Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  A study of equal groups of males and females diagnosed with ASPD indicated certain social characteristics in the subjects.97 Women with ASPD who tended to be married showed a higher incidence of marriage breakdown than the average population—and higher than married men with ASPD. Women with ASPD were four times more likely to be receiving welfare payments than women without. They were more likely to be less educated and unemployed and living in rental housing than females without ASPD. Both males and females with ASPD were more likely not to have been raised by both their parents until the age of fifteen. Yet another study found that in males the lack of contact with the father increased probability of ASPD while in females it was the lack of contact with the mother.98 Women with ASPD were found to be pervasively troubled with relationship problems, followed by job problems, violence, and lying.99

  Women (and men) diagnosed with ASPD tended to also have related problems that were not directly linked to ASPD. Both males and females had higher rates of suicide attempts. Women with ASPD were ten times more likely than those without to be alcoholic or drug addicted (compared to men with ASPD who were three times more likely).100 Unlike males with ASPD, women with it were more likely to be depressed than women without. Women with ASPD were also more likely to have phobias than those without, which contradicts the early notion that psychopaths are less likely to be anxious or fearful because of their emotional numbness—at least in females.101

  The relationship between psychopathy and male killers has been extensively studied. Male inmates incarcerated for homicide had higher rates of psychopathic symptoms than those who committed other crimes.102 There are no major studies in the U.S. of the relationship between psychopathy and homicide by females. The one current study comes out of Finland. When compared to the general female population of Finnish females, the prevalence of ASPD in murderers was 12.6 percent compared to 0.2 percent among the average population there.103 The author of this Finnish study, however, warned that it applies to countries with relatively low rates of violent crime, and would not be applicable to the United States.

  At this point in time we do not know anything conclusively about the relationship between psychopathy and ASPD. Is one a symptom of the other or are they different ways of diagnosing the same thing? In the end consensus in psychiatry is as elusive as string theory in quantum physics.

  SUMMING UP

  Serial killing by males or females is most often simply about power. The most common type of gratification that serial killers seek is a sense of power and control over their victims—to the ultimate point of life and death. The sadistic power-control or power-assertive sexual murderer is the largest category of male offenders, found in 38 percent of nearly 2,500 incarcerated sexual killers (singular and serial).104 Sexual satisfaction as you and I imagine it is not the primary motive driving sexual assaults by these types of offenders. Power over a victim is the primary motive. The sexual battery is only one of many means by which the offender humiliates and dominates the victim. This partly explains why sometimes these attackers do not ejaculate during rape (and the reality is probably never as satisfying as the fantasy).

  For some serial killers murder is not a part of their fantasy. Killing becomes collateral to the escalating violence they inflict to primarily control, possess, and humiliate their victim. The murder can sometimes be an afterthought or even entirely forgotten by the attacker, because the power-control individual loses interest in the victim once the assault is over. The attacker could not care less if the victim is dead or alive.

  All this presents a problem in understanding what motivates female serial killers. We are misled if we assume that murder is the paramount fantasy of every serial killer, the way we think sexual desire is for every rapist. It is for some, but not all. Power is the key. We presumed that the motives of female offenders were diametrically different from males because females rarely use sexual assault as a medium of aggression and control. We even hesitated to characterize females as serial killers for that reason. That kind of limited thinking has less of a hold on forensic analysis of serial murder today. We are beginning to understand that female killers can murder for many of the same reasons male serial killers do.

  The more likely scenario is that similar motives can be applied to both female and male, but it is the mode of expression that is different. Thus while power-control males may express their fantasies of domination through sexual assault, which may or may not end up in murder, most female offenders bypass the “expressive” sexual component, going directly to murder and theft. The male power-control killer gets his gratification from domination through rape and physical violence; the female offender gets her gratification from the actual death of her victim and seizure of their property. While the male power-control serialist needs to bind, confine, and physically assault the victim, the female is satisfied to kill remotely by poison or by manipulating or paying others to do it. The result rather than the process is more gratifying for the female. Uninterested in the process, the female offender tends to leave little apparent signature, other than the murder itself.

