Murder: Through the Lense of Anomie or Strain Theory

Laura Kay McAliley

6/15/14

Murder:
Murder can be defined as the unauthorized, illegitimate, and criminal version of killing. Killing,
however, simply refers to an objective loss of life. Every society on earth, has associated murder
as a form of deviance, but all societies accept legitimate forms of killing. The Sixth
Commandment is often poorly translated to Thou shalt not kill instead of its actual translation
of Thou shalt not murder. Law practices as well as the person himself determine opinions on
the matter. Some things, like an abortion, are seen as murder by some while seen as acceptable
killing by another. According to the FBI, 16,929 homicides were committed in the US in 2007
alone. This is a staggering average of 5.6 people murdered per 100,000 people (Goode, 2011, p.
119). This rate has often fluctuated, rising in the 1930s, declining through World War II, rising
in the 1960s, and dropped again by the early 1990s(Goode, 2011, p. 120). 11 generalizations
about murder include that the public and media image of murder is distorted, most murders take
place in the heat of the moment, most murderers are justified by killers as a form of vindication
or a way out of an intolerable situation, the more intimate the relationship, the greater the
likelihood a murder will occur, murderers and victims look remarkably alike, murders tend to be
overwhelmingly interracial, Africans are more likely to be the murderer and victim of a murder
than Caucasians, murder is related to social class, men are more likely to kill than women, rates
of criminal homicide vary enormously from place to place, and lethal violence has dropped
drastically since the middle ages (Goode, 2011, p. 120-122).
Anomie or Strain Theory:
Anomie Theory originated in 1938 with an article written by Robert Merton was published,
influenced by Emile Durkheims Suicide. Durkheim defined anomie as a disturbance in social
order. Merton agreed that states of anomie could influence behavior and asserted that certain
pressures could produce very deviant behavior from very typical motives. Merton reconstructed
Durkheims idea of anomie and instead developed it in a way which said that deviance is a result
too strong a hold of societys norms on a person, and as a disjunction between culturally defined
goals and structurally available opportunities. He developed a typology of responses to goal
attainment and ways of obtaining those goals including conformity, innovation, ritualism,
retreatism, and rebellion (Goode, 2011, p. 31-33).
Pitch: For my story, I will tell the tale of Thomas who wants to make it big. With limited
resources, he resolves that he will have to murder his wife to obtain a significant about of money
from her life insurance policy.
______________________________________________________________________________
Thomas, an African American male, grew up in a poor neighborhood outside of the
affluent Shady Side neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Thomas had to walk through
Shady Side every day during the school year on his walk to school. As he walked through this
incredible part of the city he would marvel at all of the mansions that towered over him. From
the beautiful Victorian mansions with their beautiful turrets to the beautiful modern mansions
with their round-about driveways, Thomas marveled at all of these huge houses and dreamed of a
day when he could live in a house that nice. Compared to his familys little 3 bedroom
apartment, living in a house like this would be a dream come true. Not only was this apartment
little to begin with, but with Thomass 5 other siblings, it felt a lot smaller.
Thomass desires burned even brighter as he transitioned into high school. Unfortunately,
due to city wide budget cuts, the previously segregated public high school and private high
school had to merge into a single school district. Thomas then started becoming friends with
people who lived in the houses that he had always admired. Before long, Thomas became best
friends with a Shady Side resident named Christopher. Thomas soon became a regular at
Christophers house, going there to hangout after school and spending the night on the weekends.
Thomas could have never imagined that the inside of these houses were even more
spectacular than the outside. Christophers house had ceilings that were three times higher than
the ones in his apartment, beautiful hardwood floors, spiraling staircases, and a whole room just
dedicated to Christophers video games. The backyard did not disappoint either. There was a
huge swimming pool, filled with sparkling blue water, a lavish pool house, and a full length
basketball court. Thomas vowed to himself that he would work as hard as it took to someday
own a house and property this nice.
Thomas took high school very seriously and worked hard to achieve an A-B grade
average. As a junior, he began looking at colleges to apply to. He longed to pursue a high paying
degree, such as engineering, computer science, or a communications major in hopes of
eventually applying to law school. While attending colleges like Pitt and Duquesne were way out
of his familys reach in terms of finances, Thomas remained hopeful that he could receive a
scholarship for his good grades or any other type of financial aid. Unfortunately, these dreams
came crashing down when Thomass girlfriend, an African American woman named Anna,
became pregnant at the end of their junior year.
