Murder-for-hire: an exploratory study of participant relationships.(Chapter five: multiple murder)
The Varieties of Homicide and its Research
January 01, 2000 | Black, James A.
ABSTRACT
Murder-for-hire events involve interpersonal relationships that are more complicated than those existing in typical one-on-one violent events. This paper presents findings that explore 2 features of relationships between solicitors, hit men, and targets in 30 murder-for-hire events in Tennessee. First, findings are presented showing differences between male and female solicitors when socially negotiated contracts to kill are distinguished in terms of their "explicit" or "implicit" natures. Second, findings are presented showing that the instrumental and expressive motivations for participation in murder-for-hire events vary, depending on whether the relationship is between solicitors and hit men, solicitors and targets, or hit men and targets. The implications of these findings for explanations about the involvement of females in lethal violence and for treating murder-for-hire events as strictly instrumental are briefly discussed. Overall, the findings challenge the underlying assumption of a face-to-face expressive confrontation in intimate violence.
INTRODUCTION
That intimate relationships and the contexts in which they occur contain the seeds of violence, some of it lethal, is a well-recognized fact. Sometimes the violence is spawned over time, growing out of a constellation of conditions that tend to unleash human tendencies toward harmfully aggressive behavior. Other times, the violence erupts quickly, almost unexpectedly, ignited by instantaneous flames of passion and emotional outburst. A central assumption about violence involving intimates is that it ultimately always involves some face-to-face expressive confrontation between the intimates themselves as offender and victim.
Embedded deep in the cultural context of intimate relationships, however, is a type of lethal violence that is more complicated than that represented by the one-on-one lethal violence so often the subject of research. It is the solicitation to hire someone to kill someone else, otherwise known as murder-for-hire. At first glance, it might seem odd to treat murder-for-hire events as expressive violence, even those involving intimates. It is, after all, almost universally classified as a type of instrumental violence (Block & Block, 1993; Derber, 1997; Luckenbill, 1977). Yet, findings from an exploratory study of murder-for-hire in Tennessee suggest that these events contain relationships that are both expressive and instrumental and, furthermore, that the contracts to kill are very often made by one partner against the other partner.
A few examples will illustrate the involvement of partners in these offenses. A woman, long abused by her husband, agrees to pay someone money to kill him and end the abuse; an ex-spouse hires someone to kill his former wife to avoid further alimony payments; a young female entices her boy friend to kill her father so she can collect insurance money. What these examples allude to is a pattern of involvement in murder-for-hire that draws a third participant, a hit man, into the relationship between intimates. This type of partner violence cannot be explained by examining the usual nexus of causal variations in the relationships among participants in one-on-one lethal events. The relationships of the participants in murder-for-hire events involve more complex instrumental/expressive patterns than those found in typical one-on-one instances of expressive violence between intimates.
Because murder-for-hire has not been viewed as an especially urgent topic in lethal violence research, there is little systematic research about it. Much of what we know of it is drawn from anecdotal and non-scientific sources.
ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
With notable exception (Levi, 1981), almost all of the information available about murder-for-hire is anecdotal and non-scientific, drawn from fictional literature (Hopler, 1996), nonfiction novels (Griffiths, 1995; Humes, 1994; Lewis, 1975; Porch & Easley, 1997; Siegal, 1990), or from social commentaries (Dershowitz, 1994; Derber, 1996). Along with murder-for-hire movies (Black & Romano, 1999), TV drama series, TV investigative reporting series, and newspaper stories about murder-for-hire, these anecdotal sources constitute the sparse base of knowledge about this type of lethal violence. From them, a sketchy and highly provisional overview of murder-for-hire in time can be fashioned.
CONTRACT KILLINGS IN TIME
Jay Hopler begins The Killing Spirit by observing, "It is easier to find a good hit man than it is to find a good hit man story. In Baltimore, you can have anyone killed for $25--more if you want finesse. I knew of a dozen street corners, all within five blocks of my one-bedroom apartment on St. Paul Street, where an assassin could be hired; the only modern hit man story I knew of was Earnest Hemingway's 'The Killers.' But the existence of one argues favorably for the existence of the other ..." (Hopler, 1996, p. xi).
There is nothing by way of an accurate historical record but, if fictional accounts can argue favorably for the existence of reality, then murders-for-hire have been around since at least Shakespeare's time (Hopler, 1996, p. xii). How murder-for-hire has both persisted and changed in time has never been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny, but anecdotal evidence enables us to capture a casual glimpse of both its enduring and changing qualities.
Murder-for-hire has gone through roughly a three-stage metamorphosis in America. In stage one, the stage of the entrepreneurial murder-for-hire, those who solicited the services of a hired killer did so primarily with particular protective reasons and justifications in mind. Most often, at least according to historical statements, these were economically and racially motivated reasons. There is nothing in the scanty, fragmented anecdotal historical record to suggest that solicitors were motivated by their personal, private lives, and their intimate associations and relationships. Indeed, a purely business type of arrangement engaged in for the protection of essentially business types of reasons was what kept hired guns working.
In what was probably its earliest form, a "hired gun" was used for protection of one's economic interests. Roger Lane speaks, for example, of the need for "Pinktertons or other hired guns" to protect striking workers from employers and each other (Lane, 1997, p. 163). Over time, the need for protection of economic interests was enlarged to include the need for control, and extended beyond the realm of economics into racial conflicts. A riveting set of scenes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittmann (Barry, Christiansen, & Rosenbert, 1974) highlights, for example, the use of a killer hired by the equivalent of the KKK, an old fishing buddy of Miss Jane's, to kill her son.
As the American economy stabilized around industrial activities, conditions of employment settled into more routine existences, and the racial …
2 years ago
Allen Croft
