NCJ Number
221920
Journal
Journal of Interpersonal Violence Volume: 18 Issue: 5 Dated: May 2003 Pages: 490-512
Date Published
May 2003
Length
23 pages
Annotation
Building upon Salfati's (2000) study of the co-occurrences of offenders' behaviors at homicide crime scenes, the current study involved a more indepth investigation of the patterns of co-occurrences of homicide crime-scene behaviors, with attention to differences related to the meaning of the victim to the offender and how the offender exhibited impulsivity.
Abstract
The frequencies of behaviors at the homicide crime scenes studied show a pattern of moving from high-frequency impulsive behaviors to low-frequency behaviors. The high-frequency impulsive behaviors were related to offender actions in killing the victim. The low-frequency behaviors, on the other hand, had less to do with killing the victim and more to do with offenders' actions related to controlling the crime event to distance themselves from the victim. The distribution of the frequencies of offender behaviors at the homicide crime scenes show that homicide is most often an impulsive act committed at a time of stress when the consequences of one's actions are not considered. The majority of the behaviors reflect an impulsive or reactive dimension; whereas, the less frequent behavior show more organization and planning. The latter homicides are more psychopathic, in that the offender's actions are neither impulsive nor reactive in the context of an interpersonal conflict with the victim. So that the results of the current study can build on previous research, the data used were the same as those used for Salfati's study. These data consisted of 247 single offender-single victim solved homicide cases in Great Britain that occurred from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Data were collected from various British police forces around the country, as well as from the Crown Prosecution Service. Thirty-six crime-scene behaviors were selected for the analysis. 4 tables, 8 figures, and 23 references