Phase Two: The Act of Murder

The Actual Murder Murder

The killing of the victim will bring the murderer back to reality, it is then when they realize what they have really gotten themselves into. Plans may change because of extenuating circumstances: the victim struggles more than anticipated, or he may feel more frightened than he had previously expected because of a heightened excitement. These feelings will provoke a killer to kill again, especially when the act goes above and beyond what they had previously fantasized. One serial killer described the excitement he experienced when driving his car with the dead bodies of two victims inside:

I drive up to my apartment with two murdered girls in my car. The trunk is a mess, with one body stabbed to death. The other [body] is on the back seat. The landlord is [at my apartment] with two friends. I [drove] right up and they kept on talking and I though, wow, would they freak out if I just got out and opened my trunk and back seat and just threw bodies out in front of them.... I took the heads up to my room. I could sit there looking at the heads on an overstuffed chair, tripping on them on my be, looking at them [when] one of them somehow becomes unsettled, comes rolling down the chair, very grisly. Tumbling down the chair, rolls across the cushion and hits the rug, bonk. The neighbor downstairs hates my guts. I'm always making noise late at night. He gets a broom and whacks on the ceiling. "Buddy," I say, "I'm sorry for that, dropped my head, sorry." That helped bring me out of the depressions. I would trip on that.

The previous killer was clearly very disturbed and achieved many thrills outside of the actual kill by fantasizing getting caught. Many killers like him are exhilarated because they broke the rules, they killed. Others feel a surprising sense of horror over the crime:

A thirty-year-old woman was strangled, stabbed, and shot. She had also been cleaned up and positioned in bed after death. Fingerprints were left at the crime scene, along with a message written in lipstick on the wall: "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself." Six months later the murderer kidnapped and killed a six-year-old girl; a ransom note left at the scene matched the handwriting of the earlier message.

The Sexual Element of Homicide

Most literature involving serial killers describes sexual elements to the killings, leading us to believe that most serial killers get some form of sexual gratification at some point. Some victims are raped and then killed, others are killed and then their bodies are sexually mutilated after death, or the killer performs sexual acts with the victim's body. The rapists who end up killing their victims claim that they do not receive any sexual satisfaction by murdering, nor do they perform postmortem sexual acts. On the other hand, the sadistic murderer, or 'lust murder', kills as part of a ritualized sadistic fantasy. Depersonalization is one form of postmortem mutilation used to obscure the personal identity of the victim. Depersonalization can be as subtle as covering up the victims face with a towel or bedspread, or it can involve brutally slashing the victims face beyond recognition.

This ends our discussion of phase 2, please continue to Phase 3, the disposing of the body, or check these sites out:

Return to Phase 1