Fantasy, Fusion, And Sexual Homicide*

Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of the confessions of two men who kidnapped, raped, killed, and mutilated a young woman (though not necessarily in that order). Following their initial denials of involvement, both men provided lengthy iterations of the crime, although, as you will see, their recollections of what occurred—or at least their recounting of events for the police—differ somewhat dramatically from one another. In addition to mining these narratives for clues about the dissociative structure of perpetrators’ interiority and actions, I have attempted to find within the stories information relevant to the most widely disseminated theory in the forensic and criminological literature as regards the antecedents of sexual homicide, namely that it is the overreliance on sexualized, aggressive fantasies that undergirds these fatal interactions (Burgess et al., 1986; Ressler, Burgess & Douglas, 1992; Prentky et al., 1989; Meloy, 2000; Schlesinger, 2000). While so many in the forensic field have concentrated on the criminogenic power of the paraphillic fantasy to transform dreamers into deviant actors, this analysis suggests that it is the formative power of deviantized, preoedipal object relations, and the ensuing reliance on dissociative defenses (including quasi-delusional fantasies), that determines who crosses the line from fantasy into action.