Archives o f Sexual Behavior, Vol. 5, No. 5, 1976
Sexual Homicide: Social, Psychological, and Legal Aspects 1 Victoria Lynn Swigert,Ph.D., 2 Ronald A. Farrell, Ph.D., 3
and William C. Yoels, Ph.D. 3
INTRODUCTION Interest in the sexually related homicide is reflected at all levels of society. Popular sentiment, scientific exploration, and judicial process all demonstrate a high level of concern over the phenomenon. Following such slayings, a reign of terror within the population, fueled by mass media descriptions of the heinousness of the offense, has become a predictable pattern. The scientific literature on the sexually sadistic murderer has explored the psychology, personal development, and the modus operandi of such offenders (e.g., see Jesse, 1924; Morris and Blom-Cooper, 1964; Pearson, 1924; TraiN, 1960; Wilson, 1969). Finally, legal battles over the seriousness of homicides that resulted from rape or sexual assault have produced the felony murder, a charge that relaxes the traditional requirement of proof of intent in a conviction of first-degree murder .4 In spite of the extensive interest in the subject of sexual homicide, little sociological examination of the issue has been conducted. Therefore, the present work explores the social as well as the psychological and judicial aspects of the phenomenon. Of particular interest are the offenders' social characteristics and psychological profiles, the circumstances surrounding their offenses, and the legal processing and final disposition of their cases by the courts.
1This article was presented at the meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research, held at Stony Brook, New York, September 1975. 2Department of Sociology, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. 3Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York. 4Unlike all other homicidal situations, where intent determines the final charges awarded by the court, the felony murder requires only that it be established that the defendant did in fact rape or attempt to rape the victim who, as a result of such an attack, died. 391 © 1 9 7 6 P l e n u m P u b l i s h i n g C o r p o r a t i o n , 2 2 7 West 1 7 t h S t r e e t , N e w Y o r k , N . Y . 1 0 0 1 1 . NO p a r t o f t h i s publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, o r otherwise, without written permission of t h e p u b l i s h e r .
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THE DATA The records maintained by a diagnostic and evaluation clinic attached to the court in a large urban jurisdiction in the northeastern United States served as the primary data source. While most of their long-term efforts have involved the evaluation of sex offenders, 5 in 1955 the clinic established a routine policy of examining cases of criminal homicide. Consequently, all persons arrested for murder in this jurisdiction are seen at the clinic, where an exhaustive study is done of their psychological condition and social background. Beginning within 24 hr after arrest and continuing over a period of several weeks, the staff conducts psychiatric and medical examinations, administers various psychological inventories, and compiles information oia the personal and legal histories of the defendants. This information, along with the reports and transcripts of the present offense, aids the clinic in its evaluation of the case. If the findings indicate that the defendant is insane, the clinic notifies the court and proceedings are initiated for his commitment to a psychiatric facility. Otherwise, the information is summarized and forwarded to the presiding judge for use in sentencing in the event that the defendant is found guilty. As part of a larger study, information was collected on 444 homicide cases seen in conjunction with this clinic, a 50% sample covering the 19-year period from 1955 through 1973 inclusive. From this sample, an effort was made to identify those cases that qualified as sexual homicides. The criteria for establishhag membership in this category were based on the police and clinic descriptions of the circumstances surrounding the offense. All persons charged with murder involving a sexual encounter with the victim were selected for analysis. Of the total sample, only five cases qualified as sexual homicides. There were two instances of consensual sex between defendant and victim, one homosexual and the other heterosexual; two cases of sexual sadism, again involving one homosexual and one heterosexual encounter; and one instance of homosexual pedophilia. 6
ANALYSIS While the number of cases is small, the wealth of material obtained on each provides knowledge of the individual careers of the offenders and insight into the societal response to their crimes. Excerpts from transcripts of clinical evaluations, as well as descriptions of the legal processing of the defendant, are therefore utilized in a case study approach to the phenomenon. Following a 5The clinic has evaluated every sex offender processed in this jurisdiction since 1937, with the exception of cases of fornication and bastardy. 6In the case of homosexual pedophilia, given the age of the victim, consensuality, while informally present, had no legal meaning in judicial processing.
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brief presentation o f these cases, the major ffmdings are summarized and discussed in terms o f their sociological implications.
