” (2002) in the *Journal of Interpersonal Violence* by Richard N. Kocsis, Andrew F. Hayes, and Harvey J. Irwin, as well as from Curt R. Bartol and Anne M. Bartol’s book *Criminal and Behavioral Profiling* (2012), which cites 1995 research by Gary Copson of the Metropolitan Police Service of London on the success rates of profiles.

Finally, the research and statistics on murder-suicide in the US comes from Katherine van Wormer and Albert R. Roberts’s book *Death by Domestic Violence* (2009), and from the Violence Policy Center.

**** Chapter 1

The history of the Jack the Ripper murders was pieced together through a variety of sources, including *Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook* by Donald Rumbelow (1988), *The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle* by Peter Costello (1991), *Inquest* by S. Ingleby Oddie (1941), *Jack the Ripper: From the Cradle to the Grave* by Peter Rutt (2013), and the online resource Casebook: Jack the Ripper, edited by Stephen P. Ryder, which aggregates historical news sources, official police documents, archival photos, and more. The account of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tour of the Jack the Ripper murder sites comes from Oddie’s *Inquest* (from which all his quotes were sourced), as well as *The Life and Memoirs of John Churton Collins* by Laurence Churton Collins (1912), which is where the quote about Caliban appears.

Historical perspectives on the East End and West End of London come in part from “Capitals at Play: London,” an article by B. Fletcher Robinson in the December 1887–May 1888 edition of *Cassell’s Magazine*. For descriptions of the Crimes Club, I drew details from Carrie Selina Parris’s 2016 doctoral thesis, “The Crimes Club: The Early Years of Our Society.” Doyle’s comments about the creation of Holmes, and the inspiration it took from Joseph Bell, come from his autobiography *Memories and Adventure* and his long essay *Through the Magic Door*. Sydney Smith also analyzed the influence of the character in *Mostly Murder* (1959). Quotes from and details about Robert Anderson primarily come from his memoir, *The Lighter Side of My Official Life* (1910). His statements about Doyle appear in his article “Sherlock Holmes, Detective. As Seen by Scotland Yard” in *T.P.’s Weekly*, October 2, 1903.

For the material on Franz Gall, Cesare Lombroso, and early phrenology, I consulted several sources: *Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism* by John van Wyhe (2017), *On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts* by Franz Gall (1835), *Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind* by George Makari (2015), *Criminal Man* by Cesare Lombroso (1876), *Degeneration* by Max Nordau (1892), and *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). For general history about the evolution of criminal profiling, I interviewed criminologist Wayne Petherick and consulted David Canter’s book *Criminal Shadows* (1994).

**** Chapter 2

Much of the material on Henry Murray’s career and intellectual pursuits comes from his own writings: *Explorations in Personality* (1938), *Endeavors in Psychology: Selections from the Personology of Henry A. Murray*, edited by Edwin S. Shneidman (1981), *Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany’s Surrender* (1943), *In Old Friendship: The Correspondence of Lewis Mumford and Henry A. Murray,* *1928–1981* (2007), and *A Clinical Study of Sentiments* by Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan (1945). For biographical information, Forrest Robinson’s book *Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray* (1992) was indispensable; I also drew from Joseph Adelson’s 1981 *New York Times* review of *Endeavors in Psychology*, titled “Against Scientism,” and the article “Portrait: Henry A. Murray” by Hiram Haydn in *The American Scholar* (Winter 1969–70). Many of the quotes from Morgan, as well as details about her life, are from the biography *Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circle* by Claire Douglas (1993). The poem Morgan quoted from in her journal is “Discordants” by Conrad Aiken (1915).

Alston Chase’s *A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism* (2004) provided a rich history of how government agencies intervened in American universities during World War II and the Cold War, and especially of Murray and Harvard’s involvement. This was also a source of financial data surrounding Harvard’s government funding and contracts, as were the books *Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955* by Sigmund Diamond (1992) and *Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology* by David H. Price (2016). Interviews with University of Pennsylvania philosopher and historian Jonathan Moreno and former CIA deputy director Carmen Medina provided further background.

Details on the formation of the Harvard Psychology Clinic, including the backlash against Murray and the alleged sexual misconduct that occurred there, are from Rodney Glenn Triplet’s 1983 dissertation, “Henry A. Murray and the Harvard Psychological Clinic, 1926–1938: A Struggle to Expand the Disciplinary Boundaries of Academic Psychology.”

Other sources on the overlap between the government and academic research in this period include *And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America* by Margaret Mead (1942), *Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage* by Douglas Waller (2012), *The Mind of Adolf Hitler* by Walter C. Langer (1972), *Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the Office of Strategic Services* by the OSS Assessment Staff (1948), *The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind* by Daniel Pick (2012), Allen Dulles’s 1953 speech at Princeton University, the 1963 “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA” memorandum for the director of Central Intelligence, *Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century* by Jonathan D. Moreno (2012), and *Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era* by Timothy Leary (1990).

