Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  According to Jones’s history, “the same social and legal deprivations that compel some women to feminism push others to homicide…society is afraid of both the feminist and the murderer, for each of them, in her own way, tests society’s established boundaries. Not surprisingly, the interests of feminists and murderers sometimes coincide…”24

  Wow! They do, do they?

  Put that together with her earlier quote about female criminality and free people not being dangerous.* How could one be but absolved of any culpability when killing for as noble a cause as freedom? What’s the word; femfascism? Or put simply, as Ann Jones declares, “The story of women who kill is the story of women.”25

  Second-wave feminists view sexual violence against women as a political manifestation of the “patriarchy” and serial killers as its instruments. As one feminist theorist insists, female serial killers simply do not exist while the male serial killer is a martyr for the patriarchal state.

  Just as the icon of the derogated eagle on the seal of the United State bespeaks this nation’s rape of the wilderness, so too does the endemic spread-eagling of women in patriarchal culture—in sexual murder, pornography, gynecology, and obligatory “missionary position” intercourse—point to the persistent and systematic punishment of women.26

  Politicized terms are substituted for “serial homicide” and imply that the offender was exclusively male and the victim female: “gynocide,”27 “phallic terrorism,”28 and “femicide.”29

  But then in 1990 along came Aileen Wuornos with her year-long serial spree of roadside murders of seven middle-aged and elderly men including a missionary evangelist, a child abuse investigator, a man on his way to his daughter’s graduation, and a police reservist. Now feminism needed to take a stand here. It did—it stood firmly behind Aileen Wuornos’s war of liberation.

  One feminist theorist on lesbian violence, whose book is dedicated, “For Aileen Wuornos and for all the women who have been vilified, pathologized, and murdered for defending themselves by whatever means necessary,” declared, “Aileen Wuornos’s story is quite banal, an all-too-ordinary repetition in a culture of paranoid male fantasies that eroticize their worst nightmares. This time, however, one might say that the fantasy has crossed a certain boundary. The hallucination has been realized.”30

  If serial killers are martyrs for the “patriarchal state” then Aileen Wuornos is a martyr for second-wave feminism. Wuornos’s defense for her murder and robbery of seven victims was that each had attempted to rape her. As she stated in her trial, “Everybody has the right to defend themselves. That’s what I did. These were very violent, violent rapes, and the other ones I had to beg for my life.”

  In a television interview with Dateline, Wuornos vehemently spat out, “Here’s a message for the families: You owe me. Your husband raped me violently, Mallory and Carskaddon. And the other five tried, and I went through a heck of a fight to win. You owe me, not me owe you.”

  Feminist analysis (and they were not the only ones guilty of it) sometimes misrepresented the scope of serial murder by citing unreliable and inflated victim statistics. Some claimed that there were nearly 5,000 serial murders a year in which most victims were women.31 That is a ridiculous number, but one that even today is still occasionally cited, and not only by feminists.32 The maximum total of all known serial killer victims in a 195-year period in the U.S. between 1800 and 1995 come to a total of 3,860.33 We have a long way to go to 5,000 a year! Other feminist scholars simply go silent when faced with explaining patently calculated, cynical, and savage murders of innocent men, women, and children by female killers.

  None of this, I want to say, is to suggest that the extraordinarily high frequency of murder of women by their intimate male partners is a feminist myth. In the recent period between 1976 and 2004 in the U.S., a total of 30.1 percent of all females murdered were killed by their intimate partners, current or former, compared to 5.3 percent of all male murder victims.34 The problem is not how feminists portray the male murderer and his victims, but their analysis of the female killer and her victims. We were counting on the feminists to explain it to us, for in all those women’s studies departments at college they must have thought about it more than the rest of us. No? Apparently not, for they appear to be failing us badly. One would have expected something better than, “The story of women who kill is the story of women.”

  This cult of the female killer as victim is not without its critics among the current rising new generation of feminists (postfeminists, a term recently floated)—the 9/11 postmillennium wave. Some of these wild new voices suggest that when female killers are invariably construed in media, in law, or in feminist discourse as victims, women are actually being denied their freedom to be human. Belinda Morrissey argues:

  If a woman kills her male partner, for example, and can demonstrate his extreme abuse of her, then she might win the right not to be viewed as an active participant in defense of herself, but as her partner’s victim. This means that her partner must take responsibility for her acts of violence as well as his own; in other words, he is considered culpable for his own murder…Having at last taken some action to defend herself against her attacker and having succeeded in overcoming him, the battered woman is immediately cast as not having acted at all. She effectively loses the very agency and self-determination she tried so hard to gain.35

  Perhaps this will yet represent a frightening future wave of feminism that will insist, as Morrissey’s publisher describes her book’s argument, “that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape, and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human.”

  Please, a little less freedom and humanity for all of us then!

