Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The stodgy Boston puritan psychiatrists were skeptical, characterizing her admission in their report as “a shameless recital of a story of sexual excitement occurring in the presence of a dying person…[Jane’s] representation as to the nature of this impulse and conditions attending it were so at variance with any known form of sexual perversion that feigning was suspected by her interviewers.”

  Jane herself summed it all up: “I seem to have a sort of paralysis of thought and reason. I have an uncontrollable desire to give poison without regard to consequences. I have no objection against telling my feelings, but I don’t know my own mind. I don’t know why I do these things.” A Boston newspaper quoted Jane as saying, “Don’t blame me, blame my nature. I can’t change what was meant to be, can I?”

  Toppan told the psychiatrists, “Most of the people I killed were old enough to die, anyway, or else had some disease that might cause death. I never killed children. I love them.”

  Jane was charged with one count of homicide. Her defense attorney admitted that she had committed eleven murders in the recent years. In her psychiatric interviews, Toppan provided the details of thirty-one murders she committed, mostly since nursing school. If one was to include the string of patients she killed as a student nurse, Jane claimed to have killed more than a hundred victims.

  At her trial she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which Jane herself questioned, claiming that she could not be insane because she knew she was doing something wrong. Indeed, had Jane been tried today, the insanity plea would not have held—psychopathic serial killers are not insane by legal definition, which requires that the offender not understand what he or she is doing or understand that it is wrong. Serial killers are acutely aware of the wrong they are committing and go out of their way to evade getting caught for it. The only element of “insanity” with serial killers is the irresistible compulsion buried somewhere in their psyche that drives them in their addiction to killing.

  On June 24, 1902, Jane Toppan was committed to a mental hospital at the age of 48. She died at the age of 84 on August 17, 1938, after thirty-six years of confinement. It was reported that she was a quiet patient in her old age but that she would occasionally taunt the hospital nurses by inviting them to “Get some morphine, dearie, and we’ll go out in the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”133

  Jane Toppan might have wrapped up the nineteenth century for female serial killers, but there was much to come in the twentieth.

  PART TWO

  Selected Case Studies of Female Serial Killers and Accomplices in the Twentieth Century

  AILEEN WUORNOS VELMA BARFIELD DOROTHEA MONTALVO

  PUENTE GENENE JONES MARYBETH TINNING

  MARTHA BECK MYRA HINDLEY CAROL BUNDY CHARLENE

  GALLEGO KARLA HOMOLKA ILSE KOCH

  IRMA GRESE MARY BRUNNER SUSAN ATKINS PATRICIA

  KRENWINKEL LINDA KASABIAN LESLIE VAN HOUTEN

  3

  THE CULT AND PASSION OF AILEEN WUORNOS

  The Postmodern Female Serial Killer

  In a previous book, which focused primarily on the history of male serial murderers, I described Ted Bundy as our first postmodern serial killer because unlike “outsider” serial killers of the past, he was more like us—or at least like those of us who believe in a college education and the middle-class values and ambitions that go with it. Bundy was not one of those solitary, backwoods, cellar-dwelling creatures hanging corpses by the heels on hooks in the mudroom or some twitchy, glassy-eyed vagrant trolling for hitchhikers and runaways behind the wheel of a Dumpster car full of crumpled beer cans and dirty rags. Bundy had his own upscale apartment with drawers full of fine linen, glassware, and ski sweaters. He was attractive, charming, well-mannered, and appeared to be ambitious—the quintessential 1970s yuppie. But sometimes Ted would snatch young women from public places, beat them into unconsciousness, and take them away in his cute Volkswagen Beetle to some lonely dark place. Then he’d kill them and have sex with the corpses. He was the real American Psycho—a popular dinner guest and date, a handsome law student with political ties to the Republican Party in Washington State. Eventually he could have been a candidate for governor—maybe higher. His smile and hair were styled just right for that.

