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Homicide Studies

Serial Murder Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators

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I. Introduction

Serial murder is neither a new phenomenon, nor is it uniquely American. Dating back to ancient times, serial murderers have been chronicled around the world. In 19th century Europe, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing conducted some of the first documented research on violent, sexual offenders and the crimes they committed. Best known for his 1886 textbook Psychopathia Sexualis, Dr. Kraft-Ebing described numerous case studies of sexual homicide, serial murder, and other areas of sexual proclivity. Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year. However, there is a macabre interest in the topic that far exceeds its scope and has generated countless articles, books, and movies. This broad-based public fascination began in the late 1880s, after a series of unsolved prostitute murders occurred in the Whitechapel area of London. These murders were committed by an unknown individual who named himself “Jack the Ripper” and sent letters to the police claiming to be the killer....

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Fantasy Fusion And Sexual Homicide

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Abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of the confessions of two men who kidnapped, raped, killed, and mutilated a young woman (though not necessarily in that order). Following their initial denials of involvement, both men provided lengthy iterations of the crime, although, as you will see, their recollections of what occurred—or at least their recounting of events for the police—differ some-what dramatically from one another. In addition to mining these narratives for clues about the dissociative structure of perpetrators’ interiority and actions, I have attempted to find within the stories information relevant to the most widely disseminated theory in the forensic and criminological literature as regards the antecedents of sexual homicide, namely that it is the over reliance on sexualized,aggressive fantasies that undergirds these fatal interactions (Burgess et al., 1986;Ressler, Burgess & Douglas, 1992; Prentky et al., 1989; Meloy, 2000; Schlesinger,2000). While so many in the forensic field have concentrated on the criminogenic power of the paraphillic fantasy to transform dreamers into

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Phenomenology and Serial Murder

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STUDYING SERIAL MURDER : THE NEED FOR ANOTHER APPROACH

How we look at the problem of serial murder will determine what we find. The conscience of humanity demands that the taking of one human life by another be explained. Human beings are distinguished from other life forms in terms of their ability to develop culture. Implicit in this notion is our sociability. Human beings have, at once, the capacity to behave in prosocial and antisocial ways two dimensions that are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, it may be the result of protective or humanitarian motives that prompt one individual to kill another. The act of taking another’s life may thus be understandable and acceptable in terms of its apparent utility Killing does not always involve criminal, violent, aggressive, or intentional acts. Killing someone in self-defense or in the context of war are examples of comprehensible killing. There are, however, other kinds of killing for ...

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A Theory Of Homicidal Behavior Among Women

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This theory explains the homicidal behavior of women in a variety of settings. Structural, social, and cultural conditions of modern societies generate strain for all women, which produces negative affect. Women tend to internalize negative affect as guilt and hurt rather than externalize it as anger directed at a target. This results in a situation analogous to over controlled personality, and results in low overall rates of deviance punctuated by occasional instances of extreme violence. The conditions found in long-term abusive relationships and pre- or postpartum are more likely to produce this result, but the theory is not limited to explaining female homicide in these settings. Men commit much more crime—including violent crime—than women. But the homicides women commit exhibit much more consistency in their characteristics and circumstances than do homicides by men (Browne, 1987; Browne and Williams, 1993; Bunch et al., 1983; d'Orban, 1990; Gelles and Cornell, 1985; Goetting, 1987; Jurik and Winn, 1990; Martin, 1981; Walker,

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Murder By Numbers: Researchers Compare The Crimes And Minds Of Individual Vs. Multiple Killers

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Crime investigators such as the RCMP, FBI and even the CIA have powerful new knowledge at their disposal to potentially help solve murders, thanks to a ground-breaking study involving UBC Okanagan forensic psychology researchers. Their findings could help police generate predictions about the characteristics of a killer or killers based on the crime scene evidence and victim. The study, Partners in Crime: A Comparison of Individual and Multi-Perpetrator Homicides, looked at 124 cases of convicted Canadian male offenders a third of the cases involving multiple people during the crime to determine what the crime scene could reveal about the nature of the suspect, and the likelihood of multiple perpetrators being involved. “It was the first empirical study of this nature,” says Stephen Porter, professor of psychology at UBC Okanagan and a practicing forensic psychologist. “We really had no literature to draw upon to come up with predictions, so it was very exploratory in nature.”