  Generally second-wave feminism tends to either ignore or bluntly reclassify female killers who do not easily fit the profile of a victim. The possibility that Aileen Wuornos is a serial killer, for example, is dismissed out-of-hand by one of her political defenders, who asserts, “The State says she is a serial killer. This charge seems implausible, given that the definition of a serial killer is one who kills for sexual arousal within a specific power imbalance.”36

  Feminist critic Lynda Hart reminds us that Wuornos is on death row “for killing seven middle-aged white men,” as if that explains everything. According to Hart:

  Wuornos is the masculine imaginary’s “dream come true,” her actions constituting a transgression of the boundary between the real and the phantasmatic [sic]. Having torn this barrier that preserves the phallocratic symbolic, Wuornos has become the “impossible-real” realized. And for that, I argue, she has been sentenced to death.37

  DEFINING THE FEMALE SERIAL KILLER

  There is absolutely no agreed-upon single definition of a serial killer. Male or female. There are as many definitions as there are experts in the subject, and the definitions include so far:

  Someone who murders at least three persons in more than a thirty-day period.38

  At least two fantasy-driven compulsive murders committed at different times and at different locations where there is no relationship between the perpetrator and victim and no material gain, with victims having characteristics in common.39

  Two or more separate murders when an individual, acting alone or with another, commits multiple homicides over a period of time, with time breaks between each murder event.40

  Premeditated murder of three or more victims committed over time, in separate incidents, in a civilian context, with the murder activity being chosen by the offender.41

  [Someone who] over time commits at least ten homicides. The homicides are violent, they are brutal, but they are also ritualistic—they take on their own meaning for the serial murderer.42

  Those who murder two or more victims, with an emotional cooling-off period between the homicides.43

  The notion that male serial killers kill only for sexual purposes and that they kill only strangers is long outdated. Se
rial killers will also kill for power, profit, belief, and politics and some will kill friends, neighbors, and family members. And female serial killers can kill for the same reasons as males do.

  The murder of two or more people on separate occasions for any reason is serial homicide and defines a serial killer. This represents the consensus of the most current analysis of serial murder: that it is not exclusively sexual and necessarily fantasy-driven nor does it only target strangers. It includes organized-crime contract killers—who for the longest time were excluded from the definition of serial killer because they did not choose their own victims—and genocidal murderers, because it was thought they were driven only by ideology or military discipline. But in the final analysis, the psychopathology of both the contract killer and war criminal is similar to that of some “ordinary” serial killers among us.

  Most of the women whose histories this book explores are serial killers by the most recent and simple definition: two victims or more on distinctly separate occasions with “cooling off” periods in between. These are killers who thought about it before they chose to kill again and again.

  CLASSIFYING THE FEMALE SERIAL KILLER: THE FBI’S CLASSIC ORGANIZED/DISORGANIZED

  The classification of serial killers is developing into a highly evolved system today. Female serial killers can frequently fit into the same male serial killer profile system. On the most basic level, serial killers are categorized as organized, disorganized, or mixed. This is a system that the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit developed primarily as an investigative tool based on the assessment of a crime scene that the serial killer leaves behind.

  Organized killers tend to carefully pick and stalk their victims. They plan the murder, they bring a weapon and restraints to the scene, they often take the victim away to another location, and they carefully dispose of the victim’s body and evidence. Disorganized serial killers on the other hand, often act spontaneously, blitz attacking the victim and leaving behind a disorderly crime scene. They frequently use improvised weapons they find at the location. They often leave the victim unconcealed and leave copious amounts of forensic evidence behind. Clinical mental illness is sometimes diagnosed in the disorganized offender’s psychopathology.

  Each of these two categories of serial killer is associated with certain personality and character traits—organized killers might be more intelligent, keep a neat house, and be personable. They will use personal charm to trap victims. They will drive clean and well-maintained automobiles, own property, and be gainfully employed. Disorganized killers are less intelligent, less sociable, and sloppy. They will use force to overcome a victim. They drive junk cars and live in messy, filthy apartments and have sporadic educational and employment histories.

  Since women serial killers more frequently kill acquaintances or intimates, they are most likely to fit the socialized organized profile—those who kill by cunning rather than brute force—but there are some differences, which we will see.

  The FBI has a third mixed category of those serial killers who do not neatly fit into one of the other two categories—who show characteristics associated with both categories. Some critics describe this category as meaningless and cite it as evidence of the weakness in the FBI’s organized/disorganized profile system.

  Using this system, virtually all female serial killers can be classified in the mixed category. As organized killers, females carefully plan and choose the moment they will kill their victim, they prepare the weapon in advance, usually poison, and they conceal evidence. Yet at the same time many know their victim and leave the body at the crime scene, a characteristic of a disorganized serial killer. Only on rare occasions does the female serial killer move and conceal the body. Unfortunately, the FBI’s mixed category is the least satisfying in making sense of a serial killer’s nature.

