Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 10, 1993 TAG: 9305100044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium
"People hear about a technique in the newspaper or on TV, whether it's murder or some other type of crime, and they think, `Hey, I could do that, but I could do it better,' " said James R. Bruner, associate professor of criminal justice at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. "These people don't kill because of the coverage - they're already predisposed to murder. But perhaps they do pick their method that way."
James Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, said the copycat pattern seems to have become more prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s.
"A vicious crime gets a lot of press," he said. "Some people's reaction is, `You think that's something; just watch this!' "
The recent slaying of a 20-year-old woman in Norfolk's Camp Allen Navy housing complex would support this, experts said.
Judy Greer, 20, bled to death last month because of a severed artery in her neck, law enforcement officials have said. Mark C. Poe, who lived a few doors away from Greer, was arrested a few days later and charged with capital murder and sodomy.
Greer's killing occurred as the capital murder trial of Michael C. Dial was receiving extensive media coverage. Dial, a Norfolk construction worker, was accused of killing his girlfriend, Brenda G. Dozier, then cutting off her head and hands and dumping her body in the ocean off the Outer Banks. Her body was found at Nags Head on July 4, 1991. Her head and hands have never been found.
On April 30, the judge in that case declared a mistrial after the jury couldn't reach a verdict. Dial remains in jail without bond, awaiting a retrial.
Just as in the Dial case, Poe has been accused of cutting off the head and hands of his victim and dumping them in different places. But state pathologists have said Dozier was already dead when she was decapitated. Investigators say Greer may have still been alive when she was mutilated.
Dozier's slaying was also considered a copycat of the unsolved murder of Janice E. Lee of Chesapeake. Lee's mutilated body was discovered two weeks earlier at the Southeastern Public Service Authority's trash-to-energy plant in Portsmouth.
Lee, 30, was last seen at 12:30 a.m. on June 2, 1991. Her torso was found 10 days later. Her body had been decapitated and severed at the waist. One hand had been removed and the fingers of the other had been cut off.
Bruner said then that Lee's killer decapitated and dismembered her body to eliminate fingerprints and hide her identity.
Before the slaying of Lee, a headless, handless body was discovered Feb. 1, 1991, by teen-agers off the Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway in Virginia Beach. The body, which been impossible to identify without fingerprints or teeth, appeared to be that of a white male. He had been shot to death before being dismembered.
Decapitation murders are more likely to generate copycat slayings than other types of murders because of two factors: The brutality generates lots of attention, and the link between sex and the mutilation of women has become a common theme in American entertainment.
William Maples, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville, said that decapitations are a way of triumphing over the victim, even in death.
Experts blame popular culture for such slayings of women.
"Violence against women has become a definite element in our culture, especially since the 1980s," Fox said. "Think of the `Friday the 13th' movies - a bad girl just has sex and she is mutilated by the monster. There's a real moralistic sense there that the woman is being punished. This kind of thinking objectifies women, is degrading. It gives the message that women are objects of sex and violence. And for some people, this might make it easier for them to act out those feelings."
Fox thinks such popular culture reflects the resentment of women by men even as the women's movement gained power.
"For some men, they feel their place of superiority is being supplanted by women . . . and one way to reassert their place is through sadism and domination," he said.
In the end, copycat killers sometimes feed off this frustration, experts believe.
"We've got a lot of dumb but violent people standing on street corners with no ideas of what they're going to do," said one law enforcement official, who requested anonymity due to department regulations. "And there are a lot of smart people who are writing for the screen and TV.
"The dumb but violent person sees what the smart person has produced and thinks, `Hey, I can do that.' Then you've got a copycat. Then you've got troubles."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB