Have Snape ever killed anybody before? WAS: Re: seeds of betrayal

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 149802

Alla wrote:
><snip> I certainly think Snape killed before, because yeah, it would
seem very strange to me that the member of terrorist organization
would not have killed before, but I think that the reasons were quite
important to Snape. <snip>

> Snape, who had no problem inventing Sectusemptra, Snape who joined 
> the gang of murderers, Snape who has enough hate to power Avada in 
> HBP (unless one subscribes to fake Avada, which I of course don't), 
> you are telling me that this Snape never killed anyone before?
> 
> Snape who claims that he took hand in Vance and Black killings, THAT 
> Snape never killed before?
> 
> I am sorry, I don't buy it at all. IMO of course. <snip>

Carol responds:

Yes. IMO, THAT Snape never killed before.

And as for the hatred required to power an AK, we don't really know
how the spell works since Harry, our POV character, has yet to cast
it, and self-hatred combined with revulsion at what he's expected, or
forced, to do (a la Harry in the cave) works better than mere
resentment of DD for failing to appreciate him (or whatever) to
explain the expression on Snape's face when he looks at DD but has yet
to raise his wand. It takes a second, pleading speech ("Severus,
please . . .") to make him "do the deed."

I've already explained that Snape's claim to have had a hand in
killing Sirius Black is baseless, but here it is again. *Wormtail*
would have told LV back in VW1 that Black was an Order member. If he
didn't tell LV then that Black was an Animagus (and the form he took)
then, he certainly would have done so when he explained his return to
Voldemort at the end of PoA. *Kreacher* told the Malfoys that Sirius
Black was the one person that Harry cared enough about to save, and
the plan was to make Harry think that LV held Black captive to lure
*Harry* to the MoM. The Order members, including Black, weren't
supposed to be there. Snape told Black *not* to go to the MoM, but
Black chose to disregard him and ordered Kreacher to wait for DD
instead. Black carelessly taunted Bellatrix as they fought near the
Veil and she sent him through it. Where does Snape fit in? What could
have have told LV that he didn't already know? Only that Black was
back in England and had returned to the Order. But since he didn't
know at first where the Order HQ would be and later could not reveal
the HQ because of the Fidelius Charm, Black was perfectly safe as long
as he stayed at 12 GP. Snape even told Black that he (Black) had been
seen and recognized by Lucius Malfoy on Platform 9 3/4. Snape is in no
way responsible for Black's death, and he has taken care to give
Bellatrix "credit" for the murder before claiming a small share in it.
As for Emmeline Vance, perhaps as a double agent he provided some
small bit of information on her (probably with DD's permission) but he
clearly didn't kill her or he would have said so. 

And note, please, that ESE!OFH!Snapers are willing to attribute lies
to Snape at "Spinner's End"--just not to acknowledge that particular
lie as possible or plausible because it doesn't support their
argument. At least we agree that not everything Snape says in
"Spinner's End" can be taken at face value!

We have seen Snape *refrain* from killing Sirius Black, whom he
thought to be a murderer--even, Snape reminds DD, attempting to murder
*him* (Severus) at age sixteen--and whom Snape knew to have broken
into Hogwarts twice to kill someone in Harry's dorm room (like
everyone else, he could not have known that it was the rat Animagus
Pettigrew and not Harry). "Give me a reason," he says--but he doesn't
do it. (Admittedly, the Dementors provide an attractive--and
legal--alternative, but both Black and Lupin were willing to murder
Pettigrew, taking vengeance into their own hands, while Snape was not.)

We have Bellatrix's testimony that Snape repeatedly "slithered out of
action." We have the marked *absence of evidence* in Karkaroff's
testimony in the Pensieve scene in GoF. While he specifies particular
crimes for other DEs, none of whom is accused of more than one or two
murders or torture sessions (though Mulciber did *Imperio* a lot of
people to get non-DEs to do LV's dirty work), he does not associate
the young Snape with any of these crimes. And Crouch cleared young
Snape of all charges, hardly likely if he'd been suspected of any
major crimes, believing DD's statement that Snape was no longer at DE
and had spied for him (DD) at great personal risk.

What do we actually know that Snape did? He joined the DEs (we can all
speculate about reasons, but none of us knows exactly why) some time
after he left Hogwarts. He eavesdropped on DD and Trelawney and
overheard the Prophecy (note "eavesdropped" rather than "spied," which
implies that he acted on an impulse rather than planning to spy on
DD). He applied for the DADA position on LV's orders (though he was
already spying on the DEs *for* DD at the time) and was hired to teach
Potions, conveniently taking him away from the DEs and placing him at
Hogwarts, where he couldn't kill anyone if he wanted to. Two months
later, the Potters died at Godric's Hollow and the DEs were either
rounded up and placed in Azkaban or killed fighting Aurors or "walked
free" claiming they were Imperio'd. Snape alone had the charges
dropped, his name unpublished in the newspapers, because of DD's
testimony. Would he have believed Snape's remorse over the revelation
of the Prophecy if he believed Snape to be a murderer? I think not.