  NEWER CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS FOR FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

  Criminologists, less focused on investigative issues, tend to categorize serial killers by motive once it has been established. In this approach, the notion of gratification as motive is grounded in the entire spectrum of serial killer classification. There has been a debate in criminology as to whether serial killings are exclusively sexually motivated. This debate is particularly applicable to female serial killers as they rarely commit crimes characterized by gratuitous mutilation or by the sadistic sexual acts of male serial killers. Within the spectrum of serial killer classification, motive is an issue: Is a mob “contract hit man” a serial killer? Is the genocidal executioner or the terrorist a species of serial killer? According to criminologists Ronald and Stephen Holmes, they all are indeed serial killers. The Holmes classification of serial killers is strictly based on the gratification motive—what reward or profit, material or emotional, are the serial killers seeking when they murder?44

  Serial killers can be classified this way into four principal categories, and three subcategories:

  Power-control

  Visionary

  Missionary

  Hedonisthedonist-lust

  hedonist-comfort

  hedonist-thrill

  In only one of these categories is sex the primary motive for serial murder: for power-control killers who derive sexual gratification from the power and control they exert over a victim and who commit purely sexually charged homicides.

  Sex is less of a motive but still an important motive in one of the three subcategories of hedonist killer—the hedonist-lust murderer. In those cases, the killer finds sexual gratification in mutilating or having sex with corpses, drinking their blood, or cannibalizing them. The killing itself is not the source of gratification, but merely the means to an end. These types of killers do not necessarily desire to kill their victim—they just want the victim’s body or to harvest some part of it. Edmund Kemper, who murdered, mutilated, and had sex with the dismembered body parts of eight female victims, including his mother, was typically a hedonist-lust killer. As he explained it, “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to: I had to evict them from their human bodies.” Kemper described his murders as “making dolls” out of human beings.45

  There has been no recorded case of a female hedonist-lust serial killer, with two exceptions: that of the Renaissance-era Transylvanian Countess Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1615) who, it was claimed, bathed in women’s blood. The other exception might be a case in Texas in the mid-1980s. Ricky Green, a serial killer of two women and two men, claimed that his wife, Sharon, a preacher’s daughter, participated in the rape, stabbing, and bludgeoning with a hammer of the two female victims and that the murders were followed by the couple sensuously smearing and lubricating each other with the victims’ warm blood and having sex. Sharon Green pled guilty to murder but claimed she was forced to participate in the rape-murders as a “battered spouse.” Ricky was sentenced to death; Sharon received a ten-year probation term and a guest appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show televised on November 12, 1991.46

  In the case of the Transylvanian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the motive for her bathing in blood is ambiguous as well, as we shall see further on. She is said to have believed it restored the youthfulness of her skin, rather than deriving any particular sexual pleasure from it.

  Thus, when feminist analysts insisted that there were no female serial killers, what they really meant was that there were no female power-control or hedonist-lust type female serial killers. We shall see, however, that much has changed since the 1980s and 1990s when they were making those assertions.

  Beyond the two categories of power-control and hedonist-lust killers, there remain several categories and subcategories of serial killers whose motives for killing are not driven by sexual impulses. (Although that does not mean that sexual acts are necessarily absent in the homicides they commit.)

  Visionary killers are driven by visions or voices to kill. For the most part they are clinically and legally insane, suffering wit
h organic brain disorders and hallucinations and are usually a highly disorganized type of offender. They are rare and are often quickly apprehended.

  Missionary killers have political, moral, ethical, or some other notional motives that drive them to kill. These killers target a particular type of victim who they believe should be destroyed, eliminated from society or punished: homeless people, abortion doctors, senior citizens, homosexuals, or members of a particular race.

  Hedonist-thrill killers derive gratification from the transgression inherent in the act of kidnapping, torturing, and killing a victim. Rape is frequently a characteristic of these killings but it is an expression of aggression rather than the sexual drive.

  Hedonist-comfort killers murder simply to profit materially from the victim’s death. The hedonist-comfort killer is, of course, the category with which we have most frequently in the past associated female serial killers. The stereotypical female serial killer remains one that uses her feminine charm to get close to her male victim, gain control of his property, and then murder him, moving on to the next victim—the Black Widow.

  The most recently proposed new classification system comes from Richard Walter, a Michigan State Prison psychologist, and criminologist Dr. Robert Keppel, a veteran of fifty serial murder investigations, including that of Ted Bundy, the Atlanta Child Murders, and the Green River Killings. Their system is focused more on classifying sexual murderers, both single and serial, and is inspired by the FBI’s classification of rapists developed in the 1980s by Roy Hazelwood and Dr. Ann Burgess.47 For investigative purposes, Keppel and Walter propose the following classification of sexual serial killers divided into four categories:

  Power-assertive, whose motive is the assertion of a masculine power over a female or male victim