THE CONSENSUAL HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP The first case is o f a 25-year-old married Black male arrested for the murder o f an older White male. The defendant and victim h a d k n o w n each other for some time prior to the offense, and had been secretly maintaining a homosexual relationship. In exchange for sexual favors, the defendant was able to earn periodic sums o f m o n e y for the support o f his family. On the day o f the offense, the defendant called on the victim to obtain m o n e y to help finance his departure from the area. Following sexual relations, he explained that he was leaving and that he would not return. An argument ensued that culminated in the stabbing death o f the victim. In the defendant's own words: I told him I had to go away. He asked me when I would be back. I told him I probably wouldn't be. Then he said, "You can't leave me, because I love you." I says, "Listen man, what had gone on between you and I was a thing that's going on every day. I came to you for money and this was only one way for me to earn it. To tell you the truth, to enjoy it, I didn't. So as far as I'm concerned, I'll forget you and you forget me. All I want now is my money." Then he said, "Wait a minute." He left the bedroom area. He came back. He had one hand behind his back. Then he says, "Honey, I love you, and before I lose you, I'll tell your family about you loving me." I says, "You old fool, you're crazy!" Then he says, "I'll show you who's crazy. I'll - - " That's when he came around with the knife, and I grabbed his arm. The knife fell and we tussled for it. I got the knife and pushed him aside and I stabbed him in his left side. He fell . . . . Clinic evaluations suggested that the defendant had a longstanding history o f "impulsivity and authority conflicts," adjustment problems resulting in running away from home, expulsion f r o m school, mental hospitalization, and att e m p t e d suicide. Arrest records indicated that, in addition to a number o f moral offenses, adultery, bastardy, and loitering, he had also been held for auto larceny and rape. No convictions for these offenses had been obtained. At the time o f the present offense, the defendant was diagnosed as emotionally unstable, but without psychiatric disease and o f normal intelligence. Psychiatric intervention into the dispositon o f the case was therefore not recommended. Persons accused o f homicide in this jurisdiction are arrested on general charges o f murder. The degree o f the offense is determined at the time o f the trial. Bail, therefore, is not precluded b y any legal definition o f offense severity. Rather, negotiations concerning the strength o f the prosecution's case, as well as informal appraisals o f the seriousness o f the crime, are utilized to determine bail eligibility. While the defendant in the present case was denied bail, a denial which has been shown to affect negatively final disposition in cases o f criminal
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homicide (Swigert and Farrell, 1976), he was able to secure two very important legal resources toward the defense of his case, a private attorney and trial by jury. In spite of these advantages, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. THE CONSENSUAL HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
The second instance of a consensual sexual relationship ending in murder involved a 31-year-old married Black male accused of slaying a 19-year-old Black female with whom he had worked in a tavern, she as a waitress and he as a bouncer. At the time of the offense, they had been drinking in various taverns from early evening until nearly 5:30 a.m.; both were quite intoxicated. The victim then took the defendant to a location behind her house for the purpose of having sexual intercourse. When she interrupted coitus and demar/ded payment, he became irate and, during a partial amnesiac state thought to have been caused by the intense anger and intoxication, strangled her to death with her skirt. In the defendant's own words: "She told me that I couldn't finish unless I gave her five dollars; and that is all I can recall. I looked up and she was laying there." Here again, the development of the defendant was described as quite abnormal. The father, a convicted offender, abandoned the family, and the defendant was subsequently placed in a series of foster homes. In early adolescence he began to manifest continual asocial rebelliousness, behavior resulting in commitment to a series of juvenile institutions, the workhouse, and, eventually, the penitentiary. Adult offenses included several arrests for robbery and one for causing a riot. In spite of this background, the defendant was diagnosed as being without psychiatric disease; testing indicated average intelligence with a high school education, and the clinic recommendation to the court suggested that no special treatment be accorded him. Concerning the legal disposition of the case, the defendant had access to none of the resources advantageous to a successful defense. An attorney was appointed by the court, bond was denied, and he was encouraged to enter a plea of guilt before the bench. The resultant conviction was for second-degree murder and the sentence was 10-20 years. THE HOMOSEXUAL SADISTIC HOMICIDE
By far the most spectacular homicides are those involving sexual sadism. The first such case involves a 24-year-old White male defendant who, during a
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homosexual encounter, took the life of a 35-year-old White male. Clinic and police accounts of the event indicated that the defendant had readWertham's The Show of Violence (1949) several years previous to the crime, and had become obsessed with one of the murders. Residing out of state, he bought a bus ticket to the city in which the crime was committed, for the express purpose of reenacting Wertham's description of the homicide. Having arrived at his destination, he purchased an ice pick and returned to the bus station to select a victim. He was shortly solicited by a homosexual, who took him to his apartment. Following sexual relations, the defendant plunged the ice pick into the skull of the victim, and beat him with a plaster statuette. He then ransacked the room to make it appear that the victim had been killed in the course of a robbery.Jr was 3 years later, while serving time for another offense, that he confessed to the murder. The problematic background which seems to characterize these cases is exemplified in the history of this defendant. His father was mentally ill and died of syphilis; his mother was said to have been a prostitute whom the defendant barely knew. He was placed in an orphanage at birth and later in a foster home where he made a poor adjustment. The foster father died, and the foster mother was described as "neurotic and domineering." He also had problems in school and, following the eighth grade, quit and joined the Navy. An attempt at suicide in the service won him a discharge as a schizophrenic. A subsequent series of minor property crimes resulted in convictions, further attempts at suicide, and mental hospital observations. He married twice and both marriages failed. The first divorce was a consequence of an attempted murder of his wife for money on their honeymoon, while his decrease in interest in a second'wife's involvement in witchcraft led to the latter separation. While the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale indicated average intelligence, the clinic diagnosis described the defendant as one who had never attained psychological maturity, as a psychopathic egocentric personality. When faced with reality problems, he behaved as a 4- or 5-year-old child would do, in temper tantrums. It was also stated that the defendant showed an extreme degree of feminine identification and homosexual inclination, but had never consciously accepted his homosexuality. Thus "after engaging in homosexual relations he would manifest self-hate and feelings of destructiveness and violence, which he occasionally projected to his homosexual partners." While there was general agreement that the defendant was mentally ill, it was nevertheless concluded that, according to M'Naghten guidelines, he was not insane at the time of the offense. Once again, access to legal resources was denied. An appointed attorney, denial of bond, and a plea of guilt resulted in a conviction of first-degree murder for which the defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment.
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The second case of sexual sadistic homicide involves a 21-year-old White male accused of slaying and disfiguring a 19-year-old White female. The defendant had served in the Vietnam War and, according to the newsPaper account, was described by the sentencing judge as "a boy who returned home no longer cheerful, but withdrawn and cold, unable to sleep because of the nightmares of that holocaust." On the night of the offense, the defendant had gone for a walk with the victim, and, after they had stopped briefly for a cup of coffee, she invited him up to her apartment. According to the defendant's statement to the police, they were "making out" when "next thing I knew it was all over, she was dead so I got scared and started wiping prints off the place." Police photographs and descriptions of the body suggested that the victim's death had been brutal, with indications of prolonged strangulation and several cigarette burns on her breasts. The social history showed that the defendant's father had abandoned the family when the defendant was 2 years old. Following several failures, he quit school after the ninth grade to enter the service. While in the Marines, he was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a native female of Okinawa. Later, he made an unsuccessful sexual attack on his girlfriend. Based on psychiatric examination, the defendant was thought to be of average intelligence with a personality that included both neurotic and passiveaggressive elements. Since he was not considered to be psychotic, psychiatric intervention was not recommended. While he was able to retain a private attorney, bond was denied and a plea of guilt before the judge resulted in a conviction of second-degree murder and a sentence of 10-20 years in prison.
