Homicide Wounding
Excerpts from Variations in Wounding by Relationship Intimacy in Homicide Cases by Carrie Trojan, Amy C. Krull
Introduction
Homicide is a social event playing out between at least two individuals (Silverman & Mukherjee, 1987) and the nature of the relationship between the victim and offender may be key to understanding the violence inflicted during this transaction. Early works in the field of offender profiling that aimed to provide direct investigative assistance assumed that wounding patterns present in a homicide could be useful in predicting the victim-offender relationship (e.g., Douglas & Olshaker, 2000; Ressler, Douglas, & Burgess, 1995). The goal of the current study was to empirically examine several of these assumptions.
One of the more specific connections proposed by some in the early behavioral profiling literature involved wounding to the face of the victim as indicative of a more intimate relationship between the offender and victim. For instance, when analyzing the unsolved homicide of Mary Ann Nichols, one of five victims killed by Jack the Ripper, former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profiler John Douglas states that the fact that the victim’s face did not receive more significant wounds beyond some bruising indicates that the victim was a stranger to the offender: “If this had been a more personally direct attack, I would have expected to see more obliterating wounds to the face” (Douglas & Olshaker, 2000, p. 11). Similarly, he later states in reference to another case that excessive violence concentrated about the face of a victim is a frequent occurrence in domestic homicide cases. The expression of such wounding in homicide is “not only a manifestation of deep-seated and often long-standing anger by the offender against the victim, but also an attempt to depersonalize him or her . . . the facial battery indicates an attempt to strip the victim of actual identity” (Douglas & Olshaker, 2000, p. 127). This idea has also been suggested by others. Salfati and Canter (1999) extend Feshbach’s (1964) conceptualization of interpersonal violence as hostile or expressive (an affective/impulsive attack on the victim) or instrumental (driven by an ulterior goal) and suggest that the face may be targeted in homicide due to the emotional meaning that the victim held to the offender. As discussed by Meloy (2006), most, if not all, aggressive behavior is goal directed. However, expressive or affective violence reflects the goal of inflicting direct harm to the victim in a more emotion-based attack, whereas instrumental or predatory violence is predatory in nature involving the offender’s attempt to satisfy an externally recognizable need or goal, such as sex or theft. Salfati and Canter (1999) suggest that the former is at work in homicides displaying facial wounding, as the face is reflective of a person’s individual identity and may be wounded as an act of depersonalization of the victim within the context of an overall expressive or impulsive attack on him or her (Salfati & Canter, 1999).
Despite the logical consistency of this connection, other authors have introduced a potential confounding factor pertaining to facial wounding that may weaken its link to victim/offender relationship, that of displacement. In a typology of rape-murder, Keppel and Walter (1999) included violence directed at the face of the victim as characteristic of an “anger-retaliatory” murderer. Although not explicitly linking this behavior to the relationship between the homicide victim and offender, the authors acknowledge that facial wounding may be part of an overall violent attack in which the victim is a substitute for the true source of the offender’s anger and frustration, such as a female acquaintance, intimate partner, or female family member. In this case, the psychological meaning of the behavior remains intact—the behavior is an attempt to depersonalize an individual—but the actual victim may be an opportunistically chosen stranger because the desired target is unavailable. This possibility could weaken the investigative utility of the information and even lead investigators down the wrong path.
Though the early profiling literature assumes a link between wounding behaviors and victim–offender relationship, these assumptions have received little direct empirical examination in relation to the “average” or typical homicide. It is far more common for the link between wounding in homicide and the victim–offender relationship to be discussed in the behavioral profiling literature within the context of specific homicide subtypes, such as serial (e.g., Douglas & Olshaker, 2000) and sexual homicide (e.g., Keppel & Walter, 1999). Although reliable estimates of the prevalence of either subtype of homicide are difficult to determine, both serial and sexual homicide are rare occurrences, each comprising approximately 1% of homicides nationwide (FBI, 2005; Meloy, 2000). The utility of relying on how the victim was wounded to predict the relationship to their offender in more typical homicide investigations is not as well established but clearly could be of use to investigators across a greater majority of their cases. The current study sought to provide empirical evidence for the presence or absence of the link between wounding behaviors, including facial wounding, and the victim– offender relationship in a typical homicide event.
