PIQUERISM IN OVERKILL HOMICIDES

Abstract

Piquerism, the sexual gratification yielded from the infliction of cutting, stabbing, and slicing wounds, remains an underresearched sexual paraphilic disorder with consequences for understanding, identification, detection, case linkage, and offender treatment. To help remedy that research deficit, a detailed case analysis is presented of a series of ‘ripper’ homicides to demonstrate common crime scene indicators and characteristics of piquerism. A case in which victims displayed overkill injuries has been chosen owing to the difficulty, even for seasoned investigators, to identify piquerism when the crime scene immediately suggests anger rather than a sexual motivation. In so doing, the knowledge base regarding this rare paraphilic disorder is expanded and directions for future research are noted.

Introduction

Media dubbed ‘Ripper Murders’ are, with some degree of consistency, reported across the world, in the United Kingdom (Press Association 2010); Russia (Stewart 2018; Patient 2018; Glanfield and Stewart 2015); China (BBC News 2019; Logan 2016); the Caribbean (Byrne 2015); and the USA (Ross 2019; Drury 2019). The phrase ‘Ripper’, in the context of homicide, denotes those killings that involve a knife, or similar sharp instrument, and the infliction of numerous, excessive stabbing or slashing wounds to the victim by the perpetrator (Kaplan 2007). Whilst the media may attribute the phrase ‘Ripper’ to a homicide, or series of homicides, it is just that, a media attribute, a shorthand almost subliminal means of communicating those intrinsic details of a killing to a public with a base knowledge of what they believe such killings to involve. That collective knowledge, imagination, or recall of such intrinsic details stems from the universal recognition of the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ and those killings attributed to him in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888 (Kaplan 2007). Despite the prevalence of ripper killings in media reports, there is little presence in the academic literature, even less of the psychological, criminological, or forensic aspects of such homicides, particularly regarding any embedded sexual element to such homicides.

In existing research literature, the comparative to a ‘Ripper’ killing are those homicides which involve overkill. Whilst the term features in a number of studies investigating homicide, it remains somewhat loosely defined in part, at least, owing to the lack of empirical investigation of overkill behaviour in relation to sexual homicide (Chopin and Beauregard 2021).

However, the most common definition would seem to be that offered by Ressler et al. “the infliction of more injury than is necessary to kill a person” (1995, p. 55), yet as Trojan et al. (2019) note, such a definition allows for the relatively easy identification of extreme cases but less so in cases where the level of injury is not easy to identify as excessive. The difficulty is further compounded by the ambiguity regarding whether it is the number of wounds or their severity, or some combination of the two that should be taken into consideration (Trojan et al. 2019). However, whilst important to note, it is not necessary here to enter the foray of that ongoing discussion; the case analysed here involves attempted decapitation; partial disembowelment; and stab wounds sometimes in excess of 50 in any one instance, thus easily reaching the threshold for any academic definition of overkill.

The case that follows is that of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, a series of at least 13 homicides and 7 attempted homicides committed by an offender over 5 years in England between 1975 and 1980. The brutality of the crimes shocked the nation, as well as police but, pivotally, that brutality masked a piquerist signature; the failure to recognise that signature prevented investigators at the time from linking cases. Whilst most investigators will never encounter a sexual homicide (James and Beauregard 2018), those that encounter such a homicide, with overkill injuries, are likely to miss a piquerist signature hidden beneath the brutality inflicted on the victim (Woods 2006). In practical terms, misinterpreting the motivation for mutilating wounds may hinder efforts to identify perpetrators (Woods 2006, p. 113) as in the following case. Indeed, it is for those reasons that the case has been chosen, to demonstrate piquerism in homicide cases displaying overkill and the difficulty in identifying a piquerist signature in such cases.

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