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Katherine van Wormer
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A paper presented at the World Conference on Violence and the Future of Society,
Dublin, Ireland, August 20th-23rd, 1997.
This paper focuses on two of the most severe forms of violence -- homicide by an
individual and homicide by the state. The link between these two seemingly
disparate phenomena, at least within the context of this paper, is suicide. This
article will be looking at a peculiar variety of murder, at murder as an extended
form of suicide. That some would willingly inflict harm on others as a way of
ensuring their own death, sometimes turning the gun on others in order to get up
the nerve to pull the trigger on themselves, sometimes killing people so that the
state would execute them: this is the case to be made in this paper. This
phenomenon is referred to here as suicide-murder. Suicide, in other words, will
not be viewed not as the consequence of murder but, rather, as its cause.
In the United States, at about the same time, the Cunanan murder spree
which was launched against successful gay men, filled the air waves. A seemingly
rich, flamboyant homosexual playboy, Andrew Cunanan, craved attention. Tellingly,
his high school class had voted him "most likely to be remembered" (Thomas, 1997).
Following the climactic killing, the murder of the fashion guru, Gianni Versace,
Cunanan hid in a houseboat awaiting his inevitable capture. Upon discovery, he
shot himself through the mouth.
Both of these cases were world news events. More typical are these
newspaper headlines: "New York Mother Throws Her Three Children from Roof of 14-
Floor Building, then Jumps to Her Death" (Jet, 1996); "Father Who Killed Kids Asks
for Death Penalty" (Associated Press, 1997a); "Relatives Blame Family Troubles for
Shooting Spree" (Associated Press, 1997b: A2). The description of this last
tragedy is noteworthy: The man accused of killing three people at a bank and or
everyone else to sing the Lord's Prayer with him was upset by family problems and
wanted by the police, relatives said. H was very suicidal. He didn't want to kill
himself. He wanted someone else to do it for him". The last two sentences are
placed in italics for emphasis: The inability to kill oneself directly is a theme
transcending the majority of suicide-murder cases.
Biological aspects
Despite the impetus throughout the social and behavioral sciences to consider
organic factors in violent behavior, an extensive Internet search revealed very
little of substance relating organic factors to murder-suicide. In his
comprehensive study of self-destructive violence, James Gilligan (1992)
hypothesized that testosterone played a role in this form of aggression. His
subjects were young imprisoned males who were at once suicidal and violent toward
others. Bourgeois (1991), similarly, found a relationship among low levels of
serotonin in the brain, impulsivity, and suicide and/or murder. In a research
study more specifically related to murder-suicide, Rosenbaum (1990) discovered
the murder-suicide perpetrators to be vastly different from perpetrators of
homicide alone. Whereas murderer-suicides were found to be highly depressed and
overwhelmingly men, other murderers were not generally depressed and more likely
to include women in their ranks.
In Iowa a spate of murder-suicides have occurred over the past few years
(Clayworth & Erb, 1998). The significance of the wave of spousal murder-suicides
in Iowa (representing over one-quarter of the total homicide rate for the year) is
that in every case the man did the killing; the killing all seemed to have emerged
in conjunction with marital break-up.
The theory linking homicide with suicide is not new. Psychoanalytical literature,
in fact, has long proposed a link between homicidal and suicidal tendencies.
Freud’s extensive work on the unconscious, however flawed, helped students of
psychology, such as Freud’s granddaughter, to see that “surfaces mirror only one
aspect of human motives, and that each visible aspect of human behavior carries
within it, its very opposite” (Freud, S., 1998: 459). A major contribution was
Freud’s notion of the death instinct. This notion is concisely summarized in a
book on the social reality of death by Charmaz (1980): In Freud’s view, the death
instincts exist in conflict with life instincts in a similar way as the asocial id
is in conflict with the socially imbued superego. The death instincts then become
mediated by the ego into aggressive acts outside the self.
