FANTASY
The published research of the NCAVC over the past ten years has established that fantasy occurs well in advance of the crime in the cases of serial sex offenders, serial rapists, and serial sexual killers(i.e. [10],[11], & [12]). For most of society, fantasy is a means of escape or a means of entertainment. It is temporary and generally understood as unreal. For the violent serial sex offender, fantasy evolves into something compelling and complex until it becomes the central behavior of choice, rather than a brief, unrealized mental distraction.
Take for example Edward Wyatt, a convicted serial rapist from the central and western United States. At age 18, he was convicted of criminal trespassing for peeping through a neighbor's window. Several years later, he was convicted of the same offense. He was found to be carrying a buck knife at the time. Over the next several years, while married and starting a family, he moved a number of times and changed jobs with the same frequency. When he began his series of rapes, he used a
buck knife as a means of threatening and controlling his victims. He would enter their houses when they were alone. He would use the knife to threaten them, and then tie them up with duct tape. Once they were bound and blindfolded, he would force them to submit to vaginal, anal, and then oral intercourse, in that order. All the while, he would script them, saying repeatedly, "Tell me how good I am," or "Beg me to fuck you in the ass, whore!". When he kidnapped 17 year old Allison Shaw, to his own house, Edward Wyatt escalated to audio-taping and photographing the ordeal. It lasted several hours and took place in the living room in front of the Wyatt family Christmas tree. Allison was let go and later identified Wyatt as her assailant. During an interview while incarcerated for that crime, Edward Wyatt explained that he did not know if he would have eventually started killing his victims. In 1991, after serving 9( years, Edward Wyatt was granted parole. Fourteen months later, he was charged with burglary. After getting a search warrant, police discovered a ski mask, a video camera, and a stool in the trunk of his car. A subsequent search of his home revealed
videotapes of Edward committing other crimes such as masturbating over a ten-year old girl while she slept (Flynn, [7]).
This case demonstrates a clear escalation from fantasy to behavior. Note that the escalation of behavior keeps true to the flavor of the original fantasy. Edward Wyatt carried the knife with him from the beginning of his criminal career. The buck knife represented a wish, or fantasy, that was already present before the commission of the crimes, as the nature of his later crimes indicates. In the beginning, the knife was the link to an unrealized fantasy waiting in his mind for an opportunity. Later on, it was the means. It's consistent presence clearly suggests a deliberate escalation.
The crime itself is the fantasy planned and played out by the offender. The victim is subsequently cast and scripted. The victim is inserted into a role that the offender needs occupied for his fantasy to come true. The victim, then, is a reinforcing element. The victim serves as fortification to the fantasy. The escalation of fantasy and behavior requires constant reinforcement, and consequently a succession of victims. This kind of escalation has a great deal of momentum, and ultimately the
burgeoning fantasy is the behavior of acting out the escalated fantasy. The fantasy becomes the motive and establishes the offender's signature [5].
Tandem escalation of fantasy and behavior itself serves a number of complex ends for the offender. The most basic values of the escalable fantasy to he offender are 1) provision of control 2) disassociation from the victim/crime to support the superficial personality veneer & 3) provision for later reenactment and fantasy fueling. This is where in the fantasy the trained investigator finds motive.
CONTROL--The fantasy provides an offender with a means of controlling a situation. As long as he can keep the world he creates with the victim true to his fantasy, he is in control.. Levin & Fox, [6], put it this way: Domination unmitigated by guilt is a crucial element in serial crimes with a sexual theme. Not only does sadistic sex-- consensual or forcible --express the power of one person over
another, but in serial homicides, murder enhances the killers sense of control over his victims." The offenders engage in behavior that establishes that they are unquestionably in control.
One such way to establish control is a fantasy theme of extended periods of victim degradation and devaluation. With a live victim, offenders can use scripting (i.e.-- repeating severe epithets to the victim, or simply getting them say how powerful the offender is, etc..), sex (i.e.-- forcing the victim to engage in painful anal sex then immediately fellate the offender), and torture (i.e.-- biting and ripping away nipples, or pre-mortem cutting). Some offenders do not feel that they have control until the victim is dead, so they kill the victim relatively early on. Once the victim is dead and under control, they proceed to freely master the corpse by such means as postmortem mutilation (such as numerous curiosity incisions made throughout the body, or removal of an appendage), defeminization (which includes severe damage or removal to the sexual areas of a female), and ritual displaying of the corpse (leaving the body in a purposeful, humiliating position, unclothed, in a place where it
is certain to be discovered, perhaps by loved ones). In both cases, the behavior clearly establishes the offender's control over the victim. To the offender, the fantasy that is played out, which elicits fear and humiliation from the victim, establishes the dominance of the offender over the world he creates; the world of a victim in a crime scene.
