Homicide

A Forensic Psychology Casebook

Joan Swart, Lee Mellor, Joan Swart, Lee Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498731522
• eBook ISBN: 9781315352985
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Forensic psychology plays an increasingly important role in criminal investigations and legal decision-making. Homicide: A Forensic Psychology Casebook guides readers through the practical aspects of homicide cases across the entire criminal justice system, from the investigative process to the criminal trial process, and beyond. Each chapter contains a description and analysis of selected cases and offenders, and provides a crime narrative and offender narrative to illustrate the underlying theory and practical considerations of homicide investigations. Criminal justice students and practitioners alike will benefit from the comprehensive scope of this text.

In order to ensure fair and efficient criminal justice practices in the field of forensic investigation, there is still a need for conformity and standardization of sound protocols and approaches based on improved knowledge and education. This book is part of that effort to understand homicidal behavior and offenders better in order to prevent similar crimes.

1	Introduction Lee Mellor

Contents

Glossary of Notable Terms

References

Homicide, the killing of one person by another, encompasses murder and manslaughter, lawful slayings during wartime, executions, euthanasia, and justifiable homicide. To write exhaustively about homicide would, therefore, necessitate several lengthy volumes, with each chapter spread fecklessly thin like jam over too much toast. For this reason, in Homicide: A Forensic Psychology Casebook, we have focused chiefly on unlawful homicide, extending to cases in which the legality of the killing has been subject to much debate and scrutiny. Thus, you will find homicide perpetrators such as George Zimmerman—controversially acquitted of the 2012 manslaughter of Trayvon Martin—alongside the likes of serial murderer Paul Bernardo and rampage killer Elliot Rodger. Where certain types of homicides are better accounted for by sociological and historical analysis than forensic psychology, we have given salience to the more useful academic lens, which incorporates a multitude of theoretical and applied perspectives.

Understandably, there are a great many factors that influence, motivate, or facilitate homicide, including biological factors such as psychopathy (see Chapter 9), psychosis (see Chapter 10), being a child (see Chapter 12), and being intellectually disabled (see Chapter 13). At other times, the spatial and social relationship between killer and victims play the crucial factor, as in domestic (see Chapter 3), disgruntled (see Chapter 4), lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) (see Chapter 14), and racially motivated (see Chapter 5) homicides. In other instances, the murder or acts of violence associated with it actually serve to sexually gratify the offender. Here, sexually sadistic (see Chapter 8) and necrophilic (see Chapter 7) homicides have been discussed at some length.

The variations of homicide in this volume are not mutually exclusive, in fact, many homicides show dynamic motivational interplay. As the sociologists Katz (1988) and Athens (1997) remind us, even premeditated homicide must play out in a series of immediate visceral moments, with the perpetrator reacting and adapting to unanticipated factors—an unexpected knock on the door, powerful resistance on the part of the victim, or a jamming pistol. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder illustrates this wonderfully, as does Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a classic of nineteenth century Russian literature.

In Crime and Punishment, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, decides to murder and rob an elderly and wealthy pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna. Though he plans the offense meticulously, upon actually perpetrating the killing, Raskolnikov finds himself encountering numerous contingencies—both physical and psychological—that affect how he commits the crime. Ms Ivanovna seems^* more suspicious about answering her door than he assumed she would be. When she finally opens it a crack, Raskolnikov unintentionally reacts to her perceived caution by pulling the door forcefully toward him, almost causing her to fall into the street. Words tumble out of his mouth when he speaks to her, and when she asks him why he is so pale, he realizes that his nervousness is manifesting externally. After murdering Ms Ivanovna with an ax and looting her purse and cupboards, he returns to the room where her dead body lies, only to discover her half sister, Lizaveta, standing there aghast. Raskolnikov reacts by splitting Lizaveta’s head open with the ax, but the gravity of this unforeseen event causes him to lose his cool. Next, visitors pound on the locked door to the shop, and he overhears that they are suspicious and about to notify the authorities. Raskolnikov beats a hasty retreat although the double homicide continues to gnaw at him for the duration of the novel. Homicide, like most things in life, is best summarized by paraphrasing the Scottish poet Robert Burns “the best-laid schemes of mice and men go awry and leave us with nothing but grief and pain for promised joy.”