Victim Injury in Homicide
Several studies have uncovered patterns of injury based on the relationship of the victim to the offender in homicides and other violent crimes. Tjaden and Thoennes (2000) found that in cases of assault, if the crime was committed by an intimate, the victim sustained greater physical injury. Sheridan and Nash (2007) completed a literature review of injury in intimate partner violence (IPV) cases. Although not specifically examining homicide cases, they concluded that the head, neck, and face are the most common injury sites during an IPV assault. This is in accordance with the findings of Le, Dierks, Ueeck, Homer, and Potter (2001) who examined domestic violence victims receiving hospital treatment and found that 81% suffered facial wounding; 30% of these wounds were serious enough to cause facial fractures. The drawback to each of these studies is the focus on assault rather than homicide.
Heller, Ehrlich, and Lester (1983) found that in cases of assault, up to and including those resulting in death, the severity of the injury increased as the closeness of the relationship between the victim and offender increased. Serious injury or death was more common when the victim was related to the offender or was an intimate partner and minor injury was more likely associated with a more distant relationship, such as an acquaintance or stranger relationship. Moreover, this trend did not deviate when subgroups were examined, such as when the offender did or did not have a psychiatric diagnosis, was or was not above 30 years old, whether the victim was male or female, or whether the victim was an adult or child (Heller et al., 1983). In an examination of attempted homicide, Fritzon and Ridgway (2001) found that offenders varied the frequency or intensity of an attack on victims who resisted, with injury to the face more common among those who did resist (93%) compared with those who did not (66%). The authors suggest that this finding logically follows the psychological principles laid out by others that offenders may be “intent on harming not only the victim’s face, but also the person that the face represented” (p. 686). However, homicide is the most violent act and it is possible that any interpersonal transaction rising to the level of lethality may involve a heightened degree of violence that masks the predictive utility specifically of injury to the face. Fritzon and Ridgway (2001) state that victims who resisted their attacker were more likely to receive wounds over several body areas—the face, head, torso, and limbs. Again, this could suggest that wounding to the face is part of an overall violent assault on the victim due to an expressive motivation.
In relation specifically to homicide cases, Safarik and Jarvis (2005) did not find a significant difference in injury severity between victims and offenders who were known to one another compared with those that were not. Last and Fritzon (2005) examined homicides in the United Kingdom using a sample of offenders gleaned from a psychiatric facility and compared several crime scene variables across relationship categories-familial, stranger, and acquaintance. Their results showed that where excessive wounding was present in a homicide, the victim was also likely to suffer wounds to the face. In addition, highly expressive homicides characterized by the use of manual violence, using a weapon available at the scene, excessive wounding to the victim, multiple wounds distributed over several body areas, and facial wounding were more likely to indicate a familial relationship as opposed to a more distant relationship. Also examining homicide in the United Kingdom, Salfati (2003) found that facial wounding is not a rare behavior and occurred in 36% of cases in her sample. Moreover, and in accordance with the findings of Last and Fritzon (2005), facial wounding tended to co-occur with other crime scene behaviors aimed at inflicting harm to the victim, as opposed to a more instrumental motive, and indicated a greater level of reactive violence and/or a more impulsive attack (Salfati, 2003). Last and Fritzon (2005) point out, however, that facial wounding by itself was not able to distinguish between the three relationship groups and in fact was likely to occur nearly equally among strangers and family members; the quantity of wounds inflicted, rather than location of the wound, was the most predictive in identifying a familial relationship.
Given that the nature of affective or expressive violence as an attack on the victim as a person and the findings cited here that the frequency or intensity of wounding may increase as the intimacy of the victim-offender relationship increases, one could expect to see overkill more often in these cases. For this reason, the authors of the current study had intended to include a measure of overkill in the analysis of wounding behaviors, yet this proved to be highly problematic due to the lack of an objective definition in the relevant literature. Most commonly, the term is defined as involving the infliction of wounds beyond what was necessary to kill the victim (Douglas, Burgess, Burgess, & Ressler, 1992). However, the exact method for deter- mining if and how this manifests in a given case through the use of medical examiner’s reports or crime scene photos is conspicuously absent. The lack of a precise definition of “overkill” and method for its identification translates into substantial problems of operationalization and reliable measurement across studies. As Bell and Vila (1996) explain overkill is easily appreciable when there is a remarkably high number of wounds, yet it is difficult to identify a specific boundary between what is or is not necessary to kill the victim and the offender’s subjective awareness of it as the number of wounds decreases; in other words, any sort of an objective and quantitative cutoff point has not been put forth. In short, the literature thus far has treated the phenomenon of overkill according to the axiom of “we’ll know it when we see it,” a standard that falls short of acceptable in empirical studies. To avoid adding to the confusion on this topic, the current study simply looked at the degree of wounding according to how many wounds were inflicted. Before the concept of overkill can be of practical use to either researchers or investigators, a more precise definition and methodology for its identification is necessary.
