Introduction
Most sex offenders are characterized by recidivism with or without punishment and counseling after their initial offenses. We are all to question the effectiveness of our courts and correction facilities as well as the abilities of our psychologists. Worse still, serial sex offenders grow to develop a tendency to commit, arguably, worse crimes during or after offending their victims sexually. They end up developing some kind of a signature which is perhaps meant to give them credit for their crimes. Most of the sex offenders kill their victims in a certain way primarily to maim investigations and secondly to leave a signature for the aforementioned purpose. Others assault their victims to make them fear reporting the assaults to the authorities. This paper looks into the criminal behavior of a sex offender, identifies reasons for such behavior and analyses one of the most famous sex offenders in the history of the United States.
Murder after Sex Offence
As mentioned in the discussion above, most sex offenders kill their victims after sexually assaulting them. The main reason for this could be their intention to make the crime hard to unravel since most rapes are committed without other witnesses other that the offender and the victim. This has been one of the major drawbacks of investigations into sex offenses since most of the victims are killed after the offence. The offenders eventually become addicted to raping and killing people such that they eventually want to be recognized for the crimes they commit. This leads to leaving of signatures on their victims bodies or in the crime scenes. These signatures have been very substantial in helping forensic officers get these offenders (Cassel, 2007, p. 31). Other sex offenders try to kill their victims but they fail to do so. The victim may overpower the offender or the offender may leave the victim thinking that he/she is dead while he/she is not. In such cases, finding the offender may be relatively easy since the victim can positively identify the offender. After committing the first or a couple of sex related crimes and killing their victims, the psychological instability worsens making them commit even worse crimes (Hazelwood, 2009, p. 1). An example of how worse they can get is a sex offender who is used to targeting teenagers could start targeting infants and so forth.
Assaults after Sex Offence
Most of the assaults perpetrated by offenders to their victims are perpetrated by offenders who are not used to sexual offences. Such offenders are normally yet to kill their first victim and thus they use assaults to scare their victims so that they may keep the offence a secret. This behavior is common with offenders who defile children sexually and others who rape elderly people. An example of such offenders is Cesar Barone, a teen-age sexual offender who raped old people and beat them. He used to assault his victims before he killed his first victim (McManus, 2008, p. 1). It was even reported that he once beat his grandmother but it was not clarified why he assaulted her. After he was used to raping and assaulting his victims, he started killing them. Some of his victims are a Margaret Schmidt, who he raped in and killed in her home. She was in her early sixties. The second one was Martha Bryant, a midwife he injured by shooting, then raped her and shot her head killing her instantly. His reported youngest victim was a Chantee Woodman who was twenty three years old. He raped her and then shot her killing her. Betty William, one of his elderly victims died of a heart attack ignited by his entering into her room and his forced attempts to have sex with him. She was in her early fifties. He was later sentenced to eighty-nine years in prison for killing Betty and was also got a death sentence for killing the other mentioned three women (Montaldo, 2010, p. 1). Another serial sex offender and killer is Ted Bundy whose case is discussed later in this paper.
Causes of Addiction to Sex Offences
Most sex offenders are people who have problems relating with people. They are mainly shy, unable to relate to the opposite sex well and they are also loners. Others are socially balanced and successful individuals who develop this habit due to the influence of pornographic materials. In Ted Bundy case, we are to see that before he was sent to the electric chair, he made a confession of the deaths he was responsible for and blamed it on pornography. Additionally, a person may develop this habit as a result of psychological problems developed during his/her childhood and/or in the course of his/her life. These psychological problems are normally caused by unbearable difficulties in a person’s life that make the person change his/her lifestyle completely. For instance, bankruptcy problems and problems in marriage coupled with the diagnosis of her father with cancer and the subsequent death of her father made Mary Letourneau, a teacher in her mid thirties, develop a relationship with her student, Villi, when he was 13 years old. She later married him when he was 21 years old, after she had served a seven year sentence for defilement (Cloud, 1998, pp. 1-7).
The aforementioned problems may also be experienced in a person’s childhood. For instance, it has been proved that infants who are separated from their mothers at a tender age, probably due to diseases or financial problems are very likely to develop psychological problems which may make them criminals in later stages of their lives. For instance, a child who is adopted from his mother due to the death of the mother due to financial problems may grow to be a psycho committing very serious crimes. Some of such criminals develop a strong hate for the opposite sex. Mostly, it is a male child who is separated from his mother at a tender age who develops psychological instability leading to criminal behavior. This kind of a person may end up developing a strong hatred for women which may make him rape and kill in cold blood. Although he did not rape his victims, David Berkowitz, also known as “son of Sam” (Howard, 2010, p. 1) was a serial killer who hunted and shot pretty girls to death. He was an adopted child and he knew it since his childhood. He grew up to be a man who had no close ties with women. He was a loner who had immense psychological problems seeing illusions of a master (Sam) who gave him instructions to kill. While he was in the military, he always avoided interacting with other people and always avoided conversations started by his friends who discussed women and sex. He killed a number of women and wounded several others before he was arrested. When he knew that his arrest was imminent he started preparing to go down in “glory” (Howard, 2010, p. 1). He had prepared to go to a public place and shoot at the gathering before he was arrested.
