Abstract
There has been a growing interest in the language and communicative ingredients of law enforcement and community relations (e.g., Gnisci, Giles, & Soliz, in press), on the one hand, and death and dying, on the other (e.g., Nussbaum, Giles, & Worthington, 2015). This unique book, written by a retired police officer and experienced teacher-scholar, brings these two arenas together. In an attempt to answer a dozen research questions, Bozeman analyses an impressive and comparative database of suicide notes and voluntary confessions from murderers. Rather than seeing homicide and suicide as two quite separate acts of violence as have some prior theorists, he articulates common denominators (e.g., frustration) across them and explores the psychological conditions that might lead to the choice of one option over the other. That said, he acknowledges that murderers often take their own lives—the contemporary convergence of which he picks up in a later chapter.
The book opens with statistics and demographics pertaining to these (self- and other-) aggressive acts in the United States and draws on previous literature that underscored similarities between the violence manifest in suicide and homicide. The corpus (from 1998 to 2008), made available from the Huston Police Department, consists of 27 recorded or transcribed homicide confessions obtained interactively in interrogation interviews—a context that has attracted much interest among language scholars (e.g., Antaki, Richardson, Stokoe, & Willmott, 2015; Oxburgh, Mykebust, Grant, & Milne, in press; Richardson, Taylor, Snook, Conchie, & Bennell, 2014)—and 34 monologue-like notes (sometimes one-liners, other times pages directed at multiple recipients) from suicide victims. After a substantive section discussing the procedures adopted for his analysis—and Bozeman, throughout, is laudably critical of them—the textual data were subjected to a qualitatively grounded theory approach for locating themes and categories, and coded with excellent reliabilities by two other collaborators. The volume has extensive appendices with respect to the coding protocol for both suicides and homicides as well as a sample suicide note and confession interrogation.
Among the major recurring themes (17) and underlying categories (95) in the suicide notes were taking full responsibility and blame for the act; resignation in that all other options had been exhausted; expressions of love; apologies and requests for forgiveness; economic down-turns; and self-attributions of hopelessness, low self-esteem, health, and depression. Each theme and category was identified by language use in the notes and related to Durkheim’s (1897) typology of suicides. For the homicide confessions—which were much more voluminous than the suicide notes—a similar painstaking analysis of recurring themes (17) and underlying categories (116) for homicide is reported that also indicates the diversity of emotions and cognitions arising. Among these were victim blame and the escalation of violence; financial burdens; the detailing of postmurder behaviors (e.g., cleaning up, showering); drug use; and disorganized planning.
In an absorbing chapter on “interconnected themes,” Bozeman highlights similarities (such as the target’s self-avowed mental anguish and taking responsibility for the act) and differences emerging between the two data sets, providing percentages in relevant cases. For instance, lack of self-esteem and resignation featured way more in the suicide notes than in the murder confessions. In the latter, trying to avoid detection or deny involvement, self-serving justifications for the act, and trying to control the victim were uniquely present. Bozeman concludes this chapter by claiming that his
findings clearly suggest that those who kill themselves and those who kill others share at the very core of their thought processes and expression similar underlying motivations and explanation for their decision-making process . . . supporting the integrated approach to the study of suicide and homicide. (pp. 157-158)
Indeed, in the penultimate chapter Bozeman discusses the ways in which Durkheim’s typologies of suicide were also found in the language of murders. Throughout, the author is not shy about making his own feelings known about the actors involved and their plights.
This book presents some exceptional and rare data about the real-life language of (and expressed motivations for) homicide and suicide. The data buried within this volume are an intriguing resource to mine for social psychologists (and others) interested in a whole host of communication topics beyond the acts themselves, such as accounting, aggression, apologies, avoidance, contrition, death and dying, denial, forgiveness, and even spirituality, to name but a few. Ideally, this progressive volume might inspire retrospective longitudinal analyses that examine communicative acts of murderers and own-life-takers and relevant social networks (e.g., law enforcement, legal professionals, health practitioners, and family) before they reach the life junctures unearthed in this volume as well as, in relevant instances, after the fact.