  2

  THE QUEST FOR POWER, PROFIT, AND DESIRE

  A Brief History of Female Serial Killers

  We mistakenly presumed that serial killers were a symptom of modernity; a product of the newly industrialized urban society with its mass of faceless crowds so inviting to the sick and lost to anonymously act out their most primitive and dark demented homicidal compulsions upon the weak and the expendable; every atrocity salaciously reported by a newborn mass media feeding the voracious imaginations of a rising wave of serial monsters and their victims.

  Serial killing actually has been around since the beginning of recorded history in both the cities and the countryside and long before the industrial age. It ebbed and waned at different times in different segments of society. When we look back into history for the earliest traces of serial killers, we discover them among the ranks of old-world despots, dictators, emperors, and aristocrats who literally had the power of life and death over their subjects. Many appeared to have killed only because they could. This is precisely the kind of imperial power that so many serial killers today fantasize of wielding over their victims.

  Did ordinary people of the past commit serial murder? Average people were extraordinarily busy years ago doing what we take for granted: finding food, building shelter, avoiding plague and disease, paying dues and taxes, and fighting off homicidal enemies, raiders, and slavers. There probably wasn’t a lot of leisure time to brood and foster compulsive homicidal sexual fantasies. Only the aristocracy could afford that kind of time.

  If there were serial killers among commoners, it was not reported or recorded anywhere. Until very recently history was mostly written by elites for elites about elites—it was all about princes and kingdoms and empires and fortunes. The common people were irrelevant except on harvest and tax days.

  Of course commoners committed serial killing and cases of it are surely imprinted on our collective imagination in the form of monsters: werewolves tearing, mutilating, and cannibalizing flesh; vampires biting, draining, and drinking blood from their victims. These are only a few of a horrific range of grisly acts serial killers are capable of perpetrating in reality—true tales of horror. And as unfathomable as these acts were then, even today they are explained in almost the same way: as incomprehensible acts of monsters. The modern serial killer is really our secular monster.

  It was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we began giving our monsters precise names and human identities when we could, and individual monikers when we couldn’t. That Jack the Ripper emerges in the London of the 1880s—the newspaper capital of the world—is no coincidence. It is only with the advent of cheap printing, resulting in the rise of popular mass media in the form of novels, pamphlets, broadsides, and eventually newspapers, that monsters began to be identified as real people and not mystical animallike creatures roaming in the dark of the woods.

  Jack t
he Ripper really is the first industrial-age serial killer with lasting fame of any consequence, despite the fact there were so many others before and after him, and mostly females as we will see.105

  For nearly a century Jack the Ripper framed our popular conception of serial killers until the 1970s, when Ted Bundy brought serial killing into the new age. He was the first postmodern serial killer—the handsome, angelic boy-next-door-with-a-college-degree, somebody who should never have been a serial killer. He was too much like so many of us! (Aileen Wuornos in her diametrically opposite way is our female serial postmodernist. We will see how in the next chapter.)

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS IN EARLY HISTORY

  Inevitably the earliest accounts of female serial killers take us into the ranks of the aristocracy. It is here that some historical record survives.

  The names of murderous tyrants are infinitely familiar: Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein. Less familiar are their female equivalents, who we believed simply did not exist. They could not exist because (remember?) we thought women were only capable of emotionally driven “expressive” violence.

  The Bible is the best reflection of the most inner corridors of the Western cultural psyche and there we find Salome—the female murderer who has John the Baptist’s head cut off in response to his condemnation of her mother’s “adulterous” marriage to King Herod. The figure of Salome is a typical example of the deeply rooted notion in our culture of female expressive violence.106 John lost his head because Salome got too emotional.

