Crime of Passion

A crime of passion is an act of homicide or violence done out of a sudden strong impulse such as anger rather than being premeditated. Usually occurring after a Moment of Weakness, this can lead the person to commit murder or attack someone in the heat of the moment. What can cause this varies, but it might have something to do with repressing your feelings until they finally boil to the surface. It can also happen after a Rage Breaking Point, a Fisticuff-Provoking Comment, or when someone presses a very severe Berserk Button. Once the act is committed and the person comes to their senses, they will have a My God, What Have I Done? moment if they're not usually like this.

In many real-world legal frameworks, including the Napoleonic code and Anglophone common law, the "heat of passion" is considered a mitigating factor in legal culpability. For instance, some jurisdictions classify killing in the heat of passion as manslaughter instead of murder (or as third-degree murder). And in some nations, such as Brazil before 1991, killing an adulterous spouse could even be fully excused as a "legitimate defense of honor."

Sub-Trope of Tragic Mistake. See A Tragedy of Impulsiveness for when a person commits a violent crime out of impulsiveness and ends up facing the consequences for it, Manslaughter Provocation for when the homicide is done in the heat of the moment as a result of unprovoked violence from the victim, and Death by Woman Scorned for when this could be done as a result of seeing a significant other committing infidelity. Can lead to an Accidental Murder if the attack wasn't intended for murder.

Not to be confused with the visual novel Crimes of Passion.

Truth in Television, but No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Fan Works

• Akame Ga Kill Clockwork: Caesar, founder of the Revolutionary Army, argues with his twin brother Ceasare about Walker's fate when he is set up to be executed after the disastrous meeting Tatsumi made with the leaders of the Revolutionary Army. Caesar tries to convince his brother to fake Walker's death, which leads to an argument between the twins about the ideals of the Revolutionary Army before Cesare kills Caesar in a fit of blind rage. Cesare is utterly horrified by what he's done even though Caesar forgives him, so he decides to make amends for this by framing Tatsumi for the murder so he and Walker can escape from the punishment Commander Bifrost has set for them.
• Never Say Never: Just like in canon, Mondo snaps and reacts violently when Chihiro reveals her secret, but Leon's words from earlier cause Mondo to avoid dealing a fatal blow to Chihiro and only put her into a coma. This incident serves as a wake-up call for Mondo to keep his anger under control.
• Rain Code: New Game Plus: Karen's history and crime of passion against Aiko are expanded on as part of her Adaptational Sympathy treatment. Karen felt pressured living up to her abusive father's expectations, which led her to bottle up her emotions. Aiko could sense Karen was feeling troubled and wanted to help her, and though Karen felt annoyed by her persistence, she could never bring herself to hate Aiko. On the night of Aiko's death, Karen would meet Aiko in the back of the schoolyard where Aiko promised she would help her get through her troubles and lends her hairpin to her as proof of this. This unfortunately caused all of Karen's repressed frustrations to finally boil to the surface and led her to kill Aiko in a fit of blind rage. Karen is utterly horrified and regretful of what she's done, but she ends up covering up the incident due to her fear of being scorned. But the more people kept trying to dig into what happened, the more pressured Karen felt, which led her to plot to fake her death after discovering she's being targeted for murder just so she can finally leave her life as Karen behind.

Films — Animated

• The Incredibles: Bob Parr is called to Mr. Huph's office so the latter can call him out for caring more about helping clients than helping the company profit when Bob notices a mugging outside. When Mr. Huph shows no empathy to the man being mugged, Bob attempts to leave and help the man, only for Mr. Huph to threaten to fire him if he leaves. Seeing the mugger get away along with Mr. Huph's taunting causes Bob to lose his temper, leading to him grabbing Mr. Huph by the neck and punching him through several walls, hospitalizing him. Although Rick Dicker manages to cover up the damages, Bob is still fired from his job.
• Played for serious drama in Turning Red:
  • Mei decides to use her red panda form to make enough money to buy tickets to go to the 4*Town concert with her friends. During Tyler's birthday party, Mei finds out that the concert she wants to go to is actually on the same day as the ceremony to remove her red panda and Abby got the date wrong, which leads her to feel overwhelmed by stress and causes her to lash out at Tyler when he insults her family. Mei scratches his face and terrifies him, scaring every other guest at the party as Mei realizes what she's done. This leads to her Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure when Ming accuses her friends of manipulating Mei and Mei is too afraid to deny it.
  • Ming is revealed to have done this in the past with her mother, lashing out at her with her red panda form after getting into an argument with her about her marriage to Jin. Her panda form was colossal when compared to her other family members and she destroyed half of the temple in the process scarring her mother, an event she's deeply ashamed of. When Mei chooses to defy her by keeping the red panda form and running off to see the 4*Town concert, Ming grows angry enough to unleash her panda form once more, leading her to go on a blind rampage and attack her daughter at the concert, endangering lives in the process. Once she's defeated and Mei meets her on the astral plane, Ming starts crying Tears of Remorse over how she's acting, and Mei helps her mother and grandmother come to terms with what happened before everyone but Mei has their red panda removed.
• Up: When a construction worker named Steve accidentally damages Carl’s mailbox and tries to put it back into place, Carl immediately tries to get him to stop touching it and hits him with his cane hard enough to draw blood. This ends up happening in front of witnesses, and Carl can only look horrified when he realizes what he’s done, knowing that the real estate agent will use this as a reason to take his land from him.

