Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Power-reassurance, who seeks from the victim reassurance that they are “pleasing” them or are “better” than other lovers

  Anger-retaliatory, who have a need to avenge, get even with or retaliate against a female, or her substitute, who somehow offended the killer in his perception

  Anger-excitation, whose primary motive is to inflict pain and terror on the male or female victim for the sexual gratification of the perpetrator

  All these various described profiles, however, are focused on and defined by male psychopathology. There is a range of newer categories, which seek to more specifically address female serial killers:

  Black Widows, who traditionally murder their husbands, lovers, or other kin for either financial profit or other motives

  Angels of death, who kill patients they nurse or children they babysit for various motives—sometimes profit but most often unexplained

  Cult disciples, who are led to kill by a charismatic leader—the Manson Family women are the most high-profile example of this category of female killer

  Accommodating partners, who resign themselves to participate in murders initiated by their husbands or lovers

  Depraved sadistic partners, who enthusiastically participate in rapes and murders committed by their partner

  Explosive avengers, who are driven to murder a particular type of victim reminding them of past abusers in their life—Aileen Wuornos is most likely a candidate for this category

  Profit-predators, who kill strangers for material gain—Aileen Wuornos can easily fit into this category as well

  Missionaries, who have a political or social agenda that they attempt to achieve or conform with through serial targeting of a particular type of victim—Nazi nurses, for example, who participated in the medical killing of handicapped children and adults

  Power-seekers, in which the female offender attempts to attain some form of control or power in politics or in her personal life

  Munchausen syndrome by proxy killers—an elusive category in which mothers and caregivers serially murder their children or nurses kill patients in order to focus sympathy and attention on themselves48

  Another method of classifying female serial killers could be by their personality type. One study identified six behavioral personality types of women who were sentenced for both serial and singular homicide in California:

  Masochistic female offenders, who generally appear to be stable, have a good reputation, and might be strictly religious but who tend to become intimately involved with abusive and violent partners whom they end up killing

  Overtly hostile violent females are emotionally unstable, impulsive, and violent. They frequently have a history of assaults and while they do not plan to murder, their violent outbursts can result in death unintentionally

  Covertly hostile female killers suppress rage and express it secretly, often by targeting their own children or other vulnerable victims in a killing range

  Inadequate female killers have few coping skills, limited intelligence, and low self-esteem. Their primary concern is pleasing their partners, which they sometimes do by participating in murders or sexual assaults led by their partner

  Psychotic offenders are clinically insane. Similar to visionary serial killers, they are driven by voices or hallucinations to kill

  Amoral offenders commit premeditated murders with no remorse for personal or material gain. They could be described as psychopaths or sociopaths—a personality disorder rather than a mental illness. They are aware of the acts they commit but do not care. Most serial killers, female or male, can be diagnosed as sociopaths, or as suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD)49

  Yet another study focuses on the victim/offender relationship to categorize female killers as:

  Alpha females, who use violence to protect themselves or others from harm. These are cases of self-defense against the victim who is an abuser

  Beta females, who are provoked to kill by emotions such as jealousy and hatred or who provoke to some degree their own victimization, resulting in an impulsive murder

  Omega females, who use sexuality to deceive their victims and are emotionally detached from them, killing their victims coldly and frequently for personal material gain50

  All these different categories can exclude each other or overlap. There is no single definition of a serial killer, nor is there a single universal system of categorizing serial killers, male or female. One thing, however, is clearly evident: the wide range of definitions and categories reflects a phenomenon of female serial killers far more extensive and diverse than we customarily thought existed.

  GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

  Some general observations can be made about the sum total of female serial killers. Statistically speaking, female serial killers are better at it than their male counterparts. While the average male serial killer kills for a period of about four years before being apprehended, the female serial killer kills twice as long before she is stopped: slightly over eight years.51 Some female serial killers have been known to kill for over thirty years.

  This is partly the result of our common reluctance to recognize a female as capable of sustained long-term violence and the fact that females often murder in their home or in hospitals where a death might not be recognized as unnatural and the female’s presence at the scene professionally related. Female serial killers rarely leave community-alarming bodies of young women or teenagers by the roadside. Described thus as “quiet killers,” their crimes can continue for years before they are even known to have occurred.

  Another aspect of female serial killer longevity might be more gender based. Male serial killers, particularly sexually driven ones, appear to burn out and slow down once they are over forty years old.

  With female serial killers, however, it is not unusual to find cases of women in their fifties and sixties still active and not even near peaking in their killing careers. Dorothea Puente was 60 years old at the height of her killing when she was charged in 1988 with murdering nine male and female victims. Puente is still going strong in prison: a collection of her recipes has been recently published.

  Nancy “Nannie” Doss was 50 years old when she was arrested for poisoning her husband in 1954. In their investigation, police uncovered a twenty-eight-year-long career in which the grandmotherly serial killer apparently murdered four husbands in four different states, her mother, two of her four daughters, a mother-in-law, and other family members, by poisoning them with prunes soaked in rat arsenic.

