Section 3b

As I've mentioned before, many of the visitors to my site are doing research for school reports and projects and many of those are folks also in criminology and forensic classes. These classes typically explore profiles of the infamous serial killers and the results are usually exploration into necrophilia since many serial killers do have post mortem sex with the victims they kill. One of the most important elements I try to convey to student researchers is that in discussing and exploring the real life paraphilas, like necrophilia, one has to remember that these are all labels of psychological disorders. In other words, for a psych disorder to exist it has to affect the quality of life of the person suffering from it and/or the lives of others that may cross paths with him/her. I call it obsession. BUT.. this does not mean that one who might engage in necrophilic encounters from time to time is an obsessed necrophile. I often use my own experience in years of chatting with people on and off the Internet in that given all the people I have chatted with who have diddled with the dead, there's not one I can call the proverbial true 'card carrying' obsessive necrophile. The point I am trying to make is that serial killers are not necessarily obsessive necrophiles in spite of their post mortem acts being part of their overall gratification.

The more traditional stereotype with the general public concerning those engaging in necrophilia is someone obsessive who digs up graves to have sex with corpses... and when they can't get any dead people they go out and murder someone to have sex. For the most part that's not actually true. Partly because digging people up is extraodinarliy difficult this day and age (for most parts of the country) given the depth of the grave, heavy metal caskets, and caskets being placed in heavier concrete vaults (to prevent grave collapse). Partly also because those interested in necrophilia, like with any fetish, are interested in various aspects. Some like a little rot (which they would be hard pressed to find any bodies like that which aren't already buried), some like the bodies freshly dead, and some simply like the bones. Another reason that blows away the typical stereotype, and this is a major reason, is that a passive or obessive necrophile may not have a desire to kill. In fact, necrophilia, in a more pure form, could be described as another variation of 'making love' rather than 'fucking' for lust and thusly the desire to take a life is non-existant, or in the least, not part of the necro-love process. As an example, the same can be said for pedophiles. In our society pedophilia has become such a repulsive crime of and by itself that we fail to acknowledge or even attempt to understand the reasons, causes, or the depths of the interest... thusly we presume anyone with a photograph on their computer is a potential sociopathic sexual predatory deviate hell-bent on having sex with any child walking alone in the park or luring them off the Internet. The average person with pedophilic thoughts has no desire to 'harm' a child sexually and in fact their desires are what we might call love-based rather than lust. Now, I am not defending pedophilia here but rather using it as an example that with any paraphilia there are broad dimensions, with resultant actions that should never be taken at face value or judged completely by the crime itself being committed. A serial killer might have sex with his dead victim but it doesn't mean he's a necrophile. But the act of necrophilia itself upon his victim can provide significant information toward the behavioral profiling process. Although, sometimes certain acts might stimulate valid conclusions that might be of questionable value (such as the statistic that the majority of serial killers have voted republican).

Well, that brings us to the killers themselves in trying to determine if their necrophilic acts were feeding a specific lust for necrophilia or rather simply part of a greater satisfaction. I recommend going to this site to read Katherine Ramsland's discussions on necrophilia and serial killers. The question to be asked.. are these all true necrophiles? Many serial killers are not motivated by the desire for sex with the dead but by other psychological motivations, like gender hatred, social hatred, inability to relate socially, a simple desire to kill for the lust of killing, pure cannibalism, the list can go on and on. In the vast majority of cases, having sex with the dead victim is more a consequence than the primary goal, perhaps toward what is perceived as continued humiliation of the victim after death. But admittedly there are some killers who do focus on necrophilia to a greater degree. Jeffery Dahmer might be a recent example of killing simply to have the dead body as a possession for sex and cannibal consumption.

What is a bit interesting is that those folks that I have had contact with who have had a real life experience in having sex with a dead person I would say an easy 50% were female... either having had mortician boyfriends who allowed them to play, in a morgue occupation themselves, or female morticians and funeral home employees. Yet, there are no female serial killers who kill for sex. Of course, necrophilia is more of a male-dominated paraphilia obsessively (an exception would be women like Karen Greenlee and my buddy Leilah Wendell), female sexual desire is totally different in motivation than male and I feel that is part of reason female sexual killers are rare. It's instinctual for males to be sexually aggressive so it makes sense that the some male-dominated sexual deviations represented in the various paraphilias, like necrophilia, would have manifestations of sexual possession.