ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 is the first of four that explore prominent motives or reasons behind the homicides. These motives or reasons are not mutually exclusive. Chapter 3 addresses the role of mental illness. The bulk of the chapter concerns perpetrators with dementing illness. The courts held the majority of these perpetrators unfit to stand trial. The small number that went to trial were found to be suffering from diminished responsibility because of an abnormality of mind or other mental disorder at the time of the killing. Three case studies of spousal perpetrators follow, all of whom appear to have experienced dissociative episodes at or around the time they killed. The section also includes possible “misrecognition” cases in which perpetrators appeared to think they were killing someone else or responding to an apparently misperceived threat. The chapter then tackles the small percentage of caregiver-killers that the court deemed to have been suffering from an “abnormality of mind” at the time they killed a person with dementia. The two groups of perpetrators, those with dementing illnesses and caregivers, differed in their tendency to “overkill.” Perpetrators with dementia overkill much more frequently than caregivers. Overkills reflected impulsive/expressive as opposed to instrumental violence. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the role of mental ill health for perpetrators with dementing illness and caregivers who killed.
