Body Disposal Patterns of Sexual Murderers: Implications for Offender Profiling

Abstract

Offender profiling postulates that crime scene behavior should predict certain offender characteristics. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between offender characteristics, situational factors, and body disposal patterns. Sequential logistic regression analysis on a sample of 85 sexual murderers shows that those who were in a relationship at the time of the crime and who present organized psychological characteristics are more likely to move the victim's body after the homicide. However, when the victim is older and a conflict with the offender occurred prior to the crime, the body is more likely to be left at the crime scene. Implications for offender profiling are discussed in light of the results.

A Descriptive Study of Sexual Homicide in Canada

“…Davies and Dale (1995) studied stranger rapists and suggested that travelling longer distances to commit an offense may be indicative of forensic awareness. Beauregard and Field (2008) identified a precaution (i.e., moving a victim's body post murder) that may be undertaken to delay apprehension but may also be considered an indicator of investigative and forensic awareness. Moving the body complicates the investigation by International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 57(12) decontextualizing the crime, potentially decreasing the likelihood that the victim will be found or if found, identified.…”

Cleaning up your act: Forensic awareness as a detection avoidance strategy

“…Davies and Dale (1995) examined stranger rapists and suggested that an offender travelling longer distances to commit a crime may be an indicator of forensic awareness. Moreover, in their study of sexual murderers, Beauregard and Field (2008) suggested that offenders who moved the victim's body after the murder to delay detection and therefore make apprehension difficult showed a higher degree of forensic awareness.…”

An application of CRAVED to the choice of victim in sexual homicide: a routine activity approach

“…Such a factor is not important when the victim is a child as they are typically considerably smaller than the offender. For instance, Beauregard and Field (2008) found that young victims are more readily transportable from the crime scene to the disposal sites and are easier to hide because they are smaller and easier to control. This illustrates the importance of the inertia of target as proposed in the routine activity theory (Felson 2002) or the removable component of CRAVED.…”

“…Perhaps more interesting is the fact that sexual murderers of children were more likely to establish contact with the victim prior to the crime, to commit the crime during the day, to use strangulation to kill the victim, and to dismember and hide the victim's body, as compared to sexual murderers of adults. According to (see also Beauregard and Field 2008), most of the differences observed between sexual murderers of children and adults could be explained through a routine activity perspective (see Cohen and Felson 1979).…”