Season of Terror is the first book-length treatment of the little-known true story of the Espinosas-serial murderers with a mission to kill every Anglo in Civil War-era Colorado Territory-and the men ...who brought them down. For eight months during the spring and fall of 1863, brothers Felipe Nerio and José Vivián Espinosa and their young nephew, José Vincente, New Mexico-born Hispanos, killed and mutilated an estimated thirty-two victims before their rampage came to a bloody end. Their motives were obscure, although they were members of the Penitentes, a lay Catholic brotherhood devoted to self-torture in emulation of the sufferings of Christ, and some suppose they believed themselves inspired by the Virgin Mary to commit their slaughters. Until now, the story of their rampage has been recounted as lurid melodrama or ignored by academic historians. Featuring a fascinating array of frontier characters, Season of Terror exposes this neglected truth about Colorado's past and examines the ethnic, religious, political, military, and moral complexity of the controversy that began as a regional incident but eventually demanded the attention of President Lincoln.
The duration of time that the serial offender remains free in the community to commit murders may be seen as a direct measure of their longevity; a sign of their success. The aim of this study is to ...predict the duration of the serial homicide series by examining the factors that contribute to the length of time a serial murderer is able to remain free of police detection.
Generalized estimating equations with a negative binomial link function were used to examine factors predicting the duration of series in a sample of 1258 serial murder cases.
Results showed that offenders' criminal history, race (i.e., White and Hispanic), and victims of minority backgrounds significantly predicted longer duration in their murder series. A combination of multiple killing methods and atypical methods also predicted longer murder series, while the moving of the victim's body predicted shorter duration in the series.
This study builds upon the serial homicide literature, particularly the duration of the series. Results from this study help inform investigative efforts in serial homicide cases.
•The duration of time in a homicide series may be seen as a sign of ‘success’.•Offender, victim, and crime factors contribute to the duration in a murder series.•1258 serial murder cases from 56 countries were examined.•Factors impacting the duration in homicide series help inform police investigation.
A 1995 classification of combined homicide‐suicide was based on the psychopathology of the perpetrator and the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim(s). A three‐part model was proposed ...for the study and potential understanding of individual homicide‐suicide acts. This triarchic model consisted of the concepts of ego weakness, stress, and vector, the vector representing the ideational component. Today, approaching a quarter of a century after this initial classification based on a review of the literature available then, a considerable volume of experience and investigative knowledge has been published advancing our knowledge of homicide‐suicide. The present review updates and revises the original classification, retains the two‐part, psychopathological and relational classification, and adds several categories. Because this updated classification is more expansive than the original, it is presented in three parts. Part I, the present article, provides the introduction to this classification and the classification of mental conditions that may attend homicide‐suicide. Parts II and III will address intrafamilial and extrafamilial homicide‐suicide, respectively, the two major divisions of the classification based on the relationship between the actor and the homicide victim(s). All three parts are integral to this classification and belong together.
Kolsky examines the creation of a legal "state of exception" on the northwest frontier of British India. Colonial expansion to this remote area involved strategic decisions about the extent and ...nature of legal control in newly conquered territories. British officials viewed India's northwest frontier as a dangerous place overrun with Muslim "fanatics" who were determined to kill members of the ruling race. The discourse of fanaticism provided the conceptual framework for unleashing and legitimizing the terror of empire within a legal framework normally devoted to rational discourse and the imposition of the rule of law. Under the Murderous Outrages Act (1867), those legally deemed "fanatics" could be executed on the spot, with their bodies and property disposed of as the state saw fit. The most common method of disposing of the corpses of executed fanatics was to burn them. The colonial response to "murderous outrages" on India's northwest frontier developed in connection to policies and practices elsewhere in the empire, as an "outrage" in one imperial locale hastened the urgency of dealing with disturbances in another. Her article contributes to scholarship on law and colonialism and colonial violence by revealing how at one particular edge of the British Empire, colonial rule pressed against its own limits of legality and produced new forms of law that licensed what in other institutional contexts would have been lawless violence.
Charles Cullen, a nurse who killed at least 29 patients in the USA, was reported by numerous colleagues at various institutions for drugging patients, but hospital officials did not report his ...behaviour, even offering him resignation deals or positive references. ...the state law did not require hospitals to report a nurse under potential investigation and the National Practitioner Data Bank only collected data on those convicted of a crime. ...those in charge lacked the incentive to report Cullen, so instead passed their problem on to others. Letby, a former nurse at Countess of Cheshire Hospital, was convicted of murdering seven babies, and attempting to murder six more, in the hospital's neonatal ward between 2015 and 2016.
The capacity of contemporary forensic genetics has rendered “race” into an interesting tool to produce clues about the identity of an unknown suspect. Whereas the conventional use of DNA profiling ...was primarily aimed at the individual suspect, more recently a shift of interest in forensic genetics has taken place, in which the population and the family to whom an unknown suspect allegedly belongs, has moved center stage. Making inferences about the phenotype or the family relations of this unknown suspect produces suspect populations and families. We discuss the criminal investigation following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case in the Netherlands and the use of forensic (genetic) technologies therein. It is in many ways an interesting case, but in this paper, we focus on how race surfaced in science and society. We show that race materializes neither in the technologies used nor in the bodies at stake. Rather, race emerges through a material semiotic relation that surfaces in the translation that occurs as humans and things move across sites. We argue that race is enacted, firstly, in the context of legislation as biology reduced to bodily characteristics; secondly, in the forensic analyses as patterns of absent presence; and, thirdly, in society as a process of phenotypic othering.
Despite cultural notions that psychopathy and homicide are strongly linked, there has not been a quantitative meta-analytic review of the association between psychopathy and homicide offending. The ...current study meta-analyzed data from 29 unique samples from 22 studies that included 2603 homicide offenders, and found that the mean psychopathy score on the PCL-R for a homicide offender was 21.2 (95% CI = 18.9–23.6). This score is indicative of moderate psychopathy. The overall effect size r = 0.68 was large, and effect sizes intensified in studies of more severe manifestations of homicide including sexual homicide (r = 0.71), sadistic homicide (r = 0.78), serial homicide (r = 0.74), and multi-offender homicide (r = 0.80). Current study findings make clear that psychopathy and homicide are importantly linked and that psychopathic personality functioning is a significant risk factor for various forms of lethal violence.
Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through ...informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the "systemic" model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofit formation, we estimate the causal effect on violent crime of nonprofits focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities. Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.
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