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Homicide Event Motive: A Situational Perspective

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ABSTRACT

The motive for a homicide can be conceptualised from different perspectives, for instance, psychological, legal, investigative, and is often focused on the offender’s reasons for committing the homicide. As criminology often draws on theories from various disciplines, motive’s conceptualisation from study to study and comparison is difficult. This manuscript introduces a new perspective for conceptualising motive, based on the situational approach termed “homicide event motive”. Defined as the fundamental reason for the homicide and drawing on theories such as the Routine Activities Theory, Crime Pattern Theory, and Theory of Closure on Deviant Acts, this conceptualisation shifts the focus from the offender’s personal reasoning to the homicide situation itself and the elements that brought about the event. This manuscript will outline the theoretical foundations of homicide event motive.

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Differences in Characteristics of Criminal Behavior Between Solo and Team Serial Killers

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Introduction

Numerous research and theory have been published in an effort to better understand and categorize the most aberrant of pathological behaviors, those of a serial killer. This research is not only used to understand these individuals and what causes them to act out in this manner, but is also applicable when thinking about prevention and early detection of such behavior. When one can accurately understand patterns of behaviors, and the characteristics of such patterns, one can then begin to understand and trace back psychological mechanisms and etiologies of such behavior. Understanding and identifying precursors to these behavioral patterns will aid in early detection and intervention. A considerable amount of this research has focused on solo serial killers specifically, or serial killers as an entire population. Very little research is available regarding differences between different categories of killers, such as solo and team types of serial killers. The current research aimed to increase specificity of the available research and examine whether there are key differences in various aspects of criminal behavior between solo and team serial killers.

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Mapping Crime: Understanding Hot Spots

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About This Report

Much of crime mapping is devoted to detecting high-crime-density areas known as hot spots. Hot spot analysis helps police identify high-crime areas, types of crime being committed, and the best way to respond. This report discusses hot spot analysis techniques and software and identifies when to use each one. The visual display of a crime pattern on a map should be consistent with the type of hot spot and possible police action. For example, when hot spots are at specific addresses, a dot map is more appropriate than an area map, which would be too imprecise. In this report, chapters progress in sophistication. Chapter 1 is for novices to crime mapping. Chapter 2 is more advanced,...

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Body Dismemberment in Sexual Homicide Cases: Lust Murder or Rational Decision?

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Introduction

Sexual homicide (SH) is a rare crime that represents only a small proportion of homicides committed every year (see Beauregard & Martineau, 2017 for a review). Despite the rarity of these offenses, SHs often monopolize media headlines and have the unique ability to provoke wide-spread fear in the community due in part to the apparent randomness of victim selection, but also because they are often characterized by gratuitous brutality as well as a combination of irrational behaviors (Roberts & Grossman, 1993). In some cases, certain acts committed during the crime-commission process become even more shocking and irrational than the murder itself. One of the most exemplary among these acts is the criminal dismemberment of the victim’s body, which is considered to be the ultimate act of aggression (Holmes, 2017). This act, whatever its motivation, is not only shocking but also demoralizing as it constitutes a way to deny the victim’s integrity (Black et al., 2017).

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Iowa Missing Person Training Curriculum

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INTRODUCTION

Approximately 2 years ago I received information regarding grant monies that were available for state clearinghouses through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Immediately my thoughts went to the need for training in the area of missing persons. \-Vith new laws that had been passed and improved resources that were available to law enforcement agencies I felt the need for training in these areas to be very important. I not only wanted to be able to provide this training in the area of missing persons, I wanted to be able to make it available to all Iowa law enforcement agencies. I realized that many agencies did not have the funds to pay for the registration, travel or overnight stays for their personnel. I also realized there were those agencies that would not be able to allow personnel to be gone for any great length of time, due to the fact they were either understaffed or one man departments. The decision was made to apply for the grant monies and bring training to as many law enforcement agencies as possible by dividing the state into sixteen different regions and presenting a one day seminar in each region.

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The Prostitution of Lying in Wait

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Kurt Michaels planned and executed the murder of JoAnn Clemons.' He and an accomplice waited at a construction site adjacent to some apartments where they could view the victim's third-story window After several hours, the light in the victim's apartment went out and the two set off across the parking lot, walked up the stairwell and, using a key supplied by the victim's daughter, entered the apartment.' The victim called out, "Who is it?" Michaels and his cohort entered her bedroom, struggled with the victim and killed her. The San Diego District Attorney capitally charged Michaels, alleging as one of the death qualifying circumstances that Michaels murdered while "lying in wait."

