I just finished reading a book in which a housekeeper embezzled money from the independently wealthy college-age adult daughter of a wealthy widow and then stabbed the daughter to death with a paring knife during an argument that took place upon her being found out. The housekeeper then enlisted her boyfriend to help get rid of the body.
Her daughter’s disappearance (and likely murder: significant blood stains belonging to her daughter were found by the police despite the killer’s efforts to clean it up) drove her already mentally flaky mother to assume a second personality who set about killing some of her daughter’s friends whom she had wrongfully come to believe were responsible for her death, and she killed three of them before being found out and killed in self-defense when she tried to shoot the book’s protagonist as he tried to arrest her.
So my question is, would the housekeeper and her boyfriend (who were found out over the course of the investigation and arrested for the daughter’s murder) be subject to murder charges in the deaths of the three people the mother killed, plus the mother’s death as well, since they all died as the indirect result of a crime committed by the housekeeper and her boyfriend? The novel ended without saying one way or the other.
I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect the answer is no, because the three deaths were too remote in the causal chain of events. The first death (from stabbing with a knife) is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the housekeeper’s actions, even if death wasn’t immediate. However, the other deaths are not reasonably foreseeable. I think this would be regardless of jurisdiction, but I can’t cite any specific law.
Phantom Prey, right? It was a pretty good read. I agree with Giles, a reasonable person would not have forseen the whole multiple personality and subsequent murders as probable.
Yep, Phantom Prey. In my opinion one of the better of the very good Prey series. Read it in two sittings.
The reason for my question is that the law holds that if anyone dies as a result of the commission of a crime, everyone involved in the crime is guilty of murder. Thus, a getaway driver, sitting his car during a bank robbery can be found guilty of murder should one of his compatriots get trigger happy and shoot someone inside the bank or if an employee or customer should die of a heart attack brought on by the robbery.
So I’m wondering, since the mother and the three people she killed would not have died had the housekeeper’s crime not been committed, whether she and her boyfriend could be charged and found guilty of murder in their deaths too, even if, like the getaway driver, they had no foreknowledge that other people were going to die as a result of their crime.
Nope. It’s the “result” thing that kind of trips it up here. It’s not some long chain where I steal your ring, your wife thinks your cheating on her and talks to your father, who flies off the handle at you, you go drinking and then drive drunk crashing into a pedestrian who gets paralyzed, and his uncle murders you in a rage. Totally not murder. (ETA: that is, not a murder charge against me)
OK, kidding aside - it’s meant to apply during the comission of the crime, not after.
The only exception to the argument that Darth Panda asserts, would be if the mother and the housekeeper and the boyfriend were in a conspiracy together and the mother killed the other three people to disguise the fact of the original murder. That’s the only situation where I believe the housekeeper could be charged in their murders as well.