Films — Live-Action

• Attack of the Clones: Anakin Skywalker takes his first step on the path to the Dark Side when, after witnessing his mother die from her injuries following her capture by Sand People, he flies into a rage and slaughters the entire tribe, including the women and children.
• The first section of The Edge of Heaven, "Yeter's Death" follows a Turkish prostitute named Yeter who gets involved in a relationship with an old widower named Ali after he promises to pay for her upkeep if she moves in with him. As she has been receiving threats from a pair of Muslim hardliners because of her work, she agrees. After Ali suffers a heart attack, Yeter becomes close with his son Nejat, and Ali thinks that they're having an affair. When he confronts Yeter about this, they get into a fight, and he strikes her hard enough to accidentally kill her. He is subsequently sent to prison, and Nejat goes off to find Yeter's daughter in order to make amends.
• Minority Report opens with this trope, when the "Precrime Division" just barely prevents a man from murdering his wife and her lover, having gone home for his glasses only to catch them in bed together. John Anderton explains that crimes of passion are harder to predict and intercept precisely because they're spur of the moment. In fact, the Precrime Divison spends most of its time dealing with these types of crimes because the system has proven effective at preventing almost all premeditated murders.
• Se7en: Det. Mills finds out that John Doe killed his wife, beheading her. Doe takes some pleasure in revealing to Mills that Tracy Mills pleaded for her life and that of her unborn child, and even more pleased to learn Mills was unaware of the pregnancy. Mills, pushed beyond his ability to cope, shoots John Doe dead in that moment, completing Doe's plans to have Mills become "Wrath".
• In both the 1961 and 2021 film adaptations of West Side Story, Tony stabs Bernardo immediately after Riff dies from Bernardo stabbing him, as a result of his anger and grief. Once he calms down, he regrets what he did and plans on turning himself in to the cops until Maria stops him.

Literature

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: It's revealed that the Bloody Baron, the Slytherin House ghost, was infatuated with Helena Ravenclaw, the Ravenclaw House ghost. In life, he was sent by Rowena Ravenclaw to find her daughter when she ran away with her diadem. Upon being rejected, the Bloody Baron killed Helena in a fit of rage, then took his own life upon realizing what he's done.
• Kokoro Connect: The Kizu Random Story Arc has the inhibitions of the Student Cultural Society members suppressed at random times, which sometimes also makes them react violently. Examples include Yui using excessive force on a pair of guys sexually harassing girls, Aoki fighting off the police officers arresting Yui, and Yui breaking the table in a fit of rage. This arc has led to some people outside the Student Cultural Society getting hurt and was also toned down in the anime.
• Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption: Discussed. The district attorney prosecuting Andy Dufresne says that Andy finding his wife and lover in each other's arms, it might have been "understandable", if not condoned, if Andy had simply shot them in the heat of the moment. But, he points out, that isn't what happened. Each of the victims received four shots from a revolver, meaning that Andy had to empty the gun, reload, then fire again. Though, for the record, Andy really wasn't the killer, but was unable to provide his revolver for forensic comparison as he'd chucked it in a river, and so he was convicted of the crime, anyway.
• Warrior Cats: In Mapleshade's Vengeance, Frecklewish is furious when she finds out that Mapleshade has lied to her about her three kits being her deceased brother Birchface's, and they were actually fathered by Appledusk, who killed him. She launches herself at Mapleshade and starts clawing her face.

