Dismemberment

Abstract

The authors describe 3 cases of dismemberment. Numerous methods of hiding a body and thus erasing proof of murder have been devised. Those most frequently described in the literature include: burial of the body in an unusual or impervious place such as a wood, grotto or mountain; charring the body by wrapping it in a tire, for example, to fuel the fire until all traces of the crime have been erased and identification of the victim is difficult; and dropping the weighted-down body in the open sea or in a well in the hope that it will never be found. Dismemberment is in reality a relatively rare method whereby, after killing the victim, the murderer uses a very sharp cutting weapon (a saw, axe, etc.) to sever the limbs and cut the body into small pieces. The operation is generally carried out immediately after the crime, although more rarely a long time may pass between the 2 events.

Body Part Removal: A Thematic Exploration of U.K. Homicide Offenses

“…Aside from several high frequency variables -'body parts cut off (unskilled)', 'head removed' and 'legs or feet removed' -BPR-specific behaviors were medium-to-low frequency, having each occurred in less than 39% of all cases (Table 5). This suggests that not only is BPR rare in the context of homicide (Di Nunno et al, 2006), but that even within itself, the specific behaviors that constitute the offense are uncommon and widely heterogeneous.…”

“…Evidence-based reasoning is a core tenet of the recommendations provided to British police forces by Behavioural Investigative Advisors (BIAs) (Alison, Smith, Eastman & Rainbow, 2003;Almond, Alison & Porter, 2008). However, because mutilation in the context of homicide is rare (Rajs et al,1998;Di Nunno et al, 2006;Konopka et al, 2007;Häkkänen-Nyholm et al, 2009), there are no MDS research publications which have considered mutilation and dismembermentA logical consequence of this is that when BIAs encounter a case of homicide involving body part removal, there are few empirical sources available to them from which they can draw and support investigative inferences. The proposed study will provide the first empirical piece of research based on UK mutilation homicide offenses from the ViCLAS database.…”

“…First, although it used the largest sample of any investigation of BPR written in the English language to date, the sample was, nonetheless, small. This was unsurprising given the rarity of BPR (Di Nunno et al, 2006) and that the ViCLAS system from which the data were extracted was only established in 1998 . Future research should try to remedy this by using larger samples, whether they use a more complete sample of U.K. offenses or a combination of contemporary European (or even international) samples.…”

“…BPR is rare in cases of homicide (Di Nunno, Costantinides, Vacca, & Di Nunno, 2006). To illustrate, in the United Kingdom, 518 homicides occurred in the year ending March 2015 alone (Office for National Statistics [ONS], 2016), whereas only 55 cases of BPR were estimated to have occurred between 1975(Cox, 2006.…”

Victim body mutilation in sexual homicides: Exploring Chinese sexual homicide cases

“…Other acts such as slashing, cutting, and raping the victim's dead body are also regarded as acts of mutilation (Sea & Beauregard, 2016). Mutilation of the victim's body is rare in cases of homicide (Di Nunno et al, 2006). For instance, it is estimated to occur in about 0.4% of all homicides that occurred in the UK between 1975 and 2004 (Cox, 2006).…”