Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Proportionally there are more females among serial killers (16 percent) than females among total homicide offenders during the twenty-five year period from 1976–2002 (11.4 percent.)8 In general, violent offenses by females have been rising significantly. In 1987, women’s arrest rates for aggravated assault and robbery in the U.S. rose by 17.6 percent from 1978—and in some localities, like New York City, the rise was much more dramatic: 47 percent for aggravated assault and 75.8 percent for robbery. More recently, between 1992 and 1996, the rate of females arrested for violent crimes increased by 22.8 percent.9

  THE DEPTHS OF SERIAL DEPRAVITY

  Serial killing, whether perpetrated by male or female, has always stood in its own special corner of criminal depravity. Most of us can understand killing once—we can imagine a degree of jealousy, fear, desperation, rage, or even greed that could lead to taking a life. Most murderers do not know they are about to kill—it is not planned or intended. Many sincerely and deeply regret their act, make no attempt to evade justice, and rarely kill again. Serial killers, however, are opposite in every way from the common kind of murderer.

  Serial killers are frequently aware of their intention to kill long before they commit murder—some fantasize about it for years and carefully plan it. After committing their first murder and “cooling off” from any emotions that led to it, serial killers are cyclically prepared to commit more murders, or—as some might argue—are compelled to kill again and again. (They become addicted to murder.) There is no regret or remorse—or certainly not enough to change their behavior. Many carefully review their actions, improving their plan for the next murder, going to extraordinary lengths to evade apprehension. A willingness or desire to kill repeatedly is something from the realm of evil—impervious to rational, scientific explanation. Our society can barely account for evil in males, let alone imagine it in females.

  FEMINISM AND THE FEMALE SERIAL KILLER

  If being killed by a female intimate is characteristic of a male middle-aged murder victim, then so is blaming feminism for it. The problem is that our understanding of the steady rise of female serial killers among us since 1950 has truly been confounded in its analysis by a new radical so called “second-wave” feminism, a form of “spartacism,” a tendency to associate female criminality with an aspiration for freedom from slavery and oppression at the hands of “the patriarchy.”

  Ann Jones, a feminist historian of female-perpetrated murder proclaims, “A wave of attention to women’s criminality follows thunderously on every wave of feminism and surely will continue to do so until we can grasp the truth that free people are not dangerous.”10 Slave revolt is the crime, she is saying.

  The early first wave of feminism addressed the “liberation” and equality of females within the parameters of precise and specific legal and constitutional challenges—the right to vote, the right to equal pay for equal work, family law equity, fair hiring, equal status, equal opportunity, and so on.

  First-wave feminists (so-called “liberal feminists”) had associated the rise of female criminality with the notion of women becoming free to assert themselves as equally as men. Thus Freda Adler’s Sisters in Crime in 1975 interpreted increasing female violence in the context of self-empowerment. As in business, sports, the arts or sciences, the female as a criminal was not content to take second place in the hierarchy of crime. According to Adler, women were ready to compete with men on male terms and by their rules and that meant necessarily being as aggressive and as violent as the male criminal. This became known as the “liberation hypothesis.”

  Adler’s Vietnam War–era antiestablishment liberationist generation of feminism, however, was flagging by the time her book came out. Moreover, the glee with which conservatives adopted Adler’s thesis in their opposition to female equality further alienated Adler’s liberation hypothesis from new emerging feminism. Adler was even seen as dangerous by some of the younger radicals in the feminist movement because her work was so eagerly cited by conservatives blaming feminism for the rise in female violence along with other family and societal ills.

  A more radical second wave of feminists emerged, focusing on a darker notion of a deeply seated systematic victimization of women and womanhood by a biocultural conspiracy of a male “phallocentric heteropatriarchy” or the “phallocratic state.” According to this school of feminism, women will remain oppressed until males are transformed into something other than what they are collectively socialized to be today.

  This second wave of feminism rejected the simple notion of equality between male and female, claiming that inherent in first-wave feminism is the proposition that all women want is to be like men—share their opportunities, have access to their world, be able to play by their rules, be equal to them—period. They maintained that this was akin to arguing that all African-Americans just needed and wanted to be white. Second-wave feminists called on women to liberate themselves not as individuals but as a unique collective feminine culture and to establish an identity of their own in the pursuit of an overthrow of an unyielding and oppressive male hegemony.

  According to second-wave feminism, women are victims and males are collectively oppressors and women’s aggression should not be equated with any kind of female aspiration for equality with an oppressor.

  Female violence, it was argued, was self-defense against systemic male aggression against women: It was liberational. And it was; the female murderer was transformed into the victim and the victim into the aggressor. As one feminist argues, “Women do kill. And their motives can usually be attributed to a very specific set of circumstances, underlying which are American principles of economics and property ownership, firmly legitimated by media coverage…women in America appear to have a very specific orientation to murder. Motivations may loop and repeat as social, political, and judicial landscapes do, but the basic issue is almost always one of survival.”11

  As Patricia Pearson summarizes in her recent study of female violence, “By the 1980s, it was no longer a badge of honor to make a fist and wave it; it was more prestigious to weep in a therapist’s office. Therefore women couldn’t want to do something so antisocial and frankly offensive as crime. Women were not to be held as men’s equals in villainy, they were to be shown as men’s victims.”12

  The absence of studies on female aggression and violence prior to 1975 was soon remedied by new feminist analysis, which fundamentally argued that all women are systematically victimized by the “heteropatriarchy” and its “phallocentric” institutions. Its common currency was to explain female-perpetrated homicide as an act of self-defense and rebellion against a long-standing conspiracy of rape and battering at the hands of the “phallocracy.” This vision was passionately popular among reading young women in the mid-1970s in bestsellers like Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller in 1975 and Battered Wives by Del Martin the following year. The Burning Bed/Battered Woman Syndrome emerged in jurisprudence, explaining how wives can kill their husbands in “self-defense” even as their victims sleep soundly. The American Civil Liberties Union chimed in, saying, “Most death-row women have killed an abusive husband.”13 Could this be true?

  A FEW TALES OF WOMEN ON DEATH ROW

  Since the resumption of executions in the U.S. in 1977, a total of sixty-three women have been sentenced to death by 2005.* Eleven of them have been executed. (The last woman executed prior to 1977 was Elizabeth Duncan, back in 1962 in California’s gas chamber for the contract murder of her pregnant daughter-in-law, who she had buried alive.) Here are the brief case histories of the eleven women actually executed. You be the judge.

  The first to be executed was in 1984. Fifty-two-year-old Margie Velma Barfield in North Carolina, a grandmother who not only killed her husband by poisoning him with arsenic, but also on separate occasions murdered two elderly men and one elderly woman who employed her as a home-care worker, her fiancé, and her own mother. A total of six victims, and perhaps a seventh one—her first husband whose fire death she might
have staged to appear as a result of his careless smoking. (More on Velma later.)

  Second executed was 37-year-old Karla Fay Tucker in Texas in 1998. Karla and her boyfriend, both high on drugs, went to the apartment of an acquaintance, Jerry Lynn Dean, and attempted to steal the keys to his motorcycle. After her boyfriend knocked Dean unconscious with a hammer, Tucker found a pickax in the apartment and finished Dean off to stop him from making gurgling sounds. As she explained at her trial, “I just wanted to make the noise stop.” She then noticed 32-year-old Deborah Thornton cowering in bed under a blanket, and proceeded to batter her to death with the pickax, eventually leaving it embedded in her torso. On police wiretaps, Tucker was heard saying that she had an orgasm every time she sank the pickax into her two victims.