Live-Action TV

• Diagnosis: Murder:
  • "The Busy Body" has Amoral Attorney Lorenzo P. Kotch found dead in the Community General pharmacy with a blow to his head. The killer is revealed to be Ralph McCreedy, the son of Community General's security guard who was being replaced by a security firm. Ralph had been trying to steal drugs from the pharmacy so that the security firm would be made a scapegoat and his father would get his job back.^note This is not exactly as selfless as it sounds. Ralph is a gambling addict, and is so in hock to his creditors that the only way of saving his life was to sell the cabin his father was planning to retire to, and thus keeping his job would keep him away from the cabin and let him sell it. Lorenzo ran into the pharmacy hoping to avoid a woman on the hospital accreditation committee whom he had sexually assaulted, and when he stumbled upon Ralph trying to steal the drugs, Ralph panicked and cracked him in the head with a nightstick belonging to his father. Ralph then decided to take some advantage of the murder by taking the body to leave it for the committee to find, giving Community General even more reason to fire the security firm.
  • The episode "Murder, Country Style" ends with the reveal that the woman we've been led to believe is the culprit was actually Taking the Heat for her daughter. The daughter, a songwriter named Laura Manning, was in a relationship that evolved into an engagement with the victim, a country singer named Mickey McShane. However, Laura saw a groupie leave Mickey’s trailer and realized he was cheating on her. In a fit of rage, she grabbed a lamp and cracked his skull with it, telling her mother what she had done. Her mother, Betty Manning, then took it upon herself to take the fall for her daughter's crime, as she had about six months left to live due to cancer.
• Doom Patrol (2019) episode "Finger Patrol": Dorothy is tasked by her father with entertaining Baby Doll, one of Jane's less mature alters. While at first, Dorothy is happy to have a sister to play with, eventually The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry kicks in, as both Dorothy and Baby Doll become convinced that Niles favors the other, and when Baby Doll traps Dorothy in a furnace and kills Manny when Dorothy summons him for protection, Dorothy snaps and summons Candlemaker, who kills Baby Doll (as well as another alter, Flaming Katy.) Afterwards, Dorothy is horrified by what she's done and flees Doom Manor, afraid that she'll hurt someone else.
• House of the Dragon: Ser Criston Cole and Lord Larys Strong are foils. They are both in the service of Queen Alicent, and both have a track record of unhinged murder. Their relevant contrast is that Criston's killings are crimes of passion — he really wants to be a Knight in Shining Armor, but his anger gets the better of him, though he regrets it later. Larys is even-tempered and always seems in possession of himself, and his killings are calmly premeditated.
• This trope is present all throughout Law & Order. Many episodes derive some or all of the drama from the question of whether the crime was intentional or a "crime of passion". A few examples that stand out from the pack:
  • "Born Bad": The killer is a fifteen-year-old boy with a history of violent overreactions to relatively minor provocations. When an attempted shoplifting goes wrong, he explodes and beats one of his accomplices, a younger boy, to death.
  • "Conduct Unbecoming": A female Navy officer is mortally injured during a party. The culprit turns out to be her commanding officer, who was arguing with her, lost his temper and hit her hard enough to fracture her skull and cause lethal internal bleeding.
  • "Survivor": The murder-of-the-week was committed by a woman who was pursuing some property, a collection of rare coins, that her father lost during the Holocaust. The woman is extremely messed up mentally and fixated on getting the coins back, so when the man that she believes has the coins refuses to show them to her, she smashes his head in.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: In "Babes", a pregnant teenage girl named Fidelia is found hanging from the ceiling fan in her house. Her boyfriend Max (not the father of her baby) turns out to be her killer. He had gotten upset because they had made a religious commitment to abstain from sex before marriage, and they had argued over it. She taunted him that she never would have married him and that he was only still a virgin because he was afraid to have sex. He accidentally strangled her in a fit of rage, then hung her corpse to make it look like a suicide.
• Defied in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. While being interrogated, Adar manages to strikes a sensitive spot in Galadriel by suggesting that her search for Morgoth's successor should have ended in her own mirror. Overwhelmed by his taunt, Galadriel nearly kills him in a moment of weakness before Halbrand intervenes.
• Murder, She Wrote episode "Murder Takes the Bus": A recently released ex-con is found dead on the titular bus. The ex-con had been involved in a robbery that left an innocent bystander dead. The victim was the bus driver's daughter, and he'd specifically asked for that bus route so he could confront his daughter's killer. He only intended to speak with the ex-con, but when the killer showed no remorse (even calling the girl a "dumb kid"), the driver lost control and strangled him to death. After he did it, he was utterly horrified by his actions.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: "The Survivors" follows the only two survivors of what was once a colony on Rana IV, and investigating just what happened to it leads to the discovery of one such crime of passion to an unimaginable scale. Kevin Uxbridge is a Reality Warper who was sworn to pacifism right until constant attacks from aliens called the Husnock led to the death of the colonists - in particular, the death of his mortal wife. Seeing her broken body on the floor as a result of Husnock attacks drove him utterly mad with rage and grief, and with just a single thought, he wiped the Husnock out. All of them. Everywhere. For a being so powerful, it took the same amount of effort and the exact same lapse in judgement as pulling the trigger on a gun already in his hands. When he came back to his senses moments later, he was so horrified he punished himself with self-imposed exile in the dead colony with only a simulacrum of his wife as a reminder.

