Introduction
It has been over 15 years since Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides was published. A lot has happened in the past decade and a half in the areas of research, theory, and clinical practice, which has made a second edition a necessity. Over the years, I have been encouraged by many colleagues to write a second edition. I resisted, based mainly on time constraints, but there reached a point where I just sat down and did it. The second edition is now up to date with best practices, new clinical case analyses, recent empirical research, and the latest thinking in the field, including my own.
So many people have asked me how I got started in this rather unique sub-specialty. Here’s how: during graduate school, I had planned on a career in professional psychology with an emphasis on evaluating and treating children and adolescents. After a 2-year traineeship at a state hospital, I was ready to begin my clinical internship at the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute in Princeton. Due to an administrative snafu, however, I was unable to go there and had to choose another site. The director of training recommended I consider the Menlo Park Diagnostic Center, the state’s forensic facility. I was not exactly sure what forensic psychology was since there were hardly any forensic psychologists in 1974. But I had to go somewhere, so I decided to give it a try. I certainly did not realize that the administrative foul-up that resulted in my placement at the Diagnostic Center would so profoundly change my life and professional career.
While at the center I met Eugene Revitch, one of the country’s leading forensic psychiatrists, who not only provided exceptional training in assessment but allowed me to participate in sodium amytal interviews, hypnoanalytic sessions, evaluations in state prison, and consultations with law enforcement officers, as well as to observe court testimony. I became so interested in forensic psychology that I signed up for the second half of my internship at Trenton State Prison. My fellow interns all thought I was out of my mind for pursuing forensic psychology as a specialty since the opportunities back then seemed so limited. In the mid-1970s, in order for psychologists to get involved in a forensic case, they had to be invited by a psychiatrist and their role was usually limited to psychological testing. I never dreamed that 20 years later the professional status of psychologists would change so dramatically and that we would have such a major impact on legal decision making.
Dr. Revitch and I became close friends, and over the years, we collaborated on many forensic cases and several books. In 1981, we coauthored Psychopathology of Homicide; in 1983, we coedited Sexual Dynamics of Antisocial Behavior; and in 1989, we wrote Sex Murder and Sex Aggression. Although Dr. Revitch (who died in 1996) had no direct involvement in writing the original volume or this second edition, his influence is present on almost every page.
The second edition of Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides is the culmination of my 45+ years of experience with, and thinking about, sexually motivated homicide. Sexual murders are generally of two types—catathymic and compulsive.
Catathymic homicides are caused by a breakthrough of underlying sexual conflicts. They can be unplanned, explosive (acute) attacks or planned murders, stemming from a chronic obsession with, or disturbed attachment to, the victim. In compulsive homicides, a fusion of sex and aggression results in a powerful internal drive which pushes the offender to seek out victims to kill—and the killing itself is sexually gratifying. These murders also may be planned or unplanned. In compulsive homicides that are unplanned, the urge breaks through and disrupts the offender’s controls when a victim of opportunity crosses his path. The compulsive offender who plans his crimes often eludes law enforcement, and as a result, he can have multiple (serial) victims over extended periods of time. Both forms of sexual murder—the catathymic and the compulsive—are presented in this volume, primarily from a clinical-descriptive perspective, encompassing case studies with analysis.
Sexual murder is a low base rate crime, and, as a result, it has been exceptionally difficult to research empirically. Most of our knowledge about sexual murder, over the past century, has come from the clinical case analysis. There have, however, been recent advances in empirical research, including findings from the joint research project (where I am a co-principal investigator) between John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. Our team has published many important studies on topics such as necrophilia and foreign object insertions in sexual homicide, ritual and signature and temporal patterns in serial sexual homicide, and papers in related areas such as mass murder, crime scene staging in homicide, and undoing (symbolic reversal) at homicide crime scenes. All of this research, as well as research of others, are included in the second edition, along with many new clinical case studies used to illustrate various points.
Chapter 1 covers the many problems encountered in studying sexual murder. Homicide and sexual homicide cannot be understood in isolation. Just as physicians who want to specialize in cancer cannot limit their education to oncology but must first study general medicine, professionals who want to understand sexual murder cannot limit their study to this one criminal behavior. Sexual murder must be understood within the general context of criminal behavior, crime theory, and crime and homicide classification. Accordingly, this chapter, as with other chapters throughout the book, presents sexual murder within the context of nonsexual homicide and crime.