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Victims of Abduction: Patterns and Case Studies

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INTRODUCTION

In July 1960, eight–year-old Graham Thorne, whose parents had just won the Opera House lottery, was abducted, held for ransom and then murdered by a man known as Stephen Bradley. The case attracted saturation media coverage, in part because, up until that time, cases of abduction and kidnapping were virtually unheard of in Australia. Since 1960, a number of other tragic cases of abduction have also generated widespread public interest and concern. They include the abduction and murder of Anita Cobby, Janine Balding, Samantha Knight and Ebony Simpson.

In 2005, police recorded 393 abductions in New South Wales (NSW). Taken at face value, police figures suggest that NSW has the highest recorded rate of abduction in the country (ABS 2005). Police abduction statistics and media reports of abduction, however, are in some ways quite misleading. Much of the media focus is on incidents of abduction where the victim is raped and/or murdered. Abduction, however, is not always committed for reasons of sexual gratification or to obtain a ransom. Some abductions are committed as part of a robbery, others occur in the context of domestic violence.

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Understanding and Managing Risk in the Context of Missing Persons

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Introduction

An early assessment of a missing person report to determine the urgency of the investigation is critical. This can be compared to the triage used in assessing casualties and the speed of response needed to save lives. Core to this process is assessing the level of risk to the missing person and how immediate that risk is. The assessment and categorisation of risk and the particular circumstances of the case should shape the response, informing the investigative and search strategies. Risk should also be regularly reviewed to consider new information and evolving circumstances.

Making such an assessment of risk in relation to missing persons is often difficult, as only partial information may be known. Much depends on the judgement of the person trying to determine the risk and the skills and experience possessed by those people is widely varied.

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Risk Taking, Impulsiveness, and the Age-Crime Relationship

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The study's purpose was to determine to determine the influence of risk-taking and impulsiveness on criminal behavior, the factors' relationship to each other and their relationship, to age. It was hoped that the data would help explain the phenomenon of criminal burnout. Subjects were three groups of males aged 18 to 44, classed by their criminal history. Group One was 83 prisoners; group two, 53 subjects who had never been arrested; group three, 28 who had been arrested or incarcerated in the past, but who were not incarcerated at this time (the "erstwhilegroup). Measures utilized were the Self-control (Sc) scale from the California Psychological Inventory, Risk-taking (Rtg) and Infrequency (Inf) scales from the Jackson Personality Inventory, a modified Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire, the Impulsiveness (Imp) and Venturesomeness (Ven) scales from the Eysenck, Pearson, Easting, and Allsopp (1985) 1-7, and two behavioral measures: volunteering and cigarette smoking.

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Investigator Beliefs Of Homicide Crime Scene Characteristics

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Homicide investigators rely on a plethora of sources to solve a case, including their own beliefs and intuitions. We discuss a variety of these beliefs and explore their veracity using a novel approach, coding cases from the documentary television show, Forensic Files. Our results indicate that most of these beliefs are unsupported. However, some beliefs may be predictive. Specifically, a body that was wrapped or placed in a container was indicative that the body had been transported. In addition, finding the victim nude was predictive of rape. We discuss the problems of following inaccurate beliefs, and the potential use of the accurate beliefs we identified.

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The Psychology of Murder Concealment Acts

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Abstract:

The escalating trend of murder victim concealment worldwide appears worrying, and literature does not reveal any specific study focusing on victim concealment amongst convicted male Malaysian murderers. Therefore, this study was aimed at investigating the psychological traits that may underlie the act of murder concealment in Malaysia via mixed method approaches. Male murderers (n = 71) from 11 prisons were selected via purposive sampling technique. In the quantitative analysis, a cross-sectional study design using the validated questionnaire was used. The questionnaire contained murder concealment variables and four Malay validated psychometric instruments measuring: personality traits, self-control, aggression, and cognitive distortion. The independent sample t-tests revealed the significantly higher level of anger in murderers who did not commit concealment acts (8.55  2.85, p < 0.05) when compared with those who did so (6.40  2.64). Meanwhile, the Kruskal–Wallis H test revealed that anger and the personality trait of aggressiveness hostility significantly varied across the different groups of murder concealment acts (p < 0.05). The qualitative data obtained via the in-depth interviews revealed...

