Disclaimer: The following article contains disturbing content
The probe into the Mehrauli murder is ongoing, even as other ‘similar’ cases have emerged.
A man was arrested on Sunday after an encounter with the police for killing a woman and chopping her body in Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh. The accused, Prince Yadav, reportedly had an affair with the victim, who had got married earlier this year to some other person. On November 9, Yadav took Aradhana on his bike to a temple, PTI reported. When they reached there, he, with the help of his cousin Sarvesh, strangled her in a sugarcane field. The two then cut her body in six parts, packed them in a polythene bag, and threw it into a well, police said.
Meanwhile, the details of the Delhi murder, in which a live-in partner Aaftab Poonawalla murdered his partner Shraddha Walkar and chopped her body into 35 parts, continued to shock, and many wondered – why? The murder and motive aside, the brutality of the crime alone has disturbed people.
Why Do Some Murderers Dismember their Victims?
Thai psychologist Wanlop Piyamanotham in a report for the Nation has explained that according to studies, murderers who dismember their victims exhibit a form of subconscious cruelty and can be divided into three categories.
The first, he explains, are those who have had prior experience with dismemberment, such as medical professionals or butchers. The latter group, who are used to butchering animals, may become desensitised to the act of dismemberment even if the corpse is human.
Second, people who have experienced trauma, such as being assaulted, frequently suppress their pain and rage. Former victims may later commit crimes to express these suppressed emotions, according to Wanlop, citing a Songkhla case in which a boy witnessed his parents being strangled to death. He survived and went on to commit similar crimes as an adult, strangling and dismembering his victims.
Persons suffering from acute psychotic episodes associated with rage are the third group. In such cases, the expert explains, the dismemberment is often done in a fit of psychotic rage or to conceal the crime.
‘Introverted but Deviant’
Natee Jitsawang, a criminologist told the Nation that murderers who dismember their victims’ bodies frequently exhibit other deviant behaviour and a proclivity for excessive cruelty.
He stated that such people may appear normal in everyday situations despite being introverted. Natee agreed that dismemberment murders were frequently linked to the killer’s professional experience or childhood trauma.
The 5 Motives Behind Dismemberment
Helinä Häkkänen-Nyholm, Eila Repo-Tiihonen, and other Finnish academic colleagues published one of the definitive pieces of research on this type of gruesome killing in a paper titled ‘Homicides with Mutilation of the Victim’s Body’ in the prestigious ‘Journal of Forensic Sciences.’
A report by Huffpost UK explains that according to the researchers, there are five types of homicidal mutilation; the most common is referred to as ‘defensive‘ by Forensic Specialists because the motive is to assist in hiding or moving the body, getting rid of evidence, or making identification of the victim more difficult.
The second most likely motive or category for this type of mutilation murder is ‘aggressive’ – where the killing and mutilation are caused by the same aggressive strong emotions, they are part of the same emotional motivation. A subset of this type could be where dismemberment is the actual cause of death, such as dismemberment as a form of torture.
The third most common type of mutilation is what is known as a ‘offensive’ mutilation, in which the dismemberment is the true purpose of the murder all along, and this includes lust and necro-sadistic murders. Those motivated primarily by sexual desires mutilate the corpse in distinctive ways, such as severing genital organs or breasts, the report states. Some offenders extract abdominal organs via the disfigured genital tract. Strangling appears to be a common method of death in this type of homicide.
In the fourth category are ‘psychotic’ murders, in which the perpetrator has lost touch with conventional reasoning and perceptual reality, so that they may hear voices or suffer from bizarre delusions. The fifth type of dismemberment refers to the types of killings associated in the modern world with organised crime, such as the Mafia, in which mutilation or dismemberment is used to send a message to others – in this case, the murder is also a form of communication – a warning or threat.
A Famous Indian Dismemberment Case
Raja Kolandar, a serial killer who killed and dismembered his victims in 2001, made headlines with the gruesome nature of his crime. According to a Times of India report, police discovered that he used to kill people over trivial matters, dismember their bodies, and dispose of the body parts in lakes, rivers, and forests. In most cases, however, he kept the head to “eat the brain” and then hung the skulls as a trophy in his house.
Explaining the convict’s psychology, Dr. Rajat Mitra, a clinical psychologist told the Sparrow that he lived in a ‘imagined reality’ in which the reality of being oppressed clashed with his imagination of taking control of it, resulting in his core personality.
This falls in the fourth category of the psychotic murders mentioned above, where the killer loses touch with his reality, and falls victim to his own imaginings.
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