Thomas Joiner - The Perversion of Virtue. Understanding Murder-Suicide

The Perversion of Virtue

Understanding Murder-Suicide

THOMAS JOINER, PHD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Joiner, Thomas E.
The perversion of virtue : understanding murder-suicide / Thomas Joiner.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780199334551 (hardback)
1. SuicideUnited States. 2. HomicideUnited States. I. Title.
HV6545.J649 2014
362.28dc23
2013028785

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

This book is ambitious and single-minded about a grave subject. The goal of the book is to develop and defend a specific perspective on murder-suicide, one that borrows on established knowledge and concepts, but one that reorganizes and extends them into a coherent and incrementally novel understanding of the horror that is murder-suicide. By the books end, I hope to have persuaded readers that the perspective developed in the book is viable, incremental beyond past work, and crucially, now ready to face off empirically with other perspectives.

The bootstrapping nature of this process deserves emphasis. The argument begins with facts, moves to conjecture, and builds from there to establish a theory of what defines murder-suicide and the thought processes that underlie it. The approach is inherently conjectural, as theory-building by definition is. My goal is to introduce a contender into the race to explain murder-suicide, not to call the race as finished.

In a field such as this, the race clearly is not finished, a main reason for which is the extent and quality of extant data on the phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, illuminating data on the mindset of the murder-suicide perpetrator are rare, and when available, incomplete. To this point, Liem and Nieuwbeerta state, Most existing studies

This state of affairs affects the current project as it would any project on murder-suicide, but it should be acknowledged that this book is acutely affected by this issue because the books goal is to characterize the true mindset of the murder-suicide perpetrator. My approach is to work with what data are available, which often involve things like notes left behind by perpetrators, as well as behavioral observations made by those who knew the perpetrator. These can be quite revealing but have drawbacks as sole sources of data, as do purely anecdotal sources of information more generally. The gaps in the record are sometimes extensive enough that I speculate on the state of mind of the individuals involved. I attempt to make the tentative nature of these speculations clear and have confidence that readers can decide on their own whether they are plausible or not.

Inevitably, and I think naturally enough, the book, to a degree, favors its own argument. This would be natural enough even if there were many existing theories of the phenomenon of murder-suicide, but as the book shows, there are not. The book advocates for a particular perspectivean initial theoretical conjecture in the midst of a relative conceptual vacuumand trusts readers discernment regarding the merits or lack thereof of the explanation developed in what follows.

I N CONNECTICUT IN 1782, LYDIA BEADLE WAS MURDERED, as were her four children, who ranged in age from 6 to 11. Her headstone reads, Fell by the hands of William Beadle/an infatuated Man who closed the/horrid sacrifice of his Wife/& Children with his own destruction. If William Beadle were intent on suicide, one might ask, why would he first kill his wife and children? Or, alternatively, did he kill his family rashly and then, in despair and as a consequence, kill himself? The headstone describes William Beadle as infatuatedwhat does this mean precisely? Why, fundamentally, did William Beadle perpetrate this appalling incident?

Crime perpetrated by one of us on a fellow human being opens up a unique window on our very souls. The ancient Roman playwright Terence wrote Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto (I am human and nothing human is alien to me).mirror on us: Why did he do that? What could have driven someone to such lengths? Given certain circumstances, do I have that in me?

In what follows, I propose some answers to these questionsanswers that may surprise, maybe even shock. Truth regularly has this character. In fact, in his poignant A Mathematicians Apology, the eminent English mathematician G. H. Hardy described trueeven beautifulmathematical concepts as being initially surprising, but then, upon reflection and in retrospect, familiar, even obvious. The power of truth and beauty, in part, is that in rapid succession they startle us and then they ground us.

Mathematicians have perhaps more opportunities to understand and experience this power, but they have not cornered the market. Darwins bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, upon perceiving the core idea of Darwins masterpiece and experiencing the attendant surprise, pleasure, and then familiarity, stated, How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!

I have posed concepts in previous books that, although not Darwinian in profundity, I nevertheless contend have this character of initial surprise followed by knowing understanding. In Why People Die By Suicide, I argued that a kind of fearlessness is required to voluntarily face the daunting prospect of ones death, and that doing so necessarily involves a fight against ancient, ingrained, and powerful self-preservation instincts. Many are initially startled by this perspective on suicidal behaviorthe concepts of fearlessness and suicide tend not to co-occur in the public mindbut upon reflection, it is conceptually obvious that confronting an extremely fearsome thing requires a certain fearlessness, just as it is empirically obvious that many highly suicidal people shrink from enacting their own deaths, despite genuine desire and intent to die, the obstacle being an uncontrollable fear of death. This perspective surprises people at almost the same time it induces them to say things like, oh, yes, of course.