Hows and Whys of the Perfect Murder

By the time you are 18 you have probably spoken at least 60,000,000 words, says Dr. Paul L. Soper of the University of North Carolina. Surely among them will be these universal six:

"Someone ought to kill that sonofabitch."

Everyone has thought it, said it, and probably even acted out a tentative little psychodrama toward its fulfillment. You don't need a violent temper and great provocation to transform the "someone" into "I." No one could have been gentler and had' a greater appreciation of life than James Agee, author of the classic A Death in the Family. When he was 26, Agee was in the middle of a continuing correspondence with Father Flye, his former English teacher at St. Andrew's.

"I have thought how interesting and serviceable it would be," wrote Agee, "to organize a group of terrorists; say 600 young men who don't care especially for their lives: to pair them off to trail the 300 key sonsofbitches of the earth ... and exactly a year from then, at just the same hour all over the world, to ring up the assassinations ..."

Women have the need, too. The English writer Mrs. Friniwyd Tennyson Jesse, who edited the "British Notable Trial" book series, once summed it up incisively: "We must admit that most of us would have committed at least one murder had we known we could go absolutely free from detection."

Agree never did organize his elite corps of assassins, but thousands of his contemporaries were doing their own work directly: Most murders in the U.S. are committed by men under 30. These come to about 8500 a year—about one every hour—which is a great slowdown from the 12,000 a year we used to tote up in the murderous Thirties when we had 50,000,000 fewer people.

The sonsofbitches are much safer in England, where the murder rate is only a tenth of ours. New York has a murder a day; London has one only every two weeks. Paris is more like home: Until quite recently it had two murders a day. Bloody passions run higher as you move toward the Equator. In Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, the criminal homicide rate is 12 times higher than in the New England states.

Home, Sweet Homicide ran an archly cute but statistically accurate whodunit title a few years ago. Women kill most often in the kitchen but are killed usually in the bedroom, according to a study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang. Men, however, kill and are killed most often in the street. Usually, men who kill are younger than those they kill. Women most often kill their husbands, lovers or infants.

The weapons used are almost always the terribly obvious: guns or knives or rocks. But firearms are far more popular with white killers (continued on page 126)Perfect Murder(continued from page 117) than with Negro, who depend on knives. Women, white and Negro, also are more apt to use knives and ice picks than men.

Why do these murders happen? Here statistics are available but quite unreliable, even meaningless. The Philadelphia Police Homicide Squad, points out Dr. Wolfgang, "is well aware that most underlying 'causes' and unconscious motivations usually lie beyond the realm of necessary police investigation." In short, the tabloids can scream "Passion Murder" in Second Coming type, but the killing could just as well have been motivated "because she had thick legs." At least, that was the original motive given by Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the 19th Century English art critic and forger, when asked why he killed a woman friend.

In his investigation of Philadelphia murders, Dr. Wolfgang found that 36 percent of the cases resulted from an altercation of "relatively trivial origin": Someone used the wrong word and forgot to smile. About 14 percent of the murders stemmed from a husband-and-wife argument. Jealousy followed next (11 percent), and then fights over money (10 percent). Revenge accounted for 5 percent. Murder resulting from the commission of another crime is comparatively minor. Robberies leading to murder accounted for 8 percent. Curiously, this figure is just as low in England.

The categories are too tight to cover all cases such as the great American classic: the murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks in 1906. Of course, you know it better in the fictional mold Theodore Dreiser gave it in An American Tragedy. In the novel, you will recall, Clyde Griffiths lets his pregnant girlfriend, Roberta Alden, drown because he wants to marry the boss' daughter, Sondra Finchley. Nice, clear, understandable motive, well suited to a less sophisticated age. We're trickier today.

Some 150 miles southwest of Big Moose Lake is Elmira, New York. Here on May 23, 1953, an 18-year-old college freshman stabbed his father while he slept next to the boy's mother. He returned to his dormitory at Hobart College. A few days later he confessed. Why did he kill his father? The lad was a homosexual and his father had taunted him about being a sissy. As yet, there's no official police category for this motive.

The murder rate is remarkably low, considering that nearly all of us at one time or another have strong motives for homicide. "If wishes were horses they would pull the hearses of our dearest friends and nearest relatives," says Dr. John M. Macdonald, Chief of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "All men are murderers at heart."