Chapter 2 covers forensic assessment, with a focus on the evaluation of the sexual murderer. Here, distinctions are drawn between the clinical and the forensic approach to the assessment of criminal defendants. Various aspects of the forensic evaluation, including psychological testing, narcoanalysis, hypnosis, and neurodiagnostic assessment, are reviewed, and several complicating factors in the assessment of offenders are discussed, as well as new research on various types of crime scene behaviors that forensic practitioners need to become familiar with. Theories of crime and various systems of classification of homicide are covered in Chapter 3, along with a detailed presentation of Dr. Revitch’s and my method of classifying antisocial behavior along a spectrum of motivational dynamics. Throughout this chapter, distinctions are drawn between killings (mostly of women) that are not sexually motivated and killings that are sexually motivated. Finally, the place of sexual murder in the overall classification of crime and homicide is explained.
Chapters 4 through 6 present catathymic homicides. The discussion of catathymia from a historical perspective includes a detailed review of Hans W. Maier’s papers, which were published in the early years of the 20th century, and a description of the seminal work of Fredric Wertham. Acute (unplanned) catathymic homicides and the more protracted or chronic catathymic process, which involves a planned murder and an obsession with the future victim, are differentiated and illustrated with many case examples.
The compulsive murderer is the focus of Chapters 7 through 9. Following a presentation of compulsive homicides in historical context, the compulsive murderer who plans his crimes is contrasted with the compulsive murderer whose killings are unplanned. Their different psychological makeups and crime scene patterns are among the topics covered. Finally, Chapter 10 considers prediction, disposition, and possibilities for preventing sexual murder.
The cases reported in this book have been adjudicated and are a matter of public record. Nevertheless, the identifiers—but not the underlying facts—have been altered to add a measure of confidentiality. At times throughout the book, some discussions may seem to stray from the central topic of sexual murder. I hope that the reader will bear with me because I strongly believe that a full understanding of the psychopathology of nonsex- ual homicide is necessary in order to fully understand sexual homicide. Some details that at first may seem unrelated to the topic (for example, the discussion in Chapter 1 of lunar cycles and homicide) will become clear in later chapters (Chapter 7 in this case) as these various elements are eventually tied together.
My central aim throughout this book is to enlarge the reader’s view of sexual murder and to modify some preconceived ideas. If, after finishing this book, readers have broadened and varied their understanding of sexual homicide, my effort will have been successful.
Louis B. Schlesinger, PhD Maplewood, New Jersey
In the intercourse of the sexes, the active or aggressive role belongs to man.... This aggressive character, however, under pathological conditions, may likewise be excessively developed, and express itself in an impulse to subdue absolutely the object of desire, even to destroy or kill it.
Krafft-Ebing Psychopathia Sexualis
The history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct; but nothing has been done towards explaining the connection, apart from laying emphasis on the aggressive factor in the libido. According to some authorities this aggressive element of the sexual instinct is in reality a relic of cannibalistic desires—that is, it is a contribution derived from the apparatus for obtaining mastery, which is concerned with the satisfaction of the other and, ontogenetically, the older of the great instinctual needs. It has been maintained that every pain contains in itself the possibility of a feeling of pleasure. All that needs to be said is that no satisfactory explanation of this perversion has been put forward and that it seems possible that a number of mental impulses are combined in it to produce a single resultant.
Freud
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Anyone who has once experienced this power, this unlimited control over the body, blood, and spirit of a man like himself, a fellow creature, his brother in Christ—anyone who has experienced this power to inflict supreme humiliation upon another being, created like himself in the image of God, is bound to be ruled by emotions. Tyranny is a habit; it grows upon us and, in the long run, turns into a disease. I say that the most decent man in the world can, through habit, become as brutish and coarse as a wild beast. Blood and power intoxicate, callousness and vice develop; the most abnormal things become first acceptable, then sweet to the mind and heart. The human being, the member of society, is drowned forever in the tyrant, and it is practically impossible for him to regain human dignity, repentance, and regeneration. One such instance—the realization that such arbitrary power can be exercised—can infect all society; such power is seductive.
Dostoyevsky The House of the Dead
