The Shape of Him Part 4: The People Who Fit The Profile And Never Cross The Line

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This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky. Here now, Tony Brusky.

Something happens in the days after an arrest like this that nobody really names directly.

The profile gets assembled fast. A name becomes public. And within hours, the picture is coming together

in the coverage and the conversation and the group chats and the comment sections,

awkward, isolated, intensely focused on dark subject matter.

Made people uncomfortable. Didn't connect easily. Loner.

Interior. Someone who gave people a feeling they couldn't name.

In somewhere, in a lot of somewhere, someone is reading that description

and feeling something they were not expecting to feel. Not grief, not fear exactly.

Something colder and more specific than either of those. A recognition landing in the wrong place.

Because the description being assembled around the person who allegedly did something

unthinkable doesn't only describe that person, it describes them.

The woman who's always been too intense for whatever room she's in. The one who built her entire

life around her interior world because the exterior social world was never particularly welcoming

to her. The person people have described more than once in her life as a lot. Too much.

Hard to read. Not quite right for the space she or he occupies. The one who's been quietly

monitored at work without anyone saying directly why? Kept at a slight arm's length

that family gatherings, watched in a way here she can feel, but that nobody will acknowledge

is happening. The true crime listener who spent hundreds of hours with content exactly like this

in a quiet moment somewhere wondered what that says about them. Nobody makes room for what those

people feel when a profile like this gets assembled in public. Nobody stops to say that description

also belongs to people who are going to go home tonight and make dinner and call their mothers

and live entirely regular and entirely harmless lives. People who will never hurt anyone,

people who are sitting with a recognition that has nothing to do with violence and everything

to do with what it feels like to be seen as something you are not. This episode is for those people.

Let me name the profile before we examine it because you can't look at something honestly until

you've looked at it directly. The characteristics that could have assembled around Brian Coburger,

prolonged social isolation and tense preoccupation with criminal psychology and violent subject matter,

physical awkwardness and social settings, difficulty with natural, easy exchange,

a pattern of making people uncomfortable without doing anything specifically wrong. A defended

interior life that didn't open easily towards other people, a dramatic physical transformation,

a sustained focus on understanding why people do what most people never do.

Now ask yourself honestly, how many people does that describe? Maybe even yourself to a certain

extent. The Ph.D. student who has never done small talk and never well, the woman who builds everything

around her interior world because the exterior world kept its distance from her. The person,

and this is a lot of people listening right now who consumes true crime obsessively,

the one drawn to understanding darkness academically because she encountered it personally.

I wanted to make sense of it. The person who lost her dramatic amount of weight after years of

feeling wrong in their own body, the one who has always been described as a lot. The profile is not

a fingerprint, a fingerprint belongs to one person and only one. This profile is a smudge,

a wide, imprecise smudge covering an enormous population of people, the overwhelmingly majority

of whom are not dangerous have never been dangerous and will go their lives without crossing any

line. Some of them are listening right now and nobody is asking what it costs to live inside

that description. Here's what it actually costs. There is a specific experience that a lot of

socially awkward, intense, and non-normative people know very well and almost never talk about.

The experience of knowing you're being monitored, not formally, not legally, just watched. The room

recalibrates slightly when you walk in. Conversations adjust postureships.

The invisible social math running in your vicinity that everyone pretends isn't happening

while it very clearly is. People have spent a lot of time on the outside of rooms get very good

at reading this, not because they're paranoid, because they've had to when belonging is an automatic.

When you've never been able to take a room for granted, you develop a precision for reading

rooms that people have always felt welcome. Never need. When you've been assessed before the

conversation started, you know what the two careful friendliness means. You know the difference

between someone who is warm towards you and someone who is managing you. You know what the

watchfulness is even when it's being performed as something else. There's nothing you can do about

it because here's the trap. You cannot disprove a feeling. There's no form to file, no test to pass,

no demonstration that establishes for the skeptical coworker or the watchful neighbor that you

are not what their nervous system is telling them you might be. The concern is not based on something

you did. It's based on something you are and you cannot change what you are in the ways that would

satisfy it. And if you try, if you make yourself warm or more accessible softer on the edges,

easier to be around, the effort reads as performance, which confirms the original concern rather than

addressing it. It's a closed trap. There's no version of changing yourself that exits it because

the self is perceived is the perceived problem and no amount of self-modification resolves a

concern that was never about behavior in the first place. I want to talk directly to all of our true

crime audience. The people who listen to this kind of content are overwhelmingly women. The ones

who go deep on cases, the communities, the hours, the genuine fascination with this psychology,

the need to understand overwhelmingly is women, which means a significant portion of the people

listening to this episode share at least one characteristic with the profile being assembled

around Brian Coburger, an intense sustained preoccupation with violent crime and the people

committed. And I know some of you have probably asked yourself the quiet version of this at some

point late at night, in a moment of honesty with yourself, what does that say about me? And here's

the honest answer. It says you're a woman or a man, 20 men that listen to? Living in a world

where violence is disproportionately aimed at women. It says you have a direct personal stake in

understanding how this works, not an academic one, a survival one. It says you're using the oldest

human tool for processing fear, which is story to understand something that is real and ongoing,

that directly affects your life and the lives of every person you love.

