Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The last major serial murder trial where the plea was made was that of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1992, who was charged with the murder of fifteen men and boys. He kept some of their body parts in his fridge, occasionally eating them. He constructed altars from their skulls while reducing the remains of their corpses in drums of acid stored in his bedroom. He attempted to transform several of his still-living victims into sex zombies by drilling through their skulls and injecting their brains with battery acid. One would think if that were not crazy, then what is? And that is precisely the argument his attorney attempted to present. It did not work.

  No modern-day female serial killer to the best of our knowledge has yet come even close to replicating the gruesome behavior of Jeffrey Dahmer. The insanity plea itself has become rare in serial killer cases, male or female, no matter how gruesome or “insane” their acts appear to be. However, some female serial killers have attempted to mitigate their sentences with a plea that they suffered from Battered Woman Syndrome, resulting in temporary insanity.

  THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHOPATH

  Our modern definition of the psychopath stems from the research of Hervey Cleckley, a professor of psychiatry in Georgia who published his results in 1941 in a book still studied today, The Mask of Sanity. Essentially, the psychopath, according to Cleckley, is grandiose, arrogant, callous, superficial, and manipulative. Psychopaths are often short-tempered; get bored easily; are unable to form strong emotional bonds with others; lack empathy, guilt, and remorse; and behave in irresponsible, impulsive ways—often in violation of social and legal norms.

  In the earlier editions of his work, Cleckley argued that psychopathy was actually a form of psychosis not technically demonstrable and concealed by an outer surface of intact function—a mask of sanity—and only manifested in behavior. In the 1950s this was challenged because, according to one critic, Richard Jenkins:

  A psychosis is a major mental disorder. A psychopathic personality shows not a disorder of personality but rather a defect of personality, together with a set of defenses evolved around that defect. The defect relates to the most central element of the human personality: its social nature. The psychopath is simply a basically asocial or antisocial individual who has never achieved the developed nature of homo domesticus.85

  In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual replaced the term psychopath with “sociopathic personality” and the psychopath came to be informally called the sociopath. One of the major problems with the definition of psychopath and sociopath at the time was that it did not account for criminal behavior and the use of the term in the legal system. Under the definitions of these terms, one could easily find not only serial killers and sex offenders but functioning business executives, physicians, judges, politicians, movie stars, and a host of other seemingly “successful” members of society. Cleckley acknowledged this issue:

  It must be remembered that even the most severely and obviously disabled psychopath presents a technical appearance of sanity, often with high intellectual capacities and not infrequently succeeds in business or professional activities for short periods, some for considerable periods. Although they occasionally appear on casual inspection as successful members of the community, as able lawyers, executives or physicians, they do not, it seems, succeed in the sense of finding satisfaction or fulfillment in their own accomplishments. Nor do they, when the full story is known, appear to find this in an ordinary activity. By ordinary activity we do not need to postulate what is considered moral or decent by the average man but may include any type of asocial, or even criminal activity…86

  This lack of consensus of defining the disorder led to the adoption in the 1990s of yet another term: antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). This is currently the “official” psychiatric definition of what we used to call psychopathy as described by the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Edition IV (DSM-IV) which defines it by the following symptoms:

  A. Pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 as indicated by at least three of the following:

  Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.

  Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.

  Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.

  Irritability and aggressiveness.

  Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.

  Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain work behavior or honor financial obligations.

  Lack of remorse, as indicated by indifference to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

  B. Individual is at least 18 years of age.

  C. The occurrence of the behavior is not exclusively during the course of a schizophrenic or manic episode.

  D. Evidence of conduct disorder onset before age fifteen.87

  PROBLEMS IN DEFINING PSYCHOPATHY AND ASPD

  Some psychiatrists argue that the diagnosis of ASPD is too behaviorally based and neglects persistent personality traits. There is a faction in psychiatry that suggests that ASPD is actually a disorder that some psychopaths suffer from—in other words, a symptom of psychopathy—not the disorder itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian psychologist Robert Hare returned back to Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity definitions and found that while all psychopaths can be diagnosed with ASPD, not all those diagnosed with ASPD are psychopaths.

  Hare developed a different type of diagnostic test for psychopathy to differentiate it from ASPD and it is used extensively in psychiatric testing. Known as the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) the test relies less on questions requiring the scoring of self-reported symptoms, which—according to Hare—psychopaths can learn the correct responses to and manipulate, and instead relies on a scoring matrix focused on observable factors that a therapist can collect and score without securing the subject’s cooperation.

