ABSTRACT
Day after day, month after month, year after year, murder in America continues on its inexorable path, leaving in its aftermath shattered lives, traumatized families, and broken communities. In a perverse sort of way, murder represents a highly predictable and expected phenomenon, somewhat unvaried and monotonous to those empowered by American society to deal with it. The actual number of victims and rate of homicide do change from one time period to the next, but the pattern of who kills whom, why they kill, when and where they kill scarcely differ from decade to decade. The reasons and circumstances of murders at the dawn of the twenty-first century scarcely differ from those of classical times or those of the thirteenth century, or the nineteenth century. The society and the families of murder victims also need to move beyond the anger and desire for revenge so entwined with the murderous act.
