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]
Pedicide, child murder, child manslaughter, or child homicide is the homicide of an individual who is a minor. In many legal jurisdictions it is considered an aggravated form of homicide. The age of the victim may constitute an aggravated factor for homicide offenses, or child murder may be a stand-alone criminal offense.
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 parole 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.
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.
On 12 February 1993 in Merseyside, two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, abducted, tortured, and murdered a two-year-old boy, James Patrick Bulger. Thompson and Venables led Bulger away from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, after his mother had taken her eyes off him momentarily. His mutilated body was found on a railway line two and a half miles away in Walton, Liverpool, two days later.
Erika Elaine Sifrit and Benjamin Adam "BJ" Sifrit are an American couple convicted of murdering two tourists, Joshua Edward Ford and Martha Margene "Geney" Crutchley, in Ocean City, Maryland, in 2002. The case drew substantial media attention. In 2003, both Sifrits were convicted, he for one murder and she for both murders.
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.
Stacey Mitchell was a British-born girl living in Australia who was murdered at the age of 16, on 18 December 2006, by couple Jessica Stasinowsky and Valerie Parashumti. She was bludgeoned with a concrete block and strangled with a chain. Her corpse was found in a wheelie bin shortly afterwards. Stasinowsky and Parashumti had known Mitchell for three days, and claimed they murdered her because they found her irritating.
Anthony Cook and Nathaniel Cook are American brothers and serial killers who committed at least nine rape-murders between 1973 and 1981. They were active in Toledo, Ohio, and surrounding areas with most of their victims being young couples. Anthony was arrested and convicted for the final murder, but his and Nathaniel's guilt in the other killings would not be uncovered until Nathaniel was detained for a misdemeanor in 1998, after which DNA profiling exposed their involvement. Both brothers were later convicted and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; Anthony received multiple life sentences, while Nathaniel was sentenced to 75 years with a minimum of fifteen years served, and he was paroled after eighteen years in 2018.
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, known as The Thrill Killer, is an American serial killer who shot and killed three people in Las Vegas, Nevada, from May to August 1996. The FBI was brought in to find Amati's whereabouts and added him to the FBI's ten most wanted list on February 27, 1998. He was arrested two days later, was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 40 years served in 1999.
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.