The relationship between murder and suicide has been elaborated upon by Menninger
(1938). Following Freud’s conceptualization of suicide or self-murder, Menninger
argued that suicide involves the wish to kill, to be killed, and to die. Those
prone to suicide, as Menninger further suggests, are immature individuals fixated
at early stages of development.
Suicide by cop
A second major literature source for the “death wish” comes from law
enforcement journals. The phenomenon of “suicide by cop” has long been written
about in the police and forensic journals (Jenet & Segal, 1985). This expression,
“suicide by cop,” which is well known to law enforcement officers, refers to
individuals who deliberately try to get the police to kill them. Hostage taking,
domestic violence and workplace violence are recognized as the most commonly used
situations to provoke or lure the police officers into using deadly force (Geller
& Scott, 1992). Consequently, the police are being trained today to exercise
restraint by learning to recognize the characteristics that may help them avoid
engaging people in suicidal show-downs. In a study to determine specific
situational factors that may discern “suicide by cop” from other situations
involving police use of deadly force, Kennedy, Homant, and Hupp (1998) have
filtered out the following high risk situations. Individuals:
a) May show suicidal motivation, either by word or gesture or they may confront
the police with a fake or dangerous weapon in spite of having no means of retreat,
in essence compelling the police to kill.
b) May seem distressed or, contrarily, act as if they do not care whether or not
the officers kill them; they may make a vain or desperate breakout attempt.
c) May or may not have had suicidal motivation at the outset, but caught in a
robbery situation, suspects may get shot after turning toward police officers with
a weapon.
Prison suicide
Haycock's (1991) analysis of the psycho dynamics of the sociopathic males who
commit suicide in prison is informative. Significantly, his work calls into
question the widely accepted belief that sociopaths or persons with antisocial
personalities rarely are suicidal. Haycock convincingly pointed to the high rate
of prison suicides, especially in Western Europe and Australia, to refute the
notion that violence and suicide are mutually exclusive. In his review of
relevant research, Haycock concluded that the evidence clearly indicates that
those convicted of homicide carry a greatly increased risk for suicide. Suicide
rates among lifers and persons on death row are notoriously high.
Palermo (1994) leads the reader even deeper into the psyche of the suicidal
murderer, into the mind of the jealous-paranoid perpetrator. The twin nature of
murder and suicide are recognized in Palermo's concept, extended suicide. It is
plausible to assume, argued Palermo, that the murderer, who is usually depressed
and paranoid, harbors a primary suicidal thought. Such a man does not feel,
therefore, that he is killing an autonomous entity but, rather, an extension of
himself. The murder-suicide, according to this conceptualization, then becomes
the expression of an extended suicide.
Sociological Factors
If you stab or strangle someone, however, suicide becomes much more difficult. In
any case, the high rate of spousal murder-suicides is consistent with the murder-
as-extended-suicide argument of Palermo.
Theoretical Framework
More research is needed to support this theory that in suicide-murder cases, the
primary driving force is suicide. Invaluable research can be done through
interviews with those who botched up the suicide part of the suicide-murder. Do
such persons kill another or others in order to more easily get the nerve to kill
themselves? This is the key question which cries out for further exploration.
Van Wormer (1995a, 1995b) has written elsewhere of the strange paradox that
punishment designed to curb violence may actually promote it. A second paradox
apparent in this research is that the revenge motive inherent in the death penalty
may be thwarted by criminals who favor execution over life imprisonment. Evidence
for both these absurdities was presented in the form of case histories obtained
from a variety of sources -- from psychiatric case studies, legal literature,
newspaper accounts -- of individuals whose criminal behavior seemed geared toward
getting themselves executed. A summary of these histories will be provided in the
final section of this article.
Voluntary Execution
Out of 223 executions between 1976 and 1993, twenty-nine have been
consensual or at the inmate's request (Cordes, 1994). Typical examples include
men who were clearly suicidal and those who sought an escape from death row or
from life in prison.