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Multiple Victim Public Shootings

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Abstract

Few events obtain the same instant worldwide news coverage as multiple victim public shootings. These crimes allow us to study the alternative methods used to kill a large number of people (e.g., shootings versus bombings), marginal deterrence and the severity of the crime, substitutability of penalties, private versus public methods of deterrence and incapacitation, and whether attacks produce “copycats.” The criminals who commit these crimes are also fairly unusual, recent evidence suggests that about half of these criminals have received a “formal diagnosis of mental illness, often schizophrenia.” Yet, economists have not studied multiple victim shootings. Using data that extends until 1999 and includes the recent public school shootings, our results are surprising and dramatic. While arrest or conviction rates and the death penalty reduce “normal” murder rates and these attacks lead to new calls from more gun control, our results find that the only policy factor to have a consistently significant influence on multiple victim public shootings is the passage of

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Motivated Thinking

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At one time or another, every one of us has engaged in “wishful thinking,” or “let our hearts influence our heads.” That is, every one of us has felt the effects of our motivations on our thought processes. Given this common everyday experience, it is not surprising that an essential part of early psychological research was the idea that drives, needs, desires, motives, and goals can profoundly influence judgment and reasoning. More surprising is that motivational variables play only a small role in current theories of reasoning. Why might this be? One possible explanation is that since the cognitive revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers studying motivational and cognitive processes have been speaking somewhat different languages. That is, there has been a general failure to connect traditional motivational concepts, such as drives or motives, to information processing concepts, such as expectancies or spreading activation, which form the foundation for nearly all contemporary research on thinking and reasoning.

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Political Restraint of the Market and Levels of Criminal Homicide: A Cross-National Application of Institutional-Anomie Theory

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Abstract

This article examines the effects on national homicide rates of political efforts to insulate personal well-being from market forces. Drawing upon recent work by Esping-Andersen and the institutional-anomie theory of crime, we hypothesize that levels of homicide will vary inversely with the “decommodification of labor.” We develop a measure of decommodification based on levels and patterns of welfare expenditures and include this measure in a multivariate, cross-national analysis of homicide rates. The results support our hypothesis and lend credibility to the institutional-anomie perspective. The degree of decommodification is negatively related to homicide rates, net of controls for other characteristics of nations.

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Assessing Risk Factors for Intimate Partner Homicide

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A team of researchers studied the Danger Assessment and found that despite cer- tain limitations, the tool can with some reliability identify women who may be at risk of being killed by their intimate partners. The study found that women who score 8 or higher on the Danger Assessment are at very grave risk (the average score for women who were murdered was just under 8). Women who score 4 or higher are at great risk (the average score for abused women was just over 3). The findings indicate that the Danger Assessment tool can assist in assessing battered women who may be at risk of being killed as well as those who are not. The study also found that almost half the murdered women studied did not recognize the high level of their risk. Thus, a tool like the Danger Assessment or another risk assessment process may...

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Evaluating The Usefulness Of Functional Distance Measures When Calibrating Journey-to-Crime Distance Decay Functions

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Abstract

This research evaluates the usefulness of applying functional distance measures to criminal geographic profiles using mathematically calibrated distance decay models. Both the travel- path (i.e., shortest distance) and temporally optimized (i.e., quickest travel time) functional distance measures were calculated based on the impedance attributes stored within a linearly referenced transportation data layer of several parishes in Louisiana. Two different journey-to- crime distance decay functions (i.e., negative exponential, and truncated negative exponential) were mathematically calibrated for ‘‘best fit’’, based on the distribution of distances between homicide crime locations and offenders residences. Using the calibrated distance decay functions, geographic profiles were created for a localized serial killer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A probability score was calculated for every point within the study area to indicate the likelihood that it contained the serial offenders residence. A comparison between the predicted (highest probability score) and the actual residence of the serial offender determined the predictive value and procedural validity of functional distance metrics.

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Violent Crime In African American And White Neighborhoods: Is Poverty’s Detrimental Effect Race Specific?

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Abstract

The social disorganization and anomie perspectives generally suggest that poverty’s criminogenic effect is racially invariant. These perspectives imply that policies that alleviate economic deprivation will equally reduce rates of violent crime in neighborhoods that are predominately white and neighborhoods that are predominately black. In contrast, several social commentators have suggested that alleviating poverty will be a relatively ineffective crime reduction strategy in predominately black areas. Existing empirical research on this issue has been mostly at the city level, and almost entirely cross-sectional. The present study examines potential racial differences in the longitudinal relationship between neighborhood poverty and violent crime rates. We use iteratively reweighted least squares, a robust regression technique, to estimate racespecific effects for Cleveland census tracts, 1990-2000. The results are supportive of the racial invariance hypothesis. Reductions in neighborhood poverty appear to produce similar reductions in violent crime in white and black neighborhoods.

