By Jared Hanstra & Ally Powers
In Colorado Springs, a young man walked into a little corner store with a shotgun and demanded all the cash from the cash drawer. After the cashier put the money in a bag, the robber saw a bottle of scotch that he wanted on a shelf behind the counter. He told the cashier to put that in the bag as well. The cashier refused and said, “I don’t believe you are over 21.”
The robber said he was, but the clerk still refused. At this point the robber took his drivers license out of his wallet and gave it to the clerk. The clerk looked it over, and agreed that the man was in fact over 21. He put the scotch in the bag. The robber then ran from the store with his loot. The cashier promptly called the police and gave them the name and address he got off the license. The police arrested the young man two hours later.
What is it about criminals that leads them to make silly mistakes and get caught? This figure shows the percentage of crimes cleared by arrest for 2004.
Tying into Crime and Punishment
Look at the statistic for murder—62.6% of murderers are caught in the US. While some might say it is all modern forensics, the 19th century novel Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, has some profound insights into why criminals, specifically murderers like the main character Raskolnikov, get caught. In Chapter VI of Part One, Dostoevsky writes:
At first—even long before—he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail. He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary (Pages 70-71).
In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov struggles internally with whether or not to go through with his plan of killing the elderly pawnbroker. He gets sick to his stomach before, during, and after his crime, in addition to losing focus on details and struggling to appear innocent. This example leads us to question whether this is something that occurs to all criminals in the time surrounding a crime, or whether there are some people who are able to commit crimes with absolutely no remorse.
Can There Be Cold-Blooded Killers?
Neuroanthropology 