  At this writing, 73-year-old Olga Rutterschmidt and her 75-year-old friend Helen Golay face two counts of murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder for financial gain in the deaths of Paul Vados, 73, in November 1999, and Kenneth McDavid, 51, in June 2005. The women, who met decades ago in a health club, are accused of masterminding a $2.3 million insurance-fraud murder scheme in which homeless men were killed by being run over in staged hit-and-run incidents.52Arsenic and Old Lace is less a cliché than we think.

  Approximately 68 percent of female serial killers operate alone, while the other 32 percent kill mostly with a dominant male partner, although there are cases of females dominating their male partners and all-female killing teams. It is in the female-male serial killer partnership that women are found most frequently complicit in rapes and sexual homicides, which are commonly associated only with male serial killers. Female serial killer partners are a whole category unique unto themselves and this book will explore this complex phenomenon in a separate chapter.

  In terms of victim selection, we expect that female serial killers predominately kill family members and acquaintances. This has been true until recently, but today strangers are marginally the preferred victim of the female serial killer, followed by family or intimate victims.53 The problem in clearly defining an offender-victim relationship rate is that, like male serial killers, many females kill a mix of strangers / family or acquaintances / strangers, etc.

  Th
is book explores the different histories of a wide range of categories of female killers who murdered at least twice on separate occasions for a variety of motives. They are indeed all serial killers, for each have contemplated and chosen to kill again having already murdered once.

  The motives and psychology of the killers will both vary and yet have common features among the various categories, and we will explore the various psychopathologies attributed to the offenders and their childhood histories when available. Like male serial killers, female killers are most likely both born and made, although the possible genetic and physiological markers in female offenders have not been as extensively studied as those in male serial killers.

  The cult and culture of femininity has been central to this analysis in a way it is not for male serial killers. Female serial killers not only challenge our ordinary standards of good and evil but also defy our basic accepted perception of gender role and identity and, ultimately, our overall understanding of humanity. There are no politics invested in the understanding of male serial killers in the way there are in the analysis of female killers. While male serial killers appear to confirm the worst in masculinity, the question is not as clear for women. Do female serial killers defy the feminine or only confirm the worst of it? Is aggression intrinsic to femininity and how? The question of female serial killers should not be approached in a political or gender context alone, but in its entire human scope.

  PART ONE

  The Psychopathology and Brief History of the Female Serial Killer

  AGRIPPINA THE YOUNGER VALERIA MESSALINA ELIZABETH

  BÁTHORY LA TOFANIA MARIE DE BRINVILLIERS JANE SCOTT

  ELIZABETH ECCLES SARAH DAZELY ELIZA JOYCE SARAH

  FREEMAN MARY ANN MILNER SARAH CHESHAM MARY MAY MARY

  EMILY CAGE CATHERINE WILSON MARY ANN COTTON CATHERINE

  FLANNAGAN MARGARET HIGGINS KATE BENDER PATTY CANNON

  LYDIA SHERMAN SARAH JANE ROBINSON JANE TOPPAN

  1

  THE NATURE OF THE FEMININE BEAST

  The Psychopathology of Female Monsters

  How and why? How do females become serial killers and why do they kill? The why is easy: They can kill for the same reasons that male serial killers do: for power, for control, for sexual lust, for profit, for thrills, for self-esteem, for revenge and madness.

  But there are some notable differences. Male serial killers frequently commit kidnapping, confinement, rape, and mutilation to express their rage and desire for control; female serial killers usually throw themselves straight into the kill—no stopping for mutilation or for a bite along the way. No polaroids or masturbation at the scene or sex with the corpse.* The female serial killer is all business…and it’s murder. In that sense she is infinitely deadlier than the fantasy-driven male predators.

  HOW FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS ARE DEADLIER THAN MALES

  Male serial killers can sometimes actually overlook killing some of their victims, because murder is not always a central part of their fantasy. Their fantasy could be to dominate their victim through physical and sexual assault without murder necessarily being a part of it. Once their assault is exhausted for the time being, the victim is of no further interest to the offender—dead or alive. If the victim survived the physical assault, the offender might kill to avoid having a witness to the assault or rape. The offender may kill the victim out of shame. Or not kill at all. A few might even trip-out on the power of granting mercy.

  Richard Cottingham in the late 1970s, for example, left the horribly mutilated and dismembered corpses of street prostitutes in hotel and motel rooms after drugging and torturing them for hours; he chopped the heads and hands off some of his victims.54 How can anyone survive a homicidal maniac like that? But some women did, regaining consciousness by a roadside or on motel room floors, bruised and battered but alive. Why? He did not kill them because they did not die in his attack. Simple as that. He never set out to kill them—only to torture and humiliate them. But once he was done, they did not matter—dead or alive, they were just garbage to him. So he dumped them—some dead, some living. Some died in the process; they weren’t strong enough to take it—skinny street girls all jacked up on nothing but Coke and chips. Those that he mutilated, he did so not for pleasure, but to destroy their identities—severing their heads and hands not as souvenirs, but to impede the investigation. Of the ones he chose to kill he did so to coldly eliminate witnesses. It was a necessary task and not a pleasure for him.

