I lived with a murderer. This is what he taught me about the minds of monsters… and what our obsession with their crimes reveals about us

The little boy in the blue truck had been honking the horn for hours by the time the police showed up.

Inside the house in the quiet farming community of Vinton, Iowa, they found a scene that would haunt the officers for the rest of their lives.

Crystal Hawkins, 28 – the six-year-old boy’s mother – was lying naked on a waterbed.

The bullet that had pierced her skull had also punctured the mattress. By the time her body was discovered it was so heavy and bloated, police were barely able to carry her out of the house.

Crumpled in a corner of a nearby closet was Hawkins’s ex-boyfriend Scott Johnson. He had a self-inflicted bullet wound to his head and a .44 Magnum at his feet.

Johnson’s Doberman Pinscher, Astro, had also been shot dead.

What had caused Johnson to kill? And why, wonders author Rachel Corbett in her new book, The Monsters We Make, were she and her family not the ones to die that day in May 1993.

Johnson had, after all, lived with her mother for four years until Corbett was eight years old. Both she and her brother, three years her senior, viewed him as a father figure.

Johnson and Corbett’s mother had broken up a few months earlier, but he’d turned up the night before the killings to drop off some gifts: peacock feathers for her mom, his Sega game console for the kids.

Corbett, now 41 years old and living in Brooklyn, New York, writes in her book: ‘He told [mom] 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.

‘In retrospect, I see that he had come to say goodbye.’

The next morning, Johnson drove to Hawkins’ small white house with the boarded-up garage and the waterbed, and shot her in the head, before turning the gun on himself.

At the time, Corbett only knew that the man she’d adored and looked up to had died. It wasn’t until she was 22 and studying journalism in New York that she looked back at old newspaper clippings and discovered the truth.

What signs had she missed, she wondered. She pored over old photographs, searching his vacant face for something that might indicate he was capable of such horrors.

The urge to make sense of the inexplicable is, she believes, what drives our current obsession with true crime. Nowhere is that more clear than in the huge popularity of shows like Dahmer, the recent Netflix series, Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story, and Murdaugh Murders, a dramatization of disgraced South Carolina attorney, Alex Murdaugh’s infamous slaughter of his wife, Maggie, and younger son, Paul.

Corbett said: ‘What are we doing when we can’t look away from crime? When we are drawn to these TV shows and these podcasts, what does that mean about us?’

Especially fascinating, she pointed out, is the fact that women make up about 80 percent of the audience for such content.

Psychologists have suggested part of the reason is that it enables us to experience our worst fears at a safe distance. And Corbett is sure there is some truth in that.

But, she told the Daily Mail, she believes there’s a more nuanced explanation: ‘When we make a narrative out of anything that terrifies us, it feels like we have made sense of it. We rationalize it and have mastered it, in a way.

‘We’re not good as humans in letting there be open questions or mysteries. Especially when something is so terrifying.’

This attempt to make sense of the darkest recesses of the human mind and understand what drives some to commit the most hideous crimes, is nothing new.

In the late 18th century, European phrenologists – practitioners of a pseudoscientific theory who believed that a person’s character and mental faculties could be determined by the shape of their skull – looked for bumps on the head to identify would-be criminals.

In the 19th century, many believed sharp teeth or hooked noses were the signs of a killer.

More recently, the science of criminal profiling has been used to identify serial killers, while some experts have advocated for the controversial practice of predictive policing – a strategy that combines data like previous arrests with various algorithms to forecast which individuals are more likely to commit crime.

According to Corbett: ‘You write a story to lessen the terror around you and to control what you can’t.

‘So, when I looked at my own history, I was trying to retell the story of my life, and on my own terms.’

And as she researched Johnson’s crimes – interviewing police and even Hawkins’ son, the little boy who was spared that day and survived to sound the alarm – Corbett learned that, while he had displayed no outward signs of the monster he would become, Johnson’s past was a textbook backdrop to the sort of violence he perpetrated.

He was abandoned by his mother as a child, had a legacy of suicide in the family and had recently lost his job welding train cars at the local railyard.

‘It turned out that he fit the profile precisely,’ she wrote. ‘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.’

Were there other signs that suggested Johnson could have been stopped that day?

‘I sometimes wonder if something would have been different if my mother had let him stay with her,’ Corbett said, ‘or if somehow they could have reconciled. I wonder if that’s what he wanted on some level.

‘Looking back, he was probably more depressed than I realized.’

In so many ways, Johnson was not the man she, as a child, thought he was.

She recalled him teaching her to shoot Coke bottles in the back yard and being so apparently opposed to violence he wouldn’t harm an animal.

She said: ‘Talking to my mother after the fact, [I learned] he wasn’t a great guy.

‘But violence and murder? There was nothing. Being a jerk sometimes doesn’t make you a murderer.’

And there’s the dilemma. Having started writing the book to resolve the mysteries of her past, Corbett has been left with more questions than answers.

‘I’m of the belief that a killer is a lot of things wrapped into one,’ she said. ‘It’s biological processes, it’s childhood trauma, it’s psychiatric disorders – all those things can be at play.

‘With Scott, knowing his background – he’d had three generations of suicides in his family – if he’d had different circumstances, he could have avoided this.

‘I’m not trying to excuse him, but I don’t think anyone is destined to kill. I don’t think anyone is born that way, so I don’t think he was either.’

The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling by Rachel Corbett is published by WW Norton