After catching up this morning, I'm struggling with how some posters use the rage killing. Some of us seem to mean that something happened earlier in the evening and it enraged this person so much they stalked them back home, waited an extended period of time until the house quieted down, then entered intending to to kill everyone in the house.
To me that's cold and calculating. Someone in a true rage couldn't possibly remain inactive for that long. Legally, a crime of passion is one that occurs during the "heat of passion" or as a fairly immediate response to a provocation. Just like road rage is an immediate reaction to something that happens to you on the road. I also think someone in a rage would have a hard time sustaining that rage during the time required to kill 4 people on two different levels of the house. That took a lot of physical work and IMO would have burned through the rage.
This person isn't a serial killer, so far as we know, because being a serial killer means you have killed on multiple occasions, and we have no evidence of that thus far. A spree killer means the murderer killed multiple people at more than one location. No current evidence of this either.
It does fits the legal definition of a mass murder, which is killing 4 or more people in the same location during a single period of time. Mass murderer is a very jarring term, but it does seem to be correct.
I did some reading this morning and found that mass murderers often operate off hatred rather than rage. Hatred against a group that mistreated them, that they disapprove of in general, or a group that excluded them. Hitler hated Jews. The Walmart manager hated his employees. Dylan Roof hated black people. There are other motivations, for sure, but they all seemed to be deeply rooted motivations that allowed for planning rather than impulsive actions. I watched an American Monster episode where a woman left her husband and weeks later he killed her mother and grandparents, and shot her brother 12 times. His motivation was to punish her for leaving him. He didn't shoot her. He wanted her to suffer the loss of everyone she loved.
The more I think about it, the less it makes sense to me that the killer came to kill one and the others were any sort of collateral damage. Why not just choose a different time and place rather than risk one person getting away and raising the alarm? I agree there had to be an inciting event, but I don't think this was a crime of passion. To me, at least so far, it seems more like other mass murders, where the killer has an issue with the group as a whole.
Thanks for reading.
