Bishop, Brianna Nicole2021-01-292021-01-292020-05http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12087/56a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Forensic PsychologyEmpirical research on destructive religious cults is severely limited, specifically with regard to the existence of a possible universal motivation for cultic violence. The widespread acceptance of individualized motivations for cultic violence (e.g., Manson’s Helter Skelter philosophy), however, negates the existence of striking similarities between characteristics — both offense and offender — of cultic violence and sexual homicide. The current study, in an attempt to examine the motivational implications of such striking similarities, utilized archival data to investigate the presence of 16 commonly-identified characteristics of sexual homicide within a singular case study — Charles Manson and the Manson Family. Results indicated that Charles Manson exhibited all of the commonly-identified offender characteristics of sexual homicide, while the Manson Family (and, the resultant Tate/LaBianca murders) exhibited 93.7 percent of the commonly-identified offense characteristics of sexual homicide. These findings suggest that the Tate/LaBianca murders were the product of Manson’s sexually-related fantasies, as well as the willingness of the Manson Family to execute these fantasies by proxy. Despite the limited generalizability of these findings — as a result of a limited sample size, as well as the use of strictly secondary sources (i.e., biographies) —, Charles Manson emphasizes the possibility that cultic violence exhibits an underlying sexual motivation; further research should, therefore, continue to examine this possibility within additional destructive religious cults (e.g., Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple).en-USCriminologyThesis