COULD you kill a stranger for money?

Presumably most people would struggle to commit such a ghastly and permanent action just the pay the bills. But research by a UK university has sought to find out how paid assassins do their job while maintaining their mental peace.

In a paper entitled “Becoming a Hitman” published in The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Professor of Criminology David Wilson and PhD researcher at the Centre for Applied Criminology, Mohammed Rahmand identified the shared quality of successful hitmen.

Evidently it all boils down to an ability to dehumanise their victim.

“Hired killers who consider themselves strategists or businessman, doing ‘just a job’ as one hitman described it, can convince themselves they are dealing with a target rather than a person,” the researchers said in a release this week.

The paper was inspired by largely forgotten research about deviancy management written by Ken Levi in 1981. While he was conducting research in prison, Levi became interested in how a professional hitman he encountered was able to neutralise his feelings about murder and adopt a psychological framework which had allowed him to successfully carry out a job.

“We are keen to see how potential hitmen develop a psychological ‘reframing’ of their victim, so as to be able to achieve their objectives, and how this reframing might thereafter be maintained,” the paper reads.

“This research is of interest as there has been comparatively little academic research about hitmen, or the phenomenon of contract killing.”

The researchers support their assertions with a number of anecdotal examples of both successful and unsuccessful attempts by contract killers.

They uphold Jimmy Moody a notorious henchman for a London gang in the 1960s who would later become a hired killer for the IRA as the ideal hitman who was motivated purely by financial rewards.

“Moody reframed his victims as targets, seeing getting the job done as a normal business activity. These sorts of killers are akin to ‘criminal undertakers’, who have given themselves ‘special liberty’ to get things done in the name of business,” said Mr Rahman.

On the other end of the scale, is the case of the then 26-year-old Orville Wright. After agreeing to a £7,000 (roughly AUD$15,000) fee for killing Theresa Pitkin, when he broke into her flat in 1998 he lost his nerve and failed to complete the hit after engaging in a conversation with his would-be victim. Wright was later sentenced to two years in prison for his failed attempt.

Others such as Te Rangimaria Ngarimu are unable to maintain the necessary level of “psychological reframing” in the wake of the crime and become consumed by guilt.

New Zealand born Ms Ngarimu has a degree in mathematics and chemistry and was a respected 28-year-old before she acted as a contract killer and murdered Graham Woodhatch in May 1992. She was paid £1,500 (after being promised £7,000) and shot Mr Woodhatch while he was attending the Royal Free Hospital in London. Ms Ngarimu fled the country but later returned to Britain to confess to her role in the murder of the man she had never met.

Most people would recoil from the idea of taking someone else’s life. As Melanie Joy points out in her 2010 book called Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: “There is a substantial body of evidence demonstrating humans’ seemingly natural aversion to killing. Much of the research in this area has been conducted by the military; analysts have found that soldiers tend to intentionally fire over the enemy’s head, or not to fire at all.”

However some are able to overcome this aversion and the research conducted by Mr Wilson and Mr Rahmand offers some insight as to how they do so.

“We hope to prompt greater interest in this subject area, and its various cultures and subcultures,” the researchers said.