Perfect crime

Perfect crime is a colloquial term used in law and fiction (principally crime fiction) to characterize crimes that are undetected, unattributed to a perpetrator, or else unsolved as a kind of technical achievement on the part of the perpetrator.

In certain contexts, the concept of perfect crime is limited to just undetected crimes; if an event is ever identified as a crime, some investigators say it cannot be called 'perfect'.^[1]

A perfect crime should be distinguished from one that has merely not been solved yet or where everyday chance or procedural matters frustrate a conviction. There is an element that the crime is (or appears likely to be) unable to be solved.

Overview

As used by some criminologists and others who study criminal investigations (including mystery writers), a perfect crime goes unsolved not because of incompetence in the investigation, but because of the cleverness and skill of the criminal.^[2] I.e., the defining factor is the primary causative influence of the criminal's ability to avoid investigation and reprisal, and not so much the ability of the investigating authority to perform its duties.

Would-be perfect crimes are a popular subject in crime fiction and movies. They include Rope, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Witness for the Prosecution, and Dial M for Murder.

Varying definitions

A murder committed by somebody who had never before met the victim, has no criminal record, steals nothing, and tells no one might be a perfect crime. According to criminologists and scientists, this casual definition of perfect crime exists. Another possibility is that a crime might be committed in an area of high public traffic, where DNA from a wide variety of people is present, making the sifting of evidence akin to 'finding a needle in a haystack'.^[3]

An intentional killing in which the death is never identified as murder is an example of one of the more rigorous definitions of perfect crime.^[1] Other criminologists narrow the range to only those crimes that are not detected at all.^[4] By definition, it can never be known if such perfect crimes exist.^[4][5] Many "close calls" have been observed, however—enough to make investigators aware of the possibility of a perfect crime.^[4]

Real life examples

Some crimes such as the Black Dahlia murder, the Zodiac murders of the late 1960s, the Tylenol scare of 1982, the Cleveland Torso Murderer, the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., and the Diane Suzuki case of 1985 are referred to as perfect, but the possibility always remains that a culprit will ultimately be identified. Airplane hijacking along with a parachute escape, such as in the case of D. B. Cooper, may also qualify as a perfect crime.

In March 2009, a jewel theft was described as being close to a perfect crime, in that despite having DNA evidence the police were unable to bring the case to court since the DNA belonged to one of a pair of identical twins, and faced with denials by both, it could not be proven which of the two was the criminal.^[6]

There have been several recent incidents in Japan such as the paraquat murders and Inokashira Park dismemberment incident.

See also

• Locked room mystery
• Leopold and Loeb — two wealthy University of Chicago students who, motivated by their desire to commit a perfect crime, murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and were immediately caught and sentenced to life imprisonment
• Perfect murder (fiction)
• Vicinage Clause#The perfect crime?

References

Further reading

• Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths by Timmermans, Stefan. 380 pages, University of Chicago press; ISBN 978-0-226-80398-2.
• The Perfect Crime and How To Commit It by Jekel, Dr. Pamela L. Jekel; Publisher: Paladin Press Boulder, CO 1982; ISBN 0-87364-237-6.
• Practical Crime Scene Processing and Investigation by Ross M. Gardner; 2004 CRC Press, ISBN 0-8493-2043-7.

External links

• BBC - Horizon - "How to commit the perfect murder"