"Other sinnes onley speake; Murther shreikes out," proclaims a character in the Elizabethan drama The Duchess of Malfi. This is standard copybook maxim from the Bible, Chaucer and Shakespeare onward. It is firm, comforting—and nonsense. Murder most often will not out. Worse, most often we don't even know it has taken place.

The official line, as expressed by an administrative officer of the United States Courts recently, was that a murderer's chances of being caught are 95 out of every 100. He came to this reassuring conclusion by depending on the standard evasion of police bureaucracy: They say 95 percent of all murders result in an arrest. (Still, most of Chicago's nearly 1000 gangland murders have not been "solved" even by arrest.)

As you might suspect, there's a great gap between arrest and conviction for murder. Fewer than 60 percent of those arrested for murder are convicted and sentenced in an average year in the U. S. So that right there we have 3200 murders a year for which there is no conviction. Perfect murders, in effect. But there's worse to come.

Dr. Henry. W. Turkel, the San Francisco Coroner, conducted an investigation that should have made many local doctors feel miserably incompetent. In 100 cases he undertook postmortem investigations and found that the cause of death ascribed by the attending physician was wrong nearly half the time. Then he went on to a larger series of 400 cases. From these he selected 232 deaths in which he ordinarily would have accepted the evidence of the dead person's known history of illness and the external examination of the body. Instead, Coroner Turkel treated these 232 deaths as if he had some reason to suspect the given cause. The careful postmortems on each of these 232 deaths brought forth the fact that at least eight of them were due to some kind of hidden violence. Eight out of 232 means that 3.4 percent of all normally unsuspicious deaths might well be due to murder. In any given year this could easily be more than 25,000 perfect murders, or three times the known murders. In short, not only are most murders never solved, but there's a strong suspicion most murders are never detected.

Hans von Hentig, one of the world's great criminologists, believes "the murderer is to be encountered 80 percent in free life, 15 percent in mental institutions and at most 5 percent in prisons—and this 5 percent represents a maximum."

Even this 5 percent who are caught and sentenced, Von Hentig points out, would be much, much smaller "if so many murderers having been undetected on former occasions did not grow success drunk, and overconfident. If actually 'murder will out,' it probably does so only on the second or third time."

Few of our institutions of social control stand in the way of the perfect murder. One of them is a new Manhattan six-story building, the finest and most modernly equipped medical examiner's center in the world. On the black-marble wall of the lobby is a somber motto in three-inch aluminum letters in Latin. "Let conversation cease," runs the translation. "Let laughter flee. This place is where death delights to help the living." Boss of the building is Dr. Milton Helpern, New York's Chief Medical Examiner, generally considered one of the world's great authorities in the determination of the causes of sudden, unexpected, suspicious and violent deaths.

"I think we do a careful, diligent job here," he told me, "yet I know we still miss a few every year. But we do turn up at least 300 violent deaths a year that would have ordinarily been missed by the average doctor." Dr. Helpern's staff screens 86,000 deaths a year. Of these, they closely investigate 23,000 and that, in turn, leads to 6500 autopsies.

"Many autopsies elsewhere," he said, "are routine body-opening procedures. A good autopsy by a careful well-trained man—and there aren't a hundred men in the country who can do a really professional autopsy—should take a minimum of an hour; many will run four to five hours. And even then it's damned easy to miss something. Worse, you don't even know you're missing it, no matter how good you are. Unfortunately, there are a lot of men in this field who will still label a case homicide only if there's an obvious gunshot wound or a stab. God knows how many cases of secret homicide are missed."

Most of our coroners and medical examiners are not nearly as diligent as Dr. Helpern and his staff. In fact, in 41 states these officials are not even required to be doctors. If qualified doctorcoroners miss so many cases of murder, then unqualified politician-coroners are surely going to miss many, many more. They do. Consider the Kentucky case in which the body of a man was found lying face up on his bedroom floor. The untrained coroner took a quick look from the doorway and said heart failure. After he left, the undertaker turned the body over. Between the shoulder blades was a knife.

