Homicidal mania

“ First, all killing can be divided into rational and irrational, and we'll take the last first, because they are much fewer. There is such a thing as homicidal mania, or love of butchery in the abstract. ”

“ It is conceivable that the handle of this silver hatchet has been anointed by some preparation which is a diffusible poison, having the effect upon the human body of bringing on sudden and acute attacks of homicidal mania. In such attacks it is well known that the madman’s rage is turned against those whom he loved best when sane. ”

“ There was no rime or reason for the crimes, and yet the diabolical precision of the murderer seemed to indicate he was a madman of uncanny intelligence. In all four cases his victims were vagabonds and people of the lowest order. In none of the murders had the victim been assaulted, but the head had disappeared, seemingly for ever. There was not a shred of evidence pointing to the solution, and, except that the police knew him to be a homicidal maniac, there was not a single person in a city of several millions whom they could call the murderer. ”

“ Likewise, the man who possesses the homicidal [Pg 283] mania may be cautious and quiet—to the ordinary observer a normal citizen. But the aura of insanity is around him; he lives and moves and deceives, and hides from the outside world the words that come to him day or night—the words that arise not in the voice of a living man, but in his own diseased mind. The sufferer says nothing of the voices that tell him he is persecuted—that the world's hands are against him. ”

“ The love of injuring and slaying is deeply rooted in us: men afflicted with homicidal neurosis are known to the asylums and to the criminal courts of all civilised nations; assassins on hire have often been notoriously obtainable. To slay in cold blood by violence, or even by poison, seems, however, less revolting than to slay by sorcery and obscene rites. ”

“ In fact, it was reserved for this incredible monster and his associate fiends to reduce murder to a system, and to establish a regular traffic in the bodies of their victims. Ordinary homicides slay from passion or revenge; the murders they commit are the product of an ungovernable and overmastering impulse, which hurls reason from her seat, and, in the wild conflict of guilty passion, precipitates them into the commission of acts which are no sooner done than they would perhaps give the universe were they undone. ”

“ The crank is, generally, a harmless individual, and is not anti-social unless his delusions [145] take the form of homicidal impulse, pyromania, kleptomania, etc.
Homicidal impulse is the most dangerous to society of the many mental vagaries and derangements which afflict the dwellers in the borderlands. Its invasion is sudden and its impulse is, generally, overpowering. A man may be walking the streets presumably in perfect health, and yet have, all the while, a voice whispering in his ear “kill, kill.” ”

“ But even killing, with intention to kill, is not always murder; there may be justifiable and excusable homicide, and killing in sudden heat and passion is so modified to manslaughter. Yet there may be murder when there is no ill-feeling,—nay, perfect indifference to the slain,—as in the case of the robber who slays to conceal his crime. Malice aforethought is that depraved feeling of the heart, which makes one regardless of social duty, and fatally bent on mischief. ”

“ He wants to kill, and, in his monstrous vanity, himself seems the most irreparable loss he can inflict on his fellows. But, his mood being homicidal, it is well for others to interpose no alternative. It is often only accident which makes the suicide instead of the assassin. ”

“ They implore mercy and try to kill themselves in order to escape from their shame; or they remain motionless, bewildered, and terrified. Not infrequently, because of the profound faith, which, unlike many other lunatics, they have in their hallucinations, they pass from melancholy broodings to a fit of mad energy, often of a homicidal or suicidal nature. They imagine they are struggling with thieves or wild beasts and hurl themselves from the [Pg 84] window or rush naked through the streets, killing the first person that crosses their path. ”

“ But we who live amongst our friends need neither fear nor punish. Surely if we, in dread of an occasional rare homicide, an occasional rough blow, were solemnly and legally to commit homicide and violence, we could only be a society of ferocious cowards. Don’t you think so, neighbour?”
“Yes, I do, when I come to think of it from that side,” said I.
“Yet you must understand,” said the old man, “that when any violence is committed, we expect the transgressor to make any atonement possible to him, and he himself expects it. ”

“ In the group was the "Jobard Murder", in which the criminal, a young man, killed the youth with whom he had been sexually intimate, and also killed the lad's father in an accession of jealousy and of-fear of interruption to the intrigue, and in mania. ”

“ We hate murder with a hatred that may seem absurdly exaggerated to apologists for Matabele massacres, to callous acquiescers in hangings and bombardments, but we decline in such cases of homicide, or attempted homicide, as those of which we are treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice of flinging the whole responsibility of the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. The guilt of these homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, helps to keep up social conditions that drive human beings to despair. ”

“ Fool! see yourself as every eye on earth and in heaven sees you. The land contains no criminal so black as you. Other homicides have struck hastily on provocation or stung by injury, or thrust or drawn by some great passion—but you have deliberately gnawed away men's lives. Others have seen their one victim die, but you have looked on your many victims dying yet not spared them. ”

“ My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. ”

“ This slaying was to be an exposition of the ego. Without other cause. Emotionless. With no hope of gain, financial or otherwise. No female involved. Nothing. Just a killing, a plain open and shut case of homicide for no earthly reason imaginable to the police. It would be amusing to watch those flatfoots sitting around trying to sift a motive out of the thing. ”

