What can we surmise about the background of the deceased? Well, chances are that he or she will not be wearing a business suit. Less than 7 per cent of homicide victims had a professional, managerial or skilled occupation. Twice that proportion (14 per cent) will have had a manual job. But by far the most likely status is that they didn’t have a job at all — 53 per cent of victims had ‘no current occupation’, with one in four classed as unemployed. If they did work, there are a few occupations that appear to be associated with above average risk of being murdered: security staff, medical staff, social workers and, often overlooked in the official statistics, prostitutes.
We know something of the victim but what of the cause of death? In Britain, more than a third of homicides involve the deceased, whether male or female, having been stabbed. The weapon is likely to be a knife but may be one of many sharp instruments, including broken bottles. Beyond that, the modus operandi alters depending on whether the victim is a man or a woman.
The next most common implement for a male death is a fist or a foot — about a quarter are hit or kicked to death. For women it is strangulation, accounting for roughly one in five female victims. A blunt instrument (such as a tyre spanner) is used only rarely — in about 7 per cent of homicides of either sex. Although popular culture might suggest murderers often shoot people, in the UK this is described as relatively unusual. Around 7 per cent of male victims and 2 per cent of women are shot. It is a different story in the United States, however, where the gun is by far the most commonly used weapon in murders. At the height of the ‘murder boom’ in New York in the late 1980s and early 90s, almost 80 per cent of homicides involved firearms.
Around 60 per cent of homicides take place between 8pm and 4am. More than twice as many homicides occur on a Saturday as a Monday. (There is more than a whiff of alcohol in the figures, as we shall find out.) April and October are the most common months to be bumped off, February and November the least likely.
Having identified the victim, the cause and the time of death, it is high time to begin tracking down the killer. If our murderer conforms to type, what kind of person will he or she be? Well, the odds are overwhelmingly in favour of the killer being a man. Around 90 per cent of offenders are male, and they are likely to be a similar age to their victims — between eighteen and thirty-five.
What about a description? Does a murderer have a distinctive look? Eyebrows too close together, an evil stare? According to Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s influential 1876 work
Warming to his theme, the scientist applied his theory to the skull of Charlotte Corday, the young woman who famously and fatally stabbed Jean-Paul Marat in his bath during the French revolution. ‘Not even the purest political crime, that which springs from passion, is exempt from the law which we have laid down,’ he claimed. A statue of Valeria Messalina, the Roman empress who plotted to assassinate her husband Claudius, was also employed to support his argument. He sees in her effigy a heavy jaw, a low forehead and wavy hair — the marks of a killer!
However absurd these ideas may seem today, such was their currency that in June 1902 Sir Bryan Donkin and Sir Herbert Smalley, the senior medical staff of the English prison system, agreed to test them out. The heads of thousands of inmates incarcerated in Parkhurst, Portland, Dartmoor and Borstal gaols were measured, including those of convicted murderers who had been spared the death sentence.
In 1913 Charles Goring, the Deputy Medical Director at Parkhurst, published
A century later and researchers were again inside prisons trying to spot the common factors among murderers. In 2000, David Freedman and David Hemenway published the results of long and detailed interviews with sixteen men on death row in the United States. As the stories of the condemned men unfolded, remarkable similarities emerged. All sixteen had experienced family violence; fourteen of the men had been severely physically abused as children by a family member. Three of them had been beaten unconscious. Twelve of the death row inmates had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.
Psychiatrist James Gilligan, while director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, also explored the life histories of incarcerated killers. Violent men, he concluded, have often been the victims of extreme physical and psychological violence during childhood. They have feelings of worthlessness, failure, embarrassment, weakness and powerlessness.
Research by the World Health Organization in Europe found a similar link: ‘Exposure to violence and mental trauma in childhood is associated with atypical neurodevelopment and subsequent information-processing biases, leading to poor attachment, aggression and violent behaviour. Children who experience neglect and maltreatment from parents are at greater risk for aggressive and antisocial behaviour and violent offending in later life.’
The profile of our typical killer, then, may involve an abusive childhood. We can also make a guess as to where he or she lives: offenders tend to come from poorer neighbourhoods. Research on English murders in the 1980s by the social anthropologist Elliott Leyton concluded: ‘It is clear that nine out of ten homicides, perhaps more, are now committed by members of [the] underclass — persons with little education and no professional qualifications, chronically unemployed and on welfare.’
However, assuming that poverty alone explains higher murder rates might prove a red herring. The link between homicide and deprivation is not as strong as its link with income inequality: several studies have demonstrated that murder rates go up as differences in wealth increase. An examination of violent crime rates in 125 of the largest cities in the US concluded that it wasn’t objective poverty that could be linked to violence, but relative deprivation. The World Health Organization came to a similar conclusion, reporting that rising income inequality in Europe had resulted in an increase in homicide.
We have a body and we have a description of the suspect. What we do not have yet is a motive. To help complete the picture, our detective will want to know the probable relationship between the murder victim and the killer. Are they strangers, acquaintances, friends or family? The answer is likely to depend on whether our murderer is a man or a woman.
According to UK government research, one in four of the victims of male killers will probably be a stranger to their assailant. Among those killed by women, one in twenty-three is likely to be a stranger. In fact, female killers often know their victims intimately — in half of cases research suggests it will be their husband or partner, an ex- partner or a relative. For male perpetrators, the proportion of their victims who are likely to be close family members is a quarter.
Although the average age of a killer is almost identical for men and women, at around thirty-two years old, the average disguises an important clue. If a man is going to murder he is most likely to do it in his early twenties, with probability dropping as the years pass and maturity increases. Women, however, kill with almost consistent regularity from their twenties through to their mid-forties. The motives for women tend to be buried in the chronic tensions of domestic life. For men, the causes are more likely to be found in the conflicts of their social or work lives.