• • •

When I started thinking of the perfect murder I first went back to the dandy methods devised by murder mystery writers. Just by sampling a few dozen (continued on page 196)Perfect Murder(continued from page 126) volumes I found these marvelous ingenuities:

• have the victim lick poisoned stamps

• poisoned mattresses

• electrocution by telephone

• air bubbles injected into the arteries

• frightening to death

• the thermometer that explodes a bomb when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height

• poisoned boiled eggs

• shaving brushes inoculated with some dread disease germs

• stabbing with a sharp icicle

• a gun mechanism concealed in a telephone receiver that fires a bullet into the victim's head when he puts the receiver to his ear

• the clock that fires a bullet when you wind it

• the bed that exhales a deadly gas when your body warms it

• the pistol with the string to the trigger that is pulled by the expansion of water as it freezes.

The trouble with all these devices, Raymond Chandler once pointed out, is that "the boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody thought of only two minutes before he pulled it off." In short, those who can, do. Those who can't, write murder mysteries.

The idea of injecting air into a vein by means of a hypodermic has a certain simple appeal. The trouble is, you just couldn't inject enough air to matter with a hypodermic. You need something more on the order of a bicycle pump.

Still, there are several hundred air-bubble deaths in the U.S. every year. Most of them stem from the fact that some 750,000 to 2,000,000 illicit abortions are performed in the United States annually. Of these, about 5000 result in the woman's death. Several hundred women die from air embolisms that occur when the abortionist inadvertently forces an air bubble ahead of the soapy or chemical solution he squirts into the uterus. Death from the air bubble will follow in a few minutes. Occasionally, the putative father tries to help his girlfriend abort by blowing air into her uterus. This may kill the fetus—but not until the pregnant woman's heart is stopped by the air bubble carried in her blood stream.

The electrocution ploy has been tried by several real-life killers. One of the more recent, an Englishman named Whybrow, was quite annoyed with his wife. He wired the metal soap dish in the bathroom to a bedroom switch tied to the house current. When he heard his wife in the bath he pulled the switch. All that happened was that she got a mild shock, and acute suspicion. Her husband was tried and convicted of attempted murder.

Another bungler with an original idea was Robert James, a 39-year-old California barber who wanted to become a widower again quickly. (He had had four previous wives.) He bought a few rattlesnakes and tested them first on rabbits. He got his wife stretched out on the kitchen table—she thought her good man was going to perform a thrifty abortion on her—and then tied her down firmly. He forced her left foot into the box of rattlesnakes. He and his pal, Chuck Hope, returned an hour later and found his wife still very much alive and struggling. God knows why. She was then dragged to the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub, a traditionally reliable method.

These curious details and a lot more—James had been having an affair with a niece—came out when Chuck Hope talked to the police. Chuck's little speech got him life imprisonment; James was hanged at San Quentin in 1942. Later investigation disclosed that James had almost certainly murdered his first wife, too, in 1932. She apparently drowned in a bathtub and the coroner called it accidental without an autopsy. James collected a $5000 insurance policy on her death and thus learned that you can always depend on the bathtub, even when more ingenious methods fail.

Murder made to resemble accidental drowning is a perennial favorite. George Joseph Smith drowned his successive wives by simply holding their knees out of the water while they were in the bathtub. This, of course, made it almost impossible for them to lift their heads above water. Medical examiners have long known and worried about the fact that if a person is rapidly disabled and thrown into the water, the findings will often resemble accidental drowning.

Nature sometimes provides its own perfect gimmicks for murderers: lakes that have a swift-flowing bottom stream feeding into an inaccessible underground lake. Crescent Lake in the northwest corner of the state of Washington is one of these thrifty jumbo-size Disposalls. Although it had a normal quota of drownings, the lake never yielded a body until one turned up in 1939—turned up only because an overanxious murderous husband had roped a heavy weight to his wife's body. The weight had kept the body from being swept into the underground lake. After several years the rope holding the weight frayed, snapped, and the body rose to the surface. It was almost 100 percent pure soap. Since the lake had no bacteria that would normally decay the body, it had turned to adipocere, a soaplike substance resulting from chemical change that takes place in corpses in the absence of air. After some clever detective work, the woman was identified and the husband was tried and convicted.

(One of the stereotyped murder-mystery methods of getting rid of your victim's body—putting it into a lime pit—doesn't work. Lime will preserve the body rather than destroy it.)

