Sexual homicide - A data collection from psychiatric records

After an analysis of the concerning literature we conceptualized a question naire with 124 items, which describes the most common characteristics of se xual murderers. The relevance of these characteristics was examinated on th e basis of psychiatric records. The hypothesis was, that persons who murder ed more than once show these characteristics more evidently than single mur derers. We compared 20 psychiatric records about single sexual murderers wi th those about 10 repetitive sexual murderers. Planned offenses, chronic is olation, narcism and tendency to perversity were found more often in person s that murdered more than once. Especially the psychosocial factors were fo und less often than in the angloamerican literature. More pronounced were t he differences between a group of sadistic murderers compared with nonsadis tic murderers, using criteria for sadism extracted from Kafft-Ebings first description (1892), Schorsch and Becker (1977), MacCulloch et al. (1983) an d Ressler et al. (1988). A case example illustrates the importance of an el aborated concept of sadism and its relation to personality disorder.