By February of their senior year, the baby was born. Thomas had to give up going to
Christophers mansion after school as he was forced to pick up a job to support his child. On the
weekends, he could no longer go to Christophers mansion because he now had to go to Annas
familys townhome to help with the baby. Anna and Thomas both finished high school and
decided soon after that it would be the best for their family to get married. After getting married,
Thomas nearly doubled his hours at work and was able to get into a local community college.
Anna and Thomas soon bought an apartment of their own in another poor area across the city
from Shady Side.
Thomas never forgot what he was working towards. He dreamed of providing his son
with a house like Christophers. Thomas worked as many hours as he could, struggling to
balance taking care of his child, school, and work. He tried to save up as much as he could, but
this was nearly impossible with the expenses involved with paying for his community college
classes, the gas he used to drive to school and work with, groceries, rent, utilities, cable, and all
of the money it took to raise his son. After working so hard for so long and finding no success in
saving money, Thomas resolved that he would have to resort to alternative methods to make it.
Thomas decided that to earn more money, he would steal supplies from the grocery store
that he worked at and sell it at his community college. He initially tested his luck by stealing
highlighters, notecards, and some pencils. The maneuver was a success. The next day at school,
which was conveniently right before finals week, Thomas set up a table outside the library. He
charged 3 dollars per highlighter, 3 dollars per pack of notecard, and one dollar per pencil. Many
students took to the sale, and Thomas walked away with a thirty-nine dollar profit. He began
stealing these supplies regularly as well as miniature staplers, staples, pens, and post-it notes.
Each week, he made an average of 50 extra dollars.
Even though this was bringing in more money, Thomas knew that a few hundred dollars
was not going to be enough buy him his dream home in Shady Side. He knew that he had to
develop a faster means of acquiring money. When Anna and his son were fast asleep at night,
Thomas went and hid in the darkness of the alley ways in South Side and wait for unsuspecting,
mildly to severely inebriated girls to rob. When they neared his hiding place, he would jump out
and demand that they give him all of their money. While Thomas was able to make an extra two-
hundred dollars from this method the initial weekend he tried it, he decided that it was too risky
and decided not to press his luck with this method anymore.
While sitting on the few extra hundred dollars he had earned, Thomas began to think that
perhaps he was not made to have a house like Christophers. He began to realize how lucky he
was to be married to his longtime girlfriend and mother of his child and have a healthy baby boy.
Even though he was going to have to work hard, he decided that this great life of his was too
great to jeopardize by engaging in illegal acts. Feeling guilty, Thomas immediately halted all of
his illegal activities: He stopped stealing the school supplies from his job and selling them at his
community college. He focused solely on working at his job, and even managed to pick up a few
extra shifts, and his family.
It didnt take more than a few months full sleepless nights taking care of his son, staying
up late studying, and long shifts at his job before Thomas began burning out. The straw that
broke the camels back came when Anna and Thomass son became sick and required a lengthy
and expensive stay in the hospital. Void of his sleep, mental stability, and all of the extra funds
he had acquired, Thomas had reached his breaking point. He no longer felt blessed by his
situation and began lusting after his dream house in Shady Side once again. He was bound and
determined this time, however, to make it work.
Thomas quickly realized that he was the beneficiary to Annas life insurance policy. He
so longed for a better living situation for his son than he had had, that he, almost free of
hesitation, decided that he was going to murder Anna to obtain her hefty life insurance policy.
He wrestled with a few different ideas for how he was going to get this job done. He wanted to
destroy as much evidence as possible, but if they couldnt find her body, it might take longer for
him to receive the life insurance policy. If he was to leave her body to be easily found, thus
leading to an early retrieval of her life insurance policy, there was a good chance that they could
link him as the killer with the modern advancements of forensic science.
Thomas weighed the pros and cons of each different methods, but could not draw a
definitive conclusion. During one particularly taxing week, Anna had accidently spent too much
money, causing them to fall short of the funds they would need to pay their rent the next day.
Thomas was already extremely warn down and sleep deprived from working three overtime
shifts and having to stay up late to study for two exams he had had earlier in the week. The news
of Anna over spending and leaving them unable to pay rent had Thomas fuming. As Anna laid
next to him in bed, Thomas laid next to her wide awake, still fuming. His thoughts started
wandering and he realized that he would probably never be this angry again. He concluded that
now, in the midst of his anger, would be the best time to finish Anna off. In the heat of all his
passion, Thomas grabbed Annas neck until she suffocated.
Realizing what he had done, Thomas began to panic. There was so much evidence. He
had left marks around her neck. Who else besides him could be blamed? He needed to make it
look more like a burglary scene. He took a baseball bat he kept next to his bed and broke the
window next to their bed. He soon realized that he had broken the glass the wrong way: Of
someone were to have actually broken in, they would have broken in from the outside, causing
the majority of the glass to fall into their apartment rather than outside. Because he had broken
the window from inside the apartment, most of the glass had fallen outside the window. It was
clear that the burglary scene was staged. Things were getting worse and Thomas began
panicking more and more.
