[Excerpted from Chapter 9 of Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist by Prof. Robert Trivers.]
It used to be said some forty years ago in Jamaica that if you wanted to murder someone, you should bring him first to Southfield because no one has ever been convicted of murder in Southfield. I am not sure if this still holds true, but nor do I know of a single counter-example. And I do know of many murders committed in or nearby Southfield that met with no official punishment. My closest friend was murdered there. So was a good shopkeeper friend. I have almost been killed in an armed home invasion robbery as well as in a set-up at a bar. That is how prevalent murder (or attempted murder) is in Jamaica at the local level alone.
Murders, of course, are not trivial evolutionary events. At least one person is dead and another responsible. There must be a deeper evolutionary logic to account for a society where murder is so prevalent, but I don’t know what it is beyond such simple arguments that the evidence decomposes much more rapidly in the tropics, on multiple fronts, than in the temperate zone. A corpse, for example – minus the bones and dentition – will decompose overnight in the tropics while surviving intact for months, years, and even hundreds of years in the arctic.
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The Link
A typical murder in the old days might run as follows. Someone is at your window at two thirty in the morning. Aunt Elsie is having convulsions, can you come drive her to hospital? You get dressed, you step outside, you are promptly shot to death. The key man is the one at the window. It’s always someone known to you. The murderers are a gang from Kingston, bent on robbery (their pay in the enterprise) or straight-out paid work as assassins. They are whisked quickly out of the community, so only the local link is available. Nothing is known about the Kingston crew. Rumors swirl, but nothing happens.
In the old days (thirty or forty years ago), transportation to Kingston was via ‘minibuses’ seating a maximum of twenty with a driver and a sideman. The sideman opened the side door, collected fares and helped pack in as many passengers as humanly possible. He was the dangerous man on the bus because he could so easily act as the key link. You get on your usual mini-bus in rural Southfield at 6:40 in the morning, expecting to reach Kingston, after many stops, by 8:30. At May Pen, two robbers enter the bus, one with a gun. They proceed to rob the bus but when they come to you, they start yelling as if you are not cooperating, put two slugs in you, and hurriedly finish off the robbery. Story is told as a botched robbery resulting in the unnecessary death of one of the passengers. But in fact it is an assassination, the side-man being the key since he is the link to the victim and the gang. As they come onto his bus, he covertly fingers the victim, whom they finish off before quickly ending the robbery and departing. Who feh know, who feh say?
Another example in the genre occurred as follows. A link once brought a gang from Kingston to rob a money-changer in Southfield, because he was assumed to have large sums of money at home ready to be changed into the appropriate currency (Jamaican to US). The link was both the key and a direct beneficiary, but the father of the money-changer realized at the last moment what was going on and blocked the door with his foot. The link promptly shot through the door, thereby gaining entrance, but at the cost of killing the old man. The money-changer high-charged it out the back, carrying whatever money he had, if he had any to begin with. These facts were known to everyone, including the police. Another unresolved Jamaican murder.
A Very Bitter Murder
Joe was an outsider in the community, having arrived some six years before from the neighboring parish of Westmoreland. He had come courting Ms. SP, whom he married and with whom he had two children. He worked as a porter at the Black River Hospital. He was very well liked – handsome, friendly, calm, and quiet. He fit in with everyone. I hardly knew him, but one night at Celestine’s bar he said he wanted to talk to me in private, perhaps at another bar. He suggested we have some drinks together. He was already drinking a stiff glass of rum, but I hardly drank, being then strictly a ganja man. I didn’t want to drink at a bar and I invited him up to my library, which I was in the process of dismantling so I could take it with me to Panama, where I would spend the coming year and to which I was flying in several days.
He came the next day and, sad to say, I have very little memory of what he wished to talk about. I know I was distracted by my library work as we sat together. He hinted at problems in his life, and I got the impression that he wanted to share them with me because we were both outsiders – married into the area but not born there. He didn’t make his concerns more precise and, to my shame, I never pressed him to share with me what was troubling him.
To my shame, I say, because two weeks later Joe lay dead, his body found in a field, a container of poison nearby and his mouth reeking of it – he had apparently committed suicide by drinking the poison. All of this I heard from my wife who was still in Southfield and who called me with the news. When I returned, I learned other details. His body looked as if it had been laid down to rest on the grass where it was found. There was no evidence of struggle, of convulsions, of him having moved about – no bent, torn, or shredded grass. Nothing. This was all the more surprising because the poison was not the quick-acting version that caused death at once, but a slower-acting poison that took about an hour to kill its victim, plenty of time to move about and thrash around. There were also signs of trauma to his head and upper body.
Turned out, he had had an argument with his wife, who had called her brother who had called a friend, a notorious punk who fashioned himself a real Jamaican “bad man.” Together they are said to have attacked Joe in his home so as to render him unconscious and then strangled him – the death scene arranged to provide an alternative scenario of suicide by poison. I’m sure the police never checked to see if there was any appreciable amount of poison in Joe
Oh, how I grieved his dirty murder! I doubt I could have done much, on the way off the island as I was, but had I known what he was afraid of I certainly could have spoken unambiguously to his dear wife, warning her of what I would do if she went ahead with her plans to harm him.
From what I understand, the police were not so stupid as to miss an obvious set-up. The murderers had a brother-in-law who ran a large car-repair enterprise nearby and who was said to have “bought out the case.” This is common in Jamaica. “There is no justice in Jamaica,” is a common expression and buying out is a large part of the reason why. Any case can be bought out. The expense depends on both the seriousness of the crime and on any beneficent political connections one might have.