**** Chapter 3

Dorothy Lewis sat for several interviews and shared with me in that time much of the material that appears in this book about her life and work. It also comes from her 1998 memoir, *Guilty by Reason of Insanity*, and from court testimony, previously published interviews, and Alex Gibney’s 2020 documentary *Crazy, Not Insane*. The discussion of Freud’s theory of reversals comes from his *Lectures on the Introduction to Psychoanalysis* (1915–1917).

For information about Ted Bundy, beyond Lewis’s account, I consulted several books, including *The Stranger Beside Me* by Ann Rule (1980), *Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer* by Polly Nelson (1994), which includes transcripts from some of Dorothy Lewis’s sessions with Bundy, and *The Only Living Witness* by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (1983), as well as the article “The Roots of Evil” by Myra MacPherson in *Vanity Fair* (May 1989).

Data on serial-murder rates and problems with the federal statistics comes largely from *Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide* by Philip Jenkins (1994). For the history of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and its methods I relied on interviews with retired agents Gregg McCrary, James R. Fitzgerald, and William Fleisher. It is also drawn from *Whoever Fights Monsters* by Robert Ressler (1992), John Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s *Mindhunter*, and the article “Serial Killers and Their Victims” in the *Journal of Interpersonal Violence* by John Douglas, Robert Ressler, Ann Burgess, Carol Hartman, and Ralph D’Agostino (1986). Statistics on the death penalty and politics come from the Death Penalty Information Center.

The material from Gregg McCrary about the Arthur Shawcross investigation and trial comes from an interview with McCrary. Former FBI agent Paul Lindsay’s criticism of profiling comes from the April 1993 *Vanity Fair* article “The FBI’s Agent Provocateur” by Ron Rosenbaum. Discussions of profiling’s intersection with pop culture were informed by Jenkins’s *Using Murder*, as well as *Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture* by David Schmid (2005), and *Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers* by Scott Bonn (2014).

**** Chapter 4

For information about the FBI’s investigation into the Unabomber, I relied primarily on James R. Fitzgerald’s memoir, *A Journey to the Center of the Mind*, Book 3 (2017), as well as conversations with him. I also interviewed Eric Hickey, a psychologist who consulted with the FBI’s UNABOM task force, and read the book *Unabomber: How the* *FBI Broke Its Own Rules to Capture the Terrorist Ted Kaczynski* by Jim Freeman, Terry D. Turchie, and Donald Max Noel (2014).

David Kaczynski provided invaluable insight into his brother Ted’s life, both in interviews and in his memoir, *Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family* (2016). David also introduced me to Jamie Gehring, author of *Madman in the Woods* (2022), who was generous in sharing her research and memories from her years growing up next to the Unabomber in Montana. Alston Chase’s *A Mind for Murder* again provided significant detail on Kaczynski’s years at Harvard.

**** Chapter 5

For quotes and descriptions of encounters between the sheriff’s office and Robert Jones, Bobby Jones, and Tammy Heilman, I reviewed police bodycam footage. I also interviewed residents Robert Jones and Lachelle Carpenter about their experiences and consulted court papers from several lawsuits against the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.

The *Tampa Bay Times* published an extraordinary series of articles on the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office tactics in 2020 titled “Targeted,” by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi. For details on its intelligence-led policing program, I drew from the “Pasco Sheriff’s Office Innovations” document and an internal manual.

For the history of predictive policing and its legacy of racial discrimination I relied on interviews with law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson; Institute for Justice attorney Ari Bargil; the Legal Aid Society’s supervising attorney of the Digital Forensics Unit, Jerome Greco; ACLU attorney Phil Mayor; Penn State political scientist Pete Hatemi; civil rights attorney and Ford Foundation researcher Cynthia Conti-Cook; and former Eastern Correctional Facility inmate Glenn Rodríguez, whose parole status was determined by dubious algorithms. I also consulted *Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic* by William Bratton (1998); the Manhattan Institute article “Policing Terrorism” by William Bratton and George Kelling (2006); the article “Police Performance Management in Practice: Taking COMPSTAT to the Next Level” by William Bratton and Sean Malinowski, in *Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice* (2008); *Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing* by Sarah Brayne (2020); the ACLU report *A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform* (2020); the article “Police Are Using Software to Predict Crime. Is It a ‘Holy Grail’ or Biased Against Minorities?” by Justin Jouvenal in *The Washington Post* (2016); the report “Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them” by Dhruv Mehrotra, Surya Mattu, Annie Gilbertson, and Aaron Sankin at *The Markup* and *Gizmodo* (2021); *The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America* by Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2019); and the Legal Defense Fund’s December 2024 report *Digitizing the School-to-Prison Pipeline*.

*** Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

<biblio>
Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, 72

abuse, 12, 83–90, 112–15, 180

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 157, 190

“active imagination,” 59

Adams, Eric, 185

Adams, Susan, 135

ADX Florence supermax prison, 169

Aiken, Conrad, 75

alienation, 124, 133, 140–41, 162, 206

Aloi, Joe, 113

“alters,” 114. *See also* dissociation/dissociative identity disorder

American Medical Association, 77

amphetamines, 72

Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler *(Murray), 62–67*

analytics, 173–206

crime maps, 184–85, 187

estimates about serial killers, 104, 105

identifying “at-risk” youth, 180–81, 208

in policing, 177–82

predictive policing, 181, 187–90, 203

rural incidence of murder-suicide, 12

use of profiling in the UK and the US, 156

Anderson, Robert, 23, 27–28, 41–42

anima/animus archetype, 55, 74–75

Anthony, Caylee, 155

anti-Semitism, 13, 21–23, 26–27, 40, 42, 65, 100–101

Anti-Tech Revolution *(Kaczynski), 170–71*

ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), 127–28

Atlanta Child Murders of 1979–1981, 103

“at-risk” youth, 180–81, 208

autism, 155, 189

Bargil, Ari, 196, 205

Bateson, Gregory, 50

Bedi, Neil, 180

behavioral science, 10–12, 94–95, 106. *See also* personality; profiling

Bell, Joseph, 29–30

biology

medicalized approach to criminality, 35–39, 49, 83–87, 96–98

phrenology, 13, 35–36, 40

physiognomy, 13, 17, 35–39

problem of science in a “social vacuum,” 46–47

*See also* brain anatomy and function

bipolar disorder, 82, 113

Bloody Sunday, London, 1887, 22

Bond, Thomas, 23–26

Boring, E. G., 57, 59

“born criminal,” 38–39, 97–98, 203

brain anatomy and function, 35–37, 41, 167

frontal lobe, 86, 167, 203

hypnosis, 55–56, 59, 112

mind-body dualism, 36–37, 40

neurological dysfunction and damage, 83–87

phrenology, 13, 35–36, 40

seizure disorders, 111

skull shape, 13, 35–38

temporal lobe, 36, 111, 112

brainwashing/mind control, 51, 62–64, 67–73, 76–78, 126–27, 163

Brantingham, Jeffrey, 187–89

Bratton, William, 184–87

Braun, Eva, 66

Brayne, Sarah, 189–90

“breaking” a person, 166–68

“Brides in the Bath” killer (George Joseph Smith), 21

“broken windows” theory, 183–86

Brooks, Pierce, 108–9

Brown, Frederick Gordon, 23

Brown, Pat, 98

Brussel, James, 14–15

BTK (Dennis Rader), 107

Bundy, Ted, 81–119

childhood abuse, 83–90, 112–15

as culture war touchpoint, 96–99

diagnosis of bipolar disorder, 82, 113

enter the FBI, 93–96

execution of, 99

his appearance, 116–17

his crime spree, 91–93

his signature, 114

interview with Dobson, 90–91

California

predictive policing in, 186–89

Reagan as governor of, 97–98

University of California, Berkeley, 129, 148–49, 152

Capote, Truman, 11

Carpenter, Lachelle, 196

Carroll, Lewis, 41

Chapman, Annie, 23–25

Chapman, Mark David, 83

Chase, Alston, 78–79, 124

children

abuse of, 12, 83–90, 112–15, 180

the case of Robert Jones and his son Bobby, 173–77, 181–83, 190–206

identifying “at-risk” youth, 180–81, 208

juvenile delinquency, 83–84, 179–80, 193

*See also* education

China, 68

Christianity, evangelical, 90–91, 96–98

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 51, 62–64, 67–73, 76–77, 126–27, 163

civil rights movement, 96–97

Civil War, 202

Clinical Study of Sentiments<em>,</em> A *(Murray), 69*

Collins, John Churton, 22

Committee for National Morale, 50–51, 68

competency, legal, 82–88, 110, 167–68

CompStat, 185–88

confessions, 110–11

Corbett, Rachel

investigating the murderer in her life, 1–13, 17–18, 207–9

counterterrorism, 186–87

Cowell, Louise, 88–89

Cowell, Sam, 88–89, 114–15

Cream, Thomas Neill, 21

crime fiction, 11–12, 15–18, 28–31, 40

crime maps, 184–85, 187

crime scene evidence, 10–11, 21, 94, 105–6, 110, 135, 156

Crimes Club (UK), 20–28

“criminal investigative analysts,” 157. *See also* profiling

*Criminal Man* (Lombroso), 35, 37–39, 41, 203

*Criminal Minds* (TV show), 10–11, 155

criminality

“born criminal,” 38–39, 97–98, 203

“broken windows” theory, 183–86

defining “suspicious” activity, 186–87

“degenerates,” 38–40

identity and, 35, 37–39, 41, 203

the Jekyll-and-Hyde problem, 40, 208

juvenile delinquency, 83–84, 180, 193

medicalized approach to, 35–39, 49, 83–87, 96–98

organized-disorganized typology, 108, 135, 156

predators, both human and animal, 133, 169–70

predicting, 202

premeditation, 165

the study of, 34–41

“symptoms” of, 13

tattoos, 37, 38

criminology, 21, 34–41

“broken windows” policing, 183–86

counterterrorism, 186–87

criminology (*continued*)