HOMOSEXUAL PEDOPHILIA
The final case concerns the murder of an 11-year-old Black male by a 51-year-old White assailant. The defendant, described in the newspaper as a "convicted sex deviate" and "drifter," had been staying at a Salvation Army shelter until the night of the slaying. Having been seen with the victim before the incident, he was alleged to have been engaging in homosexual relations with the boy over a period of several weeks. On the night of the offense, the victim had gone on an errand for his mother and had apparently encountered the defendant. Following sexual relations, the defendant became frightened that the boy might tell his parents and the police and, for that reason, killed him. It was not until weeks later that the police found the badly decomposed body
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along a rugged hillside near the boy's home. The coroner's report stated that the cause of death was strangulation and that the boy had been sexually assaulted. The social service report described the defendant's father as "a heavy drinker who, after the death of his wife, deserted the family and died as a hobo." He was then raised by an unwelcoming grandmother who subsequently placed him in an orphanage where he developed epilepsy. The prior record revealed several convictions for sodomy, corrupting the morals of a minor, and sexual assault on a female child, charges for which he spent a considerable amount of time in prison. Testing indicated borderline intelligence, and the psychiatric diagnosis was that of sociopathic personality with a longstanding deviation of pedophilia. The clinic recommendation to the court suggested that the defendant was and would continue to be a sexual danger to the community. Should he be found guilty, maintained the clinic, "he should be permanently removed from society, either by execution or life sentence." The defendant was found guilty. It was a procedure that saw no award of bail, court assignment of attorney, and waiver of trial by jury. The final charge was first-degree murder, and the sentence was life imprisonment.
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION The social, psychological, and legal characteristics of the sexual homicide have revealed a number of patterns that are of theoretical interest. A summary of these findings precedes a discussion of their implications for an understanding of the sexually motivated murder in society. The social characteristics of this behavior indicate that Whites and males predominate both as offenders and as victims. All of the defendants and three out of five of the victims were male, while Whites comprised three out of five of both groups. The defendants also came from the lower social classes, with most having less than a high school education and working in unskilled occupations. Arrest histories indicated that all of those accused of such slayings had prior criminal contact with the law. The types of offenses for which they were held were distributed nearly equally in property, violent, and public disorder crime categories. Concerning the social and demographic relationships existing between offenders and victims, it was found that in four of the five cases the defendant and victim were either marginally known or unknown to one another. There was, however, a noticeable intrasexual pattern, with three of the defendants accused of slaying homosexual partners. The circumstances of the offenses indicate that the most frequent site for the sexual homicide was the residence of the victim. All but one of the cases occurred in this setting. The methods employed to produce death were strangulation and knifings.
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Following the commission of the offenses, the defendants underwent clinical evaluation. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that in each case it was indicated that the development of the defendant was problematic. Broken homes and truant and delinquent behavior were said to characterize the backgrounds of all defendants. While some psychiatric disorder was found to be present in three of the defendants, none was diagnosed as insane at the time of the offense. In addition, all but one of those evaluated were found to be of average intelligence. Finally, the judicial processing of the defendants revealed a number of remarkable patterns. None of the accused was granted bail, only two were able to retain a private attorney, and four out of five waived their right to trial by jury. The convictions awarded in each case were severe. Three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder while the remaining two were adjudged guilty of murder in the second degree. The most significant finding that has emerged from this study concerns the small number of sexual homicides that actually occur. This 50% sample of all murders cleared by arrest over a 19-year period included only five instances of sexually related death. Furthermore, only two of these cases involved sexual sadism, and one the death of a child. Yet it is the sexual homicide, particularly the latter kind, that arouses concern and fear within the population. 7 One explanation of the public reaction may be found in the very fact that the sexual homicide is so rare. This becomes reflected, for example, in the newsworthiness of the event. The clinic maintains all newspaper accounts of each case handled by its staff. In this jurisdiction, homicides which resulted from altercations among friends, relatives, and acquaintances comprised nearly 80% of all criminal deaths. Yet these homicides received minimal newspaper attention, with accounts often confined to single-column descriptions. Those cases which deviated from the normal pattern, on the other hand, received extensive frontpage coverage of the details of the offense, the personal history of the offender and victim, as welt as several days and weeks of follow-up reporting on the progress of the case. Such instances of interpretation and reinterpretation of the offender and his offense may reflect the larger community's effort to order the events leading to the crime. Given a behavior with little precedent in criminality, the lives of the accused and their personalities and psyches are probed and made public in an attempt to render the offender and his motives more comprehensible, and thus more predictable. This may also be the case in the practice of exploring a defendant's developmental history in the search for causes of present behavior. 7A recent study of crime news reported in selected British newspapers indicated that while the public's conception of crime rates was found to be quite close to the actual frequency of most crimes, there was a tendency to exaggerate the problems of sexual crimes, to rate t/~.em "as being particularly serious and particularly frequent" (Roshier, 1973: 28-40).
