The author at 6 with Scott Johnson.
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Police 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 6 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 5,000 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 Processors 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 blonde woman, later identified as 28-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, 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 27-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 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.
For nearly four years, Scott was a constant presence in my life.
Thirteen years later, 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 6-year-old girl with a messy blonde ponytail. I brought the photo up close, trying to search his face for a sign of something. But his expression was neutral and vacant. I hadn’t thought of the name Scott Johnson in years. Now I couldn’t stop silently repeating it to myself.
Scott looked in the picture exactly as I remembered him. Quiet, melancholic. He was in his mid-20s, 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 Altered Beast 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 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 rail yard, 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. 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. 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 woman or 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, who had endured violence at a young age himself, first at the hands of his biological father and then as a marine drafted to Vietnam, 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.
The night before he died, Scott showed up at our house unexpectedly. He and my mother had broken up largely because 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 good-bye. 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 train yard 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 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?
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She refused. 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 good-bye 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 good-bye, 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.
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 was 22 and had just moved to New York to become a journalist. I was learning to ask questions, and it was inevitable I’d begin asking them of my own history. I looked up the Vinton newspaper archives online to see what they might tell me about him. 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, 27 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. Who was the woman? Who was the boy? And why didn’t he kill us that day? Scott’s was a crime no one understood, with no apparent motive. Even his suicide note shrugged: “Give my cat to my dad.”
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. 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.
I organized all my evidence to write a semblance of the Scott I never knew, the murderer. I’m not sure what I was looking for. 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.” Still, I took some comfort in putting form to this horror. When I look back now, I realize I was writing a profile of Scott, trying to fit the murder to the man. It led me only to the unsettling conclusion that I would never understand what he did. His crime would always defy reason.
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. Despite it being a relatively modern technique, the practice has its roots in early crime literature, in the characters of Sherlock Holmes and C. Auguste Dupin, which is where I first discovered it as a teenager. Today, profilers enjoy an almost mythological status in pop culture thanks to Silence of the Lambs and massively popular TV shows such as Mindhunter and Criminal Minds. But profiling, it turns out, is often a quixotic, haphazard blend of science and fiction. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly branded it a pseudoscience, pointing to a dearth of credible research proving its efficacy. One study found that 83 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.
Still, however shocked I was by Scott’s fate, he fit the profile of his crime 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, according to a 2008 report. Recent separation is one of the biggest risk factors, along with unemployment. Guns are almost always the murder weapon. Rural areas have higher incidences of murder-suicide than cities; 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.
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 of Chicago. The killer was never caught, which inflated his presence in her mind. “I need to see his face,” she wrote. “He loses his power when we know his face.”
Society needs monsters. They reinforce 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 comes from Romania to London, emerged amid Victorian England’s anxiety over immigrants and sexual deviance. In 17th-century Massachusetts, women who strayed from puritanical norms were branded witches.
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 themselves. 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 profiling can also be exploited 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.
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. Perhaps for the same reason, women, who are far more likely to become victims of sexual violence than men, make up the largest audience of true-crime media — and podcasts like Crime Junkie and My Favorite Murder have been soothing many of them to sleep for nearly a decade. Some psychologists speculate that the phenomenon is a way to experience our worst fears from a safe distance; in the mass-market formulas, the perp usually gets caught. But while that has proved to be excellent TV business, it doesn’t make us any wiser or safer. And 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.
Adapted from The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling by Rachel Corbett. Copyright © 2025 by Rachel Corbett. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