“godfather” of, 37

morality in, 39, 88–87, 97–98

predictive policing, 181, 187–90, 203

*See also* policing; psychology

culture

crime fiction, 11–12, 15–18, 28–31, 40

criminal profiling on television, 10–12, 155–56

culture war touchpoints, 96–99, 106

true crime genre, 11–13, 17–18, 31, 207–9

women as victim in popular culture, 155

Dahmer, Jeffrey, 97, 107

Dare to Discipline *(Dobson), 96–97*

Darwinism, 38

DC Sniper (John Allen Muhammad), 83

DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency), 204

DeAngelo, Joseph, 13

death penalty, 82, 83, 96, 98, 165, 168–69

Deegan, Dolly, 196–97

“degenerates,” 38–40

delinquency, 83–84, 180, 193

depression, 46, 73–74, 196

Depue, Roger L., 104–6

DeSantis, Ron, 197

Descartes, René, 37

desegregation, 96–97

detectives. *See* forensics; policing

Dietz, Park, 135, 167–68

Diósy, Arthur, 26

disposition, legal, 193

dissociation/dissociative identity disorder, 111–19

“divided self” of a Freudian dream state, 119

DNA evidence, 42, 107, 132

Dobson, James, 90–91, 96–97

Donovan, William “Wild Bill,” 62–64

“double event, the” (murders of Stride and Eddowes), 23–25, 32–33

Douglas, John, 12, 95, 134–36, 156–57

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 12–43

Ripperologist, 19–23, 32–34

Sherlock Holmes, 28–31

A Study in Scarlet<em>, 17, 30</em>

*Dracula* (Stoker), 16

drugs

amphetamines, 72

hallucinogenic drugs, 70, 78

marijuana enforcement, 174, 175–77, 189, 201

methamphetamine, 204

psilocybin mushrooms, 72

DSM <em>(</em>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual<em>), 97</em>

dualism (mind-body), 36–37, 40

Dulles, Allen, 69

dyadic (two-person) relationships, 60–62, 73, 76, 77–78, 124, 142–46

Eddowes, Catherine, 23–25, 32–33, 42

education

alternative schools, 191

desegregation of public schools, 96–97

juvenile delinquency, 83–84, 179–80, 193

school resource officers, 182

and social control, 51, 69, 158, 191–92, 201

electroshock therapy, 70, 89

empiricism, 36–37

England, 27, 33–35. *See also* London

evangelical Christianity, 90–91, 96–98

evil

as artificial, 11

Christian family values, 96–98

in fiction, in reality, 28, 39, 88, 117

national security as ideology justifying torture, 72

as not scientific, 96

of “primitive” peoples, 38

total disregard of, 50

urge to identify, 13–14, 28, 40

Executioner’s Song *(Mailer), 11*

Explorations in Personality *(Murray), 48–50, 78*

“fair play,” 15

false confessions, 104

false convictions, 13, 190

false memories, 112

Falwell, Jerry, 97

FBI, 10–12

Behavioral Science Unit, 10, 94–96, 104–9, 134, 156–57

domestic surveillance by the, 103

fusion centers with local police, 186

hunting serial killers, 90, 93–96, 104–9

hunting the Unabomber, 126–36, 146–47, 152–53, 157–60

organized-disorganized typology, 108, 135, 156

Waco siege, 152

in popular culture, 10–12, 60

federal death row, 98

feminism, 97

Ferguson, Andrew Guthrie, 203

“Final Problem, The” (Doyle), 31

fingerprinting, 21, 129

Fish, Caroline “Nina,” 76

Fitzgerald, James R., 131, 133–36, 146–47, 153–61, 169–70

Florida

Parkland School shooting, 181

predictive policing in Pasco County, 173–206

trial of Ted Bundy, 81–82, 93, 96–99, 113–17

Focus on the Family, 91

“focused offenders,” 205

forensic psychology. *See* profiling

forensics

blood tests, 21

crime scene evidence, 10–11, 21, 94, 105–6, 110, 135, 156

DNA evidence, 42, 107, 132

fingerprinting, 21, 129

handwriting analysis, 14, 32–34, 114

lividity, 110

modus operandi, 95, 107, 135

Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, 195

Franklin, Joseph Paul, 83

Freeh, Louis, 146–47, 159

Freeman, Jim, 107, 131, 132, 135

Freud, Anna, 63

Freud, Sigmund, 56, 63, 117–19

fusion centers, 186

Gacy, John Wayne, 97, 103

Gaetz, Matt, 197

Gall, Franz Joseph, 35–37

gender, 55, 65, 147–48, 207. *See also* sexuality

Genesee River Killer (Arthur Shawcross), 109–13

Germany, 45–51

anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, 13, 65, 100–101

Nuremberg trials, 13–14, 77, 100

profile of Hitler, 45–46, 49–51, 62–67, 76, 100–101

Gilmore, Gary, 11

Gilmore, Mikal, 11

“godfather of criminology,” 37

Goebbels, Joseph, 51

Golden State Killer (Joseph DeAngelo), 13

Göring, Hermann, 13–14

Great Britain, 15, 27–28, 33–35. *See also* London

Great Depression, 50

Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway), 107

Guilty by Reason of Insanity *(Lewis), 85*

guns, 12

hallucinogenic drugs, 70, 78

handwriting analysis, 14, 32–34, 114

Harris, Thomas, 10, 60, 134

Harvard humiliation studies, 76–79, 121–26, 138–39, 148, 162–68. *See also* Murray, Henry