It was in that moment that Thomas knew he had to escape. As he ran away into the night,
he realized that all he wanted was to not be caught and spend his life in jail. He gave up his long
lived dreams of living in a beautiful house in Shady Side with his son and desired only to live in
complete seclusion. Thomas initially sought shelter under one of the many bridges in Pittsburgh
that was notorious for being a home to many of the citys homeless inhabitants. For nearly two
months, Thomas was able to avoid being apprehended by authorities living under this bridge and
others. He made friends with other homeless people under the bridge. One in particular
introduced him to the world of drugs, and it wasnt long before Thomas was inebriated more
hours of the day than he was sober. Unfortunately, in the midst of one of his nearly debilitating
drug binges, a Pittsburgh police officer recognized Thomas and was able to apprehend him.
Thomas plead guilty to the charges placed against him and was sentenced to spend his life in jail.
Ironically, Thomass jail cell overlooked the beautiful homes of Shady Side, forever a reminder
of the dream Thomas had once had.
With anomie or strain theory, it is hypothesized that a strain or pressure causes someone
to engage in deviant behavior. Merton further asserted that our greed is actually constructed by
our culture and that we deviate when what society deems is important is unreachable through
social and economic means. In a Western society, such as the United States, our culture
designates success to be involving the acquisition of money and material possessions (Goode,
2011, p. 31). Thus, being rich is the ultimate achievement of success in that you can buy
whatever your heart desires with all of the money you have acquired. In Thomass case, this
societal construction of wealth equating to success was seen in his nearly unrelenting quest to
one day own a luxurious house in Shady Side.
Merton also devised a typology that defined different responses to goal attainment and
ways of attaining these goals. These typologies included conformity, innovation, ritualism,
retreatism, and rebellion. Relevant to Thomass quest for a beautiful home in Shady Side are the
typologies of conformity, innovation, ritualism, and retreatism. Conformity is a state in which an
individual both accepts cultural values and pursues legitimate means of acquiring their goals.
Innovation is a typology where the individual accepts the cultural definition of success but
pursues illegitimate ways of achieving the goal. Ritualism is a state in which the individual
abandons or scales down the cultural definitions of success and abides very strictly to legitimate,
institutionalized norms. Lastly, retreatism is a state in which the individual rejects both the
culturally defined version of success and does not pursue any means to achieve them (Goode,
2011, p. 31).
Thomas was initially in a state of conformity in the beginning of the story. He recognized
the value of having such a house and worked hard in school to ensure that he could go to a good
college that would secure him a well-paying job. Even after Anna became pregnant and had their
son, he still strived to obtain a Shady Side mansion by working at his job and going to
community college. A lot of Thomass story involved Mertons typology of innovation. He first
entered this typology when he stole school supplies and sold them at his community college to
acquire extra money. This state of innovation was also present when Thomas robbed girls in the
alleys of South Side and when he murdered Anna. These were states of innovation because
during all of these instances, he was still striving to obtain his house but was striving to achieve
them by the deviant means of stealing, robbing, and murdering. Thomas engaged in the typology
of ritualism when he stopped stealing and robbing, continued working, focused on his school and
family, and reasoned that he might not be made to have a mansion in Shady Side. This was an
example of the state of ritualism because while he abandoned his pursuit of a cultural sign of
success, living in a mansion, he continued to follow institutionalized norms by avoiding
deviance, working, and going to school. Lastly, the state of retreatism was achieved when
Thomas became homeless and fled to under the bridge. This state is a total retreat from what
society values. Thomas no longer went to school or worked or tried to obtain a mansion.
Although Mertons theory is usually macro in scope and does not have a micro focus (Goode,
2011, p. 32), I have applied it to a micro focus.
On the subject of murder, Thomass killing of Anna would be what the FBI defines as
murder or non- negligent manslaughter, or criminal homicide. This terms indicate the willful
killing of one or more human beings by one or more others (Goode, 2011, p. 119). Thomas
clearly did not kill Anna by accident. His killing also fit numerous generalizations about murder
including that it took place in the heat of the moment, he was doing it as a way out of an
intolerable situation, people in more intimate relationships are more likely to kill each other,
African Americans are more likely to kill and be killed, the murder was committed by someone
with a low social economic status, and men are more likely to kill than women.






References
Goode, E. (2011). Deviant Behavior. Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc..