Erotophonophilia: Investigating Lust Murder By Janet McClellan

Violence is one of the many interactions in which people engage. People rationalize their violent acts through the lens of their experiences and expectations that frame (Goffman, 1974) and organize their analyses of those interactions that are familiar to them. Therefore, to understand violence and its extremes, the researcher must consider the offender's construct of reality that displays, depicts, and asserts the rationalization of violent interactions with others and the pathological constructs of the offender. The Toch (1969) study provided for the possibility of a set of stages of interaction and reaction fundamental in the interpersonal encounters culminating in violent acts. Definitions of the stages include

The subclassification of lust murder as homicide, whether ascribed to a single incident or serial events, provided a way to distinguish the modus operandi or signature of the violence committed against the victim and the offender's psychological predispositions through the analysis of a crime scene. Lust murder is the acting out of aggressive ideologies described by investigators as cruelty, torture, or other acts sexual in nature that ultimately culminate in the death of the victim and includes those acts of homicide commonly referred to as sexual sadism. However, unlike Hazelwood and Dietz (1992), in this definition the suffering of cruelties and injuries of the victim caused by the offender does not require that the victim retain consciousness or life during all or part of the violent behavior by the offender. This more broadly inclusive definition of sexualized torture includes conscious, unconscious, live, or dead victims. The rationale for a more inclusive definition arose from Hazelwood and