Chapter 1 The Study of Murder Interpersonal violence spans a wide range of human behaviors of which murder represents one of the terminal disruptions in the equilibrium of a society. Sexual homicide, a crime of increasing concern in our society, is the killing of a person in the context of power, sexuality, and brutality. Such crimes often receive widespread publicity, and they create a great deal of fear because of their apparent random and motiveless nature. Particularly in cases of serial sexual homicide, law enforcement officials feel public pressure to apprehend the perpetrator as quickly as possible. Apprehension of the sexual murderer is one of law enforcement''s most difficult challenges. Because sexual killings often appear motiveless and random, they offer few clues about why the murder occurred or, consequently, about the identity of the murderer. Even the sexual nature of these murders is not always immediately obvious, for conventional evidence of a sexual crime may be absent from a crime scene. The Scope of the Problem The number of sexual homicides occurring in a given year is difficult to assess, partially because of the manner in which crimes are investigated.

In obvious cases of sexual assault and murder, the crime most often is reported as a homicide, not as a rape assault (Brownmiller 1975; MacDonald 1971). In other cases, conclusive evidence of sexual assault may be inadequate or lacking (Groth and Burgess 1977). Investigators may not recognize the underlying sexual dynamics of what appear to be either ordinary or motiveless murders (Cormier and Simons 1969; Revitch 1965). In addition, investigators often fail to share their findings, limiting the collective pool of knowledge on the subject (Ressler et al. 1980). The difficulty in determining the scope of the problem of sexual homicide is reflected in official reports on murder. The FBI''s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) publication, Crime in the United States, presents statistics for crimes committed in the United States within a given year. For example, a survey of the statistics in the UCR for all murders committed in the period 1976 through 1986 shows that the number of murders in the United States has fluctuated from 16,605 in 1976 to a peak of 21,860 in 1980, dropping to 20,613 in 1986 (Crime in the United States 1986).

The UCR also gives information about age, race, and sex of victims and offenders, about types of weapons used, and about situations in which killings took place. However, there is no differentiation in these official reports between homicides that included initially undetected sexual assault and those that did not. The dearth of incidence statistics for sexual homicide promotes other approaches to evaluating this crime''s magnitude. One of these approaches is to examine statistics for murders with unknown motives as indicators of the sexual homicide. Murder with unknown motive is one of five homicide categories for which the UCR annually provides data. These categories are as follows: 1. Felony murder (occurs during the commission of a felony). 2.

Suspected felony murder (elements of felony are present). 3. Argument-motivated murder (noncriminally motivated). 4. Other motives or circumstances (any known motivation that is not included in previous categories). 5. Unknown motives (motive fits into none of the above categories). Because sexual homicide so often appears random, motiveless, and with its sexual aspects obscured, some experts argue that many sexual homicides may be reported in the unknown motive category.

Figures for most categories of motives, except the unknown category, have remained relatively stable over the past decade. For example, felony-connected murders represented 17.7 percent of all murders in 1976, 17.2 percent in 1981, 18.0 percent in 1984, and 19.4 percent in 1986. The percentages for those murders placed in the "other" category are as follows: 1976, 18.6 percent; 1981, 17.

1 percent; 1984, 17.6 percent, and 1986, 18.6 percent. However, the number of murders committed for unknown motives has risen dramatically. These murders represented 8.5 percent of all murders in 1976, 17.8 percent in 1981, 22.1 percent in 1984, and 22.

5 percent in 1986. This trend is of particular interest in the study of sexual homicide. Opinion has varied on the importance of this problem. Sociologists Wolfgang and Ferracuti proposed that the vast majority of murders are committed for a specific reason and that "probably less than 5 percent of all known killings are premeditated, planned, and intentional" (1982, 189). On the other hand, in a 1969 article psychiatrists Cormier and Simons cite studies observing that dangerous sexual offenses are both rare phenomena and nonescalating in aggression; in contrast, their data suggest that sexual murderers may be more common than we wish to acknowledge and that they do in fact have progressively violent records. The rapid increase in the unknown motive category, while most categories have held relatively steady, is an indication that the Wolfgang and Ferracuti proposition, first noted in 1967, may no longer be valid. Reporting methods for the unknown motive category have remained constant since 1976 and thus do not account for the dramatic increase in motiveless murder. Although the incidence of sexual homicide may be difficult to ascertain, its effects are less unclear.

Many sexual homicides are difficult to solve precisely because of the lack of clues. Law enforcement investigators note that solution rates may be misleading and should be scrutinized closely, since some crimes reported as unsolved are, in fact, solved after the figures have been reported. It is the belief of both investigators and clinicians that the majority of serial murders are sexual in nature (Lunde 1976; Ressler et al. 1985; Revitch 1965). Veteran investigators say that sexual homicide is not a new phenomenon, although its apparent increase is. Public awareness of the problem has also increased, largely because of news media attention to these often bizarre, sensational crimes. People fear these crimes precisely because of the seemingly random nature of the murders. Studies of Murder Because of society''s view of murder as both abhorrent and pervasive, the many aspects of murder have been studied by various disciplines.

Law enforcement, the newcomer to the research arena, has added over the past decade its growing expertise in crime scene analysis. Studies of murder have offered different perspectives on this violent crime. Epidemiological studies report on demographic data concerning victims and perpetrators (Constantino et al. 1977) and patterns of homicide (Rushforth et al. 1977; Wolfgang 1958). All disciplines have tried to categorize murderers. They have been typed in terms of motive (Revitch 1965), intent (Kahn 1971), number of victims (Frazier 1974), and type of victim (Cormier and Simons 1969). However, the majority of studies do not specifically address sexual homicide but rather study murder without differentiating between sexual and nonsexual crimes (Perdue and Lester 1974).

Studies examining murder divide into the various disciplines focusing on the subject: (1) individual case reports by journalists, (2) studies of the psychological aspects of the individual who committed the murder, (3) studies investigating murder and murderers within a sociological context, (4) legal aspects of the crime, and (5) crime scene patterns. The Journalist''s Perspective The first category represents a mass communication mechanism for informing the public of crimes being committed. As such, the possible mechanisms include newspapers, magazines, and books. The writers are usually journalists, and on occasion they may have additional training like Joseph Wambaugh, formerly a police detective, who wrote The Onion Field, which depicts the murder of a police officer. The news of a murder in general and a sexual homicide in particular arouses strong emotion in the public. Newspaper headlines highlight the bizarre aspects ("Body-hack Case," "Vampire Killer''s Trial Begins"), the victim ("The Victim''s Last Hours"), the serial aspect ("Killer Strikes Again"), the outcome ("Next Stop: The Electric Chair") and the twenty-year anniversary ("July 14, 1966"). Detective magazines are another mechanism for communication and often contain the facts learned at trial or during a journalist''s investigation. In addition, journalists (Keyes 1976), as well as mental health professionals (Brussel 1968; Schreiber 1983), write books aimed at the general population.

The Psychological View The second category includes studies that examine the individual murderer in terms of psychiatric diagnoses, childhood antecedents to criminal behavior, and criminal behavior as the result of learned responses to particular stimuli. Also in this category are studies designed to determine techniques for treating incarcerated violent offenders. Study focus on the characteristics of individual murderers was evident as many as two hundred years ago. In the late eighteenth century, Swiss mystic Johann Kaspar Lavatar developed the art of physiognomy, whereby an individual''s facial features were held to reveal his or her character. At about the same time, Franz Josef Gall contended that phrenology, the study of the formation of an individual''s skull, could disclose both character and mental capacities. Physiognomy and phrenology were both used to study criminals, and death masks of murderers'' heads were examined in an attempt to explain crim.