WHY MURDER?

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 4

WHY MURDER?

The Meaning of Murder. By John Brophy. Whiting and Wheaton. 271 pp. and Index. In these 24 cases the author has tried to show what curiously different factors are conducive to the commission of a crime which is universally held to' be the supreme symbol of human savagery. Mr Brophy begins with the assumption that the ability, and not infrequently the wish, to kill is present in the minds of all of us at different times and for different reasons. Furthermore the infliction of death on one person by another does not necessarily carry with it a sense of guilt, especially where the victim has been killed through carelessness of another person in a road accident. Political assassinations can be carried out from the highest motives, and war makes the action of killers not only legal but laudable. It is, of course, those devious plotters who kill for some nefarious purpose of their own that the author has in mind. The author gives many timehonoured case-histories to illustrate the different motives which induce people to murder each other; yet one —the Hanratty case—still seems to defy all conceivable explanations. It is arguable whether, when Han-

ratty discovered a man and a woman alone in a car at night, that he intended either of them any harm. But, after keeping the pair under surveillance for some hours with a loaded revolver from the back of their car, he murdered one and raped the other —and tried to murder her too. The author’s exposition of this reasonless crime is interesting for its baffling absence of motive. Mr Brophy works his way methodically through the reasons for murder, whether they be for gain (as in Mr Smith’s “Brides in the Bath” case) a desire to “disappear” (Rouse), sadism, sexual frenzy and vanity. The last was only too well exemplified in the remorseless action of Leopold and Loeb who were convinced that they could get away with the motiveless murder of a young schoolboy. Though he has nothing new to say about any of these cases the author’s manner of presenting them makes them all re-readable: and his hatred of blood-sports (about which he is very forthright) leads him to link hunting and shooting with the unconscious lust in human beings to destroy life, for the sheer pleasure of doing so. As an addition to the long list of studies in criminology the book JJn be recommended.