The Anatomy of Motive
Paul Quinn College | The Anatomy of Motive | Dexter D. Evans | | Criminology-ONLINE | 1/7/2011 |
McIntosh |
The Anatomy of Motive
Every day I put my life on the line as a soldier in the United States Army. When a person joins the army the first material they learn is “The Soldiers’ Creed.” In this declaration to our country, a fresh recruit is expressing that he or she will defend America, come what may. This include taking out the enemy by killing them. One of the hardest questions for most people to answer is why people kill each other? We are not, of course, talking about what makes people kill in self defense as in the line of duty as soldiers. We might (because of religious or moral concerns) choose not to do so ourselves, but we can understand why someone would kill in a situation like this.
But what can possibly be the motivation for people to commit the kind of murder that is usually considered to be a senseless one. What are – what can be? – The motivations behind serial, mass, and spree killings? John Douglas and Mark Olshaker try to answer these questions for us in their book The Anatomy of Motive, a book by an FBI profiler that is actually less concerned with the mechanics of profiling than with the reasons that people commit these kinds of crimes and so have to be hunted to begin with.
The book examines some of the most widely known cases from around the world in recent years – Andrew Cunanan, who killed the designer Gianni Versace in Miami Beach in 1997; Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski; Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980; Charles Whitman, who shot 13 people from a clock tower at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1966; Lee Harvey Oswald; the mass murder in Dunblane, Scotland, in which a lone shooter killed 16 children and their teacher, the still-unsolved Tylenol poisonings, and even Shakespeare’s Othello (although surely this is a motivated a opposed to a senseless
McIntosh |
The Anatomy of Motive
Every day I put my life on the line as a soldier in the United States Army. When a person joins the army the first material they learn is “The Soldiers’ Creed.” In this declaration to our country, a fresh recruit is expressing that he or she will defend America, come what may. This include taking out the enemy by killing them. One of the hardest questions for most people to answer is why people kill each other? We are not, of course, talking about what makes people kill in self defense as in the line of duty as soldiers. We might (because of religious or moral concerns) choose not to do so ourselves, but we can understand why someone would kill in a situation like this.
But what can possibly be the motivation for people to commit the kind of murder that is usually considered to be a senseless one. What are – what can be? – The motivations behind serial, mass, and spree killings? John Douglas and Mark Olshaker try to answer these questions for us in their book The Anatomy of Motive, a book by an FBI profiler that is actually less concerned with the mechanics of profiling than with the reasons that people commit these kinds of crimes and so have to be hunted to begin with.
The book examines some of the most widely known cases from around the world in recent years – Andrew Cunanan, who killed the designer Gianni Versace in Miami Beach in 1997; Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski; Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980; Charles Whitman, who shot 13 people from a clock tower at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1966; Lee Harvey Oswald; the mass murder in Dunblane, Scotland, in which a lone shooter killed 16 children and their teacher, the still-unsolved Tylenol poisonings, and even Shakespeare’s Othello (although surely this is a motivated a opposed to a senseless
Cited: Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. The Anatomy of Murder: The FBI’s Legendary Manhunter Explores the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Geberth, V. J. (1981). Psychological profiling. Law and Order, 29, 46-49. Ressler, R. K., Burgess, A. W., & Douglas, J. E. (1983). Rape and rape-murder: One offender and twelve victims. American Journal of Psychiatry, 140, 36-40.