Perfect crime
Encyclopedia
Perfect crime is a colloquial term used in law
and fiction
(principally crime fiction
) to characterize crime
s that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator.
In certain contexts, the concept of perfect crime is limited to just undetected crimes; if an event is ever identified as a crime, some investigators
say it cannot be called 'perfect'.
A perfect crime should be distinguished from one that has merely not been solved yet or where everyday chance or procedural matters frustrate a conviction
. There is an element that the crime is (or appears likely to be) unable to be solved.
Would-be perfect crimes are a popular subject in crime fiction
and movies. They include Rope
, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train
, The Postman Always Rings Twice
, Witness for the Prosecution, and Dial M for Murder
.
An intentional killing in which the death is never identified as murder is an example of one of the more rigorous definitions of perfect crime. Other criminologists narrow the range to only those crimes that are not detected at all. By definition, it can never be known if such perfect crimes exist. Many "close calls" have been observed, however—enough to make investigators aware of the possibility of a perfect crime.
murder, the Zodiac murders
of the late 1960s, the Tylenol scare
of 1982, the Cleveland Torso Murderer
and the Diane Suzuki
case of 1985 are referred to as perfect, but the possibility always remains that a culprit will ultimately be identified. Airplane hijacking along with a parachute escape, such as in the case of D. B. Cooper
, may also qualify as a perfect crime, assuming Cooper survived his fall.
In March 2009, a jewel theft
was described as being close to a perfect crime, in that despite having DNA evidence the police were unable to bring the case to court since the DNA belonged to one of a pair of identical twins, and faced with denials by both, it could not be proven which of the two was the criminal.
On October 27, 2009, David Swain was convicted of killing his wife Shelley Tyre while on a scuba-diving outing in 1999 in Tortola
, British Virgin Islands
. Prosecutors called this a near-perfect crime motivated by Swain's desire to pursue another woman. No eyewitnesses or DNA evidence linked Swain to the murder. The prosecution's case rested largely on experts who testified they believed Swain wrestled Tyre from behind at a depth of 80 feet, tore off her scuba mask, and shut off her air supply while they swam near a shipwreck. Tyre's mask was damaged, the mouthpiece of her snorkel was missing, and her fin was found embedded in a sandbar — all signs of a struggle, prosecution witnesses said. Authorities initially classified the death as an accident. However, Tyre's parents doubted their daughter, an experienced diver, had accidentally drowned, and they long suspected that her husband had killed her. They were awarded $3.5 million in a civil jury trial, but Swain filed for bankruptcy and has not paid the sum. On November 10, 2009, Swain was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder.
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
and fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
(principally crime fiction
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
) to characterize crime
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
s that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator.
In certain contexts, the concept of perfect crime is limited to just undetected crimes; if an event is ever identified as a crime, some investigators
Detective
A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...
say it cannot be called 'perfect'.
A perfect crime should be distinguished from one that has merely not been solved yet or where everyday chance or procedural matters frustrate a conviction
Conviction
In law, a conviction is the verdict that results when a court of law finds a defendant guilty of a crime.The opposite of a conviction is an acquittal . In Scotland and in the Netherlands, there can also be a verdict of "not proven", which counts as an acquittal...
. There is an element that the crime is (or appears likely to be) unable to be solved.
Overview
As used by some criminologists and others who study criminal investigations (including mystery writers), a perfect crime goes unsolved not because of incompetence in the investigation, but because of the cleverness and skill of the criminal. I.e., the defining factor is the primary causative influence of the criminal's ability to avoid investigation and reprisal, and not so much the ability of the investigating authority to perform its duties.Would-be perfect crimes are a popular subject in crime fiction
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
and movies. They include Rope
Rope (film)
Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions...
, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train
Strangers on a Train (film)
Strangers on a Train is an American psychological thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30, 1951. The film stars Farley Granger, Ruth Roman,...
, The Postman Always Rings Twice
The Postman Always Rings Twice
The Postman Always Rings Twice is a 1934 crime novel by James M. Cain.The novel was quite successful and notorious upon publication, and is regarded as one of the more important crime novels of the 20th century...
, Witness for the Prosecution, and Dial M for Murder
Dial M for Murder
Dial M for Murder is a 1954 American thriller film adapted from a successful stage play by Frederick Knott, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, and Robert Cummings. The movie was released by the Warner Bros...
.
Varying definitions
A murder committed by somebody who had never before met the victim, has no criminal record, steals nothing, and tells no one might be a perfect crime. According to criminologists and scientists, this casual definition of perfect crime exists. Another possibility is that a crime might be committed in an area of high public traffic, where DNA from a wide variety of people is present, making the sifting of evidence akin to 'finding a needle in a haystack'.An intentional killing in which the death is never identified as murder is an example of one of the more rigorous definitions of perfect crime. Other criminologists narrow the range to only those crimes that are not detected at all. By definition, it can never be known if such perfect crimes exist. Many "close calls" have been observed, however—enough to make investigators aware of the possibility of a perfect crime.
