ABSTRACT
Diversity in the types of offences included in the broad category of sexual murder demands attention in research seeking to understand this form of offending. Further, such an understanding should be situated within the wider context of sexual aggression, especially the factors leading to fatal and non-fatal outcomes. Categorizing sexual murder into three subtypes—sexualized murder, grievance murder, and rape murder—can be useful for understanding the different ways in which sex can be functionally related to killing. Recognition of the differences in these diverse types of sexual murders is important for designing innovative research, as well as for forensic-clinical case formulation. We suggest that sexualized murderers are “true” sexual murderers, in that their offence corresponds to the image evoked by the term “sexual murder”, and are the cases that are more likely to represent a unique type of offender in the wider context of sexual aggression. One way to identify sexualized murder for research purposes is to consider behaviours indicative of a direct association between sexual arousal and killing, such as post-mortem sexual interference. Using this proxy, we have been working towards a more nuanced understanding of sexual murder. Within this chapter, we summarize findings from our research with a large sample of adult male sexual murderers of women, and we present a new multi-trajectory model of fatal and non-fatal sexual aggression.