  The same year, the state of Florida executed 54-year-old Judias “Judy” Buenoano, a successful beauty salon owner who drove a Corvette, for the arsenic poisoning of her husband. The murder came to the attention of the authorities only after they had arrested Buenoano for the car-bombing murder attempt of a boyfriend and discovered another murder in her background—that of her handicapped 19-year-old son. Buenoano first failed in her attempt to poison her son and instead caused partial paralysis, which required him to wear heavy metal leg braces. She then took him on a canoe trip during which she tipped them both over into a lake resulting in his “accidental” drowning and a lucrative insurance payout. All together, Buenoano collected $240,000 in insurance claims in the deaths of her husband and son, and in the death of a boyfriend in Colorado. But with her death sentence in Florida, Colorado authorities declined to prosecute.

  The fourth woman executed was 62-year-old great-grandmother Betty Lou Beets in 2000 in Texas, for shooting her fifth husband, Dallas fire captain Jimmy Don Beets. After burying his body in the yard of their house and setting her husband’s boat adrift with his heart medicine spilled in it, Beets reported her husband missing. She then made a claim on his life insurance and fireman’s pension. It took police two years to collect sufficient evidence to get a search warrant and discover her husband’s body under the lawn. During the search, police discovered the body of another husband who had also disappeared, Doyle Wayne Barker, buried under the garage and shot with the same .38 handgun used to kill Jimmy. During her trial, Beets claimed that her husband had battered her and she had killed him in self-defense. On the eve of her execution Amnesty International described Beets as “a lifelong survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault” and claimed that “since her conviction, prominent psychologist Lenore Walker has diagnosed Ms. Beets as suffering from both Battered Woman’s Syndrome and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”14 No mention was made by Amnesty International of the discovery of the body of another husband buried under her garage.

  That same year, the state of Arkansas executed the fifth woman, 28-year-old Christina Marie Riggs, for the murder of her two children, Justin Thomas, 5, and Shelby Alexis, 2. Riggs attempted to kill her children by sedating them and then injecting them with potassium chloride. When she botched the attempt, she ended up smothering them with a pillow. She then attempted to commit suicide but failed. Riggs pursued the execution of her own death sentence.

  Wanda Jean Allen, age 41, was the sixth woman to be put to death when the state of Oklahoma executed her by lethal injection in 2001 for the murder of her lesbian lover. Allen had already been convicted and served a sentence for killing another woman, a childhood friend, in an argument. Five years after her release in 1983, she killed again, this time shooting her lover, Gloria Leathers, in the stomach. She was the first black woman executed in the U.S. since executions resumed in 1977.

  Oklahoma also executed the seventh woman in 2001—40-year-old Marilyn Kay Plantz, who hired her teenage boyfriend, Clifford Bryson, and his friend Clint McKimble to kill her husband, Jim, for about $300,000 in life insurance. Jim was ambushed on his arrival home from his night shift at work by Bryson and McKimble and beaten into unconsciousness with the children’s baseball bats while Plantz pretended to sleep in the next room. Ignoring her husband’s desperate pleas for help, Plantz got up from her bed and instructed the killers to “burn him” in his vehicle to make it look like a traffic accident. They drove the semi-conscious victim to a deserted location, doused him and his pickup with gasoline, and set it on fire. McKimble testified in the case for the prosecution and received a life sentence. Plantz and Bryson were tried jointly. Bryson was executed in 2000.

  Eighth executed, again in Oklahoma in 2001, was 61-year-old Lois Nadean Smith, convicted for the murder of a woman, 21-year-old Cindy Baillee. According to a description from a prosecutor’s office, “Baillee was the former girlfriend of Smith’s son, Greg. Smith, along with her son and another woman, picked up Baillee from a Tahlequah motel early on the morning of the murder. As they drove away from the motel, Smith confronted Baillee about rumors that Baillee had arranged for Greg Smith’s murder—charges Baillee denied. Smith choked Baillee and stabbed her in the throat as they drove to the home of Smith’s ex-husband in Gans. At the house, Smith forced Baillee to sit in a recliner and taunted her with a pistol, finally firing several shots. Baillee fell to the floor, and while her son reloaded the pistol, Smith laughed and jumped on Baillee’s neck. She then fired four shots into Baillee’s chest and two to the back of her head.”15 (A mother’s love for her son knows no bounds.)

