In Culture
The two spinster aunts in Joseph Kesselring's play Arsenic and Old Lace act as angels of mercy for lonely old men, poisoning them with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine and cyanide.
The character Annie Wilkes in the Stephen King novel Misery seems to be a serial killer of this type. Additionally, "Angel of mercy" is mentioned in Agatha Christie's novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs. The novel The 5th Horseman in James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series features an "Angel of Mercy" serial killer. The term is also mentioned in a Fear Factory song "Demanufacture".
In the television series Dexter, Dexter Morgan's first kill is his father's nurse, an angel of mercy, who worked in the fictional Angel of Mercy Hospital.
In the television series "Elementary", Season 1, Episode 5 "Lesser Evils", Sherlock Holmes solves a case of series of angel of death's murders.
Read more about this topic: Angel Of Mercy (criminology)
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)