  AILEEN WUORNOS

  Aileen Wuornos was everything Ted Bundy was not, and that precisely makes her our postmodern female serial killer. While—until Ted Bundy came along—we thought male serial killers were creepy monsters, our perception of female serial killers was that they were lethal “ladies.” We saw them as respectable and sometimes attractive women who harbored homicidal intentions behind a façade of feminine mystique: arsenic and old lace, deadly damsels. They used their very beauty, charm, and genteel manners to lure victims into their homicidal webs ( just like Bundy) while maintaining their façade of wife, mother, nurse, babysitter, or widow. Aileen Wuornos would tear that stereotype down.

  Between the male Ted Bundy and the female Aileen Wuornos our perceptions of gender differences in serial killers crisscrossed to opposite poles. Ted Bundy normalized the serial killer into one of us while Aileen Wuornos, randomly preying with a handgun on strangers in the night, unleashed the female serial killer from the cult of feminine domesticity. Aileen Wuornos thrived in the very territory where other women feared to go and where so many women were themselves killed—hitchhiking on darkened highways and turning tricks on roadsides. She was like no other female serial killer before her and she might be signaling the shape of things to come—the infinite possibilities of female serial emancipation with its dark burden and price to pay, an opposite predatory polar star to the traditional female as victim.

  Just like Ted Bundy, after her apprehension, Aileen became a television courtroom celebrity, a documentary star, and an interview-of-the-week. Long before we heard of her, Aileen claimed that one day somebody would write a book about her and make a movie and she was right. Several books have been written, in fact, since her arrest. But books were just the beginning. Murder Trail, a four-part docudrama that looked at the Wuornos phenomenon and other criminals, was produced for the Discovery Channel and was only one in a string of film and television programs about her. Others included A&E’s American Justice and endless coverage on Court TV. Wuornos made more appearances on Sixty Minutes and Dateline than some presidential candidates. Then there was the 1992 made-for-TV movie Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, starring Jean Smart of the television sitcom Designing Women, and two documentary features by director Nick Broomfield: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, followed by the sequel, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.

  There are hundreds of websites devoted to Wuornos, which portray her alternately as victim, heroine, or fiend. Wuornos was even the subject of an opera in San Francisco by Carla Lucero, who explained, “I feel a strong yet reluctant connection to Aileen Wuornos. Her story embodies the darkness in every victim’s soul and the fleeting fantasies of every survivor…Aileen takes us into an abyss, leaving us to seek our own light. Maybe the light is in the knowledge that we chose another path; that we survived.”134

  A year after Wuornos was executed, she achieved the ultimate cult status with a Hollywood movie, Monster, which won an Academy Award for Best Actress for Charlize Theron for her portrayal of Wuornos.

  Aileen Wuornos As a Child

  In life Aileen Wuornos was as far as one can be from the red carpet of Oscar night. She was born in 1956 and raised in Troy, Michigan, a forlorn suburb fifteen miles north of Detroit. Aileen’s mother, Diane, was 16 years old and already separated from the father, a 19-year-old delinquent named Leo Pittman, reportedly a cruel and abusive spouse. Diane believes she was severely beaten by Leo when she was several weeks pregnant with Aileen. In any case, Aileen never met her natural father—he would commit suicide while serving a life sentence for kidnapping and raping a 7-year-old girl. It happens that way with serial killers—sometimes and not infrequently, they are just born into bad blood.

&nb
sp; Diane had already given birth to Aileen’s older brother, Keith, the year before. She was a single mother with two children, and she attempted to raise them but she did not do a very good job of it. Witnesses later recalled the two children crying and wailing for hours as Diane slept or just went away. One day when Aileen was six, Diane went out to dinner, leaving the children with her roommate. She never returned, and after a week the roommate called Diane’s parents, Lauri Wuornos, a Ford factory worker, and his wife, Britta, who came by and picked up their grandchildren.

  There was a twisted psychopathology already in play between Diane and her parents. Diane claimed that her mother, Britta, was jealous of her because Lauri was sexually interested in her. Although she stated that her father never actually sexually abused her, he would frequently touch her accidentally and once attempted to passionately kiss her. Aileen would later claim that her grandfather Lauri abused her but never went as far as accusing him of sexual abuse, other than laughingly recounting one similar attempt to French kiss her.