  The ninth woman to be executed, in 2002 in Alabama, and probably the last to die in the electric chair, was 54-year-old Lynda Lyon Block, a former Cub Scout mom, Humane Society volunteer, and Friends of the Library president who became involved with a faction of the right-wing patriot movement. She was traveling with her boyfriend, George Sibley, also a patriot militant, and her nine-year-old son, on the run after their conviction for assault in a property dispute involving the stabbing of Block’s former husband. Both Block and Sibley were armed. When they stopped in a Opelika-area Wal-Mart parking lot so that Block could make a phone call, a passerby noticed that the pair appeared to be living out of their car, and concerned for the child, alerted Opelika Police Department officer Roger Motley who was shopping at the time for office supplies at the mall. The officer, unaware that Block was away from the vehicle making a phone call, approached it and demanded to see Sibley’s driver’s license. Sibley instead drew his weapon and a gunfight ensued between Sibley and Motley. Lynda Block dropped the phone and ran up from behind Motley and shot him with her Glock 9mm handgun. As the wounded officer crawled towards his cruiser she continued to fire several more shots into him. Because of budgetary shortages in Opelika, Motley had offered up his bulletproof vest to a rookie cop the week before. In letters to friends and supporters, Block later would describe Motley as a “bad cop” and a wife beater with multiple complaints against him. As part of the conspiracy against her, she said, she was prohibited from bringing up his record in court. His personnel file makes no mention of any misbehavior and his wife stated that her husband had always been a kind and patient man. Block’s companion was executed in 2005 for his role in the murder.

  The tenth woman executed was Aileen Wuornos in 2002, when the state of Florida put her to death for seven serial murders. Aileen Wuornos’s case is notorious and described in more detail later on.

  Finally, the eleventh woman to die was 40-year-old Frances Newton in Texas in 2005 for the .25 caliber handgun slaying of her husband and two children—her son, Alton, 7, and daughter, Farrah, 21 months. Newton attempted to claim the $100,000 insurance policy on their lives. She was the second black woman executed among the eleven.

  Instead of the supposed abusive husbands, many of the victims in the above cases, in fact, turned out to be children, other women, or innocent men. Four, and perhaps even arguably five, of these eleven cases involved a serial killer and at least four to six involved a type of materialistic Black Widow killer we popularly associate with a bygone era or the movies. In three of these cases it was unsuccessfully argued by the defense that the male victims had been abusers of the killers.r />
  In fact, historically more than half (53 percent) of known female serial killers in the U.S. have killed at least one adult female victim and 32 percent have counted at least one female child among their victims.16

  Yet there persists a tendency to interpret homicide by women as “defensive” or to politically contextualize it. One study of fifty female-perpetrated homicide cases, for example, insists that murder for women was “a resource of self-protection.”17 Yet only eighteen of those cases featured any evidence of abuse by the victim. The other thirty-two cases involve the murder of other women, children, and innocent men. The authors of the report remain eerily silent about that majority as if these cases did not exist.18

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of new feminist rhetoric, it was asserted that women just could not be serial killers—period. Some argued, “Only men…are compulsive, lone hunters, driven by the lust to kill—a sexual desire which finds its outlet in murder.”19

  Another feminist critic, Jane Caputi, objected to gender-neutral language in the analysis of serial homicide because it “works to obscure what actually is going on out there, for the ‘people’ who torture, kill, and mutilate in this way are men, while their victims are predominantly females, women and girls, and to a lesser extent, young men.”20

  Caputi explains that, “as these hierarchical lines indicate, these are crimes of sexually political import, crimes rooted in a system of male supremacy in the same way that lynching is based in white supremacy.21

  Ann Jones also objects to the gender-neutral term “domestic violence,” arguing, “I suspect that some academic researcher coined the term, dismayed by the fact that all those beaten wives were women.”22 In the introduction to Women Who Kill, her “history of America’s female murderers,” Jones declares, “If this book leaves the impression that men have conspired to keep women down, that is exactly the impression I mean to convey…”23