Murderer

“ A murderer’s hand has been lifted against me while I slept—I have seen blood shed before my eyes, and could not stay the unrighteous hand of the murderer—I have had none to love me but one—no mother ever smiled upon me—no recollection of a father’s caress warms my heart. ”

“ Much easier was it to conjure up the feelings of a murderer, who, oppressed with the weight of his undiscovered crime, fancies he discerns in every face the knowledge of his guilt--turning his head over his shoulder every minute to see if he was being dogged--starting at familiar sounds, especially at the sound of bells and clocks striking the hour, every peal proclaiming to all the world that a Murderer was passing that way--tortured by the devilish temptation to leap into the middle of the road, and flinging up his arms to scream aloud, "Stop, you grinning fools! ”

“ No one touched the grey-headed murderer, who knelt down—not to pray, but to look into his son's eyes—and to examine his lips—and to feel his left breast—and to search out all the symptoms of a fainting-fit, or to assure himself—and many a corpse had the plunderer handled on the field after hush of the noise of battle—that this was death. ”

“ I wish you could have heard him say, ‘She’s dead, boys, she’s dead; and by God! they killed her.’ The sound of its agony would have found the heart that was intended to do more than keep you alive with its beating. Do you know what murder is? Do you know the difference between the gross, stupid, brutal murder that in satisfying its coarse lust for blood runs its thick neck into the halter, and the finer, daintier, infinitely more cruel murder that kills with torturing cruelty, and thus outwits the gallows? The blood-murderer is a poor fool, dwarfed in mind and crippled in soul. ”

“ We are next treated to an artistic study of murder in low life, the murderer being in hot pursuit of a young female in a nightgown, whose hair sets out straight as porcupine's quills from her head, and within an inch of the itching fingers of her pursuer, while behind him are laid out in an ascending scale the dead bodies of an old man, an old woman, and a child, the same being the victims he has just finished off. ”

“ If there ever was a murder committed of an especially atrocious description, one done under peculiarly horrifying and terrible circumstances, here is a wax figure of the murderer, and, if possible, of the victim. ”

“ Does anybody want proof that she is blackhearted, treacherous, lying, cowardly, a secret murderer?” raved the girl. “Yes, a murderer! She wanted me to commit murder,—to let a sweet young creature starve on her sick-bed, and tried to bribe me with that very ear-ring. ”

“ But the murderer who outwits the law in his killing, who murders the innocent and unsuspecting and confiding, who makes friendship the cup from which the poison is drunk, who employs the most damnable lies and treachery, who calmly watches the increasing agonies of his victim as the poison slowly does its work,—what punishment do you think can reach such a murderer as that? ”

“ On murders committed in deliberate revenge, or to remove a stumbling block in the murderer’s path, or in an insatiate craving for notoriety, is there reason to suppose that the punishment of death has the direct effect of an incentive and an impulse?
A murder is committed in deliberate revenge. The murderer is at no trouble to prepare his train of circumstances, takes little or no pains to escape, is quite cool and collected, perfectly content to deliver himself up to the Police, makes no secret of his guilt, but boldly says, “I killed him. ”

“ What guidance the jury got from the explanation of what constitutes murder is not quite clear to the lay mind, however satisfactory it may have appeared to the judge.
"Gentlemen," he stated, with admirable lucidity, "murder is where a man is murderously killed. The killer in such a case is a murderer. Now, murder by poison is just as much murder as murder with a gun, pistol, or knife. It is the simple act of murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Don't let the idea of murder and manslaughter confound you. Murder is one thing; manslaughter is quite another. ”

“ The hunted fugitive who struck through our hearts to slay him, should stand beside his stately bier to see how powerless are bullets and blades to take the real life of any noble man!
LETTER III. THE MURDERER. Washington, April 27th.
Justice is satisfied, though blinder vengeance may not be. While the illustrious murdered is on the way to the shrine, the stark corpse of his murderer lies in the shambles. The one died quietly, like his life; the other died fighting, like his crime. ”

“ The murder that was done into a romance, and of which the hero—that is the murderer—was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful truth that he is the hero. ”

“ A murderer may go to the play, entertain his friends at dinner, eat strawberries and cream, and cry when his favourite dog dies. ‘Once a murderer always a murderer,’ is not a proverb in any language. It is most probable that the authors of the undiscovered crimes of recent years are now considered very respectable members of society. ”

“ I have committed no crime — what has been done, that you are going to murder me?" was my reply. My master then asked me why I had followed the young lady and her brother, who went from the house the evening before, and murdered her? Astonished and terrified at the charge of being a murderer, I knew not what to say ”

“ Story of a Murderer.—Let the criminal give his version of the affair. Not every murderer has a story, or is willing to tell it; but out of hundreds of convicts you should be able to weave a tale as lurid as Blackbeard among the pirates or Bluebeard among the fairies. ”

“ She’s not sufficiently imaginative to have planned this accumulative massacre. But as regards the others, I could picture any one of ’em as being at the bottom of this diabolical slaughter. It’s a mistaken idea, don’t y’ know, to imagine that a murderer looks like a murderer. ”

“ That it is which should make people pause ere they dipped their hands in the blood of others, and that it is which becomes the first retribution that the murderer has to endure for the deep crime that he has committed. ”

“ It wasn’t Cub! It wasn’t! A murderer couldn’t kiss you so that your soul ran up and spread out flat under his lips.... A murderer couldn’t look at you so that you said you were sorry, even when you tried not to be.... A murderer’s hair wouldn’t fold into little waves where it spread under the curve at the back of his neck. ”