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A determination that the accused'schildhood was traumatic somehow makes the offense a predictable outcome of prior experiences (see Schur, 1971: 52-56). Of the defendants studied in this work, all were said to have had problems of adjustment during early life. In very general terms, predictability in criminal behavior is assured by the popular conception (see Quinney, 1975: 30-40). The resultant images of criminality, in terms of the characteristics typically associated with the offender and behavior in a normal crime (see Sudnow, 1965), provide an informal risk calculus of potential danger. The data concerning the sexual homicides, however, reveal several patterns that distinguish these cases from the more general instance of homicide. These patterns, because of their deviation from what is normally true, may elicit the more extreme societal reactions. Literally all previous research dealing with homicide defendants has pointed to the predominance of younger, low SES, and Black males with prior offense records. 8 While similar in all other respects, Black domination among sexual homicide defendants is not evident. Of the five defendants, three were White. These included both cases of sexual sadism and the case of homosexual pedophilia. More significantly, the circumstances surrounding offenses reveal crucial differences. The majority of homicides occur among relatives and friends. 8 Of the sexual homicides discussed here, however, four occurred among acquaintances and strangers and only one involved the death of a friend. An even more clear distinction between offense types is found in the obvious differences in underlying motives. Two-thirds of the general sample were involved in deaths that resulted from arguments of relatively trivial origin (Swigert and Farrell, 1976). Disputes over debts, bets, liquor consumption, and accusations of infidelity, for example, contributed disproportionately to the motives underlying the offenses. The homicides studied in the present article as sexually motivated, on the other hand, constitute only slightly more than 1% of the motives encountered in the total sample. The typical homicide, then, is one that is committed by a lower-class Black male in the course of a trivial argument with a friend, neighbor, or relative. Such a pattern establishes predictability for this behavior. The violation of this pattern, because of its threat to predictability, may produce a public reaction commensurate with that threat. In addition to the amount of media space accorded the sex homicide defendant, the legal processing of the offender seems to reflect the differences which emerged between these cases and the more general instance of homicide. All five cases resulted in conviction. Three of the defendants were found guilty ~See Bensing and Sehroeder (1960), DePorte and Pa1khurst (1935), Porkorny (1965), Schmid (1926), Swigert and FarreU (1976), Voss and Hepburn (1968), and Wolfgang (1958).
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o f first-degree murder and were awarded life sentences, while the remaining two received second-degree murder convictions and 10-20 years of imprisonment. By comparison, the modal conviction for the more general sample was voluntary manslaughter, and the average minimum sentence was 5 years (Swigert and Farrell, 1976). As with media treatment of sexual homicide, an explanation o f the legal processing of the offender may be found in the need to make sense out of such aberrant behavior. Functionalist theorists, for example, suggest that given a social system where the range of possible human behavior is infinite, behavioral boundaries become established through the punitive treatment of the deviator. The nonconformist, then, stands at the margins of socially acceptable behavior to demarcate for all other members o f the group the acceptable limits which will be tolerated. Works by Durkheim (1938), Mead (1918), Erikson (1966), and Dentler and Erikson (1959) point repeatedly to the functions o f the nonconformer for the maintenance of behavioral conformity and sohdarity in society. In the case o f homicide, the sex murderer seems to serve precisely this function. The amount of publicity associated with the details o f the offense and offender, the denial of legal resources for the successful defense of the case, and the punitiveness o f the legal sanction imposed all reflect a system need to react swiftly and severely to that behavior which lies beyond tolerable social limits. The slaying o f an individual who is either marginally known or unknown to the assailant, for reasons that are sexually motivated, 9 so violates the predictability of human interaction as to require the kind o f treatment that sets this behavior apart from all other behaviors. While the functionalist perspective on social deviance is concerned with the boundaries that exist between conforming and nonconforming behavior, this research suggests that within criminality itself there exists a range of possibilities that is carefully regulated by social and legal reaction. Those offenses which deviate from the acceptable range are singled out for the most severe treatment in order that they may serve as boundary maintainers, defining, within criminality itself, the tolerated limits o f behavior.
9It is of some significance that the case of sexual homicide involves an act which, in addition to murder, violates other traditional taboos in Western society -- taboos concerning illicit sexual relations. The commission of such acts places the offender in conflict with cultural themes that pervade the major institutional arrangements characterizing Western life -- church, family, and the law in particular. Thus media and legal reactions to persons whose sexual deviations led them to commit the ultimate violation of Western moralit y - murder-- may reflect a social need to assert the continued necessity for the strict regulation of sexual conduct.
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REFERENCES Bensing, R. C., and Schroeder, O., Jr. (1960). Homicide in an Urban Community, Charles C Thomas, Springfield, IlL Dentler, R. A., and Erikson, K. T. (1959). The functions of deviance in groups. Soc. Probl. 7(2): 98-102, DePorte, J. V., and Parkhurst, E. (1935). Homicides in New York state: A statistical study of the victims and criminals in thirty-seven counties in 1921-1930. Hum. Biol. 7: 47-73. Durkheim, E. (1938). The Rules o f Sociological Method, trans. S. A. Salovay and J. H. Mueller, ed. by G. E. G. Catlin, Free Press, New York. Erikson, K. T. (1966). Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology o f Deviance, Wiley, New York. Jesse, F. T. (1924), Murder and lts Motives, Heinemann, London. Mead, G. H. (1918). The psychology of punitivejustice. Am. J. Sociol. 23: 586-592. Morris, T, and Biota-Cooper, L. (1964). A Calender o f Murder, Joseph, London. Pearson, E. L. (1924). Studies in Murder, Garden City Publishing, New York. Porkorny, A. D. (1965). A comparison of homicides in two cities. Z Crim. Law Criminol. Police ScL 56(4):419-487. Quinney, R. (1975). Criminology: Analysis and Critique o f Crime in America, Little, Brown, Boston Roshier, B. (1973). The selection of crime news by the press. In Cohen, S., and Young, J. (eds.), The Manufacture o f News: A Reader, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, Calif. Schmid, C. F. (1926). A study of homicides in Seattle, 1914-1924. Soc. Forces 4: 745-756. Schur, E. M. (1971). Labeling Deviant Behavior, Harper and Row, New York. Sudnow, D. (1965). Normal crimes: Sociological features of the penal code in a public defender office. Soc. Probl. 12: 255-276. Swigert, V. L., and FarreU, R. A. (1976). Murder, Inequality and the Law: Differential Treatment in the Legal Process, D.C. Health, Lexington, Massachusetts. Traini, R. (1960). Murder for Sex and Cases o f Manslaughter Under the New Act, Kimber, London. Voss, H. L., and Hepburn, J. R. (1968). Patterns of criminal homicide in Chicago. 9". Crim. Law, Criminol. Police Sci. 59(4): 499-508. Wertham, F. (1949). The Show o f Violence, Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Wilson, C. (1969). A Casebook o f Murder, Cowles, New York. Wolfgang, M. E. (1958). Patterns in Criminal Homicide, University of Pennsyivania Press, Philadelphia.