In spite of another curiously widespread misconception, corpus delicti does not mean that a body or part of one is needed to prove murder. Corpus delicti simply means the body of the crime—the substantial fact that a crime has been committed.

There are at least eight known cases in the U.S. and Great Britain in which killers have been convicted of murder or manslaughter even though no traces of the bodies of the alleged victims were ever found. One notable exception: Texas, which has one of the highest murder rates in the nation, provides in its penal code that "no person shall be convicted of any grade of homicide unless the body of the deceased, or portions of it, are found and sufficiently identified to establish the fact of the death of the person charged to have been killed."

This Texas law is ridiculed by Professor Rollin M. Perkins of UCLA, a great authority on criminal law:

"Should murder be accomplished by throwing an innocent victim into a vat of molten steel, conviction under this statute would seem impossible even if there had been a dozen eyewitnesses to the fatal act, because neither the dead body nor any identifiable portion could ever be found."

For tried methods of perfect murder, the most useful and practical clues are provided by the men who know murder best—the medical examiners and coroners. Their daily proximity to violent death gives them puckish humors and from time to time they love to expound on how to commit the perfect murder. They laugh politely while doing it, but their advice has the ring of wish fulfillment. Like most of us, they, too, must have certain candidates in mind.

Not long ago Sir Bentley Purchase who, as coroner of London for 40 years conducted 20,000 inquests, suggested that the perfect murder could be done by using "a certain agricultural chemical, easily obtainable." If put on the naked skin of your victim it will kill him in half an hour and leave no telltale marks. How to apply it? Why not put it on his or her bath towel just before the victim is due to take a bath and then let him automatically infect himself. Sir Bentley wouldn't let wild horses drag the name of the chemical out of him.

An English barrister-physician, J. D. J. Havard, recently completed a thorough study of the English system of investigation of sudden and unexplained deaths. He suggested many needed reforms and then, unable to resist suggesting conditions for the perfect murder, set forth his own:

"First kill in such a way that no external marks of violence are left on the body. Secondly, make sure that no witnesses are in the vicinity; and thirdly, ensure that the body is found in just such a place as might have been expected if the person had suddenly dropped dead from a natural cause, such as heart failure."

For further insurance of perfect murder, Barrister Havard added two footnotes: Pick an area where few autopsies are performed. And pick a victim who has recently consulted his own doctor for some illness that might conceivably lead to sudden death such as coronary heart disease.

Dr. Milton Helpern thinks the cases that experts miss most often are homicides in which the victim is smothered or strangled. "In strangulation the signs can be extremely subtle; and in smothering there are almost no signs. If the killer knows how to rest the victim's head right after death, it's just about impossible to detect the fact that murder has taken place."

Incidentally, normal throttling or strangulation is fatally fast. Usually it is over in less than 15 seconds. Years ago, stage hypnotists sometimes made their subjects momentarily unconscious by pressure on the carotid artery in the neck or the head—near the right ear. There were fatalities. Even a little pressure is very dangerous and could easily cause death in a susceptible person. Several edge-of-the-hand judo chops to the side of the neck are intended to accomplish just this. And there's the classic case of the boy who watched an old lady's Adam's apple going up and down. He made to catch it as one would a butterfly. He merely touched her neck and she fell dead.

For centuries the most popular poison has been arsenic. It is ideal, lacking color, taste or smell. But for the past 129 years it has been the most dangerous poison from the viewpoint of the poisoner. In 1836 the Marsh test for the detection of arsenic in the victim's intestines was developed.

Most medical examiners are pleasantly surprised there aren't more than two or three known attempts at murder by bacterial injections. In a classic case in Calcutta a man was killed by being injected—during a railway-station crush—with bubonic plague. This successful attempt followed a previous failure in which bubonic plague bacilli were smeared on the bridge of his eyeglasses by his stepbrother. But the cuter the gimmick the likelier the solution. Since there hadn't been any plague cases in Calcutta for two previous years, the police assumed murder.

Ground glass, another stereotyped stand-by, turns out to be nonsense. If the glass is finely powdered it does no harm; if it is coarse the victim notices it immediately.

An American medical examiner, talking to mystery writers, volunteered that they were making too much of procuring rare and mysterious poisons. "What are you guys knocking yourselves out for on this angle?" he asked. "Didn't anyone tell you that a common household remedy, calomel, combined with ordinary lemonade makes bichloride of mercury? Acute nephritis ensues in five days and leads to prolonged and painful death."