Note DD's statement to Draco about how hard it is to kill, and note
that Severus Snape in his DE days was not much older than Draco (who
is on the cusp of his seventeenth birthday when he tries to kill
DD)--eighteen when he graduated and perhaps joined the DEs; about
twenty when he revealed the Prophecy to LV and twenty-one when Harry
was born some five to nine months later, the point at which, it
appears, young Snape defected to DD.

Note the interview quotation that Zara cited earlier regarding Snape's
ability to see Thestrals: "[As a Death Eater,] he will have seen
things that . . . ." (ellipses in original). Seen? *Seen*? Not *done*?
And note where JKR breaks off, fearing that she's revealed too much.
"Things that . . . ." what? "Things that" caused him to regret joining
the DEs and/or revealing the Prophecy? Evidently, he witnessed more
than one murder ("things" is plural), and "things that . . . ."
suggests that he found at least one of these "things" profoundly
disturbing--perhaps the murder of Regulus Black, who was even younger
than SS and in the same House at Hogwarts with him only a few years
earlier. The timing of Regulus's death is very close to that of
Snape's (secret) defection from the DEs. It may have followed closely
on the heels of the Prophecy and contributed to his remorse. I'm
guessing, I know. But the quote suggests that young DE Snape
*witnessed* more than one death. It does not suggest that he murdered
anyone himself.

The time frame for Snape to have committed murder is very
limited--between his joining the DEs and his "return to our side,"
which must have coincided roughly with Harry's birth when Snape was
21. He clearly has not committed any murders since rejoining the DEs
on Dumbledore's orders at the end of GoF or Bellatrix would not accuse
him of "slithering out of action" (and besides, he's been at Hogwarts
most of the time.

To return to the young Snape, whose many talents LV must have quickly
recognized. According to Lupin, the DEs at that time outnumbered the
Order members ten to one. Unless Lupin is mistaken or lying to Harry
(and why would he do that?) or JKR is mixed up in her maths again,
there were about 200 DEs at the time, and yet Karkaroff identifies
only one murderer, Travers, who "helped murder the McKinnons") and
none to the Imperius specialist Mulciber, the MoM spy Rookwood, or
even the cruel Crucio expert Dolohov, who specialized in torturing
Muggles and non-DEs. LV, if Lupin is right, had plenty of DEs at his
disposal, many of them apparently specialists in a particular curse or
task (Bellatrix, not mentioned by Karkaroff, is surely another Crucio
expert), and Mulciber was Imperioing "countless" non-DEs to make them
commit horrible crimes, leaving the DEs in the clear. Why would LV
bother to train you Severus Snape, so obviously intelligent and
multi-talented, to do the work that others could do? Why not assign
him to invent spells and make potions (including poisons)? And, most
important, who better than this young master of both the Dark Arts and
Healing, who had invented both SectumSempra and, AFWK, its
countercurse, to help LV pursue *earthly* mortality? He had his
Horcruxes to protect his soul, but what good was a protected soul if
his body was subject to aging, disease, poison, or corruption?
Speculation, yes, but look at DD's view of Snape in HBP and the uses
to which he puts him and consider what LV would want to do with a
young man of such unusual talents. *Not*, IMO, send him out into the
field to torture and kill, which any DE could do (especially fanatics
like Bellatrix and Barty Jr. and sadists like Dolohov and the would-be
hippogriff killer, Macnair), when he could be of so much use in other
ways?

We simply have no evidence that Snape killed anybody before he was
forced by the UV to choose between saving Draco and himself or dying
in a futile effort to save Dumbledore. Any statement that Snape must
have killed because he belonged to a gang of terrorists is not only an
assumption, it ignores Karkaroff's testimony that not all of the DEs
were murderers and those whose tasks he identifies were specialists in
a particular curse or task.

And in HBP, the evidence points in the other direction, to Snape the
Healer, who indirectly saved Ron from the poisoned mead (Harry would
not have known about bezoars without Snape), and directly saved DD
from the ring Horcrux curse, Katie Bell from the cursed necklace, and
Draco from Sectum Sempra. (Either Snape invented the countercurse to
his own spell, or, failing to find a simple spell that worked to
counter the curse, researched and memorized an elaborate chant that
healed wounds caused by Dark spells.) As previously stated, he is at
once a Dark Arts specialist and a Healer whose skills exceed Madam
Pomfrey's bone mending and tooth shrinking, and for that reason he is
uniquely valuable to Dumbledore. And, as we see in HBP, he's a superb
duellist and master of nonverbal spells. I'm guessing that Voldemort,
whatever doubts he had or has about where Snape's loyalties lie, would
not have risked the life (or arrest) of a uniquely valuable servant by
sending him out to maim and kill when others were ready and eager to
do exactly that.

Carol, attempting to base her argument on the limited canon available
rather than on assumptions about what the DEs as "terrorists" must
have done