[...]
DISASSOCIATION-- To successfully blend in with society, many violent serial sex offenders develop a thick superficial veneer of personality that is entirely disassociated from their violent criminal behavior.
Disassociation is not an aberrant human characteristic. It is something that we all do to some extent, like the careful superficial behavior many individuals exhibit with their co-workers vs. their emotional transparency with close family. Violent serial sex offenders merely carry a human self-protective behavior to an unhealthy extreme. Violent serial sex offenders are successful criminals. They are intelligent enough to avoid detection and persist in the repeated commission of their crimes. They live in our society with little or no leakage as to their true nature. Many are married or in a relationship. But it is disassociated. Fantasy enables the disassociation. The more intricate the fantasy, the more objectified the victim, the more distance that is mentally created between the violent
criminal behavior and the superficial veneer of personality. Mutilation of the victim and scripting of the victim that is dehumanizing also further the distance.
The true behavior of choice is successfully suppressed in social contexts by the offender's practiced superficiality. This may sound like indications of paraphilic fugue episodes or a second personality, but this is not the case. The behavior of the serial sex offender deliberately avoids detection, indicating that the offender knows full well that the behavior is not acceptable to society. The practiced superficiality of the violent serial offender in social contexts is deliberate, because it is practiced, and it does prevent leakage of the behavior of choice. Without that veneer of superficiality, provided for by the fantasy and the ritual, the violent serial offender would not be
able to live in society and avoid detection for prolonged periods. There must be a disassociation from the crimes while in a social context. [...]
REENACTMENT-- Each offense, each victim experience, is a part of the offender's collective fantasy. Both are, if only in part, relived before, during and after subsequent offenses. The behavioral aspect of the fantasy is cumulative in that respect.
Reenactment serves two very important purposes for offenders that investigators must not forget; 1) it feeds back into the fantasy which reinforces the behavior to escalate, and 2) it gives sexual pleasure.
Reenactment is largely a mental exercise for the offender, often physically facilitated by periods of ritually orchestrated masturbation with various victim related props. It reinforces the control aspect of itself, because the fantasy can be engaged at the whim of the offender. It is also in itself stimulating for the offender while being preparatory for future offenses.
Each of the violent serial sex offenders mentioned in this work provided for the later reenactment of their crimes in fantasy. Edward Wyatt progressed to the point where he photographed and audio-taped his deliberately scripted rape of Allison Shaw. He then videotaped his later offenses. Dayton Leroy Rogers kept some of his victims' clothing. He also committed his crimes in the same remote areas, so that with each progressive victim he could revisit the associative feelings elicited from previous victims; location type was an important part of his ritual. Jerry Brudos took photographs, and kept bags of his victim's clothes and shoes. Jerry also removed
body parts, particularly a victim's foot which he kept in the freezer in his garage and a breast from which he cast a paperweight.
To mentally and sexually re-experience the emotional flavor from past episodes of victim degradation and dehumanization is the purpose of reenactment. It is also the time when offenders plan and "rehearse" escalatory behaviors. Offenders of violent serial sex crimes behave in a way that provides for reenactment. Investigators may gain insight into the elements of the crime that are the most stimulating to the offender by examining those providing behaviors closely. I.E.--examine still photographs taken by the offender for a reoccurrent body position, props such as shoes, or point of
view.
It is not to be ignored that a great deal of fantasy behavior can be sexually motivated, because much of the fantasy behavior is sexual in nature. As will be discussed shortly, increased sexual arousal and offender satisfaction has been shown to be correlated with offender domination, victim resistance and victim degradation. The sexual stimulus of the behavior is intensified for the violent serial sex offender when coupled with those sadistic acts of brutality that elicit a fear/humiliation response from a victim.
The Impressions of a Man:
An Objective Forensic Guideline to Profiling
Violent Serial Sex Offenders
by
Brent E. Turvey
March, 1995