“Marionette Murderers”: The Stephanie Rengel case reveals a flaw in the way we categorize homicides (Canada)
There is a social lesson to be drawn from this crime that has not been touched on so far. When sexual jealousy pushes controlling females to the point of murder, they very often recruit a male surrogate to carry out the actual deed. The lesson to be drawn? It is well known that spousal homicides are perpetrated in a two-to-one ratio by men against women. What is not understood is that this ratio has been established using murder statistics that deal only with direct murders. That is to say, if a man kills another man at the behest of the victim's partner, the crime is registered as a homicide, not as a spousal killing. But in fact it is just as much a spousal killing as if the woman had done it herself, since the actual murderer - just as in the murder of Stephanie Rengel - would not have committed the crime, and has been coerced into it through sexual weakness or the threat of the loss of his relationship to the woman.