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The Role Of Detection Avoidance Behavior In Solving Australian Homicides

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Abstract

Detection avoidance (DA) behaviours include removing evidence, manipulating bodies, and offenders protecting their identity, and staging the scene. There is a dearth of research on DA and its impact on homicide investigations. This study examines the role of DA in solving homicides in Victoria, Australia. It explores DA tactics used by offenders in 116 unsolved homicides, compares them to 35 solved homicides, and proposes a framework for their potential effect on solvability factors. The framework suggests that detection avoidance maps on to several solvability factors in complex ways, potentially complicating police investigations in a manner different to that anticipated. Future research is recommended.

INTRODUCTION

Homicides are rare in Australia and 10.5% are unsolved (Bricknell, 2019). This research is one of the first discussions of whether specific offender behaviour – detection avoidance – has the potential to impact solvability factors. Detection avoidance (DA) is when an offender attempts to hide, destroy or manipulate evidence to avoid detection and apprehension (Beauregard & Bouchard, 2010;

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Identification Of Clandestine Grave Sites By Understanding Location Choices From An Environmental And Psychological Perspective

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1.0 ABSTRACT What factors influence an offender’s decision-making process in choosing a particular clandestine grave site? This study attempts to answer this question and in doing so proposes that it is best answered using a multifaceted approach. This approach is required to appreciate how Winthropping is a relevant method to employ to understand these decision making factors. An offender’s decision-making process is affected by theoretical underpinnings in forensic psychology and environmental criminology. Forensic psychology informs us that the environment plays a significant role in influencing decisions made by an offender, who scours it consciously and subconsciously for relevant information about how best to commit their crime. Environmental criminology states that these decisions aggregate to form larger trends about how crime is committed across geographical areas and how best we can use these to apprehend offenders. Furthermore, knowledge gained by applying statistical methods such as Matrix Forecasting, and Behavioural Sequence Analysis...

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Intimate Partner Kidnapping: An Exploratory Analysis

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ABSTRACT

The following study is an exploratory analysis of intimate partner kidnapping. The current study will give a descriptive picture of the victim, offender, and incident characteristics of a form of intimate partner violence that has never been studied before, intimate partner kidnapping, as well as a form of physical violence often seen in the literature, intimate partner assaults. The study will use a combination of the National Incident Based Report System (FBI, 2009), and the American Community Survey (Census, 2012) to identify these characteristics and also to identify any potential relationships between structural-level correlates and rates of intimate partner violence. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of multiple forms of intimate partner violence using police data, as well as, understand their relationships to structural-level correlates of counties.

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The Medium is the Message: Firearm Caliber as a Determinant of Death from Assault

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Tims is the second report of a research project on violent assault in Chicago. The first, a study of fatal and nonfatal assaults with knives and guns, produced evidence to support three conclusions:

(1) Most homicide is not the result of a single-minded intention to kill at any cost.

(2) Many nonfatal attacks with knives and guns are apparently indistinguishable in motive, intent and dangerousness from many fatal attacks. Indeed, the overlap between fatal and nonfatal assaults with knives and guns is much more impressive than any differences that were noted.

(3) Weapon dangerousness, independent of any other factors, has a substantial impact on the death rate from attack.' This paper first reports on an attempt to carry the earlier research one step further by comparing low-caliber with high-caliber firearms attacks, and then suggests some ways in which the data developed in the two studies of fatal and nonfatal attacks might interest criminologists and criminal law scholars.

I. THE STUDY
A. Plan and Basic Data

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A Study of Mental Health Problems in Criminals in Terms of Depression, Anxiety and Stress

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Abstract

Offenders resides in prison faces many problems. Isolation from the families, overcrowding in prison, guilt, and stigmatization are main causes of deterioration in mental health of prisoners. Present study intends to assess mental health problem in two groups of convicted criminals: murderers and rapists in terms of depression anxiety and stress. Based on purposive sampling technique, 72 convicted criminals were selected from Birsa Munda Central Jail Hotwar, Ranchi, India. Both the groups of criminals were matched on various socio-demographic parameters such as: gender, age, education, religion, marital status, residence and occupation. All participants were assessed on Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS). Obtained responses were scored by using standard scoring procedures and subsequently statistically analyzed by using Chi-square test. In present study rapists group have shown significant difference on scale of depression in comparison to murderer’s group. Whereas there were no significant differences found between both the groups on level of anxiety and stress. Mental health problems were found...

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