Quotes About Crime

Another problem is that it's not always easy to distinguish between a killer's MO and his signature. Supposedly, a signature act is something the killer needs to do to satisfy his sickest urges—"whatever he gets his rocks off on," as Ted Bundy so bluntly put it—whereas the MO relates to the purely practical aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime. But it's often hard to make such hard-and-fast distinctions.

For the most part, serial murder is a sex crime, a fact that accounts for its distinctive features. The classic pattern of serial murder is a grotesque travesty of normal sexual functioning.

Prostitutes (especially when they come from the underclass)—along with street hustlers, teenage runaways, vagrants, junkies, and other social outcasts—are what criminologists call "targets of opportunity": people who are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and overpower and are so marginalized that no one, including members of the police and the press, pays much attention when they go missing.

The term "target of opportunity" is also used to describe victims who are randomly slain by a serial murderer simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If serial murder is, in essence, a sex crime, mass murder is almost always a suicidal one. In blind, apocalyptic fury, the mass murderer has decided to go out with a bang and take as many people with him as possible. Typically, once the bloodbath is over, the mass murderer will either end his own life or provoke a fatal shoot-out with the police ("suicide by cop," as it is called).

According to the FBI, a serial killer is anyone who murders three or more victims with a significant interval of time between each homicide.

Because of the prominent role that such vicious daydreams play as a preliminary to the act of serial murder, Robert Ressler and his colleagues reached the conclusion that fantasy is the mainspring of sexual homicide. "My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development of perverse thought patterns," Ressler has written. "These men were motivated to murder by their fantasies.

How does anyone think that 'attempted murder' counts the same as actual murder? They shouldn't even call it 'attempted': that's just a way to flatter failure.

San Jose is made up of the finest citizens of any city in the entire United States- peace loving, quiet, cultured people. ... God-fearing, law-observing, good citizens have been watching these murders increasing and have watched crime increase in this country and from the time this splendid young fellow [Brooke Hart] was murdered this vigilance committee had in mind carrying out what in their minds was real justice...

So they think wrong. Am I to blame because the world is full of fatheads? You know well enough that birth control has nothing to do with killing babies. In fact it saves them. Which is the bigger crime—letting kids die of disease and starvation or seeing that the unwanted ones don't get born in the first place?

Every society has the criminals that it deserves.

think back to the first case with the white horse, and finding the woman crucified in the Everglades. I think about putting away a bad guy, and then receiving the little red horse when we were vacationing before.

It was a crime of passion. "Mine to", Ben nodded, also miserably. And which was worse, Penn thought. Out of hatred or love?

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

Since those who believe they need a hero/celebrity outnumber the actual heroes/celebrities, people feel safe and comfortably justified in numbers, committing egregious crimes in the name of the greater social ego. Ironically diminishing their own true hero-celebrity nature in the process.

Everybody has their field. My field is the muktiple murderer.

Everybody has their field. My field is the multiple murderer.

Lawrence Sanders

Our procedure has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream. What we need to fear is the archaic formalism and the watery sentiment that obstructs, delays, and defeats the prosecution of crime.

If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

You sound very confident, Teddy," Duncan said. "Is that because you tossed the rape kit or altered the case number so it would never be found?

You pulled Sabrina over. You warned her off. You made yourself part of the crime. Now you can make it right for yourself and your family . . . but not by breaking into my house and pointing a gun at me. The way to redeem yourself, and spare your family a lot of pain and shame, is by helping me put those deputies behind bars.

Duncan said, "Unless it's an actor, rapper, or politician who gets shot.

Mostly South America and Mexico the last few years. The drug cartels like to dismember their enemies, throw them in a pit, and set them on fire. The authorities hire me to help identify the dead," Daniel said. Now Eve knew what he meant when he said that he'd slept in worse places than a cot at the Lost Hills station. "I also worked that plane crash in Texas and the apartment building fire in Oakland.