rape offender profiles

[Kelley]

I found the on the web when Ken and I were putting together the pulp
culture theory pages.  I cut and pasted portions for a debate we were
having at pulp-c at the time but I neglected to save the URL.  In any
event, I'm sending it along to accompany the rape piece that's in the news
because it is an analysis of the "rape offender"  that many investigators
use when investigating sex crimes.  It's clearly founded on a
psychoanalytic theory and presents a sharply different answer to the
question "why rape?"  than that offered by Thornhill and Palmer.  since
it's come up again, at pulp, i'm resending for the new subscribers.


                                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