Music

• Inverted, as it's a crime from a lack of passion. In Joe Iconis's track Kevin, the titular character strangles a woman in an alley in a desperate attempt to feel something.
• D'Angelo's "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker" Tells a story about how D'Angelo came home to find his wife and best friend in bed together and killed them both with a gun in a fit of rage. At the end, D'Angelo realizes he went too far and gets arrested for his crime.
• This is the central crux of the A Tribe Called Quest track "Crew", wherein Q-Tip catches his best friend making out with his wife. Despite briefly stewing over whether or not he should resolve the situation peacefully to avoid a jail bid, Tip's emotions get the best of him, and he guns down his now-ex friend in a crime of passion after confronting him.
• “Cuban Crime of Passion” by Jimmy Buffett tells the story of a Miami piano player who falls in love with a dancer girl in Havana, but upon finding her in love with a shrimper, he kills the shrimper with a knife, then kills himself.
• In the Ricky Van Shelton sing "Crime of Passion" a drifter conspires with a woman to rob a gas station. They are stopped by the police the drifter takes the blame for the Robbery. The refrain of the song says "She took me by the heart when she took me by the hand."

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering card "Fit of Rage" had the flavor text "Anger is fleeting. Remorse is eternal."

Video Games

• Cyberpunk 2077: Saburo Arasaka is murdered by his son Yorinobu, in a moment of anger when he pushes his Berserk Button by bringing up his mother, with Yorinobu visibly in shock in the aftermath. Unfortunately our protagonist V happened to witness the whole thing from a hiding spot making them a convenient scapegoat.
• Hogwarts Legacy: Sebastian Swallow, the Slytherin companion of the protagonist, attempts to find a cure for his cursed sister by using the Dark Arts. This unfortunately conflicts with his uncle Solomon's distaste for the Dark Arts, and when Solomon destroys the artifact that could possibly cure Anne, Sebastian's anger leads him to cast the Killing Curse on his uncle in a fit of rage, an act that shocks and horrifies him. This also leads Anne to sever ties with her brother, making Sebastian's quest to save Anne All for Nothing.
• In the backstory to Injustice: Gods Among Us an encounter between the emerging Regime and Insurgency groups at Arkham Asylum had Damian Wayne angrily throw an escrima stick that ricocheted and hit Nightwing's exposed head. Nightwing collapsed, causing him to break his neck on the rubble. Damian attempted to say this was a mistake, but Batman would have none of it as he carried Dick's body away. This would lead to Damian siding with Superman, even if he's still hurting over what he did to Nightwing, and gets upset when people are flippant about it.
  Robin: I didn't murder Dick, Bruce!
  Batman: No, your temper did, Damian.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: The victim of Chapter 2, Karen, is revealed to have killed Kurumi Wendy's Best Friend Aiko in the heat of the moment by striking her in the head with a brick. That said, she loses sympathy by covering up the death as a suicide, which ends up coming back to bite her when Aiko's friends in the theater club find out the truth and decide to poison her to avenge Aiko.
• Mother 3: In the first chapter, after finding out that his wife Hinawa was killed, Flint falls into a rage and attacks everyone near him. He ends up being placed in jail as a result.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: The culprit of Chapter 2, Mondo Owada, ended up killing Chihiro Fujisaki because of this. When Chihiro reveals that he's actually male and wants Mondo to train him because he admires his strength, Mondo actually feels jealous of Chihiro's inner strength whereas he kept running away from accidentally causing his brother's death, and it leads him to snap and struck Chihiro's head with a barbell in a fit of rage. When Mondo is exposed as the culprit, Mondo barely puts up any resistance, admitting what he's done and is utterly ashamed of himself for his Moment of Weakness. Because of this, he accepts his execution with dignity.
• The Great Ace Attorney: In the first episode of Resolve, this turns out to be the motive of the real culprit. Raiten Menimemo was a journalist who was frustrated with how his native Japan was kowtowing to the British government in regards to Jezaille Brett. Brett was previously caught for the murder of John Wilson on Japanese soil, but because she was a British citizen, the treaties Japan signed meant she would only be tried by British courts, meaning all the Japanese could do was deport her. It didn't help that Menimemo had an article written about the backroom deals surrounding Brett, but his editor refused to have it published. Menimemo sought to get more answers by personally interviewing Brett herself one day before her deportation, but Brett only responded with insults and racist remarks and showed no remorse for her actions. This became the last straw for Menimemo, who decided to secretly poison Brett's drink then and there. Of course, it was by chance he had poison in his possession, as he actually stole a sample of it from the research labs of the local university, with his original intention to have the university's secret poison research be the basis for his next article.

Western Animation

• Played for Laughs in one Cutaway Gag on Family Guy, where Peter remembers two of his great-uncles, a pair of conjoined twins. During the American Civil War, one of them decided to secede and the other angrily shot him, killing him instantly. Afterwards, the surviving twin regretted it, as he wasn't able to have the dead twin's body removed from him.
  Bartender: Not too smart, huh?
  Twin: Yeah, did not think that one through.

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