The Psychology of Murder

I don’t know what you did during the year-or-so COVID-19 lockdown, but I read and wrote a lot about death. Not just any death, but unnatural death, i.e., the premature end to life which can happen one of three ways: murder, suicide, or accident. As research for a planned series of books, I completed a survey of unnatural deaths that took place in New York City, New Jersey, and Long Island between 1920 and 1970, using published newspaper accounts as my source material.

Why invest so much time and energy investigating what is unarguably a morbid subject? Although unnatural demises are, more often than not, sad or even tragic in that they represent premature death, they represent an undeniable and, to me, fascinating part of life. Death is a taboo subject in America (our last one, I believe), but I think it’s important to acknowledge its presence, as doing so reminds us of the preciousness of life. Everyone’s got to go sometime, as they say, and telling more stories of death, even bad ones, will help normalize it.

Another aim of my study was to gain a greater understanding of why, despite being a taboo subject, unnatural death, both real and fictional, is so popular in America. Murder, especially, represents a sizable chunk of the book, television, movie, and videogame industries, suggesting that consumers have an insatiable appetite for stories centered around the taking of a life. Examining and retelling hundreds of case histories of real homicides seemed to me to be as good a way as any to gain a greater understanding of why we spend so much time and money on this genre of media and entertainment.

My findings, some of which can be found in the first book in the planned series (Dead on Arrival in Manhattan), were, not surprisingly, interesting. What situations led to someone purposefully interrupting the natural lifespan of another individual? Murder was often the result of greed, i.e., the selfish pursuit of money, making criminal activity a common backdrop. This was particularly true during the Prohibition era (1920-1933), when disputes related to bootlegging or the myriad of other illegal businesses it funded, would sometimes result in someone getting whacked. Robberies gone wrong proved to be an excellent way to become dead, as did the escalation of a quarrel or double-crossing the wrong guy.

True crime was just a portion of the circumstances surrounding homicide, however. The taking of another person’s life was often the outcome of a strong emotion linked to a particular event and a close relationship, such as cases of unrequited love or cheating on one’s mate. Jealousy, anger, revenge, love, hate, and other intense feelings can make people do terrible things, we all know, with these tales from the past making that perfectly clear. Although some folks were amenable to bumping off a complete stranger, murder more typically involved family members, friends, and lovers—an especially peculiar thing about our species.

Grudges between business partners served as another prime motivating factor for murder, as did domestic violence, often related to an impending divorce. Drinking (especially around the holidays) was frequently involved, with many a bad decision made when fueled by alcohol. The presence of a gun also made it that much more likely that detectives and a coroner would be working late into the night.

Although a gun was definitely the weapon of choice in these stories—a bullet in the back of the head was a common refrain—bludgeoning, stabbing, strangulation, and suffocation occurred with some regularity. (And yes, for those wondering, an ice pick did make a cameo appearance.) As well, police were far more inclined to shoot suspects in those days, sometimes with many innocent people in the vicinity.

Most interesting, perhaps, was that murder was an equal opportunity employer, completely blind to the privileges that came with wealth or social status. While criminals accounted for many of the murderers and those murdered, a surprising number of homicides involved people who were entirely ordinary other than the ways in which their respective lives ended. The implication is that one does not have to be a psychopath or sociopath to kill another individual.

This finding resonated with research conducted by David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin. Despite the ethical, moral, and legal implications associated with committing murder, Buss found that the vast majority of Americans have not only had musings of doing it but went even further by planning their hypothetical homicides in considerable detail. 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had thoughts of killing someone, Buss’s survey of 5,000 people revealed, research presented in his book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill.

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Other researchers have explored the psychology of murder and found that most of us are capable of it in the right (or wrong) circumstances. Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist and author of the book Why We Snap, has claimed that humans are biologically predisposed to commit violence in certain situations. Aggression is a natural defense mechanism against a perceived threat, his research showed, making us all capable of violence—even killing another human being—if it means our own survival.