Male single-victim sexual homicide arrestees in the U.S.: An exploratory latent class analysis

Abstract

Sexual homicide offenders (SHOs) have been widely acknowledged to be a heterogenous offender population, including those male offenders who perpetrated against only one single victim. Since 2010, to our knowledge, 13 empirically-derived offender classifications of nonserial or single-victim (SV) male SHOs have been identified. The present study has two objectives: (1) to provide a review of these offender classifications for context, and (2) to develop a statistical classification of male SV SHOs using the U.S. FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports database that spanned over a 47-year period (1976–2022). A latent class analysis (LCA) was computed to detect subtypes of male SHOs in a large sample of 3204 offenders. Findings of the LCA identified six unique classes of male SHOs: (1) young victim sexual murderers, (2) homosexual sexual murderers, (3) older victim sexual murderers, (4) female young adult victim sexual murderers, (5) White intra-racial sexual murderers, and (6) Black intra-racial sexual murderers. The distinguishing features of these six classes were the offender's racial group and weapon used; the victim's sex, age, and racial groups; the victim-offender relationship; and the geographical urbanness level of crime location. This empirically-derived offender classification can be informative for law enforcement and other investigative and security professionals.