Death-Related Crime: Applying Bryant’s Conceptual Paradigm of Thanatological Crime to Serial Homicide

Abstract

The study of death within the field of sociology is expansive yet despite this research there is a lack of inquiry within the area of crime and deviance on the topic of thanatological crime. One researcher that has conducted an analysis of this topic is Bryant (2003). In his exposé on thanatological crime, Bryant (2003) developed a conceptual paradigm of death-related crime that consisted of four motivational categories and two patterns of victimization. Using data from the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database (Aamodt 2013), this article extends and applies the conceptual paradigm of thanatological crime to serial homicide.The study of death within the field of sociology is expansive. Researchers within this academic discipline have examined this subject from a variety of angles and have provided us with a way to conceptualize this inevitable phenomenon in an intellectual fashion. Some have focused their efforts on describing how different societies make sense of individual mortality (Berger 1969;Durkheim 1954Durkheim [1915) while others have examined the various cross-cultural and historical ways that these various societies deal with different types of death, the experience of dying and with the body of the deceased (Walter 1996). The dead are also studied by sociologists. Researchers question not only how people die but also investigate the various sociodemographic correlates of these mortality factors to determine the variations in types and rates of death among various social groups and within different institutional settings (Bryant 1979; Durkheim 1951Durkheim [1897; Lee and Ousey 2007;Neckerman and Torche 2007;O'Brien and Stockard 2006;Simon 2002;Titterington 2006). Yet despite this plethora of research in the discipline of sociology on the subject of death, there is a paucity of inquiry within the area of crime and deviance on the topic of thanatological crime and deviance. One researcher that has conducted an analysis of this topic is Bryant (2003). In his exposé on thanatological deviance, Bryant (2003) developed a conceptual paradigm of death-related crime that consisted of four motivational categories and two patterns of victimization. The resulting typology contained eight separate types of death-related crime, each of which included various criminal acts that fit within the categories. While Bryant (2003) conducted an extensive analysis of death-related crime in his original article and this topic was later revisited and further examples of death-related crime were provided by Bryant and Rothwell (2009), this area of research in crime and deviance has largely been neglected despite Bryant's (2003) call for other researchers to further explore this topic by extending his paradigm and/or applying the paradigm to various topical areas within the subject area of crime and deviance. This article answers Bryant's (2003) request by extending and applying the conceptual paradigm of thanatological crime to the phenomenon of serial homicide. More specifically, this article will be an examination of the post-mo...

Open-Source Data and the Study of Homicide

“…1 Although not nearly as prevalent as traditional sources of data, opensource data have been increasingly used in scholarly research published in peer-reviewed journals. Examples include topics such as corporate crime (Steffensmeier, Schwartz, & Roche, 2013), serial killers (Allely, Minnis, Thompson, Wilson, & Gillberg, 2014;Beard, Hunter, Kern, & Kiley, 2014), and terrorism and extremism (see, for example, Chermak & Gruenewald, 2006;Cothren, Smith, Roberts, & Damphousse, 2008;Dugan, LaFree, & Piquero, 2005;Gruenewald, Chermak, & Freilich, 2012;Gruenewald & Pridemore, 2012;LaFree, Dugan, & Korte, 2009;LaFree, Dugan, Xie, & Singh, 2012;Sageman, 2004). Considering the increasing use of these data sources in social science research, it is curious that open-source data have yet to be systematically discussed, critiqued, or evaluated as a tool for studying crime.…”