  But a closer look at the historical record shows different kinds of killing by women with plenty of examples of carefully planned “constructive” acts of violence. Women were coldly seeking to achieve the same goals their murderous male counterparts yearned for: dominance, power, and wealth. Queens and empresses—how tainted are they with aberrant psychopathology or are they merely products of their times?

  If in the Bible we find the psyche of Western civilization, then in the Roman Empire we find its spine. There is no better place to seek out early female serial killers than in Rome.

  THE EMPIRE OF DEATH: FEMALE SERIAL KILLING IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

  About two thousand years ago, Roman emperors Caligula and Nero reigned in the years immediately following the death of Christ (circa a.d. 33). Caligula and Nero represent the high madness of Imperial Rome on the path to collapse—the bloodlust of psychopath rulers who married, raped, and murdered family members as readily as strangers for the sake of power and amusement.

  If one needed a fertile hothouse in which to raise and grow serial killers then Rome’s Imperial court would be perfect. Aside from its traditions of ruthlessness and cruelty in maintaining personal and state political power, Roman culture also celebrated acts of popular recreational serial death performed for paying spectators and guests in nearly two hundred stadiumlike arenas interspersed throughout the huge empire that stretched from Britain all the way down to North Africa. The Coliseum in Rome, the perpetual Super Bowl of slaughter with individually numbered seating for 70,000 drooling spectators, was merely the largest of these facilities, competing with each other to stage the most spectacular and gory shows of death for eager crowds. Professional warriors and slaves—gladiators—fought and killed each other all day, while the half-time noon show amused lunch-munching crowds with brutal torture-executions of helpless condemned prisoners.107 Christians were victims of these half-time cruelties, where exotic animals were first used to tear at the humans before being killed for the amusement of the crowds.

  The presence of women in these games—other than as victims—is mostly confined to a few rare references to the occasional appearance of a female gladiator—the gladiatrix—and the descriptions of the prostitutes who plied their trade under the arches of the Coliseum to customers aroused by the bloodletting. About female spectators we know very little other than that there were many.

  But in the corridors of power at the imperial court of the Caesars, the presence of women is more prominent in the historical record. We know their names and stories. Some of their faces we can still view on surviving Roman coins and sculptures.

  Agrippina the Younger—the Empress of Poison

  No Roman coinage perhaps features a portrait showing a more cruel determination and lust for power than those of the dark and pretty, curly-haired Agrippina the Younger—the “Empress of Poison”—the sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero, three Roman emperors in a row.

  Agrippina, sometime referred to as the “she-wolf,” was born in a.d. 15 or 16 on the Rhine, where her father, a Roman general, was brutally putting down the revolt of barbarian Germanic tribes (as loosely portrayed in the movie Gladiator.) Agrippina’s lineage included some royal Roman superstars: she was the great-granddaughter of Mark Anthony and granddaughter of Caesar Augustus. She was born into a small incestuous power elite that ruled the Roman Empire and whose individual members were obsessively gnawing and murdering their way to the top through an endless cycle of corruption, conspiracies, and betrayals of each other.

  When Agrippina was three years old, her father was murdered by the reigning Emperor Tiberius, for no reason other than his fear of her father’s popularity with the Senate and citizenry. In the ensuing years, Agrippina and her sisters and brothers lived in various imperial households, witnessing their mother’s plotting attempts to avenge her husband’s murder. As a result, by the time Agrippina was seventeen, her mother and her two eldest brothers were put to death for conspiring against Emperor Tiberius. Remarkably, after having killed almost her entire family, Tiberius adopted Agrippina’s youngest surviving brother, a very disturbed youth nicknamed Caligula, and eventually anointed him as his succeeding son.

