Planned Compulsive Homicides

Compulsive murderers can be envisioned as falling on a hypothetical continuum. On one end are those who plan their crimes in exceptional detail and discharge their compulsion with such care that they often go undetected for long periods of time. On the other end are those individuals who also harbor an internal compulsion to kill but who act out in an unplanned, impulsive, spontaneous fashion, leaving a great deal of evidence at the crime scene; they are often apprehended after the first or second offense. In between these extremes, however, lie most compulsive offenders who exhibit a mixture of both planning and spontaneity in their criminal acts.

Despite the diverse clinical pictures of compulsive murderers—different MOs, different personalities, different types of victims, different crime-scene behaviors—Schlesinger (2000a), elaborating on Krafft-Ebing (1886), maintains that all these offenders have as part of their psychological makeup three interconnected components: sadism, fantasy, and a compulsion to kill (see Table 8.1). All three factors are present in each offender, but one element sometimes plays a dominant role. Thus, sadism is often pronounced in offenders who engage in torturous behavior, which masks both their inner drive to kill and their fantasies. In other cases, offenders’ detailed and graphic writings depicting disturbed fantasies become the distinguishing feature. And, in yet other cases, offenders may not engage in excessive amounts of overtly sadistic behavior, nor is there evidence of elaborate and intricate fantasy; however, they may reveal or demonstrate an overpowering compulsion to act. In most cases, however, none of the three components is particularly dominant.

Sadism

The term sadism was coined by Krafft-Ebing (1886) after the French writer Donatien Alphonse Franscois, Comte de Sade, commonly known as the Marquis de Sade (1740- 1814). De Sade graphically described individuals whose sexual gratification depended on the infliction of cruelty and pain. His works were labeled obscene and were generally banned until the 20th century. In fact, as a result of his beliefs, de Sade spent about a third of his life in prisons and institutions. Perhaps de Sade’s view is best stated in an excerpt from one of his most well-known works Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795).

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurses breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom Nature s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; [it is] absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. ... Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet all together corrupted: Therefore, it is a virtue, not a vice. ... The debility to which Nature condemned women incontestably proves that her

Table 8.1 Components of Sexual Homicide Noted by Krafft-Ebing

Component	Quotes from Krafft-Ebing (1886)
Sadism (a desire for complete control over victims)	“I performed the act... that she might feel the power I had over her”) (p. 76). “She should feel that she is completely in his power” (p. 76). “The object of desire is seen to be capable of absolute subjugation” (p. 68).
Fantasy	“He would imagine that he carried out the sexual act with them and then killed them” (p. 69). “Bloody thoughts were constantly present, and induced lustful excitement” (p. 72). “Simple imagining representations of blood and scenes of blood.... Without the assistance of this idea, no erection was possible” (p. 72).
Overpowering compulsion	“Then this impulse, with headaches and palpitations of the heart, became so powerful” (p. 70). “The impulse became constantly more powerful” (p. 74). “He could not resist his impulses” (p. 66). “Often he could scarcely overcome the impulse” (p. 71). “Amidst the greatest dangers and difficulties, he satisfied his impulse some fifteen times” (p. 70).

Source: From Schlesinger, L.B., Serial Offenders: Current Thought, Recent Findings, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2000, p. 10. With permission.

design is for man, who then more than ever enjoys his strength, to exercise it in all the violent forms that suit him best, by means of tortures, if he be so inclined, or worse.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary provides the common definition of sadism: “the infliction of pain as a means of obtaining sexual release.” Despite the fact that many people regard sadism as a fairly straightforward behavior, it has been hard to define, and its causes and connection to sexual arousal are even more elusive. Krafft-Ebing (1886) defined sadism as involving sexual arousal through an essential feature: “the mastery and possessing [of] an absolutely defenseless human object, ... the desire for ... complete subjugation of the woman” (p. 68). Thus, Krafft-Ebing’s view of sadism is somewhat different from the contemporary dictionary definition, which stresses the infliction of pain. Krafft-Ebing emphasized the total domination and subjugation of a victim—an act that itself becomes sexually arousing and eroticized.