Homicide

How many serial killers have a medical illness that drives them to kill? How many innocent  people are sent to death row each year? Answers to these questions and more await you in this episode that is all about homicide.  Check out the instagram page the_z_files_podcast for weekly crime fact drops!

email questions to: thezfilespodcast@gmail.com

Child abuse info sheet: https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/whatiscan.pdf

Sources:
https://www.domesticshelters.org/articles/in-the-news/women-serve-longer-prison-sentences-after-killing-abusers

https://everytownresearch.org/report/guns-and-violence-against-women-americas-uniquely-lethal-intimate-partner-violence-problem/

Friedman, Susan H. , Sarah McCue Horwitz, and Phillip J. Resnick.  2005. “Child Murder by Mothers: A Critical Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge and a Research Agenda.” Am J Psychiatry; 162:1578-1587

FBI.gov

https://projects.voanews.com/mass-shootings/

https://documents.deathpenaltyinfo.org/pdf/FactSheet.pdf

Transcript

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Intro-I started this episode with 16 pages of data that I wanted to go over, so this episode is going to be part 1. This area of crime is loaded with information so I did my best to pick out what I thought would be the most informative, but if you have any burning questions about homicide that I didn’t go over please shoot me an email as thezfilespodcast@gmail.com

 The content of this episode will be heavy. I will be talking about child abuse, domestic violence, and many other things murder related. Please keep anyone in your immediate listening vicinity in mind with this information. 

I know homicide to be a flashy topic. My students are usually the most engaged in this one. While we go over the gory details of what I have dug up about homicide, I don’t want this to spike anyone’s fear of crime. That’s a mantra I hope to preserve through many of these episodes. Please remember that most crimes do not threaten our well-being, and they are not committed by psychopathic strangers, but rather by trusted relatives and friends. 

We will talk about two types of homicide. Let’s define both. Homicide is defined as the willful killing of one human being by another. Criminal homicide is the willful killing of one human being by another without legal justification or excuse. 

In the United States of America, a variety of penalties are assigned to killings the criminal justice system deems without justification or excuse. These penalties range from probation, jail, or prison time, and the most severe being the death penalty. The death penalty is administered through 5 different options include lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad.  Currently, 27 states exercise the death penalty. The majority of executions happen in the south. By majority, I mean literally  80% of people who are executed are convicted in the south, and yet that region continues to lead the nation in homicide rates. 

The south has executed 1262 people, Texas as a state by itself has executed 574, and then the combined total of executions by the midwest, the west, and the northeast are 285 executions. I don’t know if that saying “Dont mess with TExas” came from their capital convictions but I could see it. 

In terms of the effectiveness of the death penalty, 88% of former and current presidents of the country’s top academic criminological societies reject the notion that death penatly acts as a deterrent to murder. Besides this, nearly 4 people are exonerated from death row each year due to factual evidence proving they were wrongfully convicted. Since the death penalty information center started keeping track of death row exonerations, 185 people have been released after it was discovered they were wrongfully sentenced to death. Our system that is supposed to be the standard of justice in the World sent 185 innocent people to death row. Many of them were on death row for years or decades. Some were on death row for as long as 40 years. 

It’s not surprising that our system has made so many mistakes, we have factual evidence of bias in death row sentencing. While our homicide law doesn’t differentiate punishments based on the race of the victim in a case, the humans operating our systems definitely do. In 96% of the states were there have been reviews of race and the deathpenalty, there was a pattern of either race of victim or race of defendant discrimination, or both. The main pattern that emerges is that our criminal justice system places a higher punishment on offenders who kill white people compared to homicides of any other race. 

1. Jurors in Washington state are 3x more likely to recommend a death sentence for a black defendant than for a white defendant in a similar case. 
2. In Louisianna, the odds of a death sentence are 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black. 
3. A comprehensive study of the death penalty in Nc found that the odds of receiving a death sentence rose by 3.5 times among those defendants whose victims were white. 
4. In Texas you are 6x more likely to get the death penalty if your homicide victim is white. 
5. Besides unequally applying the death penalty to cases based on race, we also see a strange pattern emerge among homicides as the result of domestic violence. 
   1. The first weird one for me, is that 90% of the women incarcerated for homicide are there for killing the man who had abused them. 
   2. According to the ACLU, women who kill their abusers will spend an average of 15 years behind bars. While men who kill their female partners will serve a sentence between 2 to 6 years. 
      1. I have a few cases to illustrate this: In 2017 in NC, a man was released from prison after serving 7 years for stabbing his pregnant wife to death in their bedroom. 
      2. In Nebraska a man was found guilty of severing his wife’s head from her body but he was still allowed to reenter the community under supervision after spending 5 years in a psychiatric hospital. 
      3. In contrast, Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot into the wall near her husband minutes after he had nearly strangled her to death. 
      4. Crystal Potter served 20 years in prison for shooting her husband after he aimed a gun at her head. This interaction was the conclusion to weekly beatings. 
      5. If we compare these cases to the definition of criminal homicide, what the system is telling us is that it is more justified for a man to kill the victim of his abuse than it is for the victim of the abuse to fight back. And yet, in sexual assault cases the court penalizes victims who can’t prove they fought back with every ounce of strength…but I digress. 

