Murder
Crime and Society Series
Series editor: Hazel Croall
Published titles
Sex Crime (second edition), by Terry Thomas
Burglary, by R.I. Mawby
Armed Robbery, by Roger Matthews
Car Crime, by Claire Corbett
Street Crime, by Simon Hallsworth
Hate Crime, by Nathan Hall
Murder, by Shani DCruze, Sandra Walklate and Samantha Pegg
Murder
Social and historical approaches to
understanding murder and murderers
Shani DCruze, Sandra Walklate and
Samantha Pegg
First published by Willan Publishing 2006
This edition published by Routledge 2011
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Shani DCruze, Sandra Walklate and Samantha Pegg 2006
The rights of Shani DCruze, Sandra Walklate and Samantha Pegg to be identified as the authors of this book have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting copying in the UK issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.
Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-184392-169-1
Hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-84392-170-7
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by GCS, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, LU7 1AR
Project managed by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
As Brian Willan, Director of Willan Publishing, will know, this book has had a long gestation during the course of which it has changed its shape and form. Its overall intention is to introduce the reader to some of the complexities that surround the social and cultural response to the crime of murder and the murderer. In exploring this response we have deliberately opted to focus on what we have chosen to call interpersonal murder. Of course, in a sense, both socially and legally, all such crimes are interpersonal but our use of this term is intended to confine our concerns to those acts of killing that involve intimates or acquaintances rather than those acts of killing that might result from road traffic accidents, political violence or the work of business corporations. Our intent is not to convey that such acts of killing are unimportant or not worthy of exploration. They are. However, in a short text of this kind it would be very difficult to do justice to the legal and social complexities that their inclusion would entail. So, in this book, we have taken the act of interpersonal murder and explored the social construction of the murderer over time in an effort to understand how such constructions search for ways of rendering the murderer pathological; Not Like Us. We hope you enjoy the journey!
In putting this book together various people have helped each of us in different ways. Shani and Sandra would like to acknowledge the support of critical academic friends in the Socio-legal Studies Group at Manchester Metropolitan University, namely Stephen Whittle, Cath Little, Kate Cook and Helen Jones, to whom we exposed our early ideas on rendering the murderer pathological. Shani would also like to thank June DCruze who spent time searching second-hand bookshops in search of source materials, and Jeff St Clair who, as always, listened endlessly and constructively. Samantha would like to thank Dr Kim Stevenson, Dr Judith Rowbotham, Professor Mary Seneviratne, Emily Garvican and Christian Marland for their support. Shani and Sandra would like to thank Samantha who was drafted into this project at short notice and ensured that we finished it this time. Sandra would like to thank Brian Willan for his patience and flexibility in waiting for the completion of this project and Ron Wardale for all his support in ensuring that, no matter what, she always stayed grounded. Finally we would all like to acknowledge the help, support and constructive criticism of the Crime and Society Series Editor, Hazel Croall. Needless to say, the faults that remain are our own.
Shani DCruze, Crete
Samantha Pegg, Nottingham
Sandra Walklate, Clawddnewydd
February 2006
Chapter 1
Cataloguing murder
British criminologists have tended to describe murder as statistically uncommon, socially contained, and morally equivocal, a mundane problem whose gravity has been somewhat overblown by popular and press misconceptions centred on the reporting of egregious cases (Rock 1998a: 8).
Introduction
The act of murder has always aroused public interest, yet there is surprisingly little written about this crime from a criminological perspective. Much of the academic material that is available focuses for the most part on particular kinds of killing (like, for example, serial killing or women who kill), or endeavours to offer an encyclopaedia-style approach to the crime, or deals with the process of making sense of particular (notorious) murderers. The majority of the rest of material available is very much in the 100 worst crimes genre or comprises rather more journalistic accounts of particular murders or murderers. Homicide has suffered from, as Rock (1998a: 9) says, an intellectual neglectfulness. The most recent exception to this rule is found in the work of Brookman (2005) who offers a comprehensive overview of the various means available to criminologists to make sense of the more generic crime of homicide.
As will become evident in this chapter, homicide is a general term that, in England and Wales, is used to cover the killing of one human being by another, regardless of motive or circumstance. This distinction between homicide and murder and the various ways in which these terms are applied in different jurisdictions is one of the first problems to address when discussing murder. An awareness of this distinction is crucial for an understanding of the focus of this book.
This book is not about homicide in general although it must be said that, in the act of writing the words here, homicide and murder may be used interchangeably depending upon the context and the references being used. Such a process notwithstanding, this book is about murder, one particular kind of murder, that we have called interpersonal murder. Now in some senses this idea of interpersonal murder is rather an odd term to use both legally and socially as all murders are in some sense interpersonal. This term is used here, however, to mark the boundaries of this book in a very real way. It means that we are not concerned to address murder as a result of terrorist activity, corporate homicide, mass murderers or even deaths that result from road traffic accidents. This is not to say that all these different kinds of killing are not salient or do not carry with them all kinds of questions about how the act of murder is constituted, especially legally. We are bounding our concerns to the more routine, everyday life, domestic kind of murders (the mundane acts referred to in the quotation taken from Rock used at the beginning of this chapter) that conjure the kinds of violent practices that are familiar, often familial, and feared. In taking this kind of bounded approach our intention is to explore murder in those circumstances in which, as an act, it carries its most powerful cultural meanings and consequences on the family, relatives and the wider community.
