murderers

Murderers are persons who have committed murder, i.e. the intentional killing of one or more other human beings. The word is the plural of "murderer" and is used in everyday and journalistic Danish as a designation for the perpetrator of such acts — not as an independent legal term in the Danish Penal Code (straffeloven), but as a natural linguistic label for the person who has carried out a killing.

In Danish legal language, the act itself — intentional homicide — is regulated in the Penal Code, whereas the concept of "murderer" as a designation for the perpetrator is an ordinary linguistic expression rather than a statutory category. A person is legally a murderer once convicted of intentional homicide; the label follows from the judgment, not from a separate statutory definition.

In true crime literature and journalism, "murderers" is used broadly for the perpetrators behind killings — from single murders to serial killings. Titles such as "Cleveland's Torso Murders" and "Criminal: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and Cleveland's Torso Murderer" place the concept in a historical and investigative context in which the identity of the murderers was never fully established, and where the designation points to the unknown perpetrators behind a series of brutal killings in 1930s Cleveland.

In a serial killer context — as in the article "Serial killer sentenced to death for 2002 murder" — "murderers" and derived forms are used about persons who have committed repeated killings, typically with a pattern or method that distinguishes the crimes from impulsive single homicides. Serial killers are a distinct phenomenon in criminology, even though Danish law does not operate with a separate criminal-law category for serial homicide.