“ It has allowed the hand of the assassin to cut short many a virtuous and valuable life, and permitted the crime to go, in this world at least, undetected and unpunished, and has even permitted the criminal to pass through life without “compunctious visitings” one qualm of conscience. Mocking, as it were, the wisdom of man, it has suffered life to be taken away in the broad glare of noon, in the middle of the crowded city, in the heart of a skilfully-trained police, without the faintest clue to the murderer. ”

“ When the murder is going on, the murderer and the murdered person are probably fearfully excited—anger, fear, and so on. That means that their whole being is stirred up right to the bottom, and that their hidden powers are frightfully active. ”

“ And to this cause, peradventure, may be ascribed the strange effect which is frequently seen in England, when, at the approach of the murderer, the slain body suddenly bleedeth afresh: for certainly the souls of them that are treacherously murdered by surprise leave their bodies with extreme unwillingness, and with vehement indignation against them that forced them to so unprovided and abhorred a passage. ”

“ Light like the wan blue flames that wave
Their death-torch o'er the murderer's grave;
And flickering shapes beset the way,
Watching in gloom to seize their prey,
Most terrible, for that the eye
Wander'd in dim uncertainty; ”

“ Murderer, murderer... A crazy woman came up behind her. A dog catcher was able to grasp her. Murderer, murderer. Took her in an open hackney cab and through the town. Murderer, murderer. Windows go up, cars stop. ”

“ That the body of a murdered man will emit blood upon being touched, or even approached, by the murderer is a belief of ancient standing, and evidence of this character was formerly admitted in judicial investigations. ”

“ Our theory is that the murderer is a man who knew the deceased, and had been frequently in the back room, so as to assure himself of the position of things. Last night he must have entered the alley--at what hour we are not prepared to say, as the time of the murder can only be determined by medical evidence--and opened the window by slipping the blade of his knife between the upper and lower parts, and pushing back the latch. ”

“ Murders are committed, as a rule, under exceptional circumstances, and a murderer may look back upon ‘his little misfortune’ with occasional regret, but it is doubtful if ever he felt the least desire to give himself up or to exchange his liberty for a prison cell. ”

“ We have hanged not only the murderer, the ravisher, and the incendiary—​not only the burglar, the highwayman, and the forger, but the sheep-stealer, the petty thief who purloined a roll of cloth or a loaf of bread from a shop-counter. If any nation ought to know how to hang, it should assuredly be the English. ”

“ Murderers come into my shop, I won’t say every day, but often. My dear friend, the world is full of them. You will ask, if that is so why are so comparatively few murders committed? For this reason, very few people have the motive for slaying a fellow man or woman. I myself cannot remember a single time in my life when the commission of a murder would have benefited me much, and when that murder could have been committed by me with reasonable chance of not being discovered. ”

“ Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated; ”

“ Though I did wish him dead, I hate the murderer, love him murdered. The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labour, But neither my good word nor princely favour; With Cain go wander thorough shades of night, And never show thy head by day nor light. ”

“ The first, in point of enormity, is Murder, which may be committed in two Ways:—first, upon one's self, in which case the offender is denominated Felo de se or a Self-murderer;—secondly, by killing another person. ”

“ Murderers! The angry hum of a bullet past his ear roused a fury in his soul that was elemental, primal, and he cursed now under his breath. Murderers... six feet of earth... in cold blood... or if they winged him, the car, amuck, slanting from the road to up-end itself, would do their bloody work for them... Bookie Skarvan... some day, if he lived through this... Bookie Skarvan... it was strange that all their shots had missed... even if the back of his car was a protection... ”

“ He that has committed murder, though he flees for his life, shall be continually haunted with terrors, shall himself flee to the pit, betray himself, and torment himself, like Cain, who, when he had killed his brother, became a fugitive and a vagabond, and trembled continually. 2. The duty of the avenger of blood, whether the magistrate or the next of kin, or whoever are concerned in making inquisition for blood, let them be close and vigorous in the prosecution, and let it not be bought off. Those that acquit the murderer, or do any thing to help him off, come in sharers in the guilt of blood ”

“ I cried; "but I will. You're just a murderer, a real murderer; that 's what you are! and when you go to be a missionary, I hope the cannibals 'll eat you ! I hope they 'll eat you alive raw, you mean old murderer!" ”

“ Murderers there have been in every country under heaven, from the time of Cain to the present—murderers from hate, from revenge, from jealousy, from fear, from the instigation of any and every evil passion of our nature ”

“ Strange as it may seem, a murderer will come to visit the relatives of his victim (though he knows that they are allowed to kill him in revenge) and will settle with them. He is kindly welcomed and sometimes lives quietly for weeks and months. ”

“ But the present was the first instance of murder alleged to have been perpetrated with the aforethought purpose and intent of selling the murdered body as a subject for dissection to anatomists: it was a new species of assassination, or murder for hire: and as such, [10] no less than from the general horror felt by the people of this country at the process, from ministering to which the murderers expected their reward, it was certainly calculated to make a deep impression on the public mind, and to awaken feelings of strong and appalling interest in the issue of the trial. ”

“ Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer but the hangman who would gain his fee? ”

“ Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye:
'Tis pretty, sure, and very probable,
That eyes,—that are the frail'st and softest things,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,—
Should be called tyrants, butchers, murderers! ”

“ O, do not slander him, for he is kind.
FIRST MURDERER
Right, as snow in harvest.—Come, you deceive yourself:
'Tis he that sends us to destroy you here. ”

“ You don’t know the kind of murderers we raise here in the country. The chances are that your city assassin would be tortured by remorse, if he escaped discovery, and that he committed the deed in a moment of passion. ”