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Homicidal behaviour is influenced by a complex interaction of behavioural, situational and environmental factors that raise many challenging psychological questions. A large and continually growing body of research has explored the crime of homicide, its epidemiology, victims and perpetrators. The area is developing rapidly, opening up new avenues of study. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This special issue of the Journal of Criminal Psychology brings together an exciting array of papers on homicidal behaviour, examining a wide range of issues including juvenile homicide perpetrators, school shootings, child homicide, homicide-suicide and differences in offence behaviours and victim characteristics between hard-to-solve one-off homicides and serial homicides.

The range of papers included in this special edition cover a wide range of aspects of homicidal behaviour, reflecting the importance of – and the need for – applied research moving away from examining general homicide to specialised research focusing on subtypes of homicide and subgroups of homicide offenders. A research agenda is proposed.

This editorial gives an introduction to the themes explored in this special issue and provides an overview of the selected papers.

Purpose – This chapter explains what is known about international homicide trends, highlights gaps in existing literature, and proposes avenues for future research that will expand understanding about international homicide.

Design/methodology/approach – We review extant literature on international homicide trends, and draw on data from the World Health Organization from 1990 to 2015 to identify patterns in contemporary international homicide trends.

Findings – We demonstrate evidence of an international homicide drop across most regions around the world. Nonetheless, the homicide decline is not a global event as several countries – particularly countries with high homicide rates – did not experience reductions in homicide during this period. The key question remains as to what the causes of changes in international homicide rates are and why many countries experience very similar reductions in homicide while a few experienced increasing violence. We propose potential explanations and suggest areas for future research.

Originality/value – This chapter documents an international homicide decline occurring between 1990 and 2015. We also demonstrate that homicide trends are likely influenced by factors beyond local phenomena and domestic policies since homicide rates largely track together for regions throughout the world. Accordingly, the chapter suggests potential avenues for future research that can help better explain this trend.

In England and Wales, on average one child every week is a victim of homicide. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether different victim-risk profiles and suspect variables can be differentiated for specific victim ages.

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of more than 1,000 child homicides committed in England and Wales between 1996 and 2013, from data provided through the Homicide Index. Statistical techniques such as cluster analysis were used to identify specific victim-risk profiles and to analyse suspect variables according to the age of victim.

The findings present a clearer picture of the risk-age relationship in child homicide, whereby several specific risk profiles are identified for specific child ages, comprised of crime variables including; likely victim and suspect demographics, the most likely circumstances of the homicide and methods of killing. Using similar techniques, a number of tentative clusters of suspects implicated in child homicide are also described and analysed, with suggestions of further analysis that might prove of value.

The practical implications cannot be understated. For those professionals working in the fields of child protection and criminal investigation the identification of risk profiles promises to provide a back-cloth with which to practice when confronted with complex and distressing child homicide scenarios. This research promises most to those currently training in related professions.

Although the statistical level of risk has been linked with the age of a child (with younger children being most vulnerable to killing by a parent or step-parent and older children most vulnerable to killing by acquaintances and strangers), extant research is yet to progress beyond the identification of broad age-risk categories. The paper concludes with a discussion of the likely implications for those charged with reducing and investigating child homicide and outlines the possibility of future research.

In order to address a notable gap in the research literature, the purpose of this paper is to examine age-related differences in juvenile homicide perpetration.

Data on 150 juvenile homicide offenders and their offences was derived from material available within the public domain, including media reports, case studies, court reports and previously published studies. Comparisons were then made between those aged 14 and under (n=63) and those aged 14-17 (n=87) across a range of offender, victim and offence-related variables.

There were no significant differences between the child (U-14) and adolescent (14-17) offender samples on any of the measured variables. The two groups had similar backgrounds, selected similar types of victims, had comparable breakdowns of different types of victim-offender relationship and had similar patterns of weapon use.

The fact that the two groups did not differ significantly has notable implications in practical and applied domains. By identifying risk factors for juvenile homicide perpetration, findings open up a range of possibilities for identification, investigation and intervention. In addition, findings might inform the development of offender treatment and rehabilitation programmes. Key limitations relate to the quality and quantity of data employed. Ways of remedying these weaknesses in future research are addressed.

This is the first study to directly compare child and adolescent perpetrators of homicide over a broad range of offender, victim and offence attributes.

The analysis of previous studies showed that research pertaining to the examination of the crime scene and Modus Operandi variables in intimate partner homicide (IPH) is scarce. Additionally, to our knowledge, there are no studies investigating sexual homicide perpetrated by intimate partners. This study aims to address that void. Thus, the study examined various components of the crime event and as such, it was exploratory in nature.

The study consisted of male sexual killers, who perpetrated against pubescent female victims (14 years old and over) and served a custodial sentence within Her Majesty’s Prison Service in England and Wales. Variables for the study were chosen on the basis of previous research examining IPH and sexual homicide. Descriptive analyses were used in this exploratory study.

Descriptive analyses indicated that the most prevalent aggravating circumstances in the lead up to the killing included conflict with the victim before the offence and substance use by the perpetrator around the time of the killing. Stalking was present in approximately a quarter of cases. The results of the analyses of sexual behaviours showed that in 54.9% of the sample the act of killing was purely instrumental whereas in 39.4% of the sample the underlying drive of the act of killing was closely related to the sexual aspect.