Sexual Homicide: Social, Psychological, and Legal Aspects 1 Victoria Lynn Swigert,Ph.D., 2 Ronald A. Farrell, Ph.D., 3
and William C. Yoels, Ph.D. 3
INTRODUCTION Interest in the sexually related homicide is reflected at all levels of society. Popular sentiment, scientific exploration, and judicial process all demonstrate a high level of concern over the phenomenon. Following such slayings, a reign of terror within the population, fueled by mass media descriptions of the heinousness of the offense, has become a predictable pattern. The scientific literature on the sexually sadistic murderer has explored the psychology, personal development, and the modus operandi of such offenders (e.g., see Jesse, 1924; Morris and Blom-Cooper, 1964; Pearson, 1924; TraiN, 1960; Wilson, 1969). Finally, legal battles over the seriousness of homicides that resulted from rape or sexual assault have produced the felony murder, a charge that relaxes the traditional requirement of proof of intent in a conviction of first-degree murder .4 In spite of the extensive interest in the subject of sexual homicide, little sociological examination of the issue has been conducted. Therefore, the present work explores the social as well as the psychological and judicial aspects of the phenomenon. Of particular interest are the offenders' social characteristics and psychological profiles, the circumstances surrounding their offenses, and the legal processing and final disposition of their cases by the courts.
1This article was presented at the meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research, held at Stony Brook, New York, September 1975. 2Department of Sociology, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. 3Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York. 4Unlike all other homicidal situations, where intent determines the final charges awarded by the court, the felony murder requires only that it be established that the defendant did in fact rape or attempt to rape the victim who, as a result of such an attack, died. 391 © 1 9 7 6 P l e n u m P u b l i s h i n g C o r p o r a t i o n , 2 2 7 West 1 7 t h S t r e e t , N e w Y o r k , N . Y . 1 0 0 1 1 . NO p a r t o f t h i s publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, o r otherwise, without written permission of t h e p u b l i s h e r .
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THE DATA The records maintained by a diagnostic and evaluation clinic attached to the court in a large urban jurisdiction in the northeastern United States served as the primary data source. While most of their long-term efforts have involved the evaluation of sex offenders, 5 in 1955 the clinic established a routine policy of examining cases of criminal homicide. Consequently, all persons arrested for murder in this jurisdiction are seen at the clinic, where an exhaustive study is done of their psychological condition and social background. Beginning within 24 hr after arrest and continuing over a period of several weeks, the staff conducts psychiatric and medical examinations, administers various psychological inventories, and compiles information oia the personal and legal histories of the defendants. This information, along with the reports and transcripts of the present offense, aids the clinic in its evaluation of the case. If the findings indicate that the defendant is insane, the clinic notifies the court and proceedings are initiated for his commitment to a psychiatric facility. Otherwise, the information is summarized and forwarded to the presiding judge for use in sentencing in the event that the defendant is found guilty. As part of a larger study, information was collected on 444 homicide cases seen in conjunction with this clinic, a 50% sample covering the 19-year period from 1955 through 1973 inclusive. From this sample, an effort was made to identify those cases that qualified as sexual homicides. The criteria for establishhag membership in this category were based on the police and clinic descriptions of the circumstances surrounding the offense. All persons charged with murder involving a sexual encounter with the victim were selected for analysis. Of the total sample, only five cases qualified as sexual homicides. There were two instances of consensual sex between defendant and victim, one homosexual and the other heterosexual; two cases of sexual sadism, again involving one homosexual and one heterosexual encounter; and one instance of homosexual pedophilia. 6
ANALYSIS While the number of cases is small, the wealth of material obtained on each provides knowledge of the individual careers of the offenders and insight into the societal response to their crimes. Excerpts from transcripts of clinical evaluations, as well as descriptions of the legal processing of the defendant, are therefore utilized in a case study approach to the phenomenon. Following a 5The clinic has evaluated every sex offender processed in this jurisdiction since 1937, with the exception of cases of fornication and bastardy. 6In the case of homosexual pedophilia, given the age of the victim, consensuality, while informally present, had no legal meaning in judicial processing.
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brief presentation o f these cases, the major ffmdings are summarized and discussed in terms o f their sociological implications.