True crime is a female dominated genre because women are disproportionately the targets of the

violence, it documents. We pay attention to this because it belongs to us to pay attention to

because knowing how it works, who does it, what it looks like before it becomes undeniable,

what the warning signs actually are versus what people claim they were after the fact. That knowledge

is not morbid, it's practical and it's the closest thing to a survival manual that exists

for navigating a world that has always been more dangerous for them than other people.

Your interest in this content is not a warning sign, it's not evidence of something

dark in your psychology, it's on a profile indicator. It's you being a person who pays attention

to the world you actually live in. Now I talked to mothers for a second, specifically the

mothers of kids that the other kids don't choose, and you're wondering what's going on here,

especially if you watch a lot of this content, a lot of co-burger stories and such and you go,

what's this? Am I raising a little co-burger? I mean,

not because he's done anything, because he reads as other. Something is in his intensity,

his focus. The particular quality

that makes other children and their parents hold them at careful distance without being able to say

exactly why. You know, if you're in this position, you feel it in the conversations with other

parents where they're clearly talking about something other than what they're saying, you feel it

in the invitations that don't come. In the way your child is included, just barely enough that

nobody can point to explicit exclusion, but not nearly enough that your child ever stops feeling it.

What it is to be that mother doesn't get talked about honestly. To know your child is being

quietly assessed by the people around him, to watch people make decisions about who he is before

they've tried to find out, to sit across some teachers and administrators who choose their words

or the precision that tells you exactly what they actually think while they pretend to be saying

something neutral. And then to go home and sit with two things that cannot fully coexist.

Your knowledge of your whole child, the real one, the one who is funny when he lets himself be,

who is genuine in pain, who has more going on inside him than anyone around him is bothering to

discover. And the terror underneath that knowledge, the question you don't say out loud because saying

it feels like making it real. What if they see something I'm too close to see?

That terror can be real. One of the loneliest things a parent carries, it doesn't go away by being

logical about it. And it's almost certainly in the overwhelming majority of cases wrong.

Most kids who carry this profile become adults who carry the weight of it without adding to anyone

else's. It's called comfort when it's your specific child and your specific life and your

specific fear sitting across from you at the dinner table. But it is still true and it's

worth saying out loud because it doesn't get said nearly enough. Here's what the research

actually tells us about profiles like this. The behavioral overlap between people who fit a

risk profile and never harm anyone and the very small numbers who do is enormous.

If you flagged every person who matched the characteristics assembled around Cobrager,

you would flag a massive population of people who will live their entire lives without crossing

any line. For every actual threat you'd catch, you'd catch hundreds. Maybe thousands of people

who were just odd, just difficult, just themselves in ways that other people find hard to be around.

The false positive rate is not a small problem. It's the whole problem.

And the cost of that, the cost of treating an enormous population of odd,

intense, isolated, harmless people as presumptive threats falls entirely on those people,

on their careers, their relationships, their sense themselves in the world, their ability to

simply exist without being someone else's ongoing risk assessment. That cost is real.

It is significant. It just doesn't generate headlines because it's distributed quietly across

millions of individual lives that nobody is covering in offices and schools and family gatherings

carried by people who fit a description that was never written for them and can't escape it.

If you are that person, if you've always been a lot, if you know you read us too much,

if you've spent years moving through the world where that you make certain people uncertain

and have never been able to address it because there was never anything specific to address,

fitting a profile is not evidence of anything. Aquinas is not a warning sign. Intensity is not

pathology. Being interior and defended and difficult to reach is not predictive of anything.

You do not owe anyone a performance of harmlessness. You are allowed to be exactly who you are without

being a problem that belongs to you to solve. In every case like this, the profile gets redovined.

More characteristics get added to the list. The checklist gets longer and more detailed and

the population of people living inside the checklist. People who fit the description and will never

cross any line grows larger and carries more weight. Nobody asks when it costs them. Nobody stops them

till the coverage and the conversation and the profile building to say, this description also

belongs to people who are going home tonight to live their regular lives who will wake up tomorrow

and go to work and come home and never hurt anyone who are carrying a label assembled around someone

else's alleged act and have no way to remove it. They don't get acknowledged. They just keep going.

Fitting that description is not the same as being the thing the description was built to describe.

The profile is a smudge, not a fingerprint. And there are a lot of people living inside it who

never asked to be there. Fascinating look at this type of individual.

And I would argue that a lot of us in the true crime world fit it to a certain extent.

It's interesting to try and understand why and what it actually means.

Your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube. The link is in the description.

Be sure to press subscribe so you don't miss any of our coverage of this and the many cases

we're following for you right here. Until then, I'm Tony Bruceke. We'll talk again real soon.

Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true

crime coverage from Tony Bruceke and the Hidden Killers podcast.

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