Murderous Motivations

By Beth Terrell

One of the most challenging facets of mystery writing is creating believable villains. One key to this is to give your villain a compelling--or at least, believable--motivation.

I've heard that there are only 4 motives for murder: love/sex, greed, revenge, and madness. There are variations on these themes--for example, obsession is a twisted form of love, greed may manifest as a lust for money or for power, and revenge may have its roots in the loss of love or in the loss of self-esteem (personal power) through humiliation--but whatever the surface motive, dig deep enough, and you'll find its roots in one of the basic four. Self-preservation could be added to the mix, but it might be said that this particular motive falls either under love (of self), greed (fear of loss of status or esteem), or madness (if the perceived threat is, in fact, all in the killer's head).

Ed McBain once wrote about a sleuth who was driven by the desire to discover an entirely new motive for murder, one that didn't trace back to one of the basic four. He never did.

P.D. James defined the four motives as: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. It's pretty easy to tie this more alliterative list to the one given above. Love might lead to a jealous rage (a husband finds his wife in bed with his best friend), a revenge killing (a woman stalks and executes her daughter's rapists), or obsession (stalker kills actress because, if he can't have her, no one can). Lust might be lust for sex or power. Lucre might lead to treachery or blackmail. Loathing might stem from the desire for revenge over real or imagined slights.

The FBI defines four basic categories of murder. Almost all (if not all) have their roots in the four basic motivations. The FBI Crimes Classification Manual describes the categories as follows:

1. Criminal Enterprise Murder
2. Personal Cause Murder
3. Sexual Homicide
4. Group Cause Homicide

The criminal enterprise murder includes all murders committed for personal gain (insurance scams, gang wars over turf, inheritance, etc.) and those committed during the commission of another violent crime.

The personal cause murder is the result of an emotional conflict. These homicides include those in which the murderer constructs an elaborate fantasy about his or her victim and will do anything to preserve it--including killing the object of his or her fascination. Other types of personal cause murders are domestic homicides, revenge killings, "authority homicides" (in which the victim is in a position of authority over the killer), extremist homicides (committed because of the killers ideology), and mercy/hero murders (such as a health care worker who acts out of a desire to put his or her victims out of their misery). (There is also what is known as the nonspecific homicide, in which the killer's motive is never discovered, but this does not generally make for very satisfying crime literature.)

Sexual homicides are those in which the sequence of events leading up to a murder have a sexual component. These homicides include children killed by pedophiles, women killed by their rapists, and the stereotypical serial killer for whom murder is accompanied by sexual gratification. Perhaps the worst of the sexual homicides are those committed by sexual sadists, who obtain gratification by means of their victims' suffering.

Group homicides are, as the name indicates, committed by multiple assailants. Motives vary, as in the personal homicides.

The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime (by Eric W. Hickey) lists a number of possible motivations for murder. Again, all were rooted, to some degree, in the Basic Four. This is an amazing book. It can be purchased for a hefty fee; the ones I looked at started at $154. Some of the motives Hickey lists are:

Abandonment/Rejection - the killer feels unloved and either lashes out in anger (many school shootings) or kills in an attempt to keep the loved one from leaving (Jeffrey Dahmer)
Altruism - mercy killings, saving victim from a worse fate or from a sinful life
Cover-up - destruction of evidence, silencing witnesses
Alcohol and drugs - a type of chemically induced, temporary madness
Protection of self or others - ex.: a woman kills her husband to protect the daughter he's abusing
Fatal Abuse - a habitual abuser loses control and goes too far
Frustration/Anger - perhaps a mother "snaps" and shakes her crying child to death, a man beats his father who has Alzheimer's, or a frustrated, back-alley boxer bites off the nose of an opponent
Greed - committed for personal gain
Escape - the killer feels an overwhelming need to get away (perhaps from an abusive relationship or a hostage situation, but also perhaps from a situation in which the killer is a caregiver and feels like he or she has no other way out)
Fame/celebrity - the killer believes he or she will become famous because of his or her killing spree
Hate/resentment - "Mother always liked you best."; "That jerk got me fired, took my job, and now he's sleeping with my wife. Enough's enough."
Jealousy/rivalry - a motivation as old as Caine and Abel
Sexual property - the killer sees the victim as belonging to him
Unwanted Children - a young mother gives birth at the prom, strangles her baby, and leaves it in the garbage can, then goes out to dance with her boyfriend; Susan Nicole Smith drowns her two small sons after her lover breaks up with her because he doesn't want children.