  The PCL-R scores the presence of psychopathy based on criteria such as: glibness or superficial charm, grandiose sense of self, pathological lying, conning or manipulative quality, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness or lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions, constant need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, early behavioral problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, juvenile delinquency, revocation of probation, promiscuous sexual behavior, many short-term relationships, and criminal versatility. Arrays of factors like those are scored on a 3-point scale (0 = does not apply; 1 = applies somewhat; 2 = definitely applies). A final score of 30 or more identifies a psychopath.

  Hare discovered that nearly 50 to 80 percent of criminals can be diagnosed as having ASPD according to criteria of the DSM-IV but only 15 percent to 30 percent of those same subjects score as psychopaths on the PCL-R test.88 The difference between ASPD and psychopathy is not so much in the definition of the disorder as in the diagnoses of the symptoms—the DSM-IV definition for ASPD, according to Hare, relies too much on the presence of criminal behavior and inappropriate interpersonal acts as criteria; the PCL-R test, on the other hand, expands the criteria to persistent personality traits rather than focusing so heavily on interpersonal behavior and criminal history. Where all this will lead in the future remains to be seen, but the PCL-R is the diagnostic tool for psychopathy today, available in forensic versions specifically for criminal offenders.

  WHAT CAUSES A PSYCHOPATHY?

  It is believed that the interruption of an infant’s physical bonding with its mother or childhood trauma—typically physical or sexual abuse—can trigger a basic animal instinct for “fight or flight.” Obviously, the child unable to fight instead stores, redirects, or suppresses the rage necessary to fight and goes into the flight mode by emotionally detaching from or numbing the pain of separation and/or trauma.

  The human mind is unable to selecti
vely switch on or off this emotional detachment—it becomes permanently welded to the subject’s personality along with a number of other defensive mechanisms ranging from fantasy to other personality traits already described above. The psychopath’s mind is permanently rewired—as if certain emotions are amputated like limbs that will never heal and grow back. To this day there is no “cure” for psychopathy. The only thing that happens is that psychopaths in their middle-ages—at least male ones—tend to “act out” fewer behavioral aspects of their disorder.

  Nevertheless, females, who more frequently kill in late middle-age, conversely rarely score on ASPD diagnostic tests once over the age of 44. This leaves questions unanswered as to what may be driving them to kill if not their psychopathic state.

  The development of psychopathy is linked to attachment theory advanced by developmental psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s. After observing the effects on children suddenly separated from their primary caregivers in England during World War II, Bowlby became convinced that when dealing with disturbed children psychiatry was overemphasizing their fantasies instead of focusing on the children’s real-life experiences. According to Bowlby, “the young child’s hunger for his mother’s love is as great as his hunger for food.”89 Bowlby argued that a child’s healthy development is entirely dependent on its reliance on access to its primary caregiver. If this access is interrupted, the child develops defensive mechanisms that may assist the child in emotionally surviving the separation, but that may cause irreparable damage in the child’s ability to bond with others and develop a normal emotional range as an adult.

  In the 1970s, experiments were conducted on infants, known as the “Strange Situation,” where primary caregivers were separated from the infants and substituted with strangers. The infants’ responses were measured and showed three distinctively different patterns of attachment:

  1. Secure (63 percent): the infants were distressed by separation, sought comfort on reunion, and stabilized once in their caregiver’s presence.

  2. Insecure/Avoidant (21 percent): these infants exhibited little or no distress upon separation, did not seek contact on reunion, and focused their attention on toys or other objects and shifted their attention away from their caregivers.

  3. Anxious/Ambivalent (16 percent): these infants were distressed prior to separation, and cried more often than others.90

  It is the insecure/avoidant category of infant that is troubling. These infants do not re-establish attachment to their primary caregiver once reunited, nor do they establish an attachment to anybody else. They focus on objects or on themselves and are only cursorily sociable with others. Some theorize that these infants interpret attachment as a precursor to hostility and develop defensive “preemptive aggression” toward those becoming emotionally close to them.

  These infants grow up to become adolescents and adults with no feelings of empathy, no attachment, and no remorse or concern how family, peers, neighbors, school, employers, or society might judge their behavior. Again, this alone cannot be attributed to the making of a serial killer, nor even guarantees the making of a psychopath, but it becomes a significant factor when combined with other circumstances. A child with interrupted parental attachment plus physical or sexual abuse plus rejection by peers plus perhaps a biochemical imbalance plus head injury, or a selective combination of the above at different intensities together can spawn a serial-killing monster. (To make matters even more complex, the DSM-IV also offers the Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), which is characterized by “markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts that [occurs] before the age of 5 years and is associated with grossly pathological care.”91 Yet another step to psychopathy—a kind of childhood psychopathy.)

