Criminal Bodies In The West

This book explores the cultural meanings of the criminal body in the west through historical and multidisciplinary frameworks, examining both how the criminal corpse was viewed as a repository of power and how it held significant cultural meaning as material relic. Authors situate the criminal body at different historical junctures to examine ways in which the criminal corpse was displayed and managed for social, political, magical and medicinal powers and purposes. They explain how this legacy persists in significant ways in the contemporary west, primarily through the commodification of criminal bodies in popular and public displays. The role of notorious criminal bodies in contemporary culture also reverberates in political and scientific realms in which criminal bodies often carry symbolic meanings related to ambivalence over interpretations of death. Drawing on examples from history as well as more contemporary criminal bodies, the book will be of interest to those studying death and criminology, and show how the criminal body can retain an iconic status in the collective memory of the living. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mortality.

Fanning was on the San Francisco Police Department for 37 years. The book discusses earlier times, e.g. Vigilance Committee, Black Bart, and more recent police activity during Fanning's career.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Beggars, outcasts, urchins, waifs, prostitutes, criminals, convicts, madmen, fallen women, lunatics, degenerates—part reality, part fantasy, these are the grotesque faces that populate the underworld, the dark inverse of our everyday world. Lurking in the mirror that we hold up to our society, they are our counterparts and our doubles, repelling us and yet offering the tantalizing promise of escape. Although these images testify to undeniable social realities, the sordid lower depths make up a symbolic and social imaginary that reflects our fears and anxieties—as well as our desires. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, Dominique Kalifa traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. He examines how the myth of the lower depths came into being in nineteenth-century Europe, as biblical figures and Christian traditions were adapted for a world turned upside-down by the era of industrialization, democratization, and mass culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience. While the social conditions that created that underworld have changed, Vice, Crime, and Poverty shows that, from social-scientific ideas of the underclass to contemporary cinema and steampunk culture, its shadows continue to haunt us.

For the killer, there is always the problem of getting rid of the body. Muswell Hill murderer Dennis Nilsen famously cooked the corpses of his victims in Cranley Gardens and flushed them down the lavatory, only to be caught when the sewers blocked up. But his first twelve victims were disposed of in the back garden of his previous home in Melrose Avenue. Fred and Rosemary West buried the bodies of three of their victims in the back garden of the House of Horrors at 25 Cromwell Street.Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer began his murderous career scattering human remains in the backyard of his parents' home in Bath, Ohio. Convicted killer Peter Tobin went back on trial after two more bodies were found in the back garden of his former home in Margate. And grisly granny Dorothea Puente murdered lodgers at her boarding house in Sacramento, California, dispatching them to the backyard while continuing to cash their Social Security cheques.This book explores these and many other cases that suggest that, whatever the motive for murder, the back garden is a convenient place to dump the corpse. The Mexican drug cartels use it. So do drug dealers in London and sex killers in France. Benjamin Laing, who killed a father and daughter to steal a ?7,000 car, went one step further, burying the bodies of his victims in the back garden of his girlfriend's house in Abbey Wood. She called the police. His crime, she decided, had come just a little bit too close to home.

With cities increasingly following rigid rules for designing out crime and producing spaces under surveillance, this book asks how information shapes bodies, space, and, ultimately, policymaking. In recent years, public spaces have changed in Western countries, with the urban realm becoming an ever-more monitored, privatised, homogeneous, and aseptic space that has lost its character, uniqueness, and diversity in the name of ‘security’. This underpins precise moral and political choices in terms of what a space should be, how it can be used, and by whom. These choices generate material consequences concerning urban inequality and freedom, or otherwise, of movement. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations in London’s ‘criminal’ spaces, this book illustrates how rules, policies, and moral values, far from being abstract concepts, are in fact material. Outlining the basis of a new urban information ethics, the book both exposes and challenges how moral values and predefined categories are applied to, and materially shape, the movement of bodies in urban space with regard to crime and security policies. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s information theory and a wide range of work in urban studies, geography, and planning, as well as in surveillance studies, object-oriented ontology, and contemporary theoretical work on both materiality and affect, the book provides a radically new perspective on urban space in general, and crime and security in particular. This book uses a balanced mix of theoretical concepts and empirical study to bring theory and practice together in an intertwining of ethnography and autoethnography. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of urban studies, urban geography, sociology, surveillance studies, legal theory, socio-legal studies, planning law, environmental law, and land law.

The definitive account of one of Britain’s most notorious killer couples, who loved, tortured, and slayed together as husband and wife. Updated with a new afterword from the author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arrests From the outside, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, looked as commonplace as the married couple who lived there. But in 1994, Fred and Rose West’s home would become infamous as a “house of horrors” when the remains of nine young women—many of them decapitated, dismembered, and showing evidence of sexual torture—were found interred under its cellar, bathroom floor, and garden. And this wasn’t the only burial ground: Fred’s first wife and nanny were unearthed miles away in a field, while his eight-year-old stepdaughter was found entombed under the Wests’ former residence. Yet, for more than twenty years, the twosome maintained a façade of normalcy while abusing and murdering female boarders, hitchhikers, and members of their own family. Howard Sounes, who first broke the story about the Wests as a journalist and covered the murder trial, has written a comprehensive account of the case. Beginning with Fred and Rose’s bizarre childhoods, Sounes charts their lives and crimes in forensic detail, constructing a fascinating and frightening tale of a marriage soaked in blood. Indeed, the total number of the Wests’ victims may never be known. A case reminiscent of the “Moors Murders” committed in the 1960s in Manchester by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—as if Hindley and Brady had married and kept on killing for decades—Fred & Rose “is a story of obsessive love as well as obsessive murder” (The Times, London).

In a chilling scene in the film Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood as the gunman stands over a wounded Gene Hackman, the sheriff, aiming a rifle at his head. "I don't deserve this, to die like this," says Hackman. Eastwood replies, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," cocks his rifle, and fires point blank at his helpless victim. This scenario dramatically brings home to the viewer what historians have long debated and hundreds of other films and books suggest: the turn-of-the-century West was a violent time and place. Ranchers, miners, deputy sheriffs, teenagers and old men, occasionally even housewives and mothers found themselves at the business end of a shotgun or a .38 revolver. Yet, since western historians tend to portray violence as essentially episodic--frontier gunfights, range wars, vigilante movements, and the like--solid data has been hard to come by. As a beginning point for actually measuring lethal violence and assessing the administration of justice, here at last is a detailed and well-documented study of homicide in the American West. Comparing data from representative areas--Douglas County, Nebraska; Las Animas County, Colorado; and Gila County, Arizona--this book reveals a level of violence far greater than many historians have believed, even surpassing eastern cities like New York and Boston. Clashing cultures and transient populations, a boomtown mentality, easy availability of alcohol and firearms: these and many other factors come under scrutiny as catalysts in the violence that permeated the region. By comparing homicide data, including coroner's inquests, indictments, plea bargains, and sentences across both racial and regional lines, the book also offers persuasive evidence that criminal justice systems of the Old West were weighted heavily in favor of defendants who were white and against those who were African American, Native American, or Mexican. Packed with information, this is a book for students and scholars of western history, social history, criminology, and justice studies. Western history buffs will be captivated by colorful anecdotes about the real West, where guns could and did blaze over anything from love trysts to vendettas to too much foam on the beer. From whatever perspective, all readers are sure to find here a well-constructed framework for understanding the West as it was and for interpreting the region as it moves into the future.

In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies embark on a hunting trip from suburban Detroit to rural Michigan, unaware they would soon become the hunted. Darker than Night tells the chilling true story of the mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects–the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness's account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man’s hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.