Sadly, there are probably many, many more. How about your villains? What makes them tick? What makes them cross that most irrevocable line?

The Perfect Villain

by Jean Henry Mead

While I was researching the criminal mind, I came across the narcissistic personality disorder, which I thought would conger up a great antagonist in a future novel. I had no idea that the disorder was so complex or that it bordered on psychosis.

A person suffering from the disorder is characterized by an excessive need to be admired as well as feelings of grandiosity—probably what used to be called “The Napoleon complex.” I couldn’t quite picture my villain running around with his hand stuffed in his shirt, so I looked for further symptoms.

This is what I found:

~People with the disorder have achieved great things because they consider themselves so special that they can’t possibly fail.
~They confine their relationships to only those people they feel are worthy of them.
~They have no qualms about taking advance of anyone.
~They’re so self absorbed that they have no empathy for others.
~They feel that everyone else envies them.
~They’re preoccupied with fantasies of power and success.
~They think they deserve adoration from everyone.
~They have a sense of entitlement to everything they desire.
~They’re arrogant to the extreme.

Know anyone like this? I always thought that narcissistic people spent a lot of time in front of mirrors, totally in love with themselves. I had no idea that they would make the perfect villains.

Psychologist Phyllis Beren revealed red flags that alert her to someone with the disorder: a desire to control other people, excessive lying, running other people down, an attitude of “my way or the highway,” sadistic behavior and over development of one area of the personality at the expense of others.

So, if someone values himself over others, has little empathy, grandiose ideas and little self-awareness, he wouldn’t hesitate to commit a crime to achieve his goals. He’s like Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and above the law.

I think I’ve found the perfect villain.

The Villain! Who, Me?

By Beth Terrell

I've been thinking about villains today, and one thing that really stands out to me is this: hardly anyone thinks he is one. Take Darth Vader. He's not out there thinking, "This is me, being the villain." He's thinking, "This is me, helping build an empire while getting even with all those jerks who didn't appreciate me back when I was a Jedi."

Or take Voldemort, the over-arching villain in J.K. Rowling's best-selling series about Harry Potter. Voldemort doesn't believe he's evil. Heck, he doesn't even believe in evil. He believes he's entitled, superior, and above all, wronged. He's just taking what's rightfully his. The Harry Potter books are chock full of villains who don't believe they're villains. Lucius Malfoy thinks he's preserving the purity of the pure-blood mages from the coarse Mud-Bloods. Toad-faced Dolores Umbridge (in my opinion, one of the most horrifying villains ever written) doesn't see herself in the black-hat role. She's standing up for order and tradition, defending the Ministry of Magic against the forces of anarchy. And you can bet that Harry Potter is not the hero of their stories. In Voldemort's mind, he's the hero. In Dolores Umbridge's mind, she is.

Of course, technically, the main character is the protagonist, who may or may not really be a hero. And the antagonist is anyone who stands between the protagonist and his or her goal, regardless of his morality. He may be a perfectly nice guy who wants to drain the marshland for perfectly good reasons. But in a mystery, the villain is usually a true villain, meaning his or her motive is generally a selfish one. I don't mean he or she has no redeeming qualities, only that the murderer in a mystery very rarely acts for altruistic or noble purposes - except maybe in his or her own mind.

So how do you make an effective villain? It's no good to make a Snidely Whiplash-style villain who twirls his curly moustache and thinks of wicked ways to kidnap the girl and foil the hero. This type of two-dimensional (or even one-dimensional) evil is rarely effective. Nor does it help much to show Snidely patting a stray dog on the head on his way to foreclose on a house he doesn't even need. Such tacked-on "good qualities" are rarely convincing, because they don't seem like part of the character.

On the other hand, Thomas Harris did a magnificent job of making the serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde, both terrifying and sympathetic. We feel for the child he was and are horrified by the monster he became, and Harris made us believe that one could easily have become the other. How? By showing us how the boy was tormented by his schoolmates because of his cleft palate, and later, how he was physically and emotionally abused by his grandmother. Harris made these scenes real, and later, when we see Francis's tenderness toward a blind woman, we understand why he takes comfort in her company, why he needs what she has to offer, and why he inevitably misunderstands her motives. None of this excuses Francis's actions. He's a villain, but he doesn't see himself that way. There are perfectly logical reasons (to him) for everything he does, even though any sane person could clearly see that his actions are evil. But because his actions grow out of his own perceptions, he is a believable villain.

That, I think, is the key. No matter how evil your villain, no matter how horrific his acts, he believes in what he is doing, and that makes us perceive him as rounded and real.