The journal American Lawyer (Siegel, 1993) describes a situation in which the
attorney who opposed capital punishment was abiding by his client's wishes for a
speedy execution. Thomas Grasso had the option of serving a life sentence in New
York, but arranged to be transferred to Oklahoma on a previous murder charge. He
would rather be executed than grow old in prison, he said. The risk, according to
the article, is that if Grasso did not get his death wish, he would kill again.
Bowers and Pierce's (1980) widely cited statistical analysis of homicide rates for
New York state 1907-1963, revealed that within a month following an execution, two
additional homicides (above the normal rate) occurred. These findings provide
some indication of the brutalizing effect of the highly publicized execution.
Although one cannot readily generalize findings from one part of the United States
to another, the implications of this study are staggering: two homicides triggered
by every execution in New York. The case we looked at earlier of the twelve year
old Italian boy who hanged himself following news accounts of an American
execution illustrates the risks of publicity of violence in inciting further
violence.
Homicide as Suicide
On our own and with the help of anti-death penalty organizations, we have
identified 20 cases of individuals who revealed publicly or under psychiatric
examination how they plotted and schemed to receive the one irrevocable punishment
by the state, the death penalty. The cases are described here briefly.
1. Harston in Kentucky. When van Wormer’s sister was a public defender of Warren
County, Kentucky, she assisted her in preparation for a "death case", or a case
for which the death penalty could be provided. In fact the defendant as well as
the prosecutor both sought the maximum penalty. The lines in the defendant
Sherril Harston’s song, composed in the Bowling Green jail cell, say it all:
Here was a man so bent on death, apparently, that he had killed a young mother and
her child, thereby consciously or unconsciously moving himself toward the fate he
believed was his. When Harston was given a life sentence instead, he fired his
attorney and filed an appeal for a new trial. Once in prison, he threatened to
kill again (Citizen Times, 1979).
2. Gilmore in Utah. G. Richard Strafer (1983) and Norman Mailer (1979) have each
written about Gary Gilmore as a prime example of one who plotted his own dramatic
end. After being paroled from Marion Federal Penitentiary, Gilmore seemed
strangely driven to go to Utah where execution was by a firing squad, rather than
his home in Oregon, then a non-death-penalty jurisdiction. He fought his attorney
for the right to be killed, and through extensive public attention managed to be
immortalized in death as he could not be in life.
3. Judy in Indiana. The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder (Wilson and Seaman, 1983)
describes the case of Steven Judy in 1980. He committed a rape-murder and then
threatened his jury: "You had better put me to death, because next time it might
be one of you or your daughter."
4. Dodd in Washington State. In early 1993, Westley Allan Dodd was hanged in the
prison at Walla Walla. The New York Times (1993) reported that he stalked and
murdered two young boys, strangled a third, and then was arrested while trying to
abduct a six-year-old boy from a movie
7. Solomon's Medical Case History Number One. Psychiatrist George Solomon (1975)
wrote about two cases involving capital punishment used as suicide. In the first,
a Vietnam veteran, hardened to killing, chose to end it all by engaging in murder-
for-hire. He knew that in his state, the death penalty was mandatory for murder-
for-hire killings. He told his sister, "I'm too much of a coward to commit
suicide."
8. Solomon's Medical Case History Number Two. In Solomon's second case, a twenty-
year-old emotionally unstable woman babysitter suffocated two children. In her
words (1975, p.707):
I killed my girls; I killed two pieces of me. They were like my sisters and I
miss them so much...I had to kill them... Yeah, they would kill me in the electric
chair probably. I remember somebody telling me they were trying to get rid of
capital punishment, and like I asked the sergeant if like they still had capital
punishment and he said yes, so I was pretty happy about it.
11. Lowery in Oklahoma. West also cites the case of an already convicted
murderer, Howard Otis Lowery, who killed again in order to make sure he would get
the electric chair. In fact, the prospect of execution is so attractive to some
people, according to West, that false confessions to murder occur. West's partial
explanation for the higher frequency of homicide in death penalty states compared
to non-death-penalty states is the evident attraction "to certain warped
mentalities" of this violent means of committing suicide. According to this
author, "capital punishment breeds suicide," (p. 51).