Hawkins, Crystal, murder of, 1–4, 8, 10

Heck, Robert O., 104–5

Heilman, Tammy, 182–83, 197, 204

Hitchcock, Alfred, 111

Hitler, Adolf, 45–46, 49–51, 62–67, 76, 100–101

homosexuality, 13, 91, 97

Hoover, J. Edgar, 103

human organization science, 134

humiliation, 69, 71–72, 76–79, 121–26, 138–39, 148, 162–68

hypervigilance, 86

hypnosis, 55–56, 59, 112

identity

dissociation/dissociative identity disorder, 111–19

gender, 55, 65, 147–48, 207

as predictor of criminality, 35, 37–39, 41, 203

urge to identify criminals, 12–13

*See also* interpersonal relationships; race/racism

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark *(McNamara), 13*

immigration, 14, 16, 21–22, 34–35, 52–53

In Cold Blood *(Capote), 11*

Industrial Revolution, 34–35

“Industrial Society and Its Future” (T. Kaczynski), 132–33, 146–47, 150, 151–54, 158–62, 167, 191

information “silos,” 181

informed consent, 77

Institute for Justice, 195

intelligence-led policing (ILP), 177–82, 188–89, 197, 201–3

interpersonal relationships

alienation, 124, 133, 140–41, 162, 206

anima/animus archetype, 55, 74

“breaking” a person, 166–68

dyadic (two-person) relationships, 60–62, 73, 76, 77–78, 124, 142–46

education and social control, 51, 69, 158, 191–92, 201

humiliation, 69, 71–72, 76–79, 121–26, 138–39, 148, 162–68

*See also* children; public order

Jack the Ripper

Arthur Conan Doyle, Ripperologist, 19–23, 32–34

“Dear Boss” letter, 32–33, 43

the “double event,” 23–25, 32–33

immigration to the East End, 16, 21–22, 34–35

murder of Mary Kelly, 19–21, 24–26

profile of, 19–28

the suspect list, 41–43

Jenkins, Philip, 104, 105

Johnson, Scott, 1–13, 17–18, 207–9

Jones, Bobby, 173–77, 181–83, 190–92, 198–206

Jones, Robert, 173–77, 181–83, 190–96, 200–206

Jung, Carl, 53–57, 59, 74–75

jurisprudence. *See* legal process

juvenile delinquency, 83–84, 179–80, 193

Kaczynski, David, 137, 142, 147–53, 157, 161, 165, 166–68

Kaczynski, Ted (Unabomber), 121–71

arrest of, 159–64

at Berkeley, 129, 148–49, 152

death of, 170–71

early life of, 136–39

first bombs, 126–32

at Harvard, 139–42

journals, 161, 167

later writings, 170–71

manifesto, 132–33, 146–47, 150, 151–54, 158–62, 167, 191

as test subject, 124–26, 140–46, 162–69

Kelling, George, 183–84, 186

Kelly, Alice, 15

Kelly, Mary Jane, 19–21, 24–26

Keniston, Kenneth, 140–42

Keppel, Robert, 105, 107

*Killer Profile* (TV show), 155

Klout (musician), 205

Kluckhohn, Clyde, 69–70, 102–3

Langer, Walter, 42, 63–64

language

“Dear Boss” letter, 32–33, 43

language (*continued*)

