After an analysis of the concerning literature we conceptualized a questionnaire with 124 items, which describes the most common characteristics of sexual murderers. The relevance of these characteristics was examined on the basis of psychiatric records. The hypothesis was, that persons who murdered more than once show these characteristics more evidently than single murderers. We compared 20 psychiatric records about single sexual murderers with those about 10 repetitive sexual murderers. Planned offenses, chronic isolation, narcism and tendency to perversity were found more often in persons that murdered more than once. Especially the psychosocial factors were found less often than in the angloamerican literature. More pronounced were the differences between a group of sadistic murderers compared with nonsadistic murderers, using criteria for sadism extracted from Kafft-Ebings first description (1892), Schorsch and Becker (1977), MacCulloch et al. (1983) and Ressler et al. (1988). A case example illustrates the importance of an elaborated concept of sadism and its relation to personality disorder.
