Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Hitmen have feelings, too. They just tend to bury those emotions and convince themselves they’re just doing their jobs when they successfully carry out a hit.
In research published in a recent edition of The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, David Wilson, a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, and his colleagues looked at those hired killers categorized as novices by a prior study. They found that if those individuals can convince themselves they’re just businessmen dealing with a target and not a person, they can successfully hide any negative feelings associated with the task.
The key is having a sense of detachment to their victim(s), as was the case in the March 2010 shooting of Gulistan Subasi. The assassin in this case, North London teenager Santre Sanchez Gayle, was offered just £200 ($310) to commit the murder, and after the act was done, she left the scene in a taxi before the victim could become personalized.
On the other end of the spectrum was the case of Orville Wright, who was hired to execute a woman named Theresa Pitkin nearly a decade ago. Wright broke into her flat, but could not bring himself to carry out the act after striking up a conversation with his would-be victim, thus humanizing her.
Seeing victims as targets for normal business transactions
Wilson cites Jimmy Moody, a henchman for the Richardson gang in London during the 1960s and later served as an assassin for the IRA, as the prime example of a contract killer who separated his “work” from the rest of his seemingly normal life. He was the classic example of a hitman who was only motivated to kill for financial reasons, the authors said.
Moody is believed to have carried out contract killings in several major cities in the UK during the 1960s, and became involved in the IRA after escaping from Brixton prison. Although not sharing the political convictions of that group, he went on to be called “a perfect secret weapon” for the IRA, often torturing people believed to be informants before shooting them in the back of the head, just behind the ear.
“Moody and the other people in our study show us that when contract killers aren’t as successful in switching off their emotions, their jobs tend not to go to plan,” Dr. Rahman said. “Moody reframed his victims as targets, seeing getting the job done as a normal business activity.”
“These sorts of killers are akin to ‘criminal undertakers’, who have given themselves ‘special liberty’ to get things done in the name of business,” he added. “The motivation for most people who become hitmen is economic, so the reframing shows their resourcefulness as individuals who want to minimize risk and effort in the pursuit of maximizing profit.”
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