Torture murder
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Torture murder is a loosely defined legal term to describe the process used by murderers who kill their victims by slowly torturing them. The torture usually lasts over a prolonged period of time. It is often a practice of serial killers.[citation needed]
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[edit] Style
Torture murder is usually preceded by a kidnapping where the killer will take the victim to a secluded place. There, the killer will kill the victim by torture.
For instance, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, during the 1980s in California, killed over 18 men, women, and children after torturing them for days or weeks. The torture included killing infants in front of their mothers, burning alive victims bound to wooden planks, and whipping victims with barbed stakes.
Houston serial killer Dean Corll subjected his young male victims, ranging in age from nine to twenty-one,[1] to sexual tortures, which included plucking their pubic hairs one by one, shoving glass rods up their penises and then crushing them, and shoving large bullet-like objects in victims' rectums.[2] A sheet of plastic was placed under the plywood torture board to catch the excreta, blood and vomit that would invariably be discharged during the abuse, and the radio would be cranked up full blast to drown out the victim’s screams.[3] Occasionally he'd castrate his victims, often their severed genitals would be buried next to the bodies in small plastic bags. At least one boy's corpse was found with his penis gnawed nearly in two.[4]
Four teenage boys, including Jo Kamisaku, held captive for over forty days and tortured to death a Japanese girl, Junko Furuta, in 1988. The boys said that they had not intended to kill her and instead pled guilty to a lesser charge.
Torture murder is considered one of the most vicious crimes in existence[attribution needed], due both to its premeditated nature and the general attitude of those who commit torture murder; a total disregard for another's life and a feeling of pleasure from inflicting pain on others. In the United States, those killers accused of torture murder are most often charged with the crime of capital murder, which can result in a death sentence.
[edit] State sanctioned
Torture murder may also be a legal act of a state, especially in nations which employ torture as a means of interrogation. Nazi Germany was well known for state sanctioned torture murder, as members of the SS were often employed to interrogate enemies of the state under slow torture, often killing them in the process. Death by slow torture was also a common occurrence in Nazi concentration camps.
The Bolshevik secret police, Cheka, practiced deadly torture on a huge scale during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War. Victims were allegedly skinned alive, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death and tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water.[5] Torture was also employed by the NKVD during Stalin’s reign, particularly during the period of the Great Purge. According to some historians, many that were tortured to death were likely not counted amongst the executed.[6]
Typically, one who kills by torture under the authority of the state is not considered a torture murderer unless later tried by another state or authority for such acts as war crimes. Such was the case with Klaus Barbie who was applauded by Nazi authorities for his abilities in the Gestapo to extract confessions under torture. Barbie was later tried and convicted of murder in several such cases.
[edit] List of torture murders
Some notable perpetrators and victims include the following. The dates indicate the time of the crime or crimes.
[edit] Torture murderers
- Moors murders (UK, 1963 to 1965)
- Hillside Strangler (Los Angeles, 1977 to 1978)
- Rosemary and Fred West (UK, 1973 to 1979)
- Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo (Canada, early 1990s)
- Paul John Knowles (the Casanova Killer) (1974) (was known to have tortured several of his victims before killing them)
- Gertrude Baniszewski (Indiana, 1965)
- Irma Grese (Nazi Germany, 1943 to 1945)
- Lavrentiy Beria (USSR, 1921 to 1953)
- Sam DeStefano (Chicago, Illinois, 1950's to the 1970's)
- Geza de Kaplany (California, 1962)
- Westley Allan Dodd (US) (September 3rd through November 1989)
- Adolfo Constanzo (Matamoros, Mexico, 1983 to 1989)
- Junko Ogata and Futoshi Matsunaga (Japan, 1996 to 1998)
- John Wayne Gacy (Chicago, Illinois, 1972 to 1978)
- Randy Steven Kraft (California, 1970's to the early 1980's)
- Robert Berdella (Kansas City, Missouri, 1984 to 1987)
- Albert Fish (New York City, 1910 to 1936)
- Christopher Wilder (United States, 1982 to 1984)
- H. H. Holmes (Chicago, Illinois, 1893 to 1895)
- Gilles de Rais (France, 1435 to 1440)
- Elizabeth Báthory (Kingdom of Hungary, 1602 to 1610)
[edit] Torture murder victims
- Christian missionaries Necati Aydin, Ugur Yuksel, and Tilmann Geske (Turkey, April 18 2007 link)
- Mary Ann Leneghan (UK, May 7 2005)
- Ilan Halimi (France, 2006)
- Sylvia Likens (Indianapolis, 1965)
- Junko Furuta (Japan, 1989)
[edit] References
- ^ Montaldo, Charles. Serial Killer Dean Corll and the Houston Mass Murders. About.com
- ^ Hanna, David. Harvest of Horror: Mass Murder in Houston. Belmont Tower, 1975. p. 173
- ^ Tom Philbin and Michael Philbin. The Killer Book of True Crime. Sourcebooks, 2007. ISBN 1402208294 pp. 82 & 83
- ^ Olsen, Jack. The Man With The Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders. Simon & Schuster, 1974. ISBN 0-7432-1283-5 p. 151
- ^ Figes, Orlando. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. Penguin Books, 1997. ISBN 0670859168. p. 646
- ^ Gellately, Robert. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007. ISBN 1400040051 p. 256
