[...]... members They are men who have always perceived themselves as being at the center of the family and have viewed their families as extensions of themselves.”61 This language of control suggests killers are often highly narcissistic, primarily thinking of themselves before others, even to the extent perhaps of failing to recognize the individuality of their intimate partners and their children However, there... lost as the corpses find their way back into the soil However, this harsh reality ought not dissuade us from piecing together the evidence of a life and the latticework of emotional styles and meanings haunting that life My approach therefore relies on the richness of the archival files and the multiple interpretations associated with them and available through them These files include the accounts of journalists,... extended the trends and patterns discovered through a statistical analysis of the 211 cases Piecing together these various sources of information, I began to use the biographies of the parties to craft the notion of what I identify in Chapter 2 as the familicidal heart As readers will see, I essentially argue that familicidal hearts emerge in modern times being shaped by the emotional conditions of modern... cut off from the products of the their labor, competing with their peers for jobs In place of premodern communally organized labor, embedded in the ebb and flow of social life, politics, 18 FAMILICIDAL HEARTS and religion, the logic of the market assumed pride of place, turning workers into the extrinsically motivated objects of the capitalist wage.45 As modernity dawned, people began to experience the. .. My emotionally charged contact with surviving family members began to alter the way I made sense of the cases Family members provided an emotional connection to the biographies of those murdered We talked of decedents’ experiences, of hurt, of pain, of abuse and emotional scars These links to the emotional lives of victims and perpetrators augmented related evidence present in the documents The emotional. .. greatly before the killing Agencies looking in from the outside usually concentrated upon violent incidents and breaches of the criminal code Often agencies worked without talking with each other Battered women often sensed the danger, frequently interpreting their options differently than did the professionals The latter often talked of an array of available options Where we learned of their perceptions,... until the state assumed a monopoly over the use of violence and the rights of taxation that we witness conditions conducive to the rapid spread of mass capitalist production For sure, capitalism had been tried in agriculture and trade well before the eighteenth century but never assumed the pride of place it did from the beginnings of the nineteenth century The commencement of the factory manufacture of. .. used to gather information on 211 cases of familicide Throughout I refer to these 211 cases and the files and information they contain as the “familicide archive.” My analysis identifies familicide as consequence of modern era emotional life I carefully examine modern life before exploring the historical emergence of familicide Since my arguments draw upon the work of other researchers, I discuss the research... nicely, The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.”24 The emphasis on “meaning for the inner life” is crucial to my approach For Mills, “Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others.”25 As the. .. identify some combination of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of perpetrators Obviously, we cannot conclude that early childhood trauma among all the familicidal hearts correlates with the commission of familicide However, in cases where we do find examples of such trauma, I try to trace links between the trauma and the future emotional styles of perpetrators On many occasions these sources are several . in the Lives of Young People David Finkelhor Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women Edited by James Ptacek Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers Neil Websdale FAMILICIDAL. FAMILICIDAL HEARTS The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers Neil Websdale 2010 1 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence. without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Websdale, Neil. Familicidal hearts: the emotional styles of 211 killers/ Neil Websdale.