  What we do not know is where the “red line” is located for psychopathy or even serial killers, because again, not all psychopaths are serial killers, and not all children who suffer trauma or detachment become psychopathic. There are many other causes under consideration for the development of psychopathy, including prenatal and postnatal hormones, prenatal alcohol poisoning, neurotransmitter turnover, and head trauma, but none of these theories have been conclusively resolved at this point in time.92

  So in the end, it is not childhood abuse and trauma alone that create serial killers; they may spawn psychopaths, and some psychopaths can act out as serial killers—others we might elect to Congress. The road to making a serial killer is a long and twisted one with many byways, stopovers, and detours to the final destination. Not all psychopaths arrive there, but the ones that do are spectacularly deadly.

  THE FEMALE PSYCHOPATH AND ASPD

  There are some distinguishing features of the female psychopath. First, ASPD in the U.S. can be diagnosed in approximately 0.5 percent of the population—in one out of every two hundred people.93 Clearly if they were all serial killers, we would be in serious trouble, although the fact that we might be electing them to office, working for them, hiring them as our attorneys, and watching their movies, listening to their music, or reading their books, might not bode well for our society either.

  The rate of ASPD, however, is significantly lower for females: 0.2 percent or one in five hundred. Males have a four times higher rate of prevalence: 0.8 percent or one in one hundred twenty-five. Studies of subjects diagnosed with ASPD in the 1960s showed that females tended to have a later onset of childhood behavioral problems compared to boys, but were more frequently engaged in sexually deviant behavior.94 Episodes of arson, cruelty to animals, physical aggression, and bullying were more rare among girls than boys. (Although Schurman-Kauflin contradicts that for at least the seven female offenders in her study, who all reported killing animals as children and adolescents.) Again, perception is the problem—aggression in females slips below the radar because they tend to express early aggression through social and verbal forms. Today few would deny that girls commit physical bullying: Schoolgirl bullies are a huge juvenile issue these days. In the past, females tended to first use gossip and social exclusion as a form of aggression among their peers, but today that expression is frequently a prelude to conventional physical violence.

  The murder of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk in British Columbia in 1997 by seven girls and one boy is indicative of the nature adolescent female violence can take today. The girls beat their acquaintance, Virk, and burned her with lit cigarettes before attempting to set her hair on fire. Virk survived the first round of beatings after most of the girls lost interest and left, but was then attacked a second time by a boy and girl who remained behind. Without apparently speaking to each other, the two beat her again and then drowned her by holding Virk’s head in a creek. All the adolescents swore to a pact of silence and the crime was only revealed when Virk’s body was discovered eight days later. The fifteen-year-olds who actually murdered Virk were sentenced to life imprisonment, but the female, Kelly Marie Ellard, was granted a retrial on appeal. While awaiting the new trial, Ellard was charged, along with another female acomplice, in the beating of a 58-year-old woman.95

  During the retrial, witnesses testified how Ellard had bragged about “finishing off” Virk and had conducted tours of the murder scene for her friends. After a mistrial during the appeal, a third trial finally resulted in Ellard receiving a life sentence in 2005. Two of the girls convicted in the initial beating allege that Virk stole one of the girls’ phone book and started calling her friends and spreading vicious rumors about her. That girl stubbed a lit cigarette into Virk’s forehead.

  Gender stereotyping still plays a major role in the underdiagnosis of females as psychopaths. Women are traditionally perceived as nurturing and passive and to classify them as dangerous repeat offenders contradicts typical conceptualization of the female. Moreover, diagnosing somebody as a psychopath means condemning them to a morally reprehensible category associated with incurable, dangerous, lifelong criminal behavior.

  Gender bias often leads to women being diagnosed with another behavio
ral disorder called Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD), the diagnosis of which includes five or more of the following symptoms:

  a) Uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention.

  b) Interaction with others is often characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior.

  c) Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions.

  d) Consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self.

  e) Has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail.

  f ) Shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expression of emotion.

  g) Is suggestible, i.e., easily influenced by others or circumstances.

  h) Considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are.

  In 1978 an experiment was conducted using 175 mental health professionals as subjects. They were given hypothetical case histories with similar mixed symptoms indicative of ASPD and HPD. When the therapists were told that the patient was a female, they tended to diagnose ASPD in 22 percent of the cases and HPD in 76 percent. However, those cases in which the therapists were told the patients were men, the same symptoms were diagnosed as ASPD in 41 percent of the cases, and HPD in 49 percent. (There were six other possible diagnostic options offered to the therapists.)96

  Clearly mental health professionals were attributing the same set of symptoms to psychopathy in men but to hysteria in women. Feminists argue, with good reason, that mental diagnosis of women is entirely related to socially constructed stereotyping of femininity. (Remember “nymphomania” for example? It no longer exists in the psychiatric catalog of disorders and is instead labeled “sexual addiction” and applied to men and women equally.)