THE CONSENSUAL HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP The first case is o f a 25-year-old married Black male arrested for the murder o f an older White male. The defendant and victim h a d k n o w n each other for some time prior to the offense, and had been secretly maintaining a homosexual relationship. In exchange for sexual favors, the defendant was able to earn periodic sums o f m o n e y for the support o f his family. On the day o f the offense, the defendant called on the victim to obtain m o n e y to help finance his departure from the area. Following sexual relations, he explained that he was leaving and that he would not return. An argument ensued that culminated in the stabbing death o f the victim. In the defendant's own words: I told him I had to go away. He asked me when I would be back. I told him I probably wouldn't be. Then he said, "You can't leave me, because I love you." I says, "Listen man, what had gone on between you and I was a thing that's going on every day. I came to you for money and this was only one way for me to earn it. To tell you the truth, to enjoy it, I didn't. So as far as I'm concerned, I'll forget you and you forget me. All I want now is my money." Then he said, "Wait a minute." He left the bedroom area. He came back. He had one hand behind his back. Then he says, "Honey, I love you, and before I lose you, I'll tell your family about you loving me." I says, "You old fool, you're crazy!" Then he says, "I'll show you who's crazy. I'll - - " That's when he came around with the knife, and I grabbed his arm. The knife fell and we tussled for it. I got the knife and pushed him aside and I stabbed him in his left side. He fell . . . . Clinic evaluations suggested that the defendant had a longstanding history o f "impulsivity and authority conflicts," adjustment problems resulting in running away from home, expulsion f r o m school, mental hospitalization, and att e m p t e d suicide. Arrest records indicated that, in addition to a number o f moral offenses, adultery, bastardy, and loitering, he had also been held for auto larceny and rape. No convictions for these offenses had been obtained. At the time o f the present offense, the defendant was diagnosed as emotionally unstable, but without psychiatric disease and o f normal intelligence. Psychiatric intervention into the dispositon o f the case was therefore not recommended. Persons accused o f homicide in this jurisdiction are arrested on general charges o f murder. The degree o f the offense is determined at the time o f the trial. Bail, therefore, is not precluded b y any legal definition o f offense severity. Rather, negotiations concerning the strength o f the prosecution's case, as well as informal appraisals o f the seriousness o f the crime, are utilized to determine bail eligibility. While the defendant in the present case was denied bail, a denial which has been shown to affect negatively final disposition in cases o f criminal
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homicide (Swigert and Farrell, 1976), he was able to secure two very important legal resources toward the defense of his case, a private attorney and trial by jury. In spite of these advantages, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. THE CONSENSUAL HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
The second instance of a consensual sexual relationship ending in murder involved a 31-year-old married Black male accused of slaying a 19-year-old Black female with whom he had worked in a tavern, she as a waitress and he as a bouncer. At the time of the offense, they had been drinking in various taverns from early evening until nearly 5:30 a.m.; both were quite intoxicated. The victim then took the defendant to a location behind her house for the purpose of having sexual intercourse. When she interrupted coitus and demar/ded payment, he became irate and, during a partial amnesiac state thought to have been caused by the intense anger and intoxication, strangled her to death with her skirt. In the defendant's own words: "She told me that I couldn't finish unless I gave her five dollars; and that is all I can recall. I looked up and she was laying there." Here again, the development of the defendant was described as quite abnormal. The father, a convicted offender, abandoned the family, and the defendant was subsequently placed in a series of foster homes. In early adolescence he began to manifest continual asocial rebelliousness, behavior resulting in commitment to a series of juvenile institutions, the workhouse, and, eventually, the penitentiary. Adult offenses included several arrests for robbery and one for causing a riot. In spite of this background, the defendant was diagnosed as being without psychiatric disease; testing indicated average intelligence with a high school education, and the clinic recommendation to the court suggested that no special treatment be accorded him. Concerning the legal disposition of the case, the defendant had access to none of the resources advantageous to a successful defense. An attorney was appointed by the court, bond was denied, and he was encouraged to enter a plea of guilt before the bench. The resultant conviction was for second-degree murder and the sentence was 10-20 years. THE HOMOSEXUAL SADISTIC HOMICIDE
By far the most spectacular homicides are those involving sexual sadism. The first such case involves a 24-year-old White male defendant who, during a
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homosexual encounter, took the life of a 35-year-old White male. Clinic and police accounts of the event indicated that the defendant had readWertham's The Show of Violence (1949) several years previous to the crime, and had become obsessed with one of the murders. Residing out of state, he bought a bus ticket to the city in which the crime was committed, for the express purpose of reenacting Wertham's description of the homicide. Having arrived at his destination, he purchased an ice pick and returned to the bus station to select a victim. He was shortly solicited by a homosexual, who took him to his apartment. Following sexual relations, the defendant plunged the ice pick into the skull of the victim, and beat him with a plaster statuette. He then ransacked the room to make it appear that the victim had been killed in the course of a robbery.Jr was 3 years later, while serving time for another offense, that he confessed to the murder. The problematic background which seems to characterize these cases is exemplified in the history of this defendant. His father was mentally ill and died of syphilis; his mother was said to have been a prostitute whom the defendant barely knew. He was placed in an orphanage at birth and later in a foster home where he made a poor adjustment. The foster father died, and the foster mother was described as "neurotic and domineering." He also had problems in school and, following the eighth grade, quit and joined the Navy. An attempt at suicide in the service won him a discharge as a schizophrenic. A subsequent series of minor property crimes resulted in convictions, further attempts at suicide, and mental hospital observations. He married twice and both marriages failed. The first divorce was a consequence of an attempted murder of his wife for money on their honeymoon, while his decrease in interest in a second'wife's involvement in witchcraft led to the latter separation. While the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale indicated average intelligence, the clinic diagnosis described the defendant as one who had never attained psychological maturity, as a psychopathic egocentric personality. When faced with reality problems, he behaved as a 4- or 5-year-old child would do, in temper tantrums. It was also stated that the defendant showed an extreme degree of feminine identification and homosexual inclination, but had never consciously accepted his homosexuality. Thus "after engaging in homosexual relations he would manifest self-hate and feelings of destructiveness and violence, which he occasionally projected to his homosexual partners." While there was general agreement that the defendant was mentally ill, it was nevertheless concluded that, according to M'Naghten guidelines, he was not insane at the time of the offense. Once again, access to legal resources was denied. An appointed attorney, denial of bond, and a plea of guilt resulted in a conviction of first-degree murder for which the defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment.
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The second case of sexual sadistic homicide involves a 21-year-old White male accused of slaying and disfiguring a 19-year-old White female. The defendant had served in the Vietnam War and, according to the newsPaper account, was described by the sentencing judge as "a boy who returned home no longer cheerful, but withdrawn and cold, unable to sleep because of the nightmares of that holocaust." On the night of the offense, the defendant had gone for a walk with the victim, and, after they had stopped briefly for a cup of coffee, she invited him up to her apartment. According to the defendant's statement to the police, they were "making out" when "next thing I knew it was all over, she was dead so I got scared and started wiping prints off the place." Police photographs and descriptions of the body suggested that the victim's death had been brutal, with indications of prolonged strangulation and several cigarette burns on her breasts. The social history showed that the defendant's father had abandoned the family when the defendant was 2 years old. Following several failures, he quit school after the ninth grade to enter the service. While in the Marines, he was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a native female of Okinawa. Later, he made an unsuccessful sexual attack on his girlfriend. Based on psychiatric examination, the defendant was thought to be of average intelligence with a personality that included both neurotic and passiveaggressive elements. Since he was not considered to be psychotic, psychiatric intervention was not recommended. While he was able to retain a private attorney, bond was denied and a plea of guilt before the judge resulted in a conviction of second-degree murder and a sentence of 10-20 years in prison.
