Hazelwood and Warren’s Impulsive Offender

Hazelwood and Warren (2000) draw a distinction between the “ritualistic offender” who carefully plans his criminal actions and the “impulsive offender” who is like the disorganized offender. The impulsive offender

invests little or no planning in his crimes. Instead, he acts impulsively, takes little or no measures to protect his identity, and is seemingly oblivious to the risk involved in committing crimes. Both informal and systematic assessment of his modus operandi... suggests a criminally unsophisticated reactive offender, (p. 270)

As an example of the impulsive offender, these authors report the case of a 24-year-old male who, while walking through a parking lot, spotted a 37-year-old woman loading groceries into her car. He walked over to her, struck her in the face with his fist, threw her into the rear seat, ripped off the clothes from the lower part of her body, and vaginally raped her. After knocking her unconscious, he left her in the rear seat and casually walked away. He was subsequently arrested and convicted of 18 similar impulsive, unplanned crimes.

Hazelwood and Warren find the impulsive offender’s fantasies, sadism, and inner compulsion to kill to be undifferentiated. Such an offender is generally unaware of the fantasies underlying his actions. And if he does describe fantasies, they are typically simplistic and concrete, usually involving simple victim characteristics and demographics.

Impulsive offenders do not seek out a particular type of victim; any victim will do. If this type of offender has a pornography collection, it usually lacks a specific theme; his fantasies are as undifferentiated as the pornography he reads. Postmortem paraphiliac behavior is often absent because such acting out is chiefly fantasy-driven and the impulsive offender lacks the differentiated fantasies that might direct such conduct. They often impulsively victimize their spouses and, occasionally, prostitutes because these women are easily accessible. Their actions are so spontaneous that they may attack a stranger while they are committing another crime simply because the victim is around. They rarely preselect victims through stalking or voyeurism.

These crimes often involve a great deal of physical cruelty, as displayed in the cases of Vacher, Pomeroy, and Sutcliffe; such cruelty is distinct from intricate forms of sadism. Because they lack criminal sophistication, impulsive offenders resort to immediate violence (usually excessive and brutal) in order to control the victim. Also, such offenders often have diverse arrest records involving multiple offenses with no specific theme. They almost always travel short distances to offend, and because of their unsophisticated spontaneity, the men usually make little effort to elude law enforcement. James and Proulx (2016) found nonserial sexual murderers are “impulsive and extremely violent, and use sexual murder to diminish their internal tension” (p. 200). Recent empirical research (Koeppel et al., 2019; Park, Schlesinger, Pinizzotto, and Davis, 2008) supports these clinical findings that singlevictim offenders display as much brutality in their offenses as the serial offenders.