  When Aileen was two, Diane returned to reclaim her two children but shortly afterward abandoned them again with the babysitter. If early infant attachment theory has anything to do with mental disorder and psychopathy, then definitely Aileen Wuornos is a candidate. Britta and Lauri, who already had two older children of their own (in addition to Aileen’s mother, Diane), finally adopted Aileen and her brother as their own. Like Ted Bundy, who believed his grandfather was his father and his mother was his sister, Aileen believed that Britta and Lauri were her natural parents, and her aunt and uncle were her siblings. And like Ted Bundy, Aileen would be about 11 years old when she learned the truth from other kids about her actual family ties. But here end the similarities with Ted Bundy.

  Photographs of schoolgirl Aileen Wuornos reveal a beautiful, fine-haired, blonde, freckled little girl with a beaming, open smile dressed in one those cheap synthetic dresses with a white frilly collar that all smartly dressed little girls wore in the early 1960s. There are family photos of Aileen at the age of 6, preciously seated in the center of her family on a footstool, while her brother, Keith, and her “stepbrother,” Barry, and “stepsister,” Lori, are lined up in a semicircle standing behind her—everyone smiling. There is Aileen on the deck of a small boat vacationing in the summer with her family at the age of 13, a gangly skinny ’tween with long legs in cutoff jeans all pretty and again smiling. And yet another picture of her on her bike—smiling. Aileen was always smiling in family photographs somebody was proud enough to take—memories apparently worth recording.135 But things were not as they seemed.

  Neighbors recall that the Wuornos home was always dark and curtained, and nobody was ever invited in. Lauri was reportedly a despotic “stepfather,” disciplining Aileen with a leather belt, beating her on her naked buttocks and legs according to her own testimony. Moreover, Keith and Aileen were disciplined by Lauri and Britta by stricter standards than their natural children, particularly their youngest child, Aileen’s “stepsister,” Lori, who was only two and a half years older than Aileen. Later the accounts by Aileen of her “stepparents’” alcoholism and her abuse at their hands came into conflict with the recollections of her “stepsister” and “stepbrother,” who denied their own abuse and Aileen’s as well.

  Parental abuse at such a young age is difficult to interpret. The line between physical and sexual abuse can sometimes be razor thin and memories are often repressed or modulated by children. In the early 1960s, being spanked or even hit with a belt, naked buttocks or not, was not unusual. This kind of punishment also modulated between ritualistic light slaps on the behind with a belt sufficient to frighten any child to actual brutal beatings with a belt—it all depended upon the particular parent. One parent’s spanking is another’s brutality. Yet Aileen appeared to be singled out for punishment. Lauri did not allow her to receive Christmas presents. Once, when she threw away a baked potato, which she could not finish, Lauri made her take it out of the garbage and eat it. He forced her to watch as he drowned a kitten she was not supposed to keep.

  From an early age, Aileen showed a precocious talent for singing and dancing and said she wanted to be a movie star. She craved the center of attention. But about the age of eight, Aileen developed a hair-trigger temper, which isolated her from other children, who became afraid of her. Lori recalls that Aileen desperately attempted to fit in and that she counseled her several times to “be nice” and keep her temper and moodiness in check. It did not work. Lori attempted to include Aileen with her own playmates, but inevitably Aileen would whine and rage, alienating them. Lori was told by her playmates not to come back with Aileen. She didn’t. Some thirty years later, after Aileen was charged with seven murders, Lori would tearfully say, “I still cry that we rejected her when she was little. The time she wanted to play and we wouldn’t let her.”

  Lori recalled that Aileen could be very nice, but it seemed somehow forced, as if she was deliberately tailoring her niceness because she knew that was the only way people would accept or tolerate her. But she would easily lose control and fly into rages. Lori felt sorry for her, but she was not going to sacrifice her own friendships and social life for Aileen. Lori recalled that later, when Aileen began to abuse drugs, her temper got worse and on several occasions when enraged she lunged at her or Keith with a knife, threatening to kill them.

