Assassinos em série: associação entre motivação, organização e prática de rituais nos crimes.

Abstract

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States of America (USA), the serial killing is defined as the murder of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events. Despite the low frequency of serial killers, each of which may be responsible for a large number of deaths. Data from this study may help detect earlier the serial killer, and prevent the extent of their crimes. OBJECTIVE: To verify the association between ritualized serial crimes and typologies based on motivation and organization of the crime scene. METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional study. The population consisted of serial killers cataloged in Radford / FGCU Serial Killer Database (Radford / FGCU SKDB) who committed their first murder in the 80s of the last century. The subjects were classified according to the motivation for the homicide and organizing of the murder. Variables were cross-matched with the presence of ritualistic behaviors during the crime. Data were tabulated in Microsoft Excel® 2013 and statistical analysis performed using the IBM SPSS software in the version 23.0. Two crosstabs were settled up, between motivation or the organization of the crime and the presence of ritualistic behaviors, with chi-square test of independence for the two subsamples and 5% of significance level. RESULTS: The typology based on the motivation for murder could be set to 619 subjects. Four types - pleasure, financial gain, anger/hatred and multiple reasons accounted for over 80% of the subjects. It was confirmed that there is statistically significant difference between the frequency with which types of murderers in series ritualize their crimes. Comparing the groups, the killers motivated by pleasure and disorganized group had the highest percentage in the practice of rituals. CONCLUSION: There were statistically significant differences in the frequency of performance of rituals. The sample was concentrated in three specific types of motivation for the crime: pleasure, anger and financial gain. The ones who kill for pleasure, in turn, presented the highest prevalence of ritual practices. As for organized or disorganized types, the latter was more associated with the practice of ritual actions than the first.