"Why look for mysterious poisons," he went on, "when right in your own back yard you probably have a great source: the mountain laurel bush. It contains a poison, andromedotoxin, which kills many cattle and sheep every year and is just as deadly to humans. Rhododendron and western azaleas have the same poison."

These are only three of dozens of ordinary plants that yield fatal poisons. Go through Poisonous Plants of the United States, Professor Walter C. Muenscher's standard text, and pretty soon you look upon any avid gardener as an apprentice Borgia. Dr. Muenscher lists 16 ordinary plants that produce hydrocyanic acid, or prussic acid as it is commonly called, which, as every murder devotee knows, kills almost instantly. These include the cherry laurel, chokecherry, flax, mountain mahogany, sorghum, Sudan grass and Johnson grass. English and Japanese yews have a poisonous alkaloid, taxine, a dangerous heart depressant. Ordinary pokeweed contains several poisons that cause paralysis of the respiratory organs. English ivy berries have a poison, hederin, that will kill quickly. The very common water hemlock has a fatal poison, cicutoxin. The fleshy roots have been fed to victims who mistakenly took them for parsnips or artichokes. Three caster-oil plant beans will kill an adult.

Reading Dr. Muenscher's book is enough to make any threatened person a strict meat-and-potatoes man. The only trouble is that potatoes aren't so safe, either. The "eyes" or new sprouts on the tubers contain solanine, which has killed many humans.

Recently I discussed some of these garden-variety poisons with medical examiner Milton Helpern, an apartment dweller and nongardener. "Unfortunately, you don't even have to go to all that work to distill the poisons out of those plants," he said. "In the old days—say, 25 years ago—you had maybe 30 poisons to worry about, mostly arsenic and mercury. Today we're in the age of overkill in toxicology. There are 5000 poisons around that can kill and an awful lot of them are pretty easy to get hold of, because they're not considered poisons: barbiturates and tranquilizers, hundreds of industrial chemicals and insecticides. A lot of these modern poisons are incredibly difficult to detect—even if you know what you're looking for. In most cases, of course, you don't. To make things worse, today there are probably no more than 100 chemists in the whole country who are any good on one of these blind poison investigations. Any medical examiner or coroner who tells you he catches every death by poison in his district is a lying idiot."

At the January 1964 meeting of the Mystery Writers of America, Alfred F. Zobel, an official of Hoffman-La Roche, the pharmaceutical firm, went into greater detail on today's subtler poisons. Almost any potent modern drug can be employed in murder by anyone with "know-how and imperfect morals," he said. Take methylcholanthrene, used by researchers to induce cancer in experimental animals. A tiny amount introduced into the victim's food each day for about six months would produce the same result. Isuprel, used mainly to treat asthma by dilating the bronchi, would produce the equivalent of a heart attack if injected in large quantities. Cortisone, under certain circumstances, can lower resistance or cause relapse in an illness.

There are simpler, more obvious drug killers: too much salt in the diet of a victim with kidney trouble; too much sugar to a diabetic. And the tiniest trace of Bacillus botulinus—a millionth of a milligram even—can kill anyone if placed in his food. Any competent bacteriologist can make his own.

If sins of commission are so often difficult to detect in homicide, the sins of omission are not only often impossible to uncover but are also almost proof against prosecution. Withholding of drugs or adequate food from invalids or bedridden patients, for example. This is particularly easy for killers who are women, points out Dr. Otto Pollak, of the University of Pennsylvania.

"Woman is not only the preparer of meals, she is also the nurse of the sick.... In this function she serves as an aide and assistant to the doctor ... therefore she usually does not fall under suspicion by the one person who otherwise would be best equipped to notice foul play." (In general, persons with long-standing illnesses are more apt to be murdered than the rest of us, H. W. Turkel, the San Francisco coroner, discovered.)

Still subtler and totally impossible to detect as homicide is what Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo, a leading New York psychiatrist, calls "psychic murder." He believes that many persons who kill themselves do so because they are literally driven to it by someone with whom they identify. He tells of the case of a man who refused to let his wife undergo psychiatric treatment for a depressed state. He took a vacation with his secretary—with whom he was having an affair—leaving his wife alone at home. After two days she committed suicide on his unconscious command, says Dr. Meerloo.

