I went down a rabbit hole looking for info on mutilation in homicides. Most are behind a paywall, and I can only access the abstracts, but the abstracts still shed some light on the research.
I’d never heard this term before- “piquerist”.
“Despite the prevalence of ripper killings in media reports, there is little presence in the academic literature, even less of the psychological, criminological, or forensic aspects of such homicides, particularly regarding any embedded sexual element to such homicides.”
“Whilst most investigators will never encounter a sexual homicide (James and Beauregard 2018), those that encounter such a homicide, with overkill injuries, are likely to miss a piquerist signature hidden beneath the brutality inflicted on the victim (Woods 2006). In practical terms, misinterpreting the motivation for mutilating wounds may hinder efforts to identify perpetrators (Woods 2006, p. 113) as in the following case. Indeed, it is for those reasons that the case has been chosen, to demonstrate piquerism in homicide cases displaying overkill and the difficulty in identifying a piquerist signature in such cases.”
More at the second link below.
Original Citation:
Pettigrew, M. Piquerism in Overkill Homicides: Identifying the Sexual Component in a Series of ‘Ripper’ Killings.
J Police Crim Psych 38, 342–352 (2023).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-022-09510-0
Largest abstract of above article
Piquerism, the sexual gratification yielded from the infliction of cutting, stabbing, and slicing wounds, remains an underresearched sexual paraphilic disorder with consequences for understanding, identification, detection, case linkage, and offender treatment. To help remedy that research...
issuu.com
