The increase in the U.S. murder rate has been accompanied over the past few decades by a rising incidence of crimes once considered rare. Mass murders, serial murders, and murders committed by strangers have become more commonplace.…

Since 1966 hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction… And yet just a handful of books have looked at murder from the victim's perspective.…

During the past twenty-five years hundreds of articles in psychiatric journals have examined the homicidal mind. Fewer than a dozen have explored how a homicide affects the victim's family.

In a study of murder in Romantic literature the theater scholar Laurence Senelick used a phrase, "the prestige of evil," that goes a long way toward explaining why our culture has become obsessed with the murderer while ignoring the victim.