"In another case, an engineer, struggling all his life with a harsh, domineering and alcoholic father, gave his father, during his last visit, a bottle of barbiturates to 'cure' his addiction. He was very well aware of what he expected his father to do. Two days later came the telegram announcing the suicidal death of his father. After he gambled away the money his father left, he came into psychiatric treatment, but he was never willing to face his psychic murder."

Unfortunately, Dr. Meerloo points out, the act of psychic murder is "legally not punishable yet... These unconscious attacks on a person's will and integrity become more and more relevant."

• • •

The real trouble with perfect murder is that you can never be sure. "There is something really wild in the universe," said William James. And sometimes this wild thing seems to be engaged in mocking observation of "perfect" murderers.

Two Australian fishermen captured a 14-foot shark which was placed in an aquarium. A few days later the shark vomited up a well-preserved human arm. Tattoo marks and fingerprints made it clear that the arm belonged to a man who had disappeared nine days before the shark's capture.

Sir Sydney Smith, reconstructing the crime, believed that the victim was killed in a seaside cottage, stuffed into a tin trunk that was taken out to sea and then dumped. But the murderer had not been able to get the tattooed arm into the trunk. He cut it off and attached it to the trunk with rope from the boat. The arm worked loose and was swallowed by the shark.

"What a queer series of coincidences it was that brought the crime to light," says Sir Sydney. "The trunk was too little, too small to take all the remains, and the only part of the body with a distinguishing mark was left out. This part worked loose and was swallowed whole by a shark—and, out of the thousands of sharks that infest the beaches of Australia, that particular shark had to be caught alive and exhibited in the aquarium. Further, out of all the sharks put in aquaria, that one had to become sick and vomit up the contents of its stomach, including the arm, which led to the identification ..."

Often the perfect murderer is apt to make his detection easier by the compulsive need to talk about his crime. If you can't talk about it, how can you win applause for the marvelous stunt you've pulled? Surely this vanity of villainy is worth a colony of coroners!

But man and law have devised curious ways to let some murderers go unpunished. For several centuries in England it was just about impossible to execute a murderer who could read the 51st Psalm. ("Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love ... blot out my transgressions.") This "benefit of clergy" provision was originally intended to protect clergymen from the exactions of the incredibly harsh criminal laws of the day, but gradually it was extended to protect another national resource—those who could read and write, a tiny minority in the unlettered medieval world. Some illiterate scoundrels successfully pleaded benefit of clergy after coaching and memorization of the preselected page of the Bible which the ecclesiastical court would ask them to read. If the clerics departed from custom and selected another Psalm, the rogue was as good as dead. Not until 1828 was benefit of clergy completely wiped out in England. By then, a lot of murderous Englishmen had learned to read the 51st Psalm, and more, too.

On the Continent there were other curious ways to escape the consequences of murder. Until the end of the 17th Century, in Germany "a pure virgin" who asked to marry the condemned man could effect his release and pardon. Switzerland had the same law even until the 18th Century, but the reprieved killer and his woman would then be banished. A woman who had borne seven sons was allowed to cut the rope of the doomed man before he was hanged—and they didn't have to be his seven sons. In other parts of Europe you could beat the noose or the garrote if some pure thing who still loved you was willing to run naked nine times around the market place or three times around the prison where you awaited your execution.

Perhaps Western civilization made a mistake in doing away with these useful customs. I would like to hear a rousing college debate on "Resolved, every human being is entitled to one murder." I know the demographers could annihilate this statistically and point to an ultimate world with one last killer. But I assume that most of us don't need a real murder in our lifetimes. Killing our enemies with our wicked thoughts and reading certain obituaries with great satisfaction will remain the socially approved forms of homicide.

Still, there will always be the man who will need a real murder. Now, if he had a virgin who was willing to run around Sing Sing three times, in the nude, to spare her condemned man ...

Film and TV plots would never be the same again. Romantic love fiction would have a great rebirth. After all, the concept of romantic love in fiction depends on unattainability and in our time this is difficult to make credible. But, if a homicidally inclined man had to keep at least one woman virginal as life insurance, why then, a new morality might very well evolve:

"Darling," she whispered, "I must stay virtuous for your sake. You know what a vile temper you have."