handwriting analysis, 14, 32–34, 114

statement analysis, 135, 153

Unabomber manifesto, 132–33, 146–47, 150, 151–54, 158–62, 167, 191

Lanning, Ken, 134–35

Lashley, Karl, 57

law enforcement. *See* legal process; policing

“Lawful” (test subject), 124–26, 163, 165

Leach, Kimberly, 95–96

leadership profiling, 64, 76

learning disabilities, 85

Leary, Timothy, 72–73

legal process

confessions, 110–11

death penalty, 82, 83, 96, 98, 165, 168–69

defining “sanity,” 82–88, 110, 167–68

delayed disposition, 193

false confessions, 104

false convictions, 13, 190

legal competency, 82–88, 110, 167–68

probable cause, 190

search and seizure, 195

Lennon, John, assassination of, 83

Lewis, Dorothy, 81–90, 96

on dissociation/dissociative identity disorder, 111–19

and the Genesee River Killer, 109–13

Guilty by Reason of Insanity<em>, 85</em>

on Hitler, 100

interviews with Bundy, 81–85, 87–90, 113

research on violence and the brain, 85–87

as student of Henry Murray at Harvard, 101–3

Lindsay, Paul, 107

“linkage blindness,” 93, 105, 128

lividity, 110

local police departments, 91, 93, 106, 108, 186

Lombroso, Cesare, 35, 37–39, 41, 203

London

anti-Semitism in, 21–23, 26–27, 40, 42

immigrants of the East End, 16, 21–22, 34–35

Metropolitan Police Force, 177

Scotland Yard, 23, 27, 32, 34

*See also* Jack the Ripper

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 186–88

Lowell, Lawrence, 56, 58

Lucas, Henry Lee, 104–5

Macnaghten, Melville, 42

Mad Bomber (George Metesky), 14–15, 135–36

Mailer, Norman, 11

Malinowski, Sean, 187

*Manhunt* (TV show), 155–56

manhunts, 14, 92–93, 95, 157

Mansfield, Richard, 41

Maple, Jack, 185

marijuana enforcement, 174, 175–77, 189, 201

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida, 181

Martinez, Bob, 98

masculinity, 65, 207

masochism, 65

Mayor, Phil, 190

McChesney, Kathleen, 116

McClelland, David, 48

McConnell, James V., 129, 162

McCrary, Gregg, 109–10, 112

McGrory, Kathleen, 180

McNamara, Michelle, 13

Mead, Margaret, 50, 51

Medina, Carmen, 76

*Mein Kampf* (Hitler), 65

Melville, Herman, 47, 49, 58, 76

Mengele, Josef, 77

mental health

bipolar disorder, 82, 113

depression, 46, 73–74, 196

hypervigilance, 86

masochism, 65

paranoia, 48, 66, 86, 167–68

sadism, 65, 83, 97, 104, 166

“sanity,” 82–88, 110, 167–68

schizophrenia, 167–68, 198

seizure disorders, 111

sensory deprivation, 70, 129

sleep deprivation, 78

stress, 67, 77–78, 113

*See also* drugs; suicide

Metesky, George, 14–15, 135–36

methamphetamine, 204

Metropolitan Police Force, London, 177

Michaud, Stephen, 114

mind control/brainwashing, 51, 62–64, 67–73, 76–78, 126–27, 163

mind-body dualism (mind-body), 36–37, 40

*Mindhunter* (memoir), 12, 95, 157

*Mindhunter* (TV series), 10, 12

Minority Report *(film), 181*

MK-ULTRA, 70–71, 78

modus operandi, 95, 107, 135

monsters, 9–16, 208

pornography and men, 90–91

the humanity within, 116–17

the Jekyll-and-Hyde problem, 40, 208

*See also* criminality; evil; psychology

morality

attempts at moral improvement, 49

in criminology, 39, 88–87, 97–98

moral panic, 96–97

according to the Unabomber, 142–43, 163

See also *evil*

Morgan, Christiana, 53–55, 58–61, 67–69, 73–76, 78

motive, 7, 16, 25, 26, 130

revenge, 26, 101, 149, 161–62

the Unabomber manifesto, 132–33, 146–47, 150, 151–54, 158–62, 167, 191

*See also* sexuality

Muhammad, John Allen, 83

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, 203

Mullany, Patrick, 94–95

“Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men” (Murray), 121–26

multiple personality disorder, 111–19

murder, 1–4, 8, 10. *See also* serial killers

murder-suicides, 7, 10, 12

Murray, Henry, 45–79, 101–3, 121–26, 141, 163–64

American intelligence services and, 67–68, 72–73

early life and career, 51–55

Explorations in Personality<em>, 48–50, 78</em>

humiliation studies, 76–79, 121–26, 138–39, 148, 162–68

interest in Herman Melville, 47, 49, 58, 76

marriage to Josephine Rantoul, 52, 55, 59, 74

profile of Hitler, 45–46, 49–51, 62–67, 76, 100–101

relationship with Christiana Morgan, 53–55, 58–62, 67–69, 73–76, 78

at “Station S,” 67, 77

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 47, 58–62, 76, 167–68

National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, 108

national security, 72, 186

nationalism/“national character,” 50–51

Nelson, Polly, 98

New York City Police Department (NYPD), 15, 185–88

New York City, 14, 52–53, 184–88

*New York Times*, *The*, 104–5, 116, 131–32, 133, 146

*New Yorker* (magazine), 167–68

Nichols, Polly, 24

Nocco, Chris, 178–79, 182, 188–89, 194–95, 197–98, 200, 203, 205

Noel, Max, 128

Nordau, Max, 39–40

Nuremberg trials, 13–14, 77, 100

Oakland, California, police department, 189

Oddie, Samuel Ingleby, 20–21, 26–27

Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 51, 62, 65, 67–68, 72–73, 124

