“A jury will likely have to decide whether Alison Gebauer died before or after she was sexually assaulted… If she was killed before her body was sexually abused, her adoptive son could be convicted of abuse of a corpse. If she was sexually assaulted first, or did not die immediately as a result of a single gunshot wound to the head, the district attorney’s office could seek a rape conviction… Asked his opinion of the chronology of the events the night Alison Gebauer was murdered, Pettit said, ‘I think too much emphasis is being put on the fact that he said, ‘I murdered my mother and raped her.’ What if he said, ‘I raped my mother and murdered her?’ She was murdered and he had sex with her. I don’t know that we have to go further, but the defense might.’” — Monessen Valley Independent (PA)

Rape, incest, matricide, necrophilia — given the heinous knot of crimes this sixteen-year-old committed with what was ostensibly one murder, it seems strange that anyone is concerned with the exact sequence of events. The culprit admitted to killing and raping his own mother. (Granted, he was adopted, but it’s still incest — and at least in this case he can’t blame it on genetic sexual attraction syndrome.) As the prosecutor said, what does it matter whether he raped his mother then murdered her? Or whether he murdered her and then raped her? In the first case he gets a rape charge, in the second an “abuse of corpse” charge (which probably carries a lesser penalty). But what’s the difference really? It’s a mere technicality on top of the homicide charge. And if they’re worried about it, why don’t they just ask him? If the teen can admit to incest and murder, he shouldn’t be bashful about admitting to rape or necrophilia, whichever it was.

About the only reason you can imagine them pushing the issue, aside from being overly scrupulous in ascertaining the correct legal charge, is that rape is a relatively “normal” crime, whereas necrophilia is highly abnormal. If the culprit admits to necrophilia, it opens the way to an insanity plea — even though ironically this implies that it’s somehow sane to rape your own mother and then murder her. Freud claimed that every man wants to sleep with his mother, and most teenagers could identify with the urge to kill a parent — but does that make it normal behavior? To tell the truth, it seems more normal, more sane, to experience lust in the pitch of a murder. It’s like the guy with a fetish for women screaming. Violence excites, and the parallel between the throes of orgasm and of death could transform homicide into an amibiguous moment, such that you’re not sure whether you’re causing your victim pleasure or pain. Or perhaps the only way to live with the fact that you caused so much pain is to transform it, however vainly, into a form of pleasure. Or perhaps the murder is such a release of tension that it also causes a spontaneous sexual release, like a wet dream.

Anyway, the point is that the defendant is doubtlessly a disturbed individual, and the necrophilia charge seems relatively superfluous in regard to the admitted chain of events. But maybe that doesn’t matter, because they’ll probably try to blame the whole thing on Marilyn Manson somehow. (To be clear, the news report does not state that the defendant was listening to the new CD by Mr. Manson. PervScan just means to imply that, whenever something inexplicably awful like this happens, it always seems to be blamed on a book or a movie or whatever…)

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