No one has come up with any precedent that a disturbed burglary turned into a child abduction.....
Not exactly.
However, I just want to return to some of Heriberto Janosch's ideas for a moment because I think they deserve elaboration.
As far as I understand the material he linked for us, it demonstrates how many crimes come to be miscategorised. That miscategorisation skews the statistics and gives us false pictures of how criminals of various descriptions actually operate.
Consider this hypothetical scenario similar to some of those in the academic papers Heriberto references: A woman, sleeping alone, wakes in the night to find a stranger walking though her home. He enters her bedroom and sexually assaults her. He then knocks her out, pocketing some some expensive jewelry she has left lying on her dressing table by the window, and leaves.
When the woman comes to, she reports the incident to the police: the breaking an entering; the assualts; the missing jewelry. But how specifically does she present events to the police? A burglar raped me? A rapist stole my jewelry?
It's hard to say which was which. Many rapes take place in homes, the would-be attacker having stalked his target , finally entering the victim's private property when he knows she'll be alone. Now who's to say such a man would not also think of lifting something small and portable of value, like jewellery or cash, given the opportunity and if he was very hard up?
How would we classify that event? The man is not a burglar as we understand the term, yet he did enter a property illegally and steal. On the other hand, he's not a rapist plain and simple as he has committed other major crimes as well.
Alternatively, the intruder could have been a professional burglar who had spied on the woman's property, noting that she often left jewelry lying out. When he entered the property and began to take things, his sense of power overcame him and he decided to overwhelm her physically as well.
Going back to Heriberto Janosch, his material is explaining that the crime statistics that are compiled with regard to such events are problematic. Sometimes the above event could be recorded as a rape, sometimes as a burglary, and sometimes both. Depending on the exact circumstances of such a case, it may or may not be easy for police or victims to determine exactly the motive or purpose of the crimes. Are the direction of the police investigations in these cases prejudiced according to common and sometimes outdated conceptions of burglars, rapists - or not?
But regardless of how things are reported, investigated and categorised in each individual case, taking these cases a whole there is a recognition in psychology that the the criminal can be flexible. A 'burglar', in other words, could be a 'rapist', sometimes at the scene of the same crime and sometimes separately. (He may steal from a property, for example, on a given occasion, and also intend to rape someone in the home, but leave before doing so having been disturbed, and vice versa).
This is only one crude example that I am citing; there are obviously many others involving all different types of crime. But the point is that criminals are 'flexible'.
Whoever first used the phrase 'burglary gone wrong' in the Madeleine case has created a great deal of confusion, because that phrase implies a cat burglar entering a property for credit cards or cash and leaving with the daughter instead.
That is obviously a ridiculous idea, and absolutely not what Heriberto and others have in mind.
