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There has been little attempt to integrate contemporary studies of suicide and mass murder to homicide-suicides. The current research attempts to do so in the context of 19th-century parricides in America. This project uses archival records from The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, 1851-1899, resulting in a total of 231 incidents. Our results indicate that parricides, mass murders, and suicides tended to originate as spontaneous acts, usually during the course of an argument, gathering momentum as the interaction unfolded. We contend that suicide is one way of alleviating threats to offender's loss of self-identity.

Parricide research in the twentieth century has been overwhelmingly framed as an adolescent phenomenon, the killing of a parent often explained as a function of severe child abuse. Using archival data from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, 1851-1899, this article examines the actual sources of conflict between parents and their offspring in nineteenth-century America. Results suggest that four common sources of conflict between parents and their offspring culminated in parricides in nineteenth-century America. The implications of a context-based classification of parricide for criminological theory and parricide research are discussed.

Although there is adequate coverage of serial murder in the extant homicide literature, there is a lack of systematic examination of healthcare professionals who serially murder their patients. Using a sample of 58 healthcare serial killers located within North America, South America, and Europe between the years of 1970 and 2010, this study examines notable pre‐offense and post‐offense behaviours of healthcare serial killers. Patterns related to offender aetiology, victim cultivation, crime scene behaviour, and techniques of evasion were explored. The findings from this study suggest that the pre‐offense and post‐offense behaviours of healthcare serial killers can be conceptualised from the theoretical framework of confidence men or ‘con men’. The findings from this study also suggest that healthcare serial killings and offenders who perpetrate them continue to be elusive and warrant additional scholarly attention to reduce their likelihood of engaging in homicide undetected for extended time. Policy implications are also discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In prior research, warnings and threats have been regarded as closely related speech acts, distinguished only by an unobservable state. In this article, I conceptualize warnings and threats as fraternal speech acts because they share the essential genetic trait of their rhetorical parent: force. In this article, I examine the ‘warnings’ that police officers give to motorists during traffic stops, and the threats that police make to citizens and suspects during routine patrol work. I argue that, by virtue of their institutional identity and ideological mandate, there is no interpretive context free of coercion in the context of police–citizen encounters. I locate the difference between warnings and threats – direct and indirect – in the ordinal level of force embedded in the intention of speakers and in the unfavorable consequences suffered by the addressee.