Weapon Use in Homicide
Authors have suggested that in addition to variations in homicide wounding, the weapon used to inflict the wounds may vary according to the victim– offender relationship (e.g., Johnson & Hotton, 2003; Last & Fritzon, 2005). Although firearms are the most commonly used weapon in homicide (FBI, 2009), strangulation, suffocation, or asphyxiation are more likely among female homicide victims (Karch, Lubell, Friday, Patel, & Williams, 2008). Thomas, Dichter, and Matejkowski (2011) also found firearms were less likely to be used in intimate partner compared with non-intimate partner homicides. A review of Canadian studies showed that stabbing, beating, and strangulation are more personal forms of violence than shooting (Silverman & Mukherjee, 1987). Johnson and Hotton (2003) examined cases of domestic homicide and found that “beating” was the cause of death in approximately 13% of the sample, with a difference in the prevalence rate for female-victim cases (15%) and male-victim cases (8%).
These patterns reflect the use of weapons in IPV cases, with objects handy in the violent situation more commonly used than firearms or knives. Manual strangulation or other forms of contact violence are also particularly common (Sheridan & Nash, 2007). Others have found that firearms are more often used by former intimates compared with those in stable intimate relationships (Silverman & Mukherjee, 1987). Taking this into consideration, similar weapon use patterns should be present in homicide cases where the victim and offender were known to one another and involved in a closer interpersonal relationship compared with being strangers. The former group may be more likely to kill the victim using manual violence or weapons available at the scene and less likely to use firearms, which in turn could affect wounding patterns.
Discussion
The goal of the current study was to examine variations in wounding according to the intimacy of the relationship between the victim and offender in homicide events. As stated at the outset, a central aim of the current study was to directly examine the link between facial wounding and the victim/offender relationship in homicide that has been evident in the offender profiling literature for some time but heretofore has received only limited examination in the empirical crime scene analysis literature. In accordance with the literature that has suggested this link exists (e.g., Douglas & Olshaker, 2000; Fritzon & Ridgway, 2001; Le et al., 2001), the victims in the current study were more likely to suffer wounds to the face if they had a closer relationship to the offender. In fact, the prevalence of facial wounding among intimates was nearly twice that of the next most intimate relational group, family/friend. Taken collectively, the results provide some support for the hypothesis that facial wounding may be an attempt to depersonalize the victim during an expressive, emotion-based attack. These findings help to build a stronger foundation for what has previously relied primarily on anecdotal accounts or more subjective clinically based interpretations of the meaning of facial wounding and relationship intimacy in interpersonal violence.
Other results of the current study also lend support to the concept that homicides with a closer relationship between the victim and offender is likely to reflect an expressive, as opposed to instrumental, goal. Those with an inti- mate relationship to the offender were much more likely to be injured with a weapon handy at the crime scene than all other relationship groups and less likely to have been shot, with this latter finding reaffirming those of Thomas et al. (2011). Moreover, this was the only variable able to statistically differentiate between the basic relationship variable of whether the offender knew their victim. As stated previously, the assumption in the early profiling literature suggested that if a homicide victim received wounds to the face, it could indicate that the offender knew the victim in some capacity and the facial wounding was a direct attack on the victim as a person. The results of the current study warrant caution in making this highly simplistic link in homicide investigations. In accordance with the suggestion made by Last and Fritzon (2005), considering the variable in isolation may be problematic. This was further supported by the analyses comparing those with an intimate relationship versus those not intimately related to the victim, where the totality of the findings show that consideration of several variables collectively, including wounds to the face, could be more indicative of relationship status. Similarly, injury to the head and the use of manual violence showed that the intimate and family/friend relational groups were both likely to engage in these behaviors, showing that these particular behaviors may be less able to differentiate these groups from each other but on the whole do seem to differentiate them from the more distant relationship groups—acquaintance and stranger.
