LIFE Crimes of Passion: 15 Stories of Love Gone Wrong

By The Editors of LIFE

LIFE magazine presents stories of crimes of passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781683306863

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INTRODUCTION

What Is a Crime of Passion?

A look at how love turns violent—and why some killers go free.

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IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus killed her husband, Agamemnon, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, seen in a painting by Pierre-Narcisse Guerin.

Deep in the mists of prehistory, some celestially beautiful young woman (or women) must have inspired the archetypal figure of Helen of Troy, whose own desires triggered a conflagration that inspired more than a few crimes of passion. The legendary 10-year Trojan War began when Helen abandoned her husband for the handsome Prince Paris, leading to the murder of Agamemnon (Helen’s brother-in-law) at the hands of Clytemnestra (his wife and Helen’s half-sister) and her illicit lover, Aegisthus.

Why, thanks to what the poet W.B. Yeats called a shudder in the loins, do otherwise rational human beings lose control? Because love and lust involve elements of addiction, experts say. When I first started looking at the properties of infatuation, they had some of the same elements of a cocaine high: sleeplessness, loss of a sense of time, absolute focus on love to the detriment of all around you, says Helen Fisher, Ph.D., author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Infatuation can overtake the rational parts of your brain. As a result, it can lead to an action committed without the benefit of ego activity, according to psychoanalyst Anna Freud. The term [crime of passion] means that the passion, the impulse, is of such magnitude that every other consideration apart from its fulfillment is disregarded.

The French called them crimes passionnels, which meant they were done in the heat of the moment without malice aforethought, or premeditation—a concept that is still used in American law today. Legally, the difference between the two ideas can be, for the perpetrator, a matter of life and death—literally. A crime of passion verdict could result in charges of manslaughter or second-degree, rather than first-degree, murder. That potentially means limited imprisonment or even an acquittal.

Many of the cases reflected in these pages are not, legally speaking, crimes of passion. They are, however, stories of love gone horribly wrong—from now-obscure scandals (the Philip Barton Key murder) to contemporary tabloid staples (O.J. Simpson, Laci Peterson). As such, these stories involve revenge, obsession, mutilation, and murder—not to mention amorous entanglements that destroyed more than a few lives, even if they didn’t start a war.

CINEGUILD/INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS/J. ARTHUR RANK FILMS/RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE/MARY EVANS/EVERETT

Bill Sikes murdered Nancy in a jealous rage, believing she had betrayed him, in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (here, the 1948 movie).

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JEAN HARRIS, in handcuffs, being taken to court on March 20, 1981, to hear her sentence for killing her longtime lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower.

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Redwood City, California, residents read about the Scott Peterson verdict.

THE REVENGE SEEKERS

Adultery, abuse, and abandonment can fuel murderous rage, but are acts of revenge the result of temporary insanity or cool calculation?

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

TO PUNISH HER lover Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame) for abandoning her by agreeing to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth, the mythical Greek sorceress Medea slaughtered their children. Here, she, Jason, and their children are seen in a painting by Carle van Loo.

Revenge provides a great cultural benefit . . . in exchange for its great personal costs.

—THE ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE OBSERVER

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge, the painter Paul Gauguin once wrote. Though the French Postimpressionist never killed anyone—he sailed off to Tahiti instead—he spoke for the many men and women who have sought vigilante justice through violent retribution since time immemorial. The impulse is, in fact, at least as old as the biblical concept of an eye for an eye and as new as the films of Quentin Tarantino. But whether or not murderous revenge is legally considered a crime often comes down to methodology—or the perception thereof.

Since at least 1859, when congressman Daniel E. Sickles shot and killed his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key, in Washington, D.C., the term crime of passion has been part of the American judicial system. This case marked the first successful use of the temporary insanity defense in the United States. The notion of revenge murders—sometimes called crimes of passion—has been based on an age-old double standard, according to Elizabeth Schneider, Rose L. Hoffer professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Historically the defense was almost always used by a man who killed the woman he was involved with because he believed that she had been unfaithful, Schneider tells LIFE.

Reflecting the prevailing idea that women were male property, crimes of passion were frequently considered not