  Like his sister, Caligula grew up in Germany in his father’s military camp and ran loose among the Roman troops as a child, often dressing up in their armor. This earned him the nickname Caligula, which means “little boots.” (His real name was Gaius.) He was adopted by the Roman legionnaires as a sort of good-luck mascot. As a child he witnessed the brutalities of the Roman campaign in Germany against the pagan tribes. He survived being taken hostage in a mutiny and the assassinations of his father, mother, and two brothers. Then, at the court of the ruthless Tiberius—adopted by the very man who had killed his parents and brothers—Caligula let loose with an unbound sexual sadism, obsessively observing the torture and executions of condemned prisoners and disguising himself while raping both male and female victims.

  A degenerate gambler and bisexual with vicious mood swings, Caligula eventually turned his sexual aggression onto his three surviving sisters—Julia, Drusilla, and Agrippina. It is unclear whether he forcibly raped them or whether they had their own agenda and voluntarily entered into incestuous relations with their unbalanced but up-and-coming brother. But when these acts of incest were brought to the attention of Emperor Tiberius, the sisters were immediately married off to suppress a scandal. Incest offended even their corrupt Roman sensibilities.

  Agrippina was married to an aristocrat twenty-five years her elder and had a son who she promptly named for one of her murdered brothers—Nero. This would be the same Nero who would later become the infamous emperor who “fiddled as Rome burned” according to legend.

  In a.d. 37, Tiberius died and was succeeded by crazy Caligula, who quickly installed his favorite sister, Drusilla, at his court as his mistress while at the same time re-established his incestuous relations with Agrippina. To keep up appearances, Drusilla was married to Caligula’s political ally and possibly his male lover, Lepidus. All three of Caligula’s sisters—Agrippina, Julia, and Drusilla—were elevated to imperial godlike status and in an unprecedented move appeared on Roman coinage during Caligula’s reign.

  When Drusilla died from fever in a.d. 38, Agrippina attempted to take her place as Caligula’s favorite lover, in the hope that her son, Nero, could rise to succeed as emperor. To her dismay, her brother Caligul
a rebuffed her. It is here, at the age of twenty-two, that the homicidal career of Agrippina begins to ferment. Her motive was, as ascribed by Roman historian Tacitus, spes dominationis—“desire for power [hope to dominate].”

  Upon being rejected by her brother, Agrippina turned to her widowed brother-in-law, Lepidus, and offered to marry him if he assisted her in assassinating Caligula. (Agrippina’s first husband had fallen ill and had died, perhaps with some help from her.) Caligula discovered the plot and executed Lepidus while exiling Agrippina. Agrippina’s son, Nero, was taken away and put into the care of her sister-in-law and rival, Domita Lepida. Agrippina remained in exile for eighteen months until Caligula became so erratically homicidal that his fearful courtiers assassinated him in a.d. 41.

  The Senate selected Caligula’s (and Agrippina’s) fifty-year-old uncle Claudius as the new emperor, made famous by Robert Graves’s historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and the 1970 BBC-PBS television series. Claudius was mature, intelligent, and easygoing, but because he had a speech impediment he was thought to be an idiot and was ignored (which did much to enhance his survival at the Roman court).

  Agrippina and Valeria Messalina—the Teenage Killer

  To the frustration of Agrippina—who was released from exile by her kind uncle Claudius—Claudius had married her sister-in-law’s daughter, the fifteen-year-old Valeria Messalina, who gave birth the next year to a male child, Britannicus. Despite the good turn in her fortune and return to Rome, with the birth of Britannicus, the chances for Agrippina’s son, Nero, of becoming emperor were rapidly fading.

  The teenage Messalina was Agrippina’s match. Smart, cruel, and manipulative, she was also pathologically jealous of Agrippina and her sister Julia. Agrippina made things worse when she convinced her sister Julia to attempt to seduce Claudius. When Messalina got wind of this plot, she persuaded Claudius to send Julia back into exile and then had her secretly murdered. Some have speculated on Agrippina’s motives for persuading Julia to undertake such a dangerous gambit. With Julia dead, Agrippina remained her assassinated father’s only surviving child.