Murderers like Ashling Murphy’s killer Jozef Puska seek to turn their sex fantasies into reality and exert ‘complete power and control over women’, a leading criminologist has told MailOnline.
How Ashling Murphy got his victim
Puska, 33, ambushed the 23-year-old teacher while she was out jogging in Tullamore, County Offaly before stabbing her 11 times in the neck.
He was found guilty of murder by a jury on Wednesday after just two hours’ deliberation. Ashling Murphy is just the latest young woman murdered as she went about her daily life.
Sabina Nessa, Sarah Everard and Zara Aleena were all killed as they went for a run, or walked home alone, by men who were prowling the streets hunting for victims.
What expert says
Professor David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said Ashling’s case was yet another horrific example of a woman being targeted by a twisted male killer.
He told MailOnline: ‘All if these cases started off as sex fantasies. Someone is turning their sexual fantasy into a reality, they have spent hours thinking about it and practising it and rehearsing it and now they are making it real.
‘It’s about having completely power and control over women, about being totally dominant over them. What we are seeing is the level of violence is rising because offenders are not expecting women to fight back.
‘Extreme porn has become usual now. I try and have conversations because if older men are not talking to boys about what is acceptable, they still have these conversations but they turn to the likes of Andrew Tate instead.’
Why did Jozef Puska murder Ashling Murphy?
Professor Wilson said murderers like Puska experienced a ‘disconnect’ between their own lives and those of their victims.
‘They are unable to empathise. They characterise the crime in a completely different way than they would if it was happening to them or their family,’ he said.
‘The thing with these fantasies is if they are not caught early on they escalate. These offences are about the power to shock, the power to surprise. What I know is that these offences are only the tip of the iceberg of the behaviour that these men are all exhibiting. They all have something questionable in their background.’
‘I can date exactly when this need to overkill and use more violence than is necessary came in – that was since Covid. During Covid the murder rate stayed stable. What did not stay stable was the level of violence we began to see.
‘Between 1984 and before Covid, I saw one case of beheading. Beheading is now normal. When there is anomaly, when there are significant changes in society and how it runs, that is when changes in these offences typically occur.’
Puska’s trial was delayed after he threatened to take his own life from behind bars in Dublin’s Cloverhill Prison last Tuesday – a fact hidden from the jury who convicted him Friday’.
Puska now joins a string of men convicted for similar attacks, including Wayne Couzens for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2020, Koci Selamaj who killed Sabina Nessa in March 2021 and Jordan McSweeney, who strangled Zara Aleem in June last year.
Sarah Everard, 33, was walking home from a friend’s house in Clapham, London, when killer police officer Wayne Couzens snatched her off the street, drove her to a secluded area, raped and murdered her.
Couzens, who had been married to his wife for 15 years and had two children at the time of the 2021 crime, took advantage of the final lockdown to convince Ms Everard that he was carrying out a legitimate arrest on suspicion of a breach in coronavirus restrictions.
Using his real police handcuffs and warrant, Couzens restrained the marketing executive and placed her in the back of his car before her death. He then attempted to hide his crime by burning her body.
