Cutting Up a Body No Sign of Psychosis
“Ontario has had its share of horrific murders involving the gruesome discovery of body parts hidden in a park or tossed on the side of a road. Farah Khan, Holly Jones, Leslie Mahaffy, to mention a few. As disturbing as these crimes are, forensic experts say the dismemberment of a victim’s body is typically not the action of a person who is crazed or mentally disturbed — just desperate and determined. ‘That’s something people don’t understand,’ said Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. ‘They think if people do these horrific and outrageous things, they have to be mentally ill. All these people have problems, but it’s not psychosis.’ In rare instances, dismemberment may be the direct outgrowth of a psychotic person who is hearing voices or is delusional. In equally rare cases, it may be part of a sexual murder where the violent crime itself is not fully satisfying, or where mutilation of a body is part of a sexual arousal pattern. But in most cases, it is simply about hiding a murder. ‘An ordinary person in a domestic case will strike out and kill somebody in a fit of rage and within a minute his or her entire life is shattered. Then they have to solve a problem — how to get rid of the body,’ said Schlesinger, author of eight books on criminal behaviour and homicide… People who do this are simply very self-centred, have lost control and don’t want to get caught, he said.” — Toronto Star (Canada)
If you’re wondering why this analysis of dismemberment is filed under the “pedophilia” category, it’s because Mr. Schlesinger’s comments were inspired by the case of Michael Briere, which PervScan once featured in a post called Pedophilia Not Glamorous. Mr. Briere kidnapped and attempted to molest a ten-year-old girl. Apparently frustrated that he couldn’t get their anatomies to work together in the way he must have imagined, Mr. Briere killed and dismembered the little girl — hence these reflections on the urge to dismember.
For everyone short of those few fetishists who lust after amputees, the thought of dismembering or being dismembered is horrific. Look down at yourself and, for a moment, give serious thought to hacking off a toe with a Swiss Army knife. Egads! And that’s just a toe! Or take a look at someone you love dearly — someone you love with the intensity that a parent loves a child — and imagine slicing through their elbow with a chainsaw. It’s really incomprehensible, isn’t it? Your mind can barely support the image. You want mentally to regurgitate it, the same as you might want to vomit up rancid milk.
And it’s precisely the incomprehensible nature of this act that makes us wonder how killers do it. Are they insane? Who can lust after a little girl one moment and then butcher her like a pig the next? Is that not the very definition of psychosis? Well, according to Professor Schlesinger, this is not psychotic at all. It’s just desperate. It is, to the killer’s mind, the act he has to perform in order to save his own skin. He resigns himself to it with the same equanimity with which you might resign yourself to being audited by the IRS. You just have to deal with it.
Somehow it’s difficult to accept that the human mind can rationalize such an act to itself. It’s easier to consider dismemberment an expression of psychosis or criminal insanity. But if Professor Schelesinger is correct, it’s actually a sane response to an extreme act. And that may be the most frightening part of all: that hideous violence is a normal response to an abnormal situation.
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Mouth to Mouth