“ In almost no case was there what an intelligent, civilized man would regard as an adequate reason for the homicide. They killed because they felt like killing, and yielded to the impulse, whatever its immediate origin. ”

“ A psychopathic killer wouldn't have held back that way. The presence of others would have added fuel to the flames. He'd have realized at once that there were other victims right at hand and would have killed and killed again, in an uncontrollable frenzy, his guilt feelings, his secret desire to be caught and punished, making him welcome the added danger and risk.
And if he was the other kind, the completely sane kind—were murderers ever completely sane?—concerned about saving his own skin, wouldn't he have shot her on the street, the instant he saw that she was heading for the restaurant? ”

“ Why would someone whose closest personal and professional associates unhesitatingly declare him to have been incapable of any dark deed of violence commit a murder by shooting down an unsuspecting victim as if from ambush? What could conceivably account for the metamorphosis of a mild, retiring young man, happily married and fulfilled in the birth of a dearly beloved son, into an indomitably resolute killer, ready to sacrifice his own life, rich with promise, in order to take the life of another? ”

“ Other patients become homicidal under the desire to protect themselves from supposed assaults. They may think a person who is approaching them is coming to kill or torture them. Others are homicidal from any of the ideas of persecution and suspicion that have just been spoken of. ”

“ Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! ”

“ when I am in a drawing room, a church, a station; on the terrasse of a cafe, at the theatre or wherever crowds pass or loiter, I enjoy considering faces from a strictly homicidal point of view. For you may see by the glance, by the back of the neck, the shape of the skull, the jaw bone and zygoma of the cheeks, or by some part of their persons that they bear the stigmata of that psychological calamity known as murder. ”

“ And similarly, in each category of crimes, the influence of the determining conditions varies greatly according to the special forms of crime.
Certain casual homicides are plainly the result of social conditions (gambling, drink, public opinion, &c.) in a much higher degree than homicides which for the most part spring from brutality, from the moral insensibility of individuals, or from their psycho-pathological conditions, corresponding to abnormal organic conditions. ”

“ The imbecile or weak-minded egotist is a frequent though unnecessary accomplice in nearly every crime, owing to his susceptibility to suggestion and incapability of understanding the gravity of his actions.
Melancholia is often the cause of suicide or homicide (as a species of indirect suicide) . The sufferer generally confesses and gives himself up to the police. Delusions that he is being poisoned or insulted are often the cause of the murders committed by this type of lunatic.
Maniacs commit robbery, rape, homicide, and arson, and behave indecently in public. ”

“ There is that in the tidings of a murder that thrills the human heart to its depths. When the word passes from lip to lip and from mouth to mouth that a human life has been taken by an assassin, the stoutest hearts stop beating, lips pale and cheeks blanch, strong men grow pale with the terror of the unknown and mysterious, and if that be so with what I may, perhaps, by comparison call an ordinary assassination, what were the feelings that overpowered the community when the news of this tragedy was spread by the lightning to the ends of the world? ”

“ Leaving out the suicides and those killed while resisting arrest, there remain one hundred persons murdered, not only by persons insane or wild from the effects of liquor, but by robbers and burglars, brutes, bullies, and thugs, husbands, wives, and lovers, and by a vast number of people who not only destroyed their enemies in the fury of anger, but in many instances openly went out gunning for them, lay in wait for them in the dark, or hacked off their heads with hatchets while they slept. ”

“ There are few great crimes in proportion to the population, nor do we ever hear of such atrocities as those classes of murders which so frequently blacken the page of our modern history. Homicide is more common than actual murder, and is often the result of a sudden quarrel where knives are drawn, and a fatal stab in passion constitutes the offence. ”

“ When the impulse of a passion is violent, so that a man is carried along by it before he has had time to reflect on the criminal nature of his act, or at least before he could do so calmly and deliberately, the courts readily recognize such passion as a partial excuse: murder thus committed in a moment of strong provocation becomes manslaughter, not murder in the proper sense of the word. ”

“ The long scene of torture in which the inhuman wretch kept the innocent object of her remorseless cruelty ere she completed the long premeditated murder, requires no comment, engaging as it did the interest, and exciting the horror of all ranks of people, and rousing the indignation of the populace more than the case of any criminal whose offences it is our duty to record, in the whole course of our melancholy narratives. ”

“ They feel dazed, ill, and miserable, but memory is to them a blank. God help them and their poor wives, for, alas! no one else can help them. Magistrates and police can do nothing for them, human sympathy is helpless before them. Temperance pledges and tracts are worse than useless, for who or what can minister to a mind diseased? Drink in their case is only a symptom of a deeper-seated trouble. Cruelty in their case 49 is not a natural condition but the outcome of their delusions. From these come the reports of many startling tragedies of murder and suicide. ”

“ Unless she went to them and said: "There is a remorseless slayer loose in the city and some night ... soon now perhaps, very soon ... another woman may be found slain, more horribly slain this time, her throat slashed from ear to ear." It may have been only a solitary crime, brought about by uncontrollable rage. But how can you know, how can you be sure ... when I myself suspected nothing and we were such close, good friends?
There is nothing ordinary about a killer, nothing predictable ... even a killer with completely innocent eyes, who can smile and order a cocktail and say: "Heads I pay. ”