organized-disorganized typology, 108, 135, 156

O’Reilly, Bill, 96

Our Society (Crimes Club), 20–28

paranoia, 48, 66, 86, 167–68

Paris, Joel, 111

Parkland School shooting, 181

Pasco County, Florida, 177, 180, 188–92, 194–95, 201, 202, 204–6, 208

Patrik, Linda, 151

Patriot Act, 186–87

Pearl Harbor, 62

Peel, Robert, 177–78, 202

personality

“breaking” a person, 166–68

dissociation, 111–19

personality tests, 137

the “scientific personality,” 101–2

scientific study of, 47–50, 64–65, 156

the “total personality,” 48–49

transformation of, 79, 124

*See also* psychology

“personology,” 48–49

Petherick, Wayne, 156

phrenology, 35–36, 40

physiognomy, 13, 17, 35–39

Pincus, Jonathan, 85–86

Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, Florida, 201, 204

Poe, Edgar Allan, 12, 29

*Policing* (journal), 187

policing

“consulting detectives,” 11–12, 155, 157

counterterrorism, 186–87

data-driven technology in, 177–82, 185

in defense of public order, 34–36, 96–97, 177–78, 183–84

detectives compared to doctors, 28–30

Fourth Amendment search and seizure, 195

“fusion centers,” 186

intelligence-led policing (ILP), 177–82, 188–89, 197, 201–3

“linkage blindness,” 93, 105, 128

local police departments, 91, 93, 106, 108, 186

manhunts, 14, 92–93, 95, 157

stop-and-frisk, 189

*See also* criminology; FBI; public order

“political/leadership profiling,” 64, 76

pornography, 90–91, 97

predators, human and animal, 133, 169–70

Predict and Surveil *(Brayne), 189–90*

predictive policing, 181, 187–89, 203

PredPol, 188–89

premeditation, 165

“primitive” peoples of Asia and Africa, 38

Prince, Morton, 55–58

probable cause, 190

profiling, 1–18, 207–9

accuracy in, 15, 171

as art rather than science, 12, 15, 49

doctors and detectives compared, 28–30

geographical profiling, 184–85, 187

in non-crime-related industries, 17

leadership profiling, 64, 76

organized-disorganized typology, 108, 135, 156

the origins of, 19–43

profile of Hitler, 45–46, 49–51, 62–67, 76, 100–101

profile of Jack the Ripper, 19–28

profile of Ted Bundy, 81–85, 87–90, 113

profile of the Unabomber, 121, 132–35, 140–51, 161–69

profilers and psychologists compared, 106

profilers in pop culture, 10–11

racial profiling, 157, 187

“toxic trifecta,” 83, 85–86

on TV, 10–12, 155–56

profiling (*continued*)