HOMOSEXUAL PEDOPHILIA
The final case concerns the murder of an 11-year-old Black male by a 51-year-old White assailant. The defendant, described in the newspaper as a "convicted sex deviate" and "drifter," had been staying at a Salvation Army shelter until the night of the slaying. Having been seen with the victim before the incident, he was alleged to have been engaging in homosexual relations with the boy over a period of several weeks. On the night of the offense, the victim had gone on an errand for his mother and had apparently encountered the defendant. Following sexual relations, the defendant became frightened that the boy might tell his parents and the police and, for that reason, killed him. It was not until weeks later that the police found the badly decomposed body
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along a rugged hillside near the boy's home. The coroner's report stated that the cause of death was strangulation and that the boy had been sexually assaulted. The social service report described the defendant's father as "a heavy drinker who, after the death of his wife, deserted the family and died as a hobo." He was then raised by an unwelcoming grandmother who subsequently placed him in an orphanage where he developed epilepsy. The prior record revealed several convictions for sodomy, corrupting the morals of a minor, and sexual assault on a female child, charges for which he spent a considerable amount of time in prison. Testing indicated borderline intelligence, and the psychiatric diagnosis was that of sociopathic personality with a longstanding deviation of pedophilia. The clinic recommendation to the court suggested that the defendant was and would continue to be a sexual danger to the community. Should he be found guilty, maintained the clinic, "he should be permanently removed from society, either by execution or life sentence." The defendant was found guilty. It was a procedure that saw no award of bail, court assignment of attorney, and waiver of trial by jury. The final charge was first-degree murder, and the sentence was life imprisonment.
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION The social, psychological, and legal characteristics of the sexual homicide have revealed a number of patterns that are of theoretical interest. A summary of these findings precedes a discussion of their implications for an understanding of the sexually motivated murder in society. The social characteristics of this behavior indicate that Whites and males predominate both as offenders and as victims. All of the defendants and three out of five of the victims were male, while Whites comprised three out of five of both groups. The defendants also came from the lower social classes, with most having less than a high school education and working in unskilled occupations. Arrest histories indicated that all of those accused of such slayings had prior criminal contact with the law. The types of offenses for which they were held were distributed nearly equally in property, violent, and public disorder crime categories. Concerning the social and demographic relationships existing between offenders and victims, it was found that in four of the five cases the defendant and victim were either marginally known or unknown to one another. There was, however, a noticeable intrasexual pattern, with three of the defendants accused of slaying homosexual partners. The circumstances of the offenses indicate that the most frequent site for the sexual homicide was the residence of the victim. All but one of the cases occurred in this setting. The methods employed to produce death were strangulation and knifings.
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Following the commission of the offenses, the defendants underwent clinical evaluation. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that in each case it was indicated that the development of the defendant was problematic. Broken homes and truant and delinquent behavior were said to characterize the backgrounds of all defendants. While some psychiatric disorder was found to be present in three of the defendants, none was diagnosed as insane at the time of the offense. In addition, all but one of those evaluated were found to be of average intelligence. Finally, the judicial processing of the defendants revealed a number of remarkable patterns. None of the accused was granted bail, only two were able to retain a private attorney, and four out of five waived their right to trial by jury. The convictions awarded in each case were severe. Three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder while the remaining two were adjudged guilty of murder in the second degree. The most significant finding that has emerged from this study concerns the small number of sexual homicides that actually occur. This 50% sample of all murders cleared by arrest over a 19-year period included only five instances of sexually related death. Furthermore, only two of these cases involved sexual sadism, and one the death of a child. Yet it is the sexual homicide, particularly the latter kind, that arouses concern and fear within the population. 7 One explanation of the public reaction may be found in the very fact that the sexual homicide is so rare. This becomes reflected, for example, in the newsworthiness of the event. The clinic maintains all newspaper accounts of each case handled by its staff. In this jurisdiction, homicides which resulted from altercations among friends, relatives, and acquaintances comprised nearly 80% of all criminal deaths. Yet these homicides received minimal newspaper attention, with accounts often confined to single-column descriptions. Those cases which deviated from the normal pattern, on the other hand, received extensive frontpage coverage of the details of the offense, the personal history of the offender and victim, as welt as several days and weeks of follow-up reporting on the progress of the case. Such instances of interpretation and reinterpretation of the offender and his offense may reflect the larger community's effort to order the events leading to the crime. Given a behavior with little precedent in criminality, the lives of the accused and their personalities and psyches are probed and made public in an attempt to render the offender and his motives more comprehensible, and thus more predictable. This may also be the case in the practice of exploring a defendant's developmental history in the search for causes of present behavior. 7A recent study of crime news reported in selected British newspapers indicated that while the public's conception of crime rates was found to be quite close to the actual frequency of most crimes, there was a tendency to exaggerate the problems of sexual crimes, to rate t/~.em "as being particularly serious and particularly frequent" (Roshier, 1973: 28-40).