Real life examples
Some crimes such as the Black DahliaBlack Dahlia
"The Black Dahlia" was a nickname given to Elizabeth Short is an American woman and the victim of a gruesome and much-publicized murder. She acquired the moniker posthumously by newspapers in the habit of nicknaming crimes they found particularly colorful...
murder, the Zodiac murders
Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer's identity remains unknown. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women...
of the late 1960s, the Tylenol scare
1982 Chicago Tylenol murders
The Chicago Tylenol murders occurred when seven people died after taking pain-relief medicine capsules that had been poisoned. The poisonings, code-named TYMURS by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, took place in late 1982 in the Chicago area of the United States.These poisonings involved...
of 1982, the Cleveland Torso Murderer
Cleveland Torso Murderer
The Cleveland Torso Murderer was an unidentified serial killer who killed and dismembered at least 12 victims in the Cleveland, Ohio area in the 1930s.-Murderers:...
and the Diane Suzuki
Diane Suzuki
Diane Suzuki was a nineteen-year old dancer and student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who disappeared on July 6, 1985, and has since been the focus of one of the most notorious modern criminal investigations in the history of the state of Hawaii...
case of 1985 are referred to as perfect, but the possibility always remains that a culprit will ultimately be identified. Airplane hijacking along with a parachute escape, such as in the case of D. B. Cooper
D. B. Cooper
D. B. Cooper is the name popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the airspace between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington on November 24, 1971. He extorted $200,000 in ransom and parachuted to an uncertain fate...
, may also qualify as a perfect crime, assuming Cooper survived his fall.
In March 2009, a jewel theft
Theft
In common usage, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent. The word is also used as an informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, shoplifting and fraud...
was described as being close to a perfect crime, in that despite having DNA evidence the police were unable to bring the case to court since the DNA belonged to one of a pair of identical twins, and faced with denials by both, it could not be proven which of the two was the criminal.
On October 27, 2009, David Swain was convicted of killing his wife Shelley Tyre while on a scuba-diving outing in 1999 in Tortola
Tortola
Tortola is the largest and most populated of the British Virgin Islands, a group of islands that form part of the archipelago of the Virgin Islands. Local tradition recounts that Christopher Columbus named it Tortola, meaning "land of the Turtle Dove". Columbus named the island Santa Ana...
, British Virgin Islands
British Virgin Islands
The Virgin Islands, often called the British Virgin Islands , is a British overseas territory and overseas territory of the European Union, located in the Caribbean to the east of Puerto Rico. The islands make up part of the Virgin Islands archipelago, the remaining islands constituting the U.S...
. Prosecutors called this a near-perfect crime motivated by Swain's desire to pursue another woman. No eyewitnesses or DNA evidence linked Swain to the murder. The prosecution's case rested largely on experts who testified they believed Swain wrestled Tyre from behind at a depth of 80 feet, tore off her scuba mask, and shut off her air supply while they swam near a shipwreck. Tyre's mask was damaged, the mouthpiece of her snorkel was missing, and her fin was found embedded in a sandbar — all signs of a struggle, prosecution witnesses said. Authorities initially classified the death as an accident. However, Tyre's parents doubted their daughter, an experienced diver, had accidentally drowned, and they long suspected that her husband had killed her. They were awarded $3.5 million in a civil jury trial, but Swain filed for bankruptcy and has not paid the sum. On November 10, 2009, Swain was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder.
See also
- Locked room mysteryLocked room mysteryThe locked room mystery is a sub-genre of detective fiction in which a crime—almost always murder—is committed under apparently impossible circumstances. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene that no intruder could have entered or left, e.g., a locked room...
- Leopold and LoebLeopold and LoebNathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb , more commonly known as "Leopold and Loeb", were two wealthy University of Michigan alumni and University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life imprisonment.The duo were...
— two wealthy University of ChicagoUniversity of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
students who, motivated by their desire to commit a perfect crime, murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and were immediately caught and sentenced to life imprisonment - Perfect murder (fiction)Perfect murder (fiction)The perfect murder is a murder which benefits the murderer, but also has no negative consequences for him or her; usually, this simply means that the murderer is never caught...
Further reading
- Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths by Timmermans, Stefan. 380 pages, University of Chicago press; ISBN 9780226803982.
- The Perfect Crime and How To Commit It by Jekel, Dr. Pamela L. Jekel; Publisher: Paladin Press Boulder, CO 1982; ISBN 0873642376.
- Practical Crime Scene Processing and Investigation by Ross M. Gardner; 2004 CRC Press, ISBN 0849320437.