As morbid as it is to fathom, for some, it is easier to be intimate with a corpse than a live human being. People with this sexual preference, or necrophiliacs, have admitted that the absence of emotion or social expectation, or the ability to exert absolute control over a corpse has made sexual relations more satisfying. Other necrophiliacs have admitted to many other reasons why they prefer to engage in sexual acts with the dead. Intercorpse explores this paraphilia in detail. It includes the categories of necrophilia, motivations for this deviant sexual behaviour, and several true accounts of individuals who are infamous necrophiliacs. Serial killers like Gary Ridgway would often return to the dump sites of his victims to have sex with their decomposing bodies while they rolled in maggots. Others like Edmund Kemper admitted to getting pleasure from further degrading his victims. This book takes a fearless look at a most disturbing topic. It will be of interest to those in criminal psychology, sexual deviance, and forensic psychology.

This is a shocking story of kidnapping, rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation, and murder. The subject matter in this book is graphic On March 24, 1987, the Philadelphia Police Department received a phone call from a woman who stated that she had been held captive for the last four months. When police officers arrived at the pay phone from which the call was made, Josefina Rivera told them that she and three other women had been held captive in a basement by a man named Gary Heidnik. He imprisoned women in chains, in the filth and stench of a hole dug under his home.

Grave Desire is an analysis of the occasions of necrophilia throughout history, literature and the arts. It is an examination of the breaking of taboos and the metastasizing of fetishes in individuals and cultures using the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and others to explore the biographies of known necrophiles such as Carl von Cosel, Karen Greenlee and Ed Gein, and to analyze the cultures of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Troy, Victorian England and the first to eighth century CE civilization of the Moche people in northern Peru who used necrophilia as a means of religious time travel. Throughout the book, examples from the works of Herodotus, the Metaphysical poets, the Marquis de Sade, Cormac McCarthy, Poppie Z Brite, Jörg Buttgereit and more are used for illustration.

Designed to serve as a complete reference guide for psychiatrists, social workers, those working in law enforcement, and students of forensic medicine and psychology Understanding Necrophilia: A Global Multidisciplinary Approach features the writing of experts from around the world who share professional, cultural, social, and legal insights on the subject. This interdisciplinary text provides a balanced and applied approach to studying necrophilia, and examines the phenomenon from the perspectives of abnormal and social psychology, cultural sociology, criminology, criminal justice, forensic anthropology, medical pathology, and legal systems. Specific topics include historical, legal, definitional, and ethical issues surrounding necrophilia, its etiology, paraphilic co-morbidities, and various typologies and links to homicide. Comprehensive and ground-breaking, Understanding Necrophilia is a well-researched, fearless academic examination of a topic that is both challenging and disturbing, and the author contributions are informative yet sensitive. Understanding Necrophilia can serve as a stand-alone text and is also an excellent supplement to standard textbooks on forensic psychology, criminology, and sexual deviance. Lee Mellor is the author of Cold North Killers: Canadian Serial Murder and Rampage: Canadian Mass Murder and Spree Killing. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University in Montreal, where he lectures on social deviance. Anil Aggrawal earned his M.D. in forensic medicine and toxicology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. He teaches forensic medicine, pathology, and psychology at the Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi. He is currently researching his theory of paraphilic equivalence, which predicts same taxonomies for all paraphilias. Eric Hickey is dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology. He is currently researching his theory of relational paraphilic attachment and sexual predators.

From the author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters comes an in-depth examination of sexual serial killers throughout human history, how they evolved, and why we are drawn to their horrifying crimes. Before the term was coined in 1981, there were no "serial killers." There were only "monsters"--killers society first understood as werewolves, vampires, ghouls and witches or, later, Hitchcockian psychos. In Sons of Cain--a book that fills the gap between dry academic studies and sensationalized true crime--investigative historian Peter Vronsky examines our understanding of serial killing from its prehistoric anthropological evolutionary dimensions in the pre-civilization era (c. 15,000 BC) to today. Delving further back into human history and deeper into the human psyche than Serial Killers--Vronsky's 2004 book, which has been called the definitive history of serial murder--he focuses strictly on sexual serial killers: thrill killers who engage in murder, rape, torture, cannibalism and necrophilia, as opposed to for-profit serial killers, including hit men, or "political" serial killers, like terrorists or genocidal murderers. These sexual serial killers differ from all other serial killers in their motives and their foundations. They are uniquely human and--as popular culture has demonstrated--uniquely fascinating.

The third title in our Conversations with a Killer series focuses on one of the most notorious serial killers of the 1970s, Ed Kemper, a key character in the hit Netflix series Mindhunter. If there ever was a human monster that walked this earth, it was the highly intelligent, psychotic, 6’9” killer Edward “Big Ed” Kemper. As a troubled 15-year-old, Kemper shot and killed his grandparents. Eight years later, he went on an 11-month reign of terror slaughtering and dismembering six college co-eds in California, brutally killing his mother with a hammer, and breaking her best friend’s neck. Kemper, 71, remains alive at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, more intimidating now than ever. Masterful crime writer Dary Matera tells Kemper’s full, shocking story, interweaving insights from the killer himself.

The Santa Cruz community looks back at the Frazier, Mullin, and Kemper murder sprees of the early 1970s.