How to commit a perfect murder * Mark Cooney Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, USA Available online 6 June 2015 Abstract The perfect murder is a recurring theme in many works of art, high and popular. Scientiﬁc inquiry has generally overlooked the issue, though a considerable body of cross-disciplinary evidence documents wide variation in the handling of homicide in human societies. At one extreme lie those intentional homicides that result in no legal sanctions and popular praise for the killer, homicides that may be fairly termed perfect murders. But when will killers get away with murder? The present paper draws upon pure soci- ology to specify the conditions under which the combination of maximal legal and popular leniency for homicide occurs. Data on the killing of civilians by police in the United States and Brazil illustrates the continuum of murder perfection, with those in Brazil providing an especially close ﬁt with the theoretical model. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Police homicide; Brazil; Pure sociology Few things are as intriguing as murder; fewer still are as intriguing as a “perfect” murder e one for which the killer avoids all penalties. Witness our collective fascination with the murder mystery e as ﬁlm, poem, play, opera, documentary, and novel. Protean though the plots and motifs of the murder mystery are, the form generally utilizes a conventional conception of lethal violence: murder is wrong and ought to be punished. Secrecy is generally the murderer' s best friend: kill without being identiﬁed, even if only for as long as it takes to escape beyond the long arm of the law. To be known or even suspected as the perpetrator but without the * I thank Donald Black, Scott Phillips, and James Tucker for comments on the work presented here. This paper draws on several sections of my book, Is Killing Wrong? A Study in Pure Sociology . E-mail address: mcooney@uga.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlcj.2015.05.006 1756-0616/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 43 (2015) 295e309 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijlcj