Trilby: Forensic Victimology and the Svengali Defense

Abstract

This book concludes with an examination of two fundamental areas of forensic investigation and evidence that have seen a surge in scholarly interest and practical relevance in recent years. These are also topics that in respect of FS² serve as the corollaries to several applications of the forensic Gothic previously discussed. Mirroring in many ways the beginning of the book, these topics include a literary examination of suspectology and the study of victimology, more recently qualified as forensic victimology, in an applied and investigative context as it relates the commission and investigation of crime. Second, this chapter explores, much as Chap. 6 does with the Daubert standard for qualifying expert opinion evidence in court, the legal terminus of a variety of forensic investigations once they arrive before a trier of fact in official proceedings. Staying within a hybrid domain of exploration that straddles forensic psychology and jurisprudence, this chapter will critically assess what is known as the Svengali defense. Like the formal classification of Renfield’s Syndrome (an allusion to the behaviors exhibited by the character of the same name in Stoker’s Dracula), a paraphilia recognized by the American Psychiatric Association and beyond, the Svengali defense is a legal strategy employed in Anglo-American proceedings that similarly draws its name from an antagonist in George Du Maurier’s acclaimed 1894 novel, Trilby.