Torture murder

Torture murder is a loosely defined term to describe a murder where death has been preceded by the torture of the victim. In many legal jurisdictions a murder involving "exceptional brutality or cruelty" will attract harsher sentences.

Cases
Torture murder is often preceded by a kidnapping where the killer will take the victim to a secluded place. There, the killer will kill the victim by torture. For instance, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, during the 1980s in California, killed over 18 men, women, and children after torturing them.

Houston serial killer Dean Corll subjected his young male victims, ranging in age from nine to twenty-one, to sexual tortures, which included plucking their pubic hairs one by one, shoving glass rods up their penises and then crushing them, and shoving large bullet-like objects in victims' rectums. A sheet of plastic was placed under the plywood torture board to catch the excreta, blood and vomit that would invariably be discharged during the abuse, and the radio would be cranked up full blast to drown out the victim’s screams. Occasionally he'd castrate his victims, often their severed genitals would be buried next to the bodies in small plastic bags. At least one boy's corpse was found with his penis gnawed nearly in two.

Four teenage boys, held captive for over forty days and tortured to death a Japanese girl, Junko Furuta, in 1988. The boys said that they had not intended to kill her and instead pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

A high-profile case from the UK is the murder of James Bulger on February 12, 1993, notable for the young age of the offenders: Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were aged 10 when they abducted 2-year-old James Bulger from a public shopping centre and murdered him. Evidence suggests that the boys took Bulger on a 4-mile walk, kicking and throwing him around, then they threw blue paint on the toddler's face, placed batteries in his mouth and continued to beat him with bricks, an iron rod and by kicking him. They eventually left his body across a railway to be decapitated by a train and make it look like an accident.

Punishment
One of the criteria for a judgement of "murder in the first degree" in the laws of the state of New York is that

"...the defendant acted in an especially cruel and wanton manner pursuant to a course of conduct intended to inflict and inflicting torture upon the victim prior to the victim's death. As used in this subparagraph, "torture" means the intentional and depraved infliction of extreme physical pain; "depraved" means the defendant relished the infliction of extreme physical pain upon the victim evidencing debasement or perversion or that the defendant evidenced a sense of pleasure in the infliction of extreme physical pain..."

Similar positions are taken in the laws of Italy, Germany and Norway and others (see, Country-specific murder law).

List of torture murders
Some notable perpetrators and victims include the following. The dates indicate the time of the crime or crimes.

Torture murderers

 * Empress Lü Zhi (China),202 BC-180 BC
 * Gilles de Rais (France, 1435 to 1440)
 * Vlad III the Impaler (Wallachia, 1448; 1456–1462; 1476)
 * Elizabeth Báthory (Kingdom of Hungary, 1602 to 1610)
 * Delphine LaLaurie (New Orleans, 1775 to 1842) (alleged)
 * H. H. Holmes (Chicago, Illinois, 1893 to 1895)
 * Albert Fish (New York City, 1910 to 1936)
 * "Mad" Sam DeStefano (Chicago, Illinois, 1950's to the 1970s)
 * David Parker Ray (U.S., 1950's to 1999)
 * Richard Kuklinski (U.S., 1960's to the 1980s)
 * Geza de Kaplany (California, 1962)
 * Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (Moors murders) (England, 1963 to 1965)
 * Gertrude Baniszewski (Indiana, 1965)
 * Sérgio Paranhos Fleury (Brazil, 1968 to 1977)
 * Randy Steven Kraft (California, 1970's to the early 1980s)
 * John Wayne Gacy (Chicago, Illinois, 1972 to 1978)
 * Rosemary and Fred West (England, 1973 to 1979)
 * Dennis Rader (Wichita, Kansas, 1974 to 1991)
 * Hamida Djandoubi (France, 1974)
 * Hillside Strangler (Los Angeles, 1977 to 1978)
 * Paul Luckman and Robin Reid (Australia, 1982)
 * Theresa Knorr (California, 1982, 1983)
 * Christopher Wilder (United States, 1982 to 1984)
 * Adolfo Constanzo (Matamoros, Mexico, 1983 to 1989)
 * Robert Berdella (Kansas City, Missouri, 1984 to 1987)
 * Gary Heidnik (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1986 to 1987)
 * Westley Allan Dodd (U.S., September 3 to November 1989)
 * Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo (Canada, 1990 to 1992)
 * Christa Pike (U.S., 1995)
 * Junko Ogata and Futoshi Matsunaga (Japan, 1996 to 1998)
 * John Justin Bunting, Robert Joe Wagner and James Vlassakis (Australia, 16 August 1992 to 20 May 1999)
 * Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs (Ukraine, 2007)

Torture murder victims

 * Aurore Gagnon (Quebec, 1920)
 * Emmett Till (Mississippi, 1955)
 * William "Action" Jackson (Chicago, 1961)
 * Sylvia Likens (Indianapolis, 1965)
 * Rubens Paiva (Brazil, 1971)
 * Vladimir Herzog (Brazil, 1975)
 * Junko Furuta (Japan, 1989)
 * Shanda Sharer (Indiana, 1992)
 * Suzanne Capper (England, 1992)
 * Kelly Anne Bates (England, 1996)
 * Pai Hsiao-yen (Taiwan, 1997)
 * Jesse Dirkhising (Arkansas, 1999)
 * Fan Man-yee (Hong Kong, 1999)
 * Kriss Donald (Scotland, 2004)
 * Ilan Halimi (France, 2006)
 * Channon Gail Christian (Knoxville, 2007)
 * Necati Aydin, Ugur Yuksel, and Tilmann Geske (Turkey, 2007)
 * Jennifer Daugherty (Pennsylvania, 2010)