  Occasionally some victims survive the male serialist’s post-cathartic flagging interest or vague and sudden remorse. Sometimes it could be what the victim says or does that deflects an attacker’s intent to kill. When I wrote about male serial killers, I concluded with a chapter on how to improve the chances of surviving a serial killer based on accounts from surviving victims and on explanations offered by killers themselves as to why they let some of their victims live. There will be no such concluding chapter for female serial killers.

  Other than those victims who survived by some twist of angel-borne luck, there are almost no accounts from survivors of female serial killers. Women killers do not change their minds once they make the decision to murder and they rarely go through any kind of fantasy torture ritual on the way there—they go straight for the kill. (Although female serial poisoners have been known to prolong the deaths of some of their victims by manipulating dosages of poison, the reasons why have never been conclusively determined.)

  Female serial killers rarely, unless accompanied by a male partner, kidnap and rape their victims. Female serial killers rarely if ever kill to harvest the corpse or some body part of their victim for their own hedonistic lust. They almost never capture, bind, confine, and torture their victims before killing them. The female serial killer’s gratification begins with the victim’s death and often continues for days, weeks, and months afterwards. While for many serial killers death is only a conclusion to their fantasy or a function of it, females kill to kill. It is their mode of expression.

  One frequent reason given by male serial killers as to why they did not kill a particular victim is because they learned something about them. This triggers a personalization of the victim in the offender’s perception and misdirects their killing desire. This phenomenon reflects the proclivity of male serial killers to target strangers whom they objectify, imposing their own lethal fantasy upon them. Yet if they come to somehow see the victim for who they really are, the fantasy can be interrupted.

  According to FBI behaviorists, the best way of surviving a serial killer’s attack is to attempt to talk to them and let them get to know you as a person, to deflate the serial killer’s fantasy construct of you as their victim.

  None of this is going to help the victim of a typical female serial killer. First, it is probable that the female killer is already intimately familiar with her victim: She is working, living, or sleeping with them. She already knows who they really are—there is no victim fantasy.

  Second, the victims are unlikely to realize that they are in danger as the female often uses the cover of the established killer-victim relationship within which to kill—nurses kill patients, mothers kill their children, wives kill their husbands, landladies kill their tenants. Thus the attack occurs in accepted social and professional relationships while the means is often surreptitious like poison or a drug overdose or sudden suffocation. The murder is invisible and the body is usually found where it belongs, not dumped by a roadside or in a shallow grave.

  Finally, as the female serial killer does not bother with torture or rituals but goes straight to the kill, there is rarely time for the unsuspecting victims to respond if they even realize they are in danger. Who expects a wife, lover, mother, or daughter might try to kill them? This is what made Aileen Wuornos so different: She was targeting strangers, killing them almost as soon as she met them.

  With some female serial killers you might not find out you are being murdered, until you are dead. You just get a little too sick and weak for yo
ur age and the next evening suddenly you can’t speak or move and when the night comes you die in the dark in your own snot behind a closed door with nothing but the sound of your own congested whimpering to comfort you. It all appears to be of natural causes—nobody will even suspect you were murdered. Two phone calls and three hours later a night shift will lift and wheel your pronounced body away and by morning you will be prepped for embalming. There can be no lonelier way to die than that.

  MURDER AS THE FEMALE SIGNATURE

  The “signature” is the opposite of the MO—the modus operandi, or method used in committing the crime. Profilers carefully differentiate crime scene characteristics between signature and MO.

  The MO is what the serial killer needs to do to accomplish the crime—pose as a repairperson, force a window open, offer a hitchhiker a ride, use a weapon to gain control, wear a mask, wash evidence away, perhaps dismember a corpse for ease of disposal, set a fire to destroy evidence. The MO usually changes—it improves as time passes because serial murder is very much a learning process. Over time, serial killers need to improve their tactics because as they repeatedly murder they increasingly raise their risk of apprehension. At the same time, they are also driven by an addiction to narrow the margin between their fantasy and reality—between the intense pleasure of the fantasy and the dissatisfaction they feel with its reality. They can never satisfactorily bridge their act with their desire. They need to try it again, but better. For all these reasons, serial killers are fantasy-driven killing machines fueled on both need and desire—pragmatism and madness.

  Serial killing requires a certain kind of studious discipline. And some can show it out of the gate, but four years is usually as far as the males get. Four years can often be equally the odds for successfully sustaining a marriage, business, or partnership—undertakings at least as challenging as serial murder. So the MO needs to change and evolve from murder to murder, increasing the odds of surviving those four years.