1. Criminal Homicide

Now that we have talked about the rage of the legal system’s response to homicide, let’s get into the homicides themselves.  

As I said in episode 1, the year 2019 had about 16,425 recorded criminal homicides. In 2015, the year had about 15,696 homicides. Important criminology tip here, you don’t want to just compare raw numbers because that’s not giving you an accurate picture of how the crime is operating in a population. You want the number of crimes per 100,000 people to have a better idea of how that crime is changing. In 2015, that rate was 4.9, so nearly 5 homicides per 100,000 people. If we compare the 2019 number of homicides to the population, the rate is also around 5 murders per every 100,000 people. 

Besides the grief homicide inflicts on loved ones, it takes a steep toll on our economy as well. A victimologist by the name of Kathryn McCollister calculated that each murder costs the economy approximately $8,982,907 in court fees, lost productivity, and lost spending by the victim. 

Most homicides follow a logical escalation process and are not random acts of violence. By logical I don’t mean that I agree homicide is a good tool for conflict resolution, but the circumstances that precipitate most homicides have a logical progression that we see case after case.  

Let’s talk about our youngest victims of homicide first, babies and children. The media is quick to sensationlize when a stranger abducts and kills a child, Hollywood is obsessed with these kinds of dramas and yet stranger danger is not the cause of the majority of child homicides each year. Multiple data points continue to show that young children are mostly killed by family members. Child homicide usually stems from chronic child abuse. Child abuse reports in recent data involved 7.8 million children per year in the US. Less than half of these children will receive preventative or post-response services. 

-91.7% of victims are mistreated by one or both parents. Compared to other industrialized nations, the US is the leading country for child and infant homicide.  The American Medical Association reports over 1,000 deaths a year due to child abuse. 70.6% of these fatalities are among children under 3 years old.  80.3% of fatalities involve at least one parent. Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death in children ages 1 to 9, however, without witnesses to confirm how the injury came about, many cases of child abuse are reported to medical professionals as unintentional injuries. These numbers are scary on their own, but even worse when we know that many child homicides are recorded as other causes of death because it’s easier for caregivers to explain certain injuries as different kinds of accidents.

Mothers more likely to commit neonaticide and infanticide than fathers. 

1. Neonaticide is defined as killing an infant in the first 24 hours of life. Infant homicide is defined as killing an infant who is older than 24 hours but younger than a year old.. Neonaticide is severely underreported because the first 24 hours of life can present enough natural challenges to explain some homicides as natural causes. Now This fact messes with people, mothers who commit neonaticide are usually not suffering from mental health challenges. 

As children grow older, the Fathers is more likely to be the perpetrator in homicide cases. And in the teen years, children are more likely to be killed outside the family. Boys are slightly more likely to be killed as children, teenage boys are at greater risk than teenage girls. 

 We need to be vigilant to signs of child abuse. A lot of that is going to start with providing more resource for public educators because they are on the front line. Anyone working in child care should be properly trained in the signs of child abuse and have access to immediate help when they come across a child exhibiting those signs. I don’t have time to go into all those signs today so we will visit that at another episode but I am leaving a link in the description box with some helpful information for now. 

Moving onto Adult Victims of Homicide. 

1. Victims and offenders usually share age, gender, and race. We find that Males are slightly more likely to be killed by a stranger or a friend. While Females are more likely to be killed or kill a family member.
2. Men are 4 times more likely to be murdered than women. 
3. Men are 7 times more likely than women to commit murder. In 2019, 88% of known homicides were committed by men. 
4. Young adults ages 18-24 have the highest victimization and offending rate for homicide. 
5.  The US has the highest rate of homicide among industrialized nations for men in this age group. So, if you are keeping score, the US now holds the highest rates of homicide for young adult males and infants. 