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A determination that the accused'schildhood was traumatic somehow makes the offense a predictable outcome of prior experiences (see Schur, 1971: 52-56). Of the defendants studied in this work, all were said to have had problems of adjustment during early life. In very general terms, predictability in criminal behavior is assured by the popular conception (see Quinney, 1975: 30-40). The resultant images of criminality, in terms of the characteristics typically associated with the offender and behavior in a normal crime (see Sudnow, 1965), provide an informal risk calculus of potential danger. The data concerning the sexual homicides, however, reveal several patterns that distinguish these cases from the more general instance of homicide. These patterns, because of their deviation from what is normally true, may elicit the more extreme societal reactions. Literally all previous research dealing with homicide defendants has pointed to the predominance of younger, low SES, and Black males with prior offense records. 8 While similar in all other respects, Black domination among sexual homicide defendants is not evident. Of the five defendants, three were White. These included both cases of sexual sadism and the case of homosexual pedophilia. More significantly, the circumstances surrounding offenses reveal crucial differences. The majority of homicides occur among relatives and friends. 8 Of the sexual homicides discussed here, however, four occurred among acquaintances and strangers and only one involved the death of a friend. An even more clear distinction between offense types is found in the obvious differences in underlying motives. Two-thirds of the general sample were involved in deaths that resulted from arguments of relatively trivial origin (Swigert and Farrell, 1976). Disputes over debts, bets, liquor consumption, and accusations of infidelity, for example, contributed disproportionately to the motives underlying the offenses. The homicides studied in the present article as sexually motivated, on the other hand, constitute only slightly more than 1% of the motives encountered in the total sample. The typical homicide, then, is one that is committed by a lower-class Black male in the course of a trivial argument with a friend, neighbor, or relative. Such a pattern establishes predictability for this behavior. The violation of this pattern, because of its threat to predictability, may produce a public reaction commensurate with that threat. In addition to the amount of media space accorded the sex homicide defendant, the legal processing of the offender seems to reflect the differences which emerged between these cases and the more general instance of homicide. All five cases resulted in conviction. Three of the defendants were found guilty ~See Bensing and Sehroeder (1960), DePorte and Pa1khurst (1935), Porkorny (1965), Schmid (1926), Swigert and FarreU (1976), Voss and Hepburn (1968), and Wolfgang (1958).
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o f first-degree murder and were awarded life sentences, while the remaining two received second-degree murder convictions and 10-20 years of imprisonment. By comparison, the modal conviction for the more general sample was voluntary manslaughter, and the average minimum sentence was 5 years (Swigert and Farrell, 1976). As with media treatment of sexual homicide, an explanation o f the legal processing of the offender may be found in the need to make sense out of such aberrant behavior. Functionalist theorists, for example, suggest that given a social system where the range of possible human behavior is infinite, behavioral boundaries become established through the punitive treatment of the deviator. The nonconformist, then, stands at the margins of socially acceptable behavior to demarcate for all other members o f the group the acceptable limits which will be tolerated. Works by Durkheim (1938), Mead (1918), Erikson (1966), and Dentler and Erikson (1959) point repeatedly to the functions o f the nonconformer for the maintenance of behavioral conformity and sohdarity in society. In the case o f homicide, the sex murderer seems to serve precisely this function. The amount of publicity associated with the details o f the offense and offender, the denial of legal resources for the successful defense of the case, and the punitiveness o f the legal sanction imposed all reflect a system need to react swiftly and severely to that behavior which lies beyond tolerable social limits. The slaying o f an individual who is either marginally known or unknown to the assailant, for reasons that are sexually motivated, 9 so violates the predictability of human interaction as to require the kind o f treatment that sets this behavior apart from all other behaviors. While the functionalist perspective on social deviance is concerned with the boundaries that exist between conforming and nonconforming behavior, this research suggests that within criminality itself there exists a range of possibilities that is carefully regulated by social and legal reaction. Those offenses which deviate from the acceptable range are singled out for the most severe treatment in order that they may serve as boundary maintainers, defining, within criminality itself, the tolerated limits o f behavior.
9It is of some significance that the case of sexual homicide involves an act which, in addition to murder, violates other traditional taboos in Western society -- taboos concerning illicit sexual relations. The commission of such acts places the offender in conflict with cultural themes that pervade the major institutional arrangements characterizing Western life -- church, family, and the law in particular. Thus media and legal reactions to persons whose sexual deviations led them to commit the ultimate violation of Western moralit y - murder-- may reflect a social need to assert the continued necessity for the strict regulation of sexual conduct.
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REFERENCES Bensing, R. C., and Schroeder, O., Jr. (1960). Homicide in an Urban Community, Charles C Thomas, Springfield, IlL Dentler, R. A., and Erikson, K. T. (1959). The functions of deviance in groups. Soc. Probl. 7(2): 98-102, DePorte, J. V., and Parkhurst, E. (1935). Homicides in New York state: A statistical study of the victims and criminals in thirty-seven counties in 1921-1930. Hum. Biol. 7: 47-73. Durkheim, E. (1938). The Rules o f Sociological Method, trans. S. A. Salovay and J. H. Mueller, ed. by G. E. G. Catlin, Free Press, New York. Erikson, K. T. (1966). Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology o f Deviance, Wiley, New York. Jesse, F. T. (1924), Murder and lts Motives, Heinemann, London. Mead, G. H. (1918). The psychology of punitivejustice. Am. J. Sociol. 23: 586-592. Morris, T, and Biota-Cooper, L. (1964). A Calender o f Murder, Joseph, London. Pearson, E. L. (1924). Studies in Murder, Garden City Publishing, New York. Porkorny, A. D. (1965). A comparison of homicides in two cities. Z Crim. Law Criminol. Police ScL 56(4):419-487. Quinney, R. (1975). Criminology: Analysis and Critique o f Crime in America, Little, Brown, Boston Roshier, B. (1973). The selection of crime news by the press. In Cohen, S., and Young, J. (eds.), The Manufacture o f News: A Reader, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, Calif. Schmid, C. F. (1926). A study of homicides in Seattle, 1914-1924. Soc. Forces 4: 745-756. Schur, E. M. (1971). Labeling Deviant Behavior, Harper and Row, New York. Sudnow, D. (1965). Normal crimes: Sociological features of the penal code in a public defender office. Soc. Probl. 12: 255-276. Swigert, V. L., and FarreU, R. A. (1976). Murder, Inequality and the Law: Differential Treatment in the Legal Process, D.C. Health, Lexington, Massachusetts. Traini, R. (1960). Murder for Sex and Cases o f Manslaughter Under the New Act, Kimber, London. Voss, H. L., and Hepburn, J. R. (1968). Patterns of criminal homicide in Chicago. 9". Crim. Law, Criminol. Police Sci. 59(4): 499-508. Wertham, F. (1949). The Show o f Violence, Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Wilson, C. (1969). A Casebook o f Murder, Cowles, New York. Wolfgang, M. E. (1958). Patterns in Criminal Homicide, University of Pennsyivania Press, Philadelphia.
