simultaneous fading of the idea of normal satisfaction. No matter what the external form of the act may be, the mentally perverse predisposition and instinct of the individual are essential to an understanding of it.
(a) Lust-Murder[1] (Lust Potentiated as Cruelty, Murderous Lust Extending to Anthropophagy).—The most horrible example, and one which most pointedly shows the connection between lust and a desire to kill, is the case of Andreas Bichel, which Feuerbach publishes in his “aktenmässige Darstellung merkwürdiger Verbrechen.”
B. puellas stupratas necavit et dissecuit. With reference to one of his victims, at his examination he expressed himself as follows: “I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does a beef, and hacked it with an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had prepared up in the mountain for burying it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.”
Lombroso, too (“Geschlechtstrieb und Verbrechen in ihren gegenseitigen Beziehungen.” Goltdammer’s Archiv, Bd. xxx), mentions cases falling in the same category. A certain Phillipe indulged in choking prostitutes, post-actum, and said: “I am fond of women, but it is sport for me to choke them after having enjoyed them.”
A certain Grassi (Lombroso, op. cit., p. 12) was one night seized with sexual desire for a relative. Irritated by her remonstrance, he stabbed her several times in the abdomen with a knife, and also stabbed her father and uncle who attempted to hold him back. Immediately thereafter he hastened to visit a prostitute in order to cool his sexual passion in her arms. But this was not sufficient. He then murdered his father and slaughtered several oxen in the stable.
It cannot be doubted, from what has gone before, that a great number of so-called lust-murders depend upon a combination of hyperæsthesia and paræsthesia sexualis. As a result of this perverse coloring of the feelings, further acts of bestiality with the body may result—e.g., cutting it up and wallowing in the intestines. The case of Bichel points to this possibility.
A modern example is that of Menesclou (Annales
- ↑ Comp. Metzger’s ger. Arzneiw., herausgegeben von Remer, p. 539; Klein’s Annalen, x, p. 176, xviii, p. 311; Heinroth, System der psych. ger. Med., p. 270; Neuer Pitaval, 1855, 23, Th. (Fall Blaize Ferrage).