The type of weapon involved in adult homicides is significant. Without the use of certain weapons, we wouldn’t have as many homicides. When guns are used in robberies for instance, the fatality rate is 3x higher than when a knife is used. Many of the intimate partner homicides in the US are the result of a gun, as many as 2/3 of these deaths are due to a gun. 92% of women in a violent relationship who were killed with a gun in developed countries in 2015 were from the US. I’ll say that another way, In 2015, the US represented 92% of women victims who were killed with a gun in a violent relationship. Women in the US are 28x more likely to die by firearm homicide than women in peer countries. Its not that domestic violence is lower in those countries, it's really about  gun access. Gun access increases likelihood of the abuser killing a female victim by 5X. States with a higher rate of gun ownership contain 65% of the intimate partner violence homicides by firearm. Some might be worried that I am advocating for a movement that would remove all guns from American households. That’s not my stance. I believe logical adults can have the conversation about who should and shouldn’t be allowed access to guns without everyone getting insecure about their rights.  Criminal offenses such as domestic violence should be disqualifiers from people having the right to a gun since we have the math to prove the toll it is taking on human lives. If you aren’t abusing anyone, this legislation won’t be a threat to you anyways. If you are abusing someone, then yeah this should make you uncomfortable. 

1. Alright, here’s what everyone has been waiting for. We can’t talk about homicide without bringing up serial killing. But because this represents so little of homicide itself, I will be brief. 

Serial murder happens when the same person kills several victims in three or more separate events. The majority of serial killers are not legally insane or medically psychotic. The truth of it is, most of them are more cruel rather than crazy. Out of seven identifiable motives for serial killing, only one deals with psychosis in which the offender is suffering from a severe mental illness and kills because of it. Their evil is a choice. Many serial killers can be categorized as sociopaths, but that doesn’t mean every sociopath is capable of serial murder. A sociopath is simply someone who lacks a conscience. Depending on how that person was socialized, they can choose many life paths that do not involve murder. Some have psychopathy, but not all violent offenders are psychopaths and not all psychopaths are violent. 

The FBI states there is no generic profile of a serial murderer. Their motivations for killing and behavior at a crime scene vary. Experts do identify some common traits that nearly all serial murderers share such as senesation seeking, lack of remorse or guilt, impulsivity, the need for control, and predatory behavior. They have also identified common interpersonal traits of serial murderers that are glibness, superficial charm, a gradiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and the manipulation of others. Generally these are accompanied by anti-social behaviors as well such as poor behavioral controls, juvenile delinquency . If you remember fro last time, this would also include arson. Bed wetting. 

1. Serial killing is on the decline thanks to better law enforcement capability and technology advances. Serial murders are more challenging because they usually target strangers and don’t leave many personal connections to their victims for police to start investigating. The FBI has been able to come up with a guide behind serial murderers actions that is helpful. Anger is the underlying motivation when an offender displays rage or hostility towards a certain subgroup of society. This would be evident in the similarities between victims. Financial gain is motivation obviously when the offender is making money from the killings. These would include black widow killings, robbery homicides, or killings that involve insurance or welfare fraud. Ideology is the motive to commit murders in order to further the goals and ideals of a specific individual or group. Examples of these include terrorist groups or an individual who attacks a specific group. Members of the KKK have earned this label throughout the entire history it has existed. Motives for serial murder also include sexual desires, power/thrill, and criminal enterprise. 
2. Washington state gets a bad rap for having the most serial killers because some famous ones started their killing there, but it is actually Washington DC that has had the most serial killings in the country. We don’t have an accurate number of total serial killers in America. A good deal throughout history have remained unknown or free from capture. In addition, the killers who go after white victims receive the most attention. Many none-white victims of serial killing are not recorded in the category so we don’t even have an accurate idea of how many victims have been killed by serial killers. Serial killers have targeted womens living on reservations and low-income, non-whtie women in order to evade capture. While I can’t give you an accurate number, I can tell you some trends that have emerged from serial killers that were known to law enforcement. In a report of 544 cases of serial murders, Seventy-four percent of the murderers were from the United States. where 85 percent were male, 8 percent were female, and the sex was undetermined in the cases in which the offender was still at large. In addition, 82 percent of American serial killers were white, 15 percent were black, and 2.5 percent were Hispanic. Eighty- seven percent operated alone, while 10 percent committed their crimes in pairs or groups. Motives were often psychological, with strong sado-sexual overtones and evidence of compulsive behavior. Since 1969, 8 percent of the cases involved practitioners of Satanism, while another 5 percent involved members of the medical profession.
3. You'll notice that I have not dropped a single name of a killer yet, and I refuse to. That is because another common trait among all serial killers is that they enjoy the attention for their killings. News reports, documentaries, podcasts, books, and now, even netflix shows all play in to exactly what a serial killer wanted when they targeted their victims. They not only wanted to take life, but they wanted to become famous for it. The sad thing is, even as a criminologist I can tell you three serial killer’s names right now off the top of my head, but I cant tell you the name of a single victim of their killings. This is why I don’t talk a lot about serial killers. I have studied their work in depth but I will not participate in glorifying them.