Classifying Female Sexual Homicide Offenders: A Latent Class Analysis of Murder Arrestees in the U.S.

Research on sexual homicides has primarily focused on male offenders, and thus little is known about female offenders who perpetrated sexual homicides. This study aimed to develop the first statistical classification of female single-victim (SV) sexual homicide offenders (SHOs) using the U.S. FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports database that spanned over a 47-year period (1976-2022). A latent class analysis (LCA) was computed to detect subtypes of female SHOs in a sample of 158 offenders. Findings of the LCA identified two unique classes of female SHOs exist within the data: White intra-familial offenders and Black extra-familial offenders. The distinguishing features of these two classes were the offender's racial group, the victim's age and racial groups, the offender-victim relationship, the geographical urbanness level of crime location, and weapon use. This empirically-derived offender classification can be informative to law enforcement agents and security professionals in their investigative strategies.