The Psychology of Corpse Dismemberment

[LadyBlue]

Forensic Psychologist Helinä Häkkänen-Nyholm, a former criminal profiler with the Finnish police and Adjunct professor at the University of Eastern Finland and University of Helsinki, comments that what seems to be unique in the Magnotta case is the fact that the body parts are sent to others. She sees this as a reflection of attention and sensation seeking, grandiosity and narcissism. It is likely, she contends, that he has fantasised many times the reactions that opening the mail will provoke.

She has also found from her experience that lack of empathy and inability to properly experience emotions are characteristic of this kind of killer. Dr Häkkänen-Nyholm argues that you cannot presume that the offender would have felt anxiety, horror or guilt when performing these acts. She was once involved in an interview with an offender who had eaten some of his victim's body parts. He told his interrogators that he ate them precisely because he was aiming to feel something. When he was asked "so how did it feel?" he said that he didn't know, because it felt no different to anything else in his life.
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-persaud/the-psychology-of-corpse-dismemberment_b_1577919.html

[LadyBlue]

In their series of cases collected in order to spot patterns 'Corpse dismemberment in the material collected by the Department of Forensic Medicine, Cracow, Poland' and published in the journal Legal Medicine, Tomasz Konopka, Jerzy Kunz and colleagues draw attention to a case when several perpetrators, both male and female, from the Middle East, executed an alleged traitor, severing parts of his face, genitals and inflicting more than 100 incised and stab wounds while the victim was still alive.

The third most common category is usually referred to as an 'offensive' mutilation where the dismemberment is in fact the real purpose of the murder all along, and these include lust and necro-sadistic murders. Those driven by primarily sexual motives mutilate the corpse in characteristic ways, Konopka, Kunz and colleagues report, for example severing genital organs or breasts. Some perpetrators pull out abdominal organs through the disfigured genital tract. Death by strangling is apparently very common in this kind of homicide.