The overall frequency and intensity of wounding, however, did not significantly differentiate the relationship groups, which is not in accordance with the findings of other studies (e.g., Last & Fritzon, 2005). Thus far, it has been suggested that facial wounding could be part of an overall expressive/ emotion-based attack on the victim as a person. The fact that intimates did not differ from the other relational groups in the overall frequency of wound- ing, even using a low threshold, or inflicting wounds over several body areas is somewhat surprising, as these behaviors were expected to co-occur given the findings of previous studies (e.g., Last & Fritzon, 2005; Salfati, 2003). Yet in accordance with our own findings, Safarik and Jarvis (2005) found no relationship between injury severity in homicide and the intensity of the victim–offender relationship. At best, it appears the true role of frequency of wounding in homicides is yet to be fully determined. This variation in findings could be simply due to the nature of samples used across studies or it could again be due to problems inherent in quantifying injuries in homicide. Taking this final point into consideration, Meloy (2006) suggests that affective/expressive and predatory/instrumental aggression are not discrete either–or categories but instead are better conceptualized as opposing ends of a continuum. Rarely will a violent event fall entirely under one theme but instead demonstrate varying degrees of expressive or instrumental violence. Given the relative lack of studies directly examining wounding and intimacy in homicide at a basic level, it is beyond the scope of the current study to undertake the challenge of identifying the finer points along such a continuum and how wounding behaviors affect the placement of a given homicide within this spectrum of violence. However, future studies should continue to explore how homicides demonstrate varying degrees of affective/expressive violence in terms of wounding frequency, and other wounding behaviors, across victim-offender relationship groups to enhance both the theoretical understanding of interpersonal violence and the resulting practical applications to homicide investigations.
Research on “Excessive Wounding”
Assaults on Inmates and Staff by Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Homicide: An Examination of Competing Hypotheses
Jonathan R. Sorensen, Mark P. Vigen, O. Woods, Bradley D. Williams
J Interpers Violence November 2015 vol. 30 no. 19
Abstract
The current study presents the results of an analysis of serious and assaultive prison rule violating behavior among male perpetrators of intimate partner homicide (IPH). Data on prison rule violations were collected from a sample of 189 inmates convicted of IPH in a large, southern prison system. The study focused on the degree of continuity in violent behavior among IPH offenders from the community to the prison setting. The current study tested hypotheses derived from both the feminist perspective (FP) and the general violence perspective (GVP). As a group, IPH offenders were better behaved in prison than other incarcerated homicide offenders, thereby offering some support for the FP. However, the lower level of assaultive behavior among the group was not universal. Characteristics associated with continued violent offending in the prison environment were the same as those found in previous studies of incarcerated homicide offenders, thereby lending greater support to the GVP.
Variations in Wounding by Relationship Intimacy in Homicide Cases
Carrie Trojan, Amy C. Krull
J Interpers Violence September 2012 vol. 27 no. 14
Abstract:
There are numerous examples in the homicide literature of a presumed connection between the victim–offender relationship and the manner, extent, and body location of wounds inflicted in homicides. The current study examined variations in wounding patterns according to the intimacy of the victim–offender relationship in a sample of urban homicides to explore the investigative utility of this information in an average homicide event. The findings demonstrated that victims who had a current or former intimate relationship with their offender were more likely to receive wounds to the face and be injured with a weapon from the scene compared with all other relationship groups, whereas injury to the head and use of manual violence were more likely among intimates and family/friends compared with acquaintances or strangers. However, the groups did not significantly differ in terms of the overall amount of wounds inflicted. Implications of the findings and suggested areas of future research are discussed.
Investigating the nature of expressiveness in stranger, acquaintance and intrafamilial homicides
Stephanie K. Last,
Katarina Fritzon
Abstract
This study explores the role of the victim–offender relationship in the dynamics of homicide, by examining the crime scene behaviour of 25 intrafamilial, 30 acquaintance and 27 stranger homicide offenders (n = 82). Six crime scene variables were examined: ‘Weapon from the scene’, ‘Excessive wounding’, ‘Facial trauma’, ‘Multiple wounds to a single area’, ‘Post-mortem activity’ and ‘Manual violence’. The first objective was to identify whether these variables could be combined to form a partially ordered scale of expressiveness. The second was to examine whether the nature of this expressive crime scene varied according to the victim and offender relationship. It was hypothesised that the intrafamilial homicides would be characterised by a more expressive crime scene. This was examined by Partial Order Scalogram Analysis which supported the hypothesised link between the level of expressed emotion evident in the crime scene and the nature of the victim–offender relationship. Further analysis on the individual variables revealed that the best single predictor of the relationship between victim and offender was the presence of multiple wounding. These findings are discussed both as contributing to a theoretical understanding of the emotional salience of crime scene actions when killing a family member, and in practical terms in relation to the significance of these variables for both police investigations and clinical interventions with homicide perpetrators.