  At school until about the age of eight, Aileen was clever and received good marks. But from eight onward, with her developing behavioral problems, Aileen had no friends, received low grades, and had conflicts with her teachers. She was also diagnosed with vision and hearing problems. But Britta refused to have Aileen evaluated for these problems, insisting that she simply “did not pay attention.” Aileen’s verbal IQ was tested at a low 80, but despite her behavioral problems, she did not receive any counseling—probably as a result of Britta’s resistance. During her trial, one psychiatrist testified that there was a wide gap between Aileen’s verbal IQ and her functional IQ, which apparently was quite high. This gap could have resulted in the uncontrollable behavioral episodes. The psychiatrist described it as “sand in the fuel line” of an otherwise working engine. Her brain sputtered—would stop and start. Sometimes she was emotionally in control, at other times she’d be raging completely out of it.

  Cigarette Pig

  By the time Aileen was eleven there was something seriously wrong: She was having sex with neighborhood boys in the surrounding woods and ravines in exchange for spare change or cigarettes. This kind of sexualized behavior at so early an age almost inevitably suggests that Aileen had been sexually abused as a child. Although she would occasionally hint at it, in the end she denied it vehemently. If not that, then she might have desperately found sex a key to overcoming the rejection she suffered at the hands of her peers.

  Numerous male witnesses later recalled losing their virginity to Aileen when they were 12 to 14 years old. They said it was joyless and mechanical, with Aileen saying very little during these encounters. Sometimes she participated in group sex with six or more boys. With these acts came denigration—she was nicknamed “Cigarette Pig” by the boys in the neighborhood and at school for her propensity to exchange sex for cigarettes. When she attempted to form an attachment to some of the boys she had sex with, she was brutally and publicly rejected.

  This just underscores how deceptive the smile of the cute 13-year-old in the photographs might have really been.

  It was the 1960s in a Detroit suburb. Aileen quickly fell into a world of available drugs and alcohol, as did many kids her age. She smoked weed and dropped LSD but eventually settled on tranquillizers and alcohol as her drugs of choice. She shoplifted, getting caught in the same K-Mart where Britta was employed. Britta quit in embarrassment. Aileen fought with Lauri and Britta and had sex with her brother, Keith.

  When Aileen was fourteen she became pregnant. Wuornos gave different versions of how she became pregnant: In one version it was a family friend and in another it was an Elvis impersonato
r who kidnapped and raped her. Lauri was unsympathetic. On January 19, 1971, Lauri drove Aileen to Detroit and dumped her into the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers. On March 24, Wuornos gave birth to a boy, whom Lauri insisted be given up for adoption without Wuornos being allowed to see him, despite her pleading. Aileen named the baby Keith in honor of her brother.

  After returning home, Wuornos re-entered high school but did not last long there. She ran away from home several more times and got into minor trouble with the law. Eventually, Lauri told her not to return. She ended up bingeing on alcohol and drugs, hooking up with men she’d pick up hitchhiking, or sleeping in abandoned cars or in the woods near their home. Keith, likewise, had gotten into trouble and had left home.

  Aileen was 15 years old when the only mother she had really known, Britta, died of cirrhosis of the liver. It came as a shock to most of the children—Britta had effectively concealed her alcoholism from them. Although Aileen had ambivalent feelings toward Britta, she nevertheless was the closest thing she had to a caring mother. When she was in the home for unwed mothers, Lauri had prohibited any visits or phone calls from home, but Britta wrote numerous letters to Aileen. Now she was dead.

  Aileen’s stepsister, Lori, had to search her out among the abandoned cars on the outskirts of town to tell her of Britta’s death. When Aileen went to the funeral home she acted out, dressing inappropriately in jeans, frivolously switching signs between the men’s and ladies’ washrooms, and blowing cigarette smoke into Britta’s face as she lay in her coffin. Wuornos growled, “If I want to blow smoke in the old slob’s face, I will!” before she was ejected from the funeral home. With Britta’s death, her last connection with any caregiver of consequence had been severed.