INTRODUCTION

Despite recent declines in street crime, the United States continues to have a very

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An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective On Homicide

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Spend some time perusing an archive of homicide cases and you are likely to find that certain conflict typologies, characteristic of particular victim-killer relationship categories are common. Barroom interactions among unrelated men became heated contests concerning dominance, deference, and face, and escalated to lethality. Women seeking to exercise autonomy were slain by proprietary ex-partners. Thieves killed victims they feared might cause them trouble later. Children were fatally assaulted by angry caretakers. How are we to understand why certain recurring types of conflicts of interest engender passions that are sometimes so intense as to motivate these prototypical sorts of homicides? A satisfactory answer to this question seems to require an understanding of what interpersonal conflicts of interest are fundamentally about, and such an understanding must itself be predicated on a basic theory of the sources and substance of individual self-interests. Fortunately, scientists have been developing, testing, and refining the requisite body of theory for decades, with the result that it is now...

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Crimes Against the Elderly 2003–2013

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For the period 2003–13, elderly persons age 65 or older experienced nonfatal violent crime victimizations at lower rates (3.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 65 or older) than younger persons ages 12 to 24 (49.9 per 1,000), persons ages 25 to 49 (27.6 per 1,000), and persons ages 50 to 64 (15.2 per 1,000) (figure 1). Nonfatal violent crime includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Each year, the elderly accounted for approximately 2% of violence and 2% of serious violence, which equals 136,720 violent crimes and 47,640 serious violent crimes. However, the elderly made up about 21% of the population age 12 or older during this time period. The rate of property crime was also lower compared to younger persons.This report uses data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to provide detailed information on nonfatal violent victimization and property victimization against...

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Familicide: Risk Factors Characteristics of the Offender Characteristics of the Crime of Familicide and the Prevalence of Suicide Following Familicide

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Abstract

This study will be examining the risk factors to familicide, the characteristics of the offenders of familicide, the characteristics of the crime, and the prevalence of suicide following familicide. Of the literature reviewed it has been found that there are risk factors to familicide, there are known characteristics of the crime of familicide, and suicide is prevalent following familicide (Wilson et at., 1995; Brewer & Paulsen, 1999; Harper &Voigt, 2007). Findings are expected to suggest that there will be a higher poportion of cases in which the offender felt as though they were under immense stress due to the stresses and expectations of society, there will be a higher proportion of male offenders that commit suicide following familicide, that a larger proportion of familicide cases occurred in homes in which stepchildren did reside, and that indicate pre-existing drug and alcohol use is prevalent in the offenders of familicide. Familicide: Risk Factors, Characteristics of the Offender, Characteristics of the Crime of Familicide,

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A Comparison of Homicide Trends in Local Weed and Seed Sites Relative to Their Host Jurisdictions, 1996 to 2001

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Operation Weed and Seed is a cooperative strategy involving local community social organizations and local law enforcement, the United States Attorneys' Offices around the country and the Executive Office for Weed and Seed (EOWS) of the United States Department of Justice, in addition to a multitude of public and private stakeholders. The goal of Weed and Seed is to systematically reduce crime in targeted high crime communities through the coordinated efforts of enforcement, prevention, and neighborhood restoration. Unlike other crime suppression or prevention programs, however, the efforts of Weed and Seed are aimed at meeting this end through the strategic coordination of pre-existing efforts and the marshaling of established community resources that go beyond the traditional activities of justice-related agencies. In bringing together diverse community actors, the Weed and Seed strategy recognizes the need to first eliminate crime and criminals in an area (weeding) and to foster community and...

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Why Are Union Members Murdered in Colombia?

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A careful analysis of available rulings by Colombian judges shows substantial inaccuracies in public documentation of cases, and undermines Colombian government claims that trade unionists in Colombia are not killed for trade union activity. The following information is based off of the court documents for 22 cases heard by the three special ILO judges in 2007. (While there were 29 distinct cases for 2007, viewing each victim or group of victims as a single case, the Colombian government did not provide the court documents in 7 cases.)

When Leonidas Gomez, leader of the bank workers’ union, was murdered in March 2008, Maria Isabel Nieto, Vice Minister of Justice, suggested during a televised interview that it may have simply been a “crime of passion,” rather than targeted political violence. Representatives of the Colombian government make such statements frequently, casting doubt on the legitimacy of claims that trade union violence in Colombia is targeted, not random. Editorialists have picked up the “random violence theory,” insinuating that thee

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