The psychological profile of the murderer

Murder is one of the crimes that can most traumatize a society. However, it is not the most committed crime. Property and drug-related crimes top that list. Even so, we cannot help but feel, to a certain extent, attracted to the murderers and everything that surrounds them. What led them to commit such an atrocity?

The term murderer has its origins in the Arabic term hashsashin. They were Nasrids who were part of a sect whose mission was to kill certain people, especially with certain power (e.g. political leaders). And all under the ideal that their mission would take them to paradise.

They started from a very young age (orphaned children, beggars, with little educational training, etc.), they drugged them and made them believe that this was their goal in life. From there, his training began. Some texts and studies say that the nickname used for them comes to mean “hashish consumers”, although it is not entirely clear.

Is a murder the same as a homicide?

In order to answer this question, we must refer to our current Penal Code. Spanish legislation recognizes two types of criminal offenses that protect the same legal asset: life. However, the difference between one and the other lies in the execution.

Homicide (art. 138) is the basic figure. It means taking someone’s life, without any type of adjacent circumstance. This could include, as an example, the so-called “hot homicides”: those that occur as a result of a dispute and end in death.

On the other hand, we find the murder (art. 139). This figure already requires specific qualities to be considered as such. What is condemned is not only the death itself, but the way in which it was carried out because it is reprehensible enough to have an autonomous crime. There are four circumstances that turn a homicide into a murder:

The treachery: generate a situation of manifest superiority over the victim, preventing them from being able to defend themselves (e.g. killing from behind).For price, reward or promise: kill in exchange for something (e.g. hitmen).With cruelty: killing by producing more pain than necessary to take life (e.g. when a victim is stabbed in strategic places that do not immediately take life but prolong the agony and suffering).To facilitate the commission of another crime or to prevent discovered (e.g. first a sexual assault is committed against the victim and later he is killed to try to cover up the traces left).

Is it necessary to be a psychopath to murder?

Due to how terrifying it is to take another person’s life, and especially when it occurs under certain circumstances, There is a tendency to think that this behavior cannot be anything other than the result of a mental problem.

The one most referred to is psychopathy. However, The percentage of murderous psychopaths is really low. It is more likely that we will encounter a psychopathic person in a high political position, leader of an important company, etc. But when a psychopath kills, he does so with such cruelty that it distorts our perception.

Society needs to find an explanation for such actions. But we cannot allow all behaviors that are incomprehensible to us to become pathological. Many of these crimes are committed out of pure evil. Just as there are good people, there are people who are bad and act like it. However, this does not mean that some of these criminal acts have not been committed by people with certain pathologies.

An example of this is “the poisoner of Melilla.” A woman who killed her husband and her daughter because they got in the way of her plans. Neither the psychiatric nor psychological reports showed that this woman suffered from any pathology. Why did he do it? The only answer is evil.

Differences between murderous men and murderous women

Generally, the number of men who murder far exceeds that of women. However, this does not mean that they do not kill. This criminal behavior is typical of human beings, not of sex and, far from it, of gender. Due to the role that women have had in society, the methods that women have used are substantially different from those of men.

Women, since they have been relegated to the kitchen, make greater use of poison. Men, for their part, tend to use more aggressive and violent methods.. Regarding motivation, women usually kill with the intention of obtaining some benefit (not necessarily financial), while men usually act motivated by reasons such as sexual gratification or domination.

Some added features of the psychological profile of the murderer

As we have seen, most murders primarily require a plan. Furthermore, murderers do not usually have great empathy and to get closer to their victims they use techniques of persuasion, seduction, etc. They may come from a deficient environment that has sometimes led to the development of an abnormal personality.

We cannot forget that this is not an exact science and everything we have said about this topic consists of differences depending on the crime itself, the actors (aggressor and victims), the environment, etc. Crime is malleable and the reasons why it is committed are only found in the mind of the murderer himself. We can create an approximate profile of a murderer that helps us understand why, but each person is different so they may sometimes break all our schemes.

Bibliographic references

Velasco de la Fuente, Paz. , (2018), Criminal – Mind. Criminology as a science. Barcelona: Spain, Ariel

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