Generally, violence is conceptualized as being instrumental or reactive in nature, with instrumental violence being premeditated and goal oriented, and reactive—as the word itself implies—denoting impulsive violence, often driven by emotion and/or situational necessity (see Chapter 2). Some academics have assigned certain types of crimes to either the instrumental or reactive categories, with robbery or theft falling under instrumental and sex crimes under reactive. Unfortunately, this is both a misguided and simplistic approach. A rapist may stalk and prepare to attack a specific victim for days or months with the goal being to commit a sexual offense. In contrast, a robbery could hypothetically occur when a gambler in dire financial straits asks somebody who owes him money to pay him back, only to become unexpectedly enraged when the borrower laughingly replies, “you’re never getting that back.” In the heat of the moment, the gambler finds himself reacting by angrily and forcibly seizing the borrower’s wallet. Thus, rather than saying that a type of crime is intrinsically instrumental or reactive, it is more fruitful to assess specific crimes on an individual basis. In the case of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s murder of Alyona Ivanovna was instrumental, while his slaying of Lizaveta was reactive, as is often the case in double homicides. The killer must murder an incidental victim—another person who just happens to be there—to cover up the homicide of his intended victim.

Some of the keener psychologists and criminologists have therefore recognized the existence of instrumental/reactive and reactive/instrumental violent offenses—crimes that begin as instrumental but become reactive and vice versa. Mixed crimes can also incorporate numerous types of homicide from each chapter. David Parker Ray, for instance, was a psychopathic sexual sadist whose purported murders also fall into the cold cases category. Biological factors will, more often than not, take precedence in such instances. For example, a psychopathic domestic killer should be interviewed as one would interview a psychopath as this disorder constitutes the very core of his being.

All this to say that though the homicide types and associated phenomena such as paraphilia or the instrumental–reactive dichotomy are heavily couched in terminology, and the academic writing style has a clinical tone to it, the reader is urged to never let their understanding of homicides become too abstract. Ultimately, how something happened is just as important as why it happened, because one cannot fully understand one without the other. Having made this clarification, some idiosyncratic or reappearing terms have been listed below to offer the reader quick reference.

Glossary of Notable Terms

Adaptive functioning: An individual’s ability to manage the day-to-day demands of life independently.

Adjustment disorders: A group of physical and psychological symptoms that emerge in the wake of a stressful or traumatic experience, which the individual struggles to cope with.

Affective violence: A response to a perceived imminent threat preceded by high levels of autonomic (sympathetic) arousal of emotions such as anger and/or fear.

Anger excitation: A type of rape in which the “rapist is sexually stimulated and/or gratified by the victim’s response to the infliction of physical or emotional pain” (Hazelwood, 1995, p. 164).

Anthropophagy: More commonly known as cannibalism, is sexual arousal from the consumption of human flesh.

Antisocial behavior: Acts of aggression directed at others which may be covert or overt.

Antisocial personality disorder: A Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) Cluster B personality disorder characterized by a chronic impaired moral sense, history of disregarding or violating the rights of others, deception, and impulsivity.

Anxiety: Feelings of worry over events that have not yet happened, which can result in problems sleeping and concentrating, restlessness, physical tension, and nervous behavior.

Asperger syndrome: An autism spectrum disorder in which linguistic and cognitive development remains relatively unimpaired.

Asphyxiaphilia: Sexual arousal from the act of asphyxiating somebody, although this can also take the masochistic form of autoerotic asphyxiation (more details below).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Editors
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Section I Reactive and Belief-Oriented Offenders
• Section II Sexual Homicide Offenders
• Section III Personality and Mentally-Disordered Homicide Offenders
• Section IV Homicide Offenders in Special Populations
• Section V Epilogue: Investigative Considerations
• Index