Case Study: Ted Bundy
Known as the devil himself, Ted was an attractive, charming and cultured political activist before he turned wild and started killing people, mostly women, having sex with their corpses until they decayed and keeping their heads and skulls in his house. By the age of forty-three, he had made a confession to killing an approximate thirty people but the police established that he had killed a minimum of thirty-four people. His victim-age spanned all ages going to as young as twelve years old. Thus his youngest victim was a twelve year old girl (Lohr, 2002, p. 1).
Ted was born to Elianor, Loise and Lloyd Marshall in 1946. He was given the name Theodore Robert Cowell before his father rejected him because he was born out of wedlock. Due to the above circumstance, his mother went to her parents in Philadelphia. Her parents, fearing shame on their daughter raised Ted as their son and thus he grew up relating to his mother as his sister. Later on, his mother moved with him to live with relatives where she fell in love with a Johnnie Bundy and thus Ted’s name became Ted Bundy. Ted never bonded with Johnnie and thus he is described to have had an unhappy childhood. He was bullied as a child and was shy. He attended Woodrow Wilson High and won a scholarship to University of Pudget Sound. He however transferred to study in the Seattle at University of Washington. At 21 he found his first girlfriend, a Stephanie Brooks. After he transferred to Stanford, his girlfriend left him making him drop out of the University due to a depression that followed. It was then, at 22, that he discovered that his mother was not his sister after going to his birth home. In 1969, he went back to the University of Washington hoping to get Stephanie back but he could not since she was not interested. He became a political activist and met another woman, Ann Rule, who wrote his biography in her Bestseller, The Stranger Besides Me (Lohr, 2002, p. 1). He was once branded a hero for saving a drowning boy of 3 years. Afterwards, he went to the University of Utah where he studied law (Lohr, 2002, p. 1).
He later became the assistant chairman of the Republican Party and started seeing Stephanie again. He dated the two women at once and became transformed to a murderer overnight. A good number of the first girls he killed and sexually assaulted sexually with bottles and crowbars were had a striking resemblance to his first love, Stephanie. It all started in January 1974 and by late 1980’s, he had killed more than forty girls and assaulted them sexually, going to the extent of sodomizing them with bottles and sleeping with their corpses (Lohr, 2002, p. 1). He is even suspected to have killed around a hundred girls in more than ten states.
One may wonder why a man of Ted’s status has to do what Ted did. He was a hired by the Republicans, he was so smart that he managed to escape from jail twice and he was so handsome that women proposed to him when he was sentenced to death. From the discussion above, it is clear that Ted, killed due to a hate directed towards women due to his breakup with Stephanie. It can t[also be argued that the hate was compounded by the fact that his mother hid her identity as his mother until he was twenty one and the fact that he had a rough childhood and thus he may have developed psychological problems. This is evidenced by the fact that his victims were all women and the fact that his initial victims resembled Stephanie. When he was interviewed before he faced the electric chair, he said that he had developed that habit due to overindulgence in pornographic materials.
Conclusion
From the discussion and the case study, it is evident that criminal behavior in sex offenders develops due to psychological problems caused by unpleasant life experiences in the past. It has also been shown that other sex offenders adopt their criminal behavior due to the desire to cover their acts inspired by consumption of pornographic materials. Parents should therefore ensure that young children have a fairly balanced childhood to prevent them from getting the aforementioned psychological problems and thus reduce the possibility that they will become sexual offenders. Parents should also ensure that their children have a balanced social life at adolescence and also that they do not access pornographic materials. This will also reduce the possibility of the children becoming sex offenders. Adults should also avoid consuming pornographic materials since they can make them become sexual offenders and consequently make them commit unthinkable crimes.
Reference List
Cassel, E. (2007). Criminal Behavior. New York. Barnes & Noble.
Cloud, J. (1998). A Matter of hearts. Web.
Hazelwood, R. (2009). The criminal behavior of the serial rapist. Web.
Howard, C. (2010). The son of Sam. Web.
Lohr, D. (2002). Ted Bundy: The Poster Boy of Serial Killers. Web.
McManus, J. (2008). Forensic and Criminal Psychology. Web.
Montaldo, C. (2010).Cesar Barone. Web.