Murder, she wrote: Augusta University professor's book examines, defines homicide
Dr. Kim Davies’ job can be absolute murder.
But she won’t always be the first to tell you.
“Sometimes I’m quiet about what I study because at a dinner party or something they all just start talking to me,” she said. “Even if I try to be quiet because I’m not always that outgoing – as a sociologist I like to sit and watch – they just start talking to me if they know I know something about murder.”
Davies – dean of Augusta University’s Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences – literally wrote the book on the subject. Her past research into gender transitioned into a closer look at domestic violence, then at murder.
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She discovered that while there were several books that academically explored mass murders and serial murders, she couldn’t find a book that suitably covered the concept in the way she wanted. So Davies wrote The Murder Book: Examining Homicide, published by Prentice Hall in 2007 – at the time, the only textbook focused specifically on homicide.
This month, Oxford University Press published Davies’ new book, The Murder Book: Understanding Homicide Today.
The murder rate in the United States has largely declined since a peak in the early 1990s. However, the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report released last month showed a 29% spike in homicides in 2020 – the sharpest year-to-year rise since the agency began keeping records in 1960.
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Researchers interpreting the data are still seeking explanations for the increase, in a year that saw close-quartered isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a galvanic public reaction to the death of George Floyd during a police arrest.
“It’s one of the things we’re struggling with: With COVID, why were the rates higher,” Davies said. “We’re going to have to know the differentiation of which homicides were higher during COVID but it could very well be we that were around more people.”
Even defining murder can prove difficult. Jurisdictions typically parse out the charge of murder from a more egregious charge of capital murder, or from manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.
The FBI defines murder as "the willful (nonnegligent) killing of one human being by another. The classification of this offense is based solely on police investigation as opposed to the determination of a court, medical examiner, coroner, jury or other judicial body." But FBI murder statistics omit circumstances such as death through negligence, suicide, accident and justifiable homicide.
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When Davies has taught her class “The Sociology of Murder,” she tasks students with classifying deaths as murders using FBI methods to help clarify gray areas. Can a bank robber, for example, be charged with murder if the bank’s security guard suffers a fatal heart attack? Or, if the robber does kill someone, can the getaway driver who never even entered the bank face a murder charge?
“It can be difficult,” she said. “I had my students do an exercise where I give them a training book that the FBI uses when they train people how to put data in their data set, because you can save something in the data set that’s designated a murder that’s not necessarily defined as murder somewhere else in the United States, but it fits the definition the FBI uses because you need that consistency in a data set.”
Davies said her class is popular with students regardless of whether they’re pursuing degrees in criminal science. Murder demands the public’s attention in media headlines, fictional murder mysteries and gritty true-crime television shows. A recent example is the Murdugh family murder case that commanded both regional and national attention.
“One of the most fascinating parts I think for students and for me is explanations. I call them ‘explanations’ because students don’t like to study theory but they like to study explanations. I kind of trick them into sociology and psychology,” she said. “But why do people do it? How does that happen?”
There can be many reasons, but Davies attributes many murders to displays of excessive and inappropriate bravado during often-trivial disputes.
“I always use this example: You parked in my parking space, or it was road rage, or you looked my boyfriend or my girlfriend the wrong way, and I’m not going to back down and you’re not going to back down, and one of us ends up pulling a gun or pulling a knife,” she said. “I push you when you fall and you break your head on my glass table and we end up having a murder because neither of us would back down.”
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The choice not to back down spurred Davies to add content about stand-your-ground laws in her new book and how those laws have been changing across the nation.
Legal precedents in Georgia for using deadly force in self-defense date to at least the late 19th century. But Davies originally is from Ohio, where no such law existed until last April, when Ohio became the 36th state to codify stand-your-ground.
“That was very foreign to me coming down here, because in Ohio you were supposed to run away, but not anymore. Students would say, ‘You’re supposed to what?’ ” she said. “Now I’ve lived here for 25 years and I’m part of the culture now. I get it and I’d stand my ground now, I think. But it was kind of fun to tell them stuff.”
FBI crime statistics have often shown murder rates higher in the South than in other parts of the country, such as the Northeast. Many researchers have theorized why.
Some people say it's the weather, but a lot of them say it’s the history of the culture here – standing up for yourself, feeling like you're the underdog," she said. “But also, Scots-Irish heritage here, or having to look after herds and being more rural at one point, and not having so many police officers, so the men had to stand up. That gets handed down, and we seem to continue to do that.”
But she also has asked students to bear in mind that when looking for explanations, correlation doesn’t imply causation.
“I talk about how murder rates are higher in the summer. So are ice cream sales. Is it ice cream that causes murder?” Davis said. “Or is it the heat? People are outside more, and that’s what we believe is going on, so we have to think about cause and effect.”
Many people cite the availability of guns as another reason, but Davies pointed out that a determined-enough assailant doesn’t need a firearm to commit murder, especially when people needlessly escalate arguments, “almost like schoolkids.”
One citation in her book mentioned a local murder case from 2012, in which a man fatally beat an acquaintance with a cast-iron floor lamp in the then-abandoned Days Inn on Broad Street.
"As adults we don’t stop, and you have a gun so I shoot you, or you have a tire iron,” Davies said. “And they always blame it on guns. We do have higher murder rates in the United States and a lot of times we blame it on guns, but we kill with all kinds of instruments of destruction. It’s amazing what we kill with.”
“If there’s a will, there’s a way,” she said. “I could call the book that.”
In the lamp case, Bryant K. Willerson was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a judge declared him guilty but mentally ill. Davies also addresses capital punishment in her book, but as with other topics throughout, she strives to keep her opinion out, and instead presents differing research findings side by side.
Most research, she said, finds capital punishment to be a largely ineffective deterrent. “The only people it deters are the people we kill. They can’t do it again once they’re dead,” Davies said. “So I say that, but I’m really careful to talk about the research.”
Davies doesn’t see murder going away, but that shouldn’t stop people from seeking ways to lessen its occurrence. She and other co-author colleagues in social sciences are pondering that puzzle.
“I give my students that difficult question,” she said. “We’re never going to get away from all of it, but some of it is: How do you solve problems without getting angry or without turning to violence even if you are angry? We get angry, but how do we stop that from taking it to the physical?”
Public interest in murder isn’t likely to wane anytime soon, Davies said.
“I think a lot of it is the idea of solving the puzzle,” she said. “I think everybody thinks we can solve the murder, we can solve the mysteries. For some of my students, they can’t imagine how someone could do it, so they’re just fascinated by it.”
And people still will likely talk to her about it, including on television.
“I’ve been on Southern Fried Homicide and I’ve been on Death Files. It’s weird what my life has brought me. Part of it is, because I study murder, I get these different opportunities,” Davies said. “I’m also doing research on bladder cancer but nobody’s talking to me about bladder cancer.”