John Wilkes Booth. John Wayne Gacy. James Earl Ray. Lee Harvey Oswald. Mark David Chapman, just to name a few. Why do we often use their full names when we reference them? “John Booth,” “Lee Oswald,” and “John Gacy” almost seem foreign, since you rarely if ever hear them referred to by just their first and last names.
And why do we very rarely refer to victims by their full names? It’s John Lennon, not John Winston Lennon, for example.
John Michael Booth, James Francis Ray, and Lee David Oswald wanted it to be very clear…
Because the news stories generally first pick up their names from police reports, which use suspect’s full names.
I think that is it. No one wants to be confused with a notorious murderer or a serial killer. That extra bit of clarification goes a long way to eliminate any confusion. The chances of any two people having all three names in common is usually hundreds or more times smaller than just having the same first and last name.
If I happened to share the first AND last name with a murderer, I’d want news organizations to use his full name.
What’s Ted Bundy’s middle name? How about Sirhan Sirhan?
We don’t always. We rarely hear Theodore Robert Bundy. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, Charles Milles Manson or Lizzie Andrew Borden.
Probably the more ordinary or common sounding the name, the more the media will latch on to a full name, either to make it more clearly descriptive or perhaps to give more drama to a mundane name.
Ted Bundy has a complicated name history due family circumstances. Robert was his middle name but Bundy wasn’t his last name at birth so I see why no emphasis was put on his full legal name. I and many others have a hard enough time keeping him straight with Al Bundy from Married With Children fame.
I don’t know if the latter is a trick question. I have no idea but my money is on Sirhan for a middle name and I am all in on that. If that isn’t the case, it should be.
I think the general rule is to make it as clear as possible for the intended audience. If John Smith kills five people, it isn’t fair to just report the first and last name. You need to clarify that it was John WILLARD Smith and not your neighbor for example. There aren’t many Sirhan Sirhans in the U.S. so that clarification isn’t needed.
I think this is the best general-purpose answer, but in the specific case of John Wilkes Booth, I think he used his full name as a professional actor long before he became notorious as Lincoln’s assassin. Wikipedia shows a playbill on which he is billed as “J. Wilkes Booth.”
Actually, original news reports originally had RFK’s killer as Sirhan B. Sirhan and used Sirhan Bishara Sirhan somewhere in the article. But since the name was so unusual, the middle name and initial were dropped.
My mom worked with a lady whose husband was named Ted Kaczynski.
The exact, and I mean exact, same spelling and pronunciation as the Unabomber. He even went by Ted.
I would imagine he would have liked the news to have repoted him as Ted John Kaczynski(though I don’t know my mom’s friend’s husband’s middle name).
It happens.
Without even googling it (yet), the middle name Bishara popped into my mind too – even after Lo! these many years since it happened. (How do our brains recall such trivia, amidst all the info-noise, after so many years?)
ETA: Confirmed. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, from Wikipedia.
More ETA: Not to be confused with Sirhan (no middle name given) Sirhan, no relation, who shot up an Israeli kibbutz.
Actor Mark Lindsay Chapman was happy that news reports used the full name of John Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman, but not so happy when he lost a starring role as John Lennon in a T.V. movie because of the creepy name coincidence.
Using a first and middle name only, especially more common ones, runs the risk of a lawsuit from someone with the same name, or even some kind of retaliation by misguided vigilantes.
Law suit? What?
“No, I’m Thomas 14X Johnson. It was Thomas 15X Johnson that shot Malcolm.”
The same reason your parents call you by your full name - you’ve done something wrong?
You don’t want to run the risk of someone with the same name claiming that they were injured by a story, particularly if they suffer some type of injury or harm because of a misperception. A lawsuit might not be successful, but it could be a nuisance. See, for example, this story about a (non-murder related) cease-and-desist letter over name confusion.
The Sirhan Sirhan who shot up the kibbutz is from the same family, who have been active in extremist politics for decades.
Happened on Seinfeld, when Elaine dated a guy with the same name as a serial killer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0oCv4lDmc
