By actually speaking with his target, he humanized her, and couldn’t bring himself to do it, Rahman and Wilson said.

Orville Wright, 26, on the other hand, lost his nerve when it came time to complete his £5,000 hit and stab Theresa Pitkin, a mother of three, in 1996, according to The Independent. They called the murder a “classic example of detachment,” because Gayle didn’t risk seeing his target as a human, shooting her the moment he saw her. Gayle killed Subasi for just £200, and got a minimum sentence of 20 years for the contract killing, according to Rahman and Wilson. “These sorts of killers are akin to ‘criminal undertakers’, who have given themselves ‘special liberty’ to get things done in the name of business.”Īlthough certainly less experienced than Moody, Santre Sanchez Gayle, 15, of North London, completed a successful hit in 2010 by shooting Gulistan Subasi in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun just as she was opening her front gate, according to The Guardian. “Moody reframed his victims as targets, seeing getting the job done as a normal business activity,” Rahman said. The infamous English hitman Jimmy Moody, who was active from the 1960s to the 1980s, was a prime example of a successful contract killer, because he was able to depersonalize his victims and treat his work as just that, Professors David Wilson and Mohammed Rahman wrote. So, what gets a person into the headspace of a contract killer - a place where life is valued using nothing more than figures and dollar signs?īefore diving into the new season of the Oxygen series “ Murder For Hire,” airing Saturdays at 6/5c, take a peek into the psychology of a hitman.Ī hitman or contract killer will most likely have the ability to depersonalize their victim - to think of them merely as a target, or a number, rather than a human being, according to a number of psychologists and criminologistsĪ team of criminologists at Birmingham City University in 2015 pored over 27 confirmed cases of contract killings in the United Kingdom, and made several observations about the psychology of perpetrators, according to Science Daily. “Hitmen do not experience require a cooling-off period between their murders, because of the unemotional and pragmatic nature of their killings,” Bonn said.

Hitmen are in it for the money, and emotions are not involved, according to criminologist Scott Bonn, who notes that serial killers typically experience an emotional “cooling off period” between their murders. Still, killers for hire differ from serial killers, most of whom take lives to satisfy some inner urge. One infamous mob killer, Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, may have boasted as many as 250 victims. Hitmen perform a service that is unimaginable to most people, with some carrying out dozens of hits over their careers.

The iceman killer victims