Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Murder For Hire: Event Characteristics And Causal Implications, Nicole Madonna Corsaro

Masters Theses

The problem of criminal homicide has been extensively studied. A productive way to examine it has been through detailed analysis of homicides as criminal events. There are a number of characteristics that are common to all homicide events, such as background circumstances, participant characteristics, and interrelationships of offenders. However, murder-for-hire events contain distinctive interactive features that are not present in other types of criminal homicide, i.e. solicitor, hitman, and target scenarios and that have not received empirical attention. Using trial transcripts, news reports, pre-sentence investigations, and Tennessee Department of Correction records, 30 murder-for-hire events have been identified involving 60 individuals …