12. Speck in Illinois. West includes Richard Speck's slaughter of eight nurses as
a possible example of a psychopath's attraction to death penalty crimes in a death
penalty state. This possibility is supported by the fact that Speck had
previously moved from Michigan, which did not have capital punishment. West's
speculation has not been confirmed, however.
13. Hickman in Indiana. An Indiana teenager, aged 15, told police he killed his
twelve-year-old friend so the state would execute him for murder. He had
attempted suicide several times but was too chicken to go through with it (Goetz,
1991).
14. Hampton in Illinois. Days before Lloyd Wayne Hampton was to die by lethal
injection in Illinois, he spoke bluntly about the fact that he had murdered in
1990 in order to get the death penalty. In a telephone interview reported by
Karwarth (1992), he stated:
Hampton made sure to torture the victim first, brutally, to ensure that he
would be given no mercy.
15. Pope in Nebraska. D.E. Pope, a Kansas football player and college student,
took a sociology class field trip to a penitentiary. His roommate reported later
that he couldn't talk about anything for the rest of the semester but capital
punishment equipment at the prison. Shortly after graduation, he killed three
people in a bank robbery in Big Springs, Nebraska. In 1965 in Kansas City, he
turned himself in and was tried in federal court on the robbery charge.
Subsequently, Pope was retried in state court on the murder charge, his
aim being to receive the death sentence he so badly desired. One trial went on
for a month, while both sides trotted out about fifty character witnesses and
hired experts to prove whether he should or should not receive a death penalty.
The story is well documented in The New York Times (1970).
16-17. Brown and Kelly in Iowa. Charlie Brown and Charles Kelly committed murders
in Minnesota in 1962, and then came to Iowa to commit another, particularly
horrible, killing. They asked to be tried in Iowa because it had a death penalty,
whereas Minnesota did not. Brown said, "I want to die for what I did. I don't
want to spend the rest of my life in jail." The state of Iowa accommodated his
request and executed both men. Former Iowa Governor Robert Ray has often cited
their case as an example of murder attracted by capital punishment.
21. Michael Sonner, 25, a jail escapee, killed a Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper
because he no longer wanted to live. " I shot him for the death penalty; I'm
going to ask for a speedy trial," he said (Omer, 1993). When officers demanded
his surrender, Sonner fired two shots into the air. He then put the gun to his
head but "didn't have the guts" to take his own life.
22. Robert Allen Smith (Associated Press, 1998) was given the death sentence on
July 12, 1996, for killing a fellow inmate in 1995 at the Wabash, Indiana
Correctional Facility. Smith said he killed the inmate so he would receive the
death penalty and avoid having to serve his 68-year-sentence for battery and
habitual offender conviction.
When cases such as those described above are reported individually, each
one seems to be one of a kind, just a bizarre product of a sick mind. But when
all are reported together, a pattern emerges. The pattern can be verbalized as
follows: "I couldn't do it myself. I needed the state to do it for me." In this
pattern of calculated, externally inflicted suicide, there is a danger in even
just having the death penalty on the statute book in a state. A second danger,
beyond the scope of this article, is the danger in allowing citizens to have guns.
For every person who verbalizes this wish of execution, there must be
others who were motivated by it but who never admit it. Death by lethal injection
would seem to offer an especially easy way out.
Often politicians in the U.S. clamor for the death penalty for prisoners
who kill in prison. The stated reason is protection for correctional staff and
fellow inmates. Studies in Britain and the U.S., however, reveal that prison
suicide attempts and suicides are extremely high, especially for inmates with
little hope of early release (Cabana, 1996; Gunby, 1981; Liebling, 1995;
Sellin, 1967). To make prison homicides capital offenses, therefore, would
clearly attract many desperate suicidal inmates who have no qualms about taking a
life.
Conclusion
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Shared by: April Sims
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