*See also* FBI; forensics; psychology

propaganda, 51, 63–67, 163

psilocybin mushrooms, 72

psychiatry, 14–15, 37–41

in the courtroom, 82–88, 95–98, 106, 110–11, 167–70

drug abuse and delinquency, 84

as psychological manipulation, 129, 132–33, 148, 162, 167–69

*See also* mental health

*Psycho* (film), 111

“Psycho Squad.” *See* Behavioral Science Unit under FBI

psychoanalysis, 47, 53–54, 56–57, 63, 84

Psychological Types *(Jung), 53–55*

psychology, 10–12, 21, 37, 62–73

of crime fiction, 11–12, 15–18, 28–31, 40

experiments in, 45–79, 121–26

at the FBI, 94–95, 132–35

Freudian reversals, 117–19

Harvard humiliation studies, 76–79, 121–26, 138–39, 148, 162–68

of killers, 21, 94–95, 99–100

profilers and psychologists compared, 106

Stanford Prison Experiment, 71–72

stress tests, 67, 77

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 47, 58–62, 76, 167–68

the unconscious, 55, 60, 63, 118

weaponization of, 62–64, 68–73, 76–78

psychopathy, 168

psychotherapy, 111

public order, 34–36, 96–97, 177–78, 183–84

immigration as threat to, 14, 16, 21–22, 34–35, 52–53

mind control/brainwashing, 51, 62–64, 67–73, 76–78, 126–27, 163

propaganda, 51, 63–67, 163

*See also* interpersonal relationships; policing

Puckett, Kathy, 146

quackery, 47

race/racism

anti-Semitism, 13, 21–23, 26–27, 40, 42, 65, 100–101

after the Civil War, 202

desegregation, 96–97

immigration, 14, 16, 21–22, 34–35, 52–53

marijuana enforcement and, 174, 175–77, 189, 201

“primitive” peoples of Asia and Africa, 38

racial bias in technology, 189

racial profiling, 157, 187

Rader, Dennis (BTK), 107

Ramsey, JonBenét, 155

Rantoul, Josephine, 52, 55, 59, 74

Rather, Dan, 159, 164

Reagan, Ronald, 81, 97–98, 103, 109

*Red Dragon* (Harris), 60

relationships. *See* interpersonal relationships

Reno, Janet, 146, 147

Republican Party, 83, 96–98, 178, 197

Ressler, Robert, 93, 95, 107–8

revenge, 26, 101, 149, 161–62

Ridgway, Gary (Green River Killer), 107

Riecken, Henry, 78–79

Rifkin, Joel, 107

Roberts, Susie, 1, 2

Robertson, Pat, 97

Robeson, Paul, 59

Robinson, Bertram Fletcher, 21

Ronay, Chris, 127–29

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 62

Rule, Ann, 105

Russell, Bertrand, 59

sadism, 65, 83, 97, 104, 166

Salem witch trials, 16

“sanity,” 82–88, 110, 167–68

Santa Cruz Police Department, 188

Saturday Review<em>, 158</em>

“satyriasis,” 26

schizophrenia, 167–68, 198

science

empiricism, 36–37

evil as not “a scientific concept,” 96

false impression of a scientific framework, 179

informed consent, 77

problem of science in a “social vacuum,” 46–47

the scientific method, 162

the “scientific personality,” 101–2

*See also* biology; forensics

Scotland Yard, 23, 27, 32, 34

Scott, Rick, 178

Scrutton, Hugh, 129–30, 164

seizure disorders, 111

sensory deprivation, 70, 129

serial bombers, 14–15, 135–36. *See also* Kaczynski, Ted

serial killers

Atlanta Child Murders, 103

“Brides in the Bath” killer, 21

BTK, 107

common traits among, 90

confessions of, 110–11

death penalty for, 82

Genesee River Killer, 109–13

Golden State Killer, 13

Green River Killer, 107

John Wayne Gacy, 97, 103

mental illness and, 86–87

mobility of, 105

motive and, 94

in pop culture, 10–11, 15

that revisit their crime scenes, 110

the “rise” of, 103–9

timelines of, 131

“toxic trifecta,” 83, 85–86

*See also* Bundy, Ted; Jack the Ripper

sexuality

Hitler’s, 63, 65

homosexuality, 13, 91, 97

pornography, 90–91, 97

“satyriasis,” 26

“sexual maniacs,” 27

Shawcross, Arthur, 109–13

Shot in the Heart *(M. Gilmore), 11*

Sickert, Walter, 41

signatures. *See* forensics

*Silence of the Lambs* (Harris), 10, 60, 134

*60 Minutes* (TV show), 168

slave patrols, 202

sleep deprivation, 78

Smith, George Joseph, 21

“smoking guns,” 15, 158

Soviet Union, 66–68, 70

“split” personality, 40, 111–19

Stanford Prison Experiment, 71–72

STAR (Strategic Targeted Area Response), 194–95

statement analysis, 135, 153

“Station S,” 67, 77

statistics. *See* analytics

Stoker, Bram, 16

stop-and-frisk, 189

Stott, June, 110

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<em>,</em> The<em>, 40, 208</em>

stress tests, 67, 77

stress, 67, 77–78, 113

Stride, Elizabeth, 23–25, 32–33

*Study in Scarlet*, *A* (Doyle), 17, 30

suicide

contagion of, 208–9

murder-suicides, 7, 10, 12

predicting, 66, 100

suicide watch, 196

Supreme Court, 83, 89

surveillance, 103, 147, 171, 186–87

Swanson, Donald, 42

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 41

*Sybil* (novel), 111

Tampa Bay Times<em>, 180, 189</em>

tattoos, 37, 38

Taylor, Dalanea, 197

technology

alienating effects of, 133, 140–41

analytics in policing, 177–82

the Unabomber manifesto, 132–33, 146–47, 150, 151–54, 158–62, 167, 191

*See also* Kaczynski, Ted

television, crime dramas on, 10–12, 155–56

“tells,” 170

Teten, Howard, 94–95

Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 47, 58–62, 76, 167–68

Tilson, Jeff, 3, 10

*Time* (magazine), 188

“toxic trifecta,” 83, 85–86

true crime genre, 11–13, 17–18, 31, 207–9

Truth Versus Lies *(Bundy), 165*

Turchie, Terry, 154

Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic *(Bratton), 184*

Unabomber. *See* Kaczynski, Ted

*Uncommitted*, *The* (Keniston), 141

unconscious, the, 55, 60, 63, 118

United Kingdom, 27, 33–35. *See also* London

United States

Army, 72, 77

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), 127–28

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 51, 62–64, 67–73, 76–77, 126–27, 163

civil rights movement, 96–97

Civil War, 202

Department of Justice, 103–4, 179, 189, 195, 197

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), 204

intelligence establishment after World War II, 62–73

Office of Naval Research, 71

Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 51, 62, 65, 67–68, 72–73, 124

Senate, 105–6, 108–9

Supreme Court, 83, 89

University of California, Berkeley, 129, 148–49, 152

Valéry, Paul, 117–19

violence, 9–11, 18, 207

animal, 38

childhood abuse and chronic violent offenders, 88–89, 177–80

dissociation and, 111–12

medicalized approach to, 35–39, 49, 83–87, 96–98

moral panic, 96–97

our “aggressive instincts,” 49, 51

patterns of, 187–88

pornographic, 90–91

revolutionary, 123, 125, 133, 148, 151, 163–64

Waco, Texas, siege, 152

*Washington Post*, *The*, 133, 146–47, 151

*What Joy!* (Morgan), 76

Wilson, James, 183

Wodehouse, P. G., 21

Wolff, Antonia, 55

Wolff, Harold, 71

women, 17

anima/animus archetype, 55, 74–75

feminism, 97

hatred of, 26, 42

Salem witch trials, 16

true crime genre, 11–13, 17–18, 31, 207–9

as victim in popular culture, 155

as victims of male murder-suicide, 12

Yale Child Study Center, 84

“You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” 154, 158–59

“Young Fate, The” (Valéry), 117–19

Zimbardo, Philip, 71–72
</biblio>

*** Also by Rachel Corbett

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*You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria*
<br>*Rilke and Auguste Rodin*
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