The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death

by Matt Murphy

One more detail I will never forget: propped up all over the interior of the townhome, a series of Polaroid photos depicting an erect penis in various stages of arousal. Dead guy, two guns, one knife, and a house full of Polaroid boners. Super weird, for sure, but also strangely comforting. Having just spent four years in the Sexual Assault Unit, no crime felt complete without some sort of weird sexual element. After those dark and twisted days of my previous assignment, I could certainly handle weird, especially in the context of a sexually motivated crime. Strange as it may sound, in that moment, I felt an odd sense of belonging. But, as I stood there, trying to absorb everything going on around me, I was struck by something else: the realization that while horribly gruesome, that poor, bullet-riddled man at my feet was perhaps the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. Someone had killed him, brutally, and it was our job to figure out exactly how, who, and why. The how was pretty obvious, and the rest was about to get even more interesting.

The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.

“Fiat Justitia, Ruat Caelum—Let Justice Be Done, though the Heavens May Fall.”

Murders aren’t tragedies. A human being intentionally taking someone else’s life in cold blood is evil, not tragic. Tragedies happen; murders are committed.

Murder is the intentional killing of another human being with what is known as malice aforethought.

Murder is when someone kills under circumstances where the act cannot legally be justified.

And there was nothing terribly mysterious about it: From best to worst, the killing of another human being can be good (self-defense), accidental (involuntary manslaughter), bad-but-we-understand (voluntary manslaughter), bad (second-degree murder), really bad (first-degree murder), and horrific (capital murder).

First, they reminded me that no matter how bad our lives seem to be, at least we get to wake up in the morning and try to make it better. We can be in the most toxic relationship, desperate for money, for companionship, for anything—and yet we still have pizza, we still have Netflix, we can still enjoy something. We still have a chance. Maybe murder cases are so compelling, in part, because sometimes we need to remember that.

“You’re either a child of God or a cosmic miracle, either way you’re pretty friggin’ awesome.”

From a purely scientific perspective, the great astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out, in 1980, that “the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

So, what is murder? From a legal, religious, or purely scientific viewpoint, the murder of an innocent human being is simply the very worst thing.

German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Gandhi: “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in service of others.”

When monsters like Alcala are released, they will kill other people. It may not be popular to say this, especially in an era of professed “criminal justice reform,” and when we want to believe that everyone is redeemable, but Rodney Alcala was living proof that some people are not. Sexual predators do not get better. They may get better at not getting caught, but they do not change. When we release violent sexual predators, it is only a matter of time before more innocent people, and their families, suffer.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, one in four women and one in nine men have experienced severe physical violence from an intimate partner, and there are more than ten million domestic violence instances per year in the US.

It is estimated that in 2021, 34 percent of female murder victims were killed by an intimate partner.

First, any man who asks for money, under any circumstance, needs to be blocked and deleted immediately. I don’t care if it happens on your first date or your fifteenth. You should also report him to whatever site you are using. Second, any man who gets physically aggressive with you, in any way, needs to go. It is beyond unacceptable. Those are the guys who murder their wives. Third, any sort of criminal conviction, other than one DUI that he takes complete responsibility for, means your man is likely a complete loser who makes terrible decisions. There are exceptions to this, of course, but very few. Fourth, any man who checks your cell phone is either massively insecure, controlling, or both. Fifth, any man who seems sketchy about where he is living is either broke, living with his parents, or married. Sixth, anyone who seems jealous of the time you spend with your own family members will eventually alienate you from anyone who may garner your attention instead of him. Seventh, and this will be controversial among some men, but any guy who has a major problem with the men you work with, or even ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands with whom you have a positive relationship, is jealous and insecure. They will package their complaint as having a “healthy boundary,” but in my view, there is nothing healthy about it. Trust is healthy; telling an adult woman who she can speak to is controlling and often leads to far greater instances of abuse. Eighth, if a man doesn’t have a job, it ...

When Larry informed one of the local sheriffs that he was thinking about bringing a cadaver dog out to look for the body, the sheriff laughed. “Oh, you can bring your dog,” he said, “and I can almost guarantee you will find a body, but it won’t be the one you’re looking for.” Larry was taken aback. “You guys find that many bodies?” he asked. The sheriff answered with a chuckle. “Son, on Judgment Day, when the dead all rise, it’s going to be standing room only out here.”

Or in the immortal words of Lew Rosenblum: “The jury sees the soul of your victim reflected in the eyes of those who loved them.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S 1936 short story “On the Blue Water” begins like this: Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue.