# Do the villains have to kill their victims get away with the crime legally?



## ironpony (Sep 1, 2019)

My story is about a group of rapists going around the city kidnapping victims and doing their crimes, and then letting them go, and the police's efforts to find out who they are and catch them.  The villains would wear masks and gloves and take measures to get rid of their DNA.  The will also make sure the victims don't know where they are taken to, and then being dumped off later.

However, I was told by readers so far that it makes no sense to keep the victims alive as this would greatly increase their chances of being caught, and that it would make a lot more sense for them to kill the victims instead.

However, I feel that if they killed their victims, dead bodies being found would just give the police a lot more to chew on though, compared to a witness, who doesn't know where they were taken and saw no faces.  Plus if you look at statistics, rapists are much more likely to be charged with a crime, if the victim is dead.  Rape and murder, is much more punish-able, compared to just rape, so it seems to me that killing the victims is a big no-no.  But am I looking at it the wrong way, and really should re-write it so that they kill their victims and leave dead bodies to be found then?


----------



## seigfried007 (Sep 1, 2019)

No, villains need not kill the victims. Bodies need not pile up anywhere, either. There are lots of good ways of disposing of witnesses and bodies besides just "piling them up" somewhere. 

It's your job to come up with why they do or don't kill them, and what they do or don't do with the bodies/victims/witnesses. *Keep it plausible in terms of character motivations and then figure out the physics.  

*I think the reason you've got so much doubt on these dudes is that you've got some weak-ass villains. You need to figure out who these bozos are. Make them plausible as human beings (even if they're twisted and villainous), and then everything else will fall into place (or not--they might run away from you and make your story interesting)


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

seigfried007 said:


> No, villains need not kill the victims. Bodies need not pile up anywhere, either. There are lots of good ways of disposing of witnesses and bodies besides just "piling them up" somewhere.
> 
> It's your job to come up with why they do or don't kill them, and what they do or don't do with the bodies/victims/witnesses. *Keep it plausible in terms of character motivations and then figure out the physics.
> 
> *I think the reason you've got so much doubt on these dudes is that you've got some weak-ass villains. You need to figure out who these bozos are. Make them plausible as human beings (even if they're twisted and villainous), and then everything else will fall into place (or not--they might run away from you and make your story interesting)



Oh okay, well I already had a reason before, and that it was murders are a worse charge than rapes, but I'm told it doesn't make sense though, but that is my reason.


----------



## luckyscars (Sep 2, 2019)

I tend to think of killing-off characters as being the last resort...because in real life usually it would be. 

Murder isn't something even hardened criminals take lightly. Not because of morality (though it could be that) but practicality. Even amoral psychopaths and serial killers don't usually murder whoever crosses their path because murder is tricky, time-consuming, and lends itself to increased attention. Plus, yeah, it can be boringly simplistic and lead to a kind of fatigue for the reader.

Why not consider some creative options? Bribery and blackmail are always interesting and good for drama. Or there are more...brutal ways. What if the victim had their eyes gouged out, their tongue removed, and their hands and feet cut off? Not easy to talk then! Comas. Locking in basements. Lots of ways to dispose of victims without the M word.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

Well I wrote it so that they wear masks and blindfold the victims, and even earmuff them to muffle their hearing to a degree.  So they don't know where they were or who the kidnappers were.  But I was told that's too risky, and oppose to killing them, cause they victims still could have seen or heard something incriminating.


----------



## seigfried007 (Sep 2, 2019)

ironpony said:


> Well I wrote it so that they wear masks and blindfold the victims, and even earmuff them to muffle their hearing to a degree.  So they don't know where they were or who the kidnappers were.  But I was told that's too risky, and oppose to killing them, cause they victims still could have seen or heard something incriminating.


It is risky.

Who the hell are your villains? Do you know these bozos yet? Get a handle on their characters. It may make more sense for them to kill, to blindfold, to make mistakes, to argue with each other, to betray each other, to accidentally kill a victim, to make mistakes disposing of the body... Right now, they're just roles, just plot puppets. They have no characters, and that's why you keep asking what they should do or shouldn't do. 

Come up with characters that make sense in that role. If you need a mastermind, make one up. However, the plot you've devised and roles you need filled for it don't jive with normal criminals. Someone as paranoid about getting caught as your villains are is much less likely to leave a witness alive--no matter how many precautions are taken. Blindfolds and muffs and such come off in the heat of the moment. There's a lot of activity going on in that rape bus of yours, a lot of jostling bodies to screw something up. 

Paranoia lends itself to isolation anyway, so that your mastermind's so sociable about bringing other men in is just plain weird. That he includes others at all is just weird. 

Gang rape is called that for a reason--there's a pre-existing hierarchy in a functional all-male group, and the peer pressure gets and keeps the rape going. Most men aren't rapists, so coercing them into such an act should take something. There are going to be some intense social pressures involved, and you need to get that shit figured out first. It's not going to be as simple as "hey, I voluntarily took a vow of chastity which I now regret so I'm going to get together with my homies and rape a small town." 

You don't see priests doing rape gangs--but you do see sports teams, organized crime and the military doing it on occasion. The priesthood has a hierarchy, but it's not the same, so you get isolated perverts and rapists, and the bulk of the problem then becomes trying to hush the crime and pretend everything's fine--not cover up physical evidence or dispose of bodies. 

The sort of rape you're dealing with is a power play--the group is bigger, the peer pressure is intense, the group members may be talked into thinking such behaviors are okay or expected of them and feel unable to disagree or speak against the action because of the intense pressure from their superiors. There's a power play on the lower ranking members as well as on the victim--who's overwhelmed by the number and size of her foes--but also on the social hierarchy and the respect it must command in the locality. If it doesn't command some kind of fear or respect, then the gang rape doesn't happen. The gang has to be (or at least feel) shielded from scrutiny *somehow* or the members won't do it. It's too risky. 

Which is why a very small group--or better yet a pair or lone individual--is far more likely to pull off the stunts you need and not a gang at all. A gang is too many variables to juggle, and someone doomed to leave, to speak out eventually, to grow that unbearable conscience, or to screw up (and possibly get murdered by the group). 

Rape is also a private crime of sorts. Most men can't do it in front of an audience. They're self-conscious enough about normal sex--let alone super illegal, awful sex that can get them landed behind bars and turned into prison bitches. A gang can shield an individual member from scrutiny via getting lost or mistaken in the group (he's just one more guy in the pile), but that doesn't mean he's going to be able to get his rocks off with everyone staring at him. Really think about the mental screws you're going to have to put to these people and who they need to be realistically for this plot to work.

A villain does not necessarily need to kill people to be a great villain. A rapist need not kill the victim; most rapists don't, but everyone knows that rapes are under-reported anyway because of the intense social pressures on the victim to move on with life and not make a stink about it. When you throw an obvious rape bus into the mix, and the crimes are more violent, more daring, that social pressure decreases infinitely and even becomes unavoidable. The more power the group exerts over the locality, the more likely a gang rape is to occur, and the less precautions need be taken. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, so to speak, and power certainly reveals the nature of the man. 

But your bozos don't seem to have these protections within the locality, which is why they take such profound precautions. They're insecure. They're paranoid. And that's what makes no sense. You're trying to shoehorn the crimes you want into the plot without doing the work of making the villains themselves believable.


----------



## Ralph Rotten (Sep 2, 2019)

Pony: I gotta admit that whenever I read your synopsis, I feel a little creeped out.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

seigfried007 said:


> It is risky.
> 
> Who the hell are your villains? Do you know these bozos yet? Get a handle on their characters. It may make more sense for them to kill, to blindfold, to make mistakes, to argue with each other, to betray each other, to accidentally kill a victim, to make mistakes disposing of the body... Right now, they're just roles, just plot puppets. They have no characters, and that's why you keep asking what they should do or shouldn't do.
> 
> ...



Well this is what I mean though, is that I had the villains already thought out, and I knew why they didn't kill their victims, and I knew why they do what they do.  I know the characters.  But the readers so far, disagree, and say that I am wrong, and that the characters would do this instead.  So what do you do, when you know the characters, but the reader disagrees?

How do you get the reader to believe that you know your characters, and that you are right?


----------



## seigfried007 (Sep 2, 2019)

You write the damn story anyway you please and stop asking for help. 

You don't really have the villains already thought out. They're not fleshed out yet. You started a discussion about how many of them you needed, for heaven's sake. They aren't living, breathing,  thinking, feeling people to you or else you wouldn't keep asking questions like these. 

If it's believable enough for you, that's great. Thomas Harris can't actually write a believable psych case either--not really. That doesn't mean he can't spin a good yarn (because he most certainly can). The issue is how deftly you wield your pen. If you can write it well, it'll go swimmingly. If you can't, then it's going to suck regardless. The fact that you've invoked comic book psychology explains everything I need to know about how seriously you're taking your villain's motivations and character.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

But I don't see how entering comic-book territory makes it less serious though.  A lot of people like movies with comic book style villains in.  The Dark Knight for example, has a group of people going around committing crimes, and they are just wanting to wreak havoc and chaos, with no motivations of money or profit.  They just want to terrorize.  And that movie was well received, because of having such a threat partially.   A lot of stories have comic book villains, committing big crimes, and readers like them. Or look at the book and movie, Fight Club.

So is having a comic book group of villains bad, or less serious therefore?

As for having the villains fleshed out, do I need to have an individual motivation for each villain?  The Dark Knight and Fight Club, do not give away every group member's motivation.  So is it really necessary to explain the background of everyone instead of just leaving some of the villains in the group to the imagination, like the movies do?


----------



## Irwin (Sep 2, 2019)

Don't forget about the prevalence of surveillance video cameras in cities today. Kidnapping people isn't nearly as easy as it was a few decades ago. So, unless your story is set in the 1970s, getting away with even one kidnapping without the FBI figuring out who you were would be difficult.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

Yes they would definitely have to kidnap people in areas with no cameras, around such as quiet neighborhoods with houses where people wouldn't have them maybe and places like that.  I want to set it modern times, to keep production costs down.  Plus if I set it in the 70s or something like that, I think readers would find it strange, thinking if this group was going around doing this back in the 70s, how come we never heard of it, etc.


----------



## seigfried007 (Sep 2, 2019)

ironpony said:


> Yes they would definitely have to kidnap people in areas with no cameras, around such as quiet neighborhoods with houses where people wouldn't have them maybe and places like that.  I want to set it modern times, to keep production costs down.  Plus if I set it in the 70s or something like that, I think readers would find it strange, thinking if this group was going around doing this back in the 70s, how come we never heard of it, etc.



Your villains are somehow omnipresent, omniscient creatures. You get a serial rape gang in an area, people are going to have cameras everywhere. People already have cameras everywhere; you just don't realize how prevalent they are because you want them to be mysteriously omniscient. 

You're dealing with impossible bad guys. That's your problem. Now you can write it anyway you want, but the premise and psychology behind your baddies is fundamentally unsound, so my suggestion is that you beef up on your writing skills and work real hard to sell it. 

Stranger Things is set in the 1980's. I rest my case regarding alternate history/nostalgia/fiction set in historical eras.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

Oh okay, it's just that the script would be too high budget to make if in another era I think though.  So I thought I would write that they would kidnap people in areas without cameras installed.  Or they could disable the cameras just before doing the kidnapping maybe?


----------



## Trollheart (Sep 2, 2019)

ironpony said:


> > Yes they would definitely have to kidnap people in areas with no cameras, around such as quiet neighborhoods with houses where people wouldn't have them maybe and places like that.  I want to set it modern times, *to keep production costs down*.
> 
> 
> I don't get the bolded. Is this supposed to be a movie you're making? If not, then what production costs are you talking about? Whatever you write will cost the same, will it not, no matter where or when it's set?
> ...


Um, it's fiction, is it not? Did anyone ever hear of vampires in Salem or a pet cemetery in... you know where that's going.

If you're determined for them to be rapists (must agree with Ralph; I feel a little creeped out every time you mention it, maybe because it sounds a little too like glorifying it?) then I'd also suggest you trawl through court reports of actual rape cases, see how they were dealt with.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 2, 2019)

Yeah it's fiction but it seems that I'm still told it's not realistic enough.

No I'm not glorifying it at all, or at least that is not my intention.  The rapists are the villains that need to be caught, are either caught or killed at the end.  When it comes to real life cases though, most of them are not done like mine where the victim is kidnapped and taken somewhere for it, but I thought this would be a smarter plan for the villains compared to real life cases perhaps, cause it would by them more time per say.


----------



## Trollheart (Sep 3, 2019)

I'd argue that. How many rape victims are attacked out in the street, where anyone can see or intervene or call the cops? Most I would think, ARE abducted, taken somewhere that the rape can be carried out in safety and comfort (for the rapist, obviously!) - I don't think you'll find a huge percentage of rapes that take place out in the open. Mind you, I'm no expert, but I'd imagine it's the case that more victims are abducted than just dealt with, as it were, then and there.


----------



## seigfried007 (Sep 3, 2019)

Trollheart said:


> I'd argue that. How many rape victims are attacked out in the street, where anyone can see or intervene or call the cops? Most I would think, ARE abducted, taken somewhere that the rape can be carried out in safety and comfort (for the rapist, obviously!) - I don't think you'll find a huge percentage of rapes that take place out in the open. Mind you, I'm no expert, but I'd imagine it's the case that more victims are abducted than just dealt with, as it were, then and there.



Rapes can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone with or without an audience. 

They do happen in the streets, in cars, on the side of the road--but there is typically an effort to obscure the act. Most don't happen right in the middle of the street. Victim will usually be hauled into an alley, into a vehicle, into a doorway, indoors. Most people have a natural love of doing sex acts in something that comes as close to privacy--and this comes double for illegal acts. You don't want witnesses to either act. Even tremendously drunk people will generally seek privacy for sex. The embarrassment seems coded into our DNA.

There are rapists (and other sorts of criminals) who get off on the thrill of getting caught--and this means taking chances. As rape is generally more about power, this can also play a role in intimidating the witnesses and victims. There's the thrill of potentially being caught, but also a relative certainty that nothing will happen, and the perp will not be caught. This goes back to that 'absolute power' thing--the perp's assumption that he is beyond public scrutiny and will not be caught can yield greater risk-taking behavior. He might flaunt how powerful he is and may act right out in public because he's certain nothing will happen. It's the fear of getting caught and the resulting social ostracism/judgment that keeps a lot of very bad behavior in check.

Victims in this case would be more likely abducted or at least hauled into alleys or some such. 

I'm the only rape case I know who was even pseudo-abducted by a serial rapist, and even then, I got in the van with him voluntarily. The violent cases are always more sensational, but they're exceptionally rare. Most rapes happen in cases where the victim knows the perp somehow--but again, everyone defines rape a little differently.


----------



## ironpony (Sep 3, 2019)

Well is it really that un-sell-able, that the villains can manage to go without leaving video or dna evidence behind for months in their crimes, even if they are very careful?


----------



## Trollheart (Sep 4, 2019)

seigfried007 said:


> Rapes can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone with or without an audience.
> 
> They do happen in the streets, in cars, on the side of the road--but there is typically an effort to obscure the act. Most don't happen right in the middle of the street. Victim will usually be hauled into an alley, into a vehicle, into a doorway, indoors. Most people have a natural love of doing sex acts in something that comes as close to privacy--and this comes double for illegal acts. You don't want witnesses to either act. Even tremendously drunk people will generally seek privacy for sex. The embarrassment seems coded into our DNA.
> 
> ...


Just wanted to give you a virtual hug. I'm so sorry you had to go through such a horrible experience. I hope you managed/are managing to get past it and don't let it ruin your life. :courage::hororr::butterfly:


----------



## ironpony (Oct 16, 2019)

I'm so sorry if I brought up bad memories of tragic events in this thread.  That was certainly not my intention.


----------

