A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. [1] While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", [2] actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic. [3]
Those identified as thrill killers are typically young males, but other profile characteristics may vary, according to Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence at Northeastern University. The major common denominator among those who commit thrill killings is that they usually feel inadequate and are driven by a need to feel powerful. "To a certain extent, [thrill killers] may make their victims suffer so that they can feel good," said Levin. "Sadism is fairly common in thrill killings. The killer might torture, degrade, or rape his victim before he or she takes his or her life." [4] They frequently have an "ideal victim type" who has certain physical characteristics. [1] [5]
Thrill killers have been frequently romanticized in films. [6] [7]
Caril Ann Fugate is the youngest female in United States history to have been tried and convicted of first-degree murder. She was the adolescent girlfriend of spree killer Charles Starkweather, being just 14 years old when his murders took place in 1958. She was convicted as his accomplice and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1976, she was paroled after serving 18 years.
Matricide is the act of killing one's own mother.
This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.
The Bega schoolgirl murders refer to the abduction, rape and murder of two Australian schoolgirls; 14-year-old Lauren Margaret Barry and 16-year-old Nichole Emma Collins of Bega, New South Wales, Australia on 6 October 1997. They were abducted by Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett, both from the New South Wales town of Yass. The men subjected the girls to repeated rapes and sexual assaults on five or more separate occasions, while driving them to remote locations throughout rural New South Wales and Victoria. Over a twelve-hour period, the girls had been driven several hundred kilometres from Bega to Fiddler's Green Creek in Victoria, where they were stabbed to death by Beckett under the order of Camilleri.
In England and Wales, life imprisonment is a sentence that lasts until the death of the prisoner, although in most cases the prisoner will be eligible for early release after a minimum term set by the judge. In exceptional cases a judge may impose a "whole life order", meaning that the offender is never considered for parole, although they may still be released on compassionate grounds at the discretion of the Home Secretary. Whole life orders are usually imposed for aggravated murder, and can only be imposed where the offender was at least 21 years old at the time of the offence being committed.
The murder of Ebony Jane Simpson occurred on 19 August 1992 in Bargo, New South Wales, Australia. Aged nine years, Simpson was abducted, raped, and murdered by asphyxiation when Andrew Peter Garforth drowned her. Garforth pleaded guilty to the crimes and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Dante Wyndham Arthurs is an Australian murderer, convicted of the murder of eight-year-old Sofia Rodriguez-Urrutia Shu.
Linwood Earl Briley, James Dyral Briley Jr. (J.B.), and Anthony Ray Briley were a sibling trio of serial/spree killers, rapists, and robbers who were responsible for a murder, rape, and robbery spree that took place in Richmond, Virginia, in 1979.
Three members of the Richardson family were murdered in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada in April 2006. The murders were planned and committed by the family's 12-year-old daughter Jasmine Richardson and her 23-year-old boyfriend Jeremy Steinke, now going by the name Jackson May. Richardson and Steinke were each convicted on three counts of first-degree murder. Richardson, who had turned 13 before being convicted, is thought to be the youngest person in Canada ever convicted of multiple first-degree murder counts. Her 10-year sentence was completed on May 6, 2016.
The Greenough family massacre was the axe murders of Karen MacKenzie (31) and her three children, Daniel (16), Amara (7), and Katrina (5), at their remote rural property in Greenough, Western Australia, on 21 February 1993. They were killed by farm hand William Patrick Mitchell, an acquaintance of MacKenzie. Details of the murders were withheld from the public as they were considered too horrific. The case led to calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty.
Samuel Leonard Boyd is an Australian spree killer from New South Wales, currently serving four consecutive sentences of life imprisonment plus 25 years without the possibility of parole for the murder of four people and the malicious wounding of a fifth between September 1982 and April 1983.
The murder of Kimberly Cates was a thrill killing that attracted national attention in the United States due to the crime’s brutality, the randomness by which the home was chosen with intent to murder, the apparent lack of remorse, and the perpetrators’ ages.
Anthony Cook and Nathaniel Cook are American serial killer brothers who committed a series of at least 9 rapes and murders of mostly couples in Toledo, Ohio, area between 1973 and 1981. Their guilt was established in the late 1990s thanks to DNA profiling, after which both brothers were convicted and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
Elizabeth Olten was a 9-year-old girl who was murdered by her neighbor Alyssa Bustamante, who was 15 at the time, in St. Martins, Missouri on October 21, 2009.
Anthony "Tony" Ray Amati is an American serial killer who shot and killed three people during a series of "thrill-killings" in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1996. The FBI was brought in to find Amati's whereabouts and added him to the FBI's ten most wanted list in 1998. Following his arrest, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and is currently serving his sentence in Nevada.
Larme Price, known as the Thrill Killer, is an American serial killer who murdered four immigrants in New York in 2003. Price claimed he carried out the murders in revenge for the September 11 attacks, and said he was driven to kill by a paranoid hatred of Arabs. Despite this claim, only one of his victims was Middle Eastern. Price confessed to the murders, was found guilty, and was sentenced to 150 years in prison without parole. He remains incarcerated at the Sullivan Correctional Facility.
Juan Rodriguez Chavez, known as The Thrill Killer, was an American serial killer and spree killer who, together with a teenage accomplice, killed eleven people in Dallas, Texas during a crime spree lasting from March to July 1995, shortly after being paroled from prison for a murder conviction. For the latter crimes, Chavez was sentenced to death and subsequently executed in 2003.
Life imprisonment is a legal penalty in Singapore. This sentence is applicable for more than forty offences under Singapore law, such as culpable homicide not amounting to murder, attempted murder, kidnapping by ransom, criminal breach of trust by a public servant, voluntarily causing grievous hurt with dangerous weapons, and trafficking of firearms, in addition to caning or a fine for certain offences that warrant life imprisonment.