This is a unique study on a topic not yet explored.

The purpose of this article is to improve the use of evidence-based practice and research utilization in the offender profiling process. The use of offender profiling has been met with increasing resistance given its exaggerated accuracy. The “Investigative Journalist/Expert Field Micro Task Force” model, a collaborative method that incorporates offender profiling and is designed to address unresolved serial homicides, is introduced and evaluated alongside recommendations on attaining adherence.

The model was field tested in 17 instances. The measures used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to gauge the usefulness of their case consultations, whether their input helped catch the offender, offer new leads, move the case forward, provide new avenues or give new ideas, were used to evaluate the model.

The model established likely patterns of serial murder activity among strangulations of women in Chicago, Cleveland, and Panama and resulted in convictions of suspects in Louisiana and Kansas City. This model is valuable when used to parse modern-day offenders from those who committed unresolved homicides as the latter display different behaviors that can make investigations difficult endeavors. Results from the field tests mirror those from the literature in that profiling alone did not result in the capture of serial killers. Instead, profiling was used in conjunction with other efforts and mainly as a means to keep the investigation moving forward.

Unresolved homicides are at a point of crisis and represent a significant but largely unaddressed societal problem. The success of this model may compel law enforcement to restore faith in offender profiling.

Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to assess the state of evidence examining and explaining trends and patterns in homicide clearances.

Design/methodology/approach – After reviewing the varying bodies of literature on homicide investigations and clearances, the author assesses the degree of support for the prevailing explanations of why some homicides are more likely to be solved than others. The author also use national data to evaluate several reasons for declining clearances.

Findings – Changes in the nature of homicide and deteriorating police–community relations are likely major contributors to declining clearance rates. The most consistent findings regarding patterns are the greater likelihood of clearance in homicides involving young children, contact weapons, residential locations, and killings not occurring in the course of another crime. Explanations relying on notions of victim devaluing generate the least support. There is considerable support for the legal factors approach and community-level explanations show promise. The findings regarding the role of forensic evidence are mixed. Smaller scale studies are beginning to help identify best practices for homicide investigations.

Originality/value – This chapter assesses several explanations for declining clearance rates and brings together divergent streams of research to summarize the current state of knowledge on homicide clearances, best practices in homicide investigations, and gaps to be filled by further studies.

In 1992, the FBI published the report Killed in the Line of Duty: A Study of Selected Felonious Killings of Law Enforcement Officers. This study of 51 incidents in which law enforcement officers were killed, reported on the personality and characteristics of those who murder law enforcement officers, the types of officers who were killed and factors which contribute to officer deaths. Unfortunately, this study suffers from methodological shortcomings in sample selection and the method of data collection that make the findings suspect. By comparing the results of the FBI study to previous research and other data on police homicides, it appears that some of the FBI’s findings are methodological artifacts and not accurate depictions of law enforcement officer homicides.

Crime linkage analysis (CLA) can be applied in the police investigation-phase to sift through a database to find behaviorally similar cases to the one under investigation and in the trial-phase to try to prove that the perpetrator of two or more offences is the same, by showing similarity and distinctiveness in the offences. Lately, research has moved toward more naturalistic settings, analyzing data sets that are as similar to actual crime databases as possible. One such step has been to include one-off offences in the data sets, but this has not yet been done with homicide. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how linking accuracy of serial homicide is affected as a function of added hard-to-solve one-off offences.

A sample (N = 117–1160) of Italian serial homicides (n = 116) and hard-to-solve one-off homicides (n = 1–1044, simulated from 45 cases) was analyzed using a Bayesian approach to identify series membership, and a case by case comparison of similarity using Jaccard’s coefficient. Linking accuracy was evaluated using receiver operating characteristics and by examining the sensitivity and specificity of the model.

After an initial dip in linking accuracy (as measured by the AUC), the accuracy increased as more one-offs were added to the data. While adding one-offs made it easier to identify correct series (increased sensitivity), there was an increase in false positives (decreased specificity) in the linkage decisions. When rank ordering cases according to similarity, linkage accuracy was affected negatively as a function of added non-serial cases.

While using a more natural data set, in terms of adding a significant portion of non-serial homicides into the mix, does introduce error into the linkage decision, the authors conclude that taken overall, the findings still support the validity of CLA in practice.

This is the first crime linkage study on homicide to investigate how linking accuracy is affected as a function of non-serial cases being introduced into the data.

The study aims to examine the effect of detective experience on the likelihood of clearing a homicide, while controlling for additional extralegal and case/investigative characteristics.

This study uses homicide and policing data collected from case files in a mid-sized US city. Detective experience is measured in multiple ways. Analytical models include extralegal variables, case characteristics, and proxies of investigative quality as controls. The study uses logistic regression with a dichotomous clearance outcome.

The results suggest a robust and significant inverse relationship between the years spent as a homicide detective and the likelihood of case closure. However, years of experience with the department overall has a significant and positive relationship to clearance. Investigation-related variables and case characteristics contribute more to model explanatory power than extralegal factors.

The potential role of experience has not been fully explored, with contradictory findings over time. This work builds on previous research to highlight the potential role of experience in clearing cases, while questioning previous assumptions tied to the belief that more experience improves investigative outcomes.