Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  In August of 1985, Marybeth, at the age of 42, gave birth to another girl, her ninth child, Tami Lynne. On the morning of December 20, the girl was found dead in her crib. Again, SIDS was certified as cause of death.

  A neighbor visited the Tinning home the next morning to see if she could be of any comfort to Marybeth, who she assumed would be grieving over the death of her newborn daughter. When she entered the house, she found Joe and Marybeth in the kitchen, nonchalantly eating breakfast as if nothing had happened

  Later, after Tami Lynne’s funeral, Marybeth had people over her house for a brunch. Her demeanor had changed noticeably. “She was smiling. She was eating, conversing with everyone there,” the neighbor testified, “and didn’t appear to be upset.”

  Sandy Roe, Marybeth’s sister-in-law, testified that when she met with Marybeth after Tami Lynne’s death, she did not seem upset. “We spoke about Christmas,” Roe stated, “She never really talked about the death of the baby. It didn’t seem to bother her.”

  Nine deaths were now too many and authorities ordered an autopsy. It revealed that the child had been suffocated.

  Marybeth Tinning confessed to the murder of the infant and to the death of two other children, but not the others. She also confessed that she was attempting to poison her husband. In 1987, Tinning was sentenced to twenty years to life and is up for a parole hearing in March 2007.

  Christine Falling—the Killer Babysitter

  The case of Christine Falling is another extreme example of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Christine Laverne Slaughter Falling was born in abject poverty in northern Florida. Even though Christine’s mother was 16 years old, Christine was already her second child. Her father was 65 years old. Christine was shuffled around to various relatives and foster parents and grew up to be a grossly obese, dull-witted child suffering with epilepsy. Her friends remember her killing cats to “see if they really have nine lives.” Despite this, Christine professed a great love for cats.

  Christine was adopted into a religious family, but after several years she became so uncontrollable that at the age of nine she was sent away to a juvenile center. There she was reported to be a compulsive liar and thief. When Christine was old enough to go to high school, she went into a special program of half-days, allowing her to work the other half.

  When Christine was 14 she married a man in his early twenties. The marriage lasted six weeks, during which Christine launched a twenty-pound stereo at her husband in an outburst of bad temper. In the two years following the breakup of her marriage, Christine made at least fifty visits to the local hospital emergency room, complaining of troubles such as snakebites, red spots, bleeding tonsils, dislocated bones, falls, burns from hot grease, and vaginal bleeding.

  Around the time Christine was 16, she was living with her mother. She was too dull to find work as a store clerk and could only earn a living babysitting for others in her poverty-stricken, tar-paper shack neighborhood.

  On February 25, 1980, while babysitting 2-year-old Muffin Johnson, Christine says the girl stopped breathing. Falling rushed the child to the hospital, where her death was declared a result of encephalitis. The hospital emergency staff praised Christine for how well she had handled the emergency, wrapping the child up in a blanket and attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the way to the hospital.

  A year later, Christine was babysitting 4-year-old Jeffrey Davis, a distant relative. After Jeffrey was found dead, Christine stated that she had laid him down for his nap and had not noticed that he had ceased breathing. Death was certified as myocarditis—heart inflammation.

  Three days later, Christine was babysitting her 2-year-old cousin, Joseph, while his parents were at Jeffrey’s funeral. Joseph also failed to wake up from his nap. Again, death was diagnosed as myocarditis as a result of a virus.

  There was some speculation that Christine might carry some type of virus deadly to children, like Coxsackie A8, which is passed from person to person through contact with fecal matter. Doctors found no traces of any virus.

  When suspicions were voiced that Christine might be murdering the infants, her relatives and neighbors quickly came to her defense, stating how much Christine liked children and how gentle and caring she was with her charges. Journalists pointed out that infant death was not unusual among Florida’s poor, where bad hygienic conditions were common.

  Christine Falling next found a job as a housekeeper for 77-year-old William Swindle, who lived in a small cottage. The first day she arrived at work, Swindle was found dead on the floor of his kitchen. Death was presumed to be of natural causes.

  Christine stated in an interview, “The way I look at it, there’s some reason God is letting me go through this. If God hadn’t wanted me to go through this, He wouldn’t have let it happen.” Christine went back into the babysitting business.

  On July 14, 1981, Christine was helping her stepsister take care of her 8-month-old daughter, Jennifer. The two women drove to a government health center where the baby was given an immunization injection. The baby was crying when Christine carried her out of the health center. The two women then drove to a supermarket, where the mother went inside to buy some diapers. Christine was left alone in the car with the crying infant. When the mother returned to the car, the infant was silent. As they were driving home, Christine suddenly told her stepsister that Jennifer was not breathing. They rushed to a hospital, where the infant was pronounced dead.

  At the baby’s funeral, Christine fainted when the organist played “Precious Memories.” Later, she told people that the child had died of “a ‘yemonia’ sickness.”

  A year later, on July 2, 1982, a 17-year-old mother dropped her 10-week-old baby off with Christine to babysit for a day and a night. Christine stated that at 4:00 a.m. she had fed the child his formula and that he was well. In the morning, however, she found the baby dead in the crib.

  Christine was again submitted to a battery of tests. Thinking that perhaps somehow her epilepsy medicine might have gotten into the food of the infant, a careful autopsy was performed. What it revealed was that the child had been smothered. Christine was charged with three counts of murder.

  She confessed, “I love young ’uns. I don’t know why I done what I done…The way I done it, I seen it done on TV shows. I had my own way though. Simple and easy. No one would hear them scream. I did like, you know, simple, but it weren’t simple. I pulled a blanket over the face. Pulled it back. Then again I did the blanket pulling over the face…just the right amount for the little one. A voice would say to me, ‘Kill the baby,’ over and over…very slow, and then I would come to and realize what happened.”

  Christine Falling is serving a life sentence, but she became eligible for parole in December 2006.

  6

  SEX, DEATH, AND VIDEOTAPE

  The Female As Serial Killer Accomplice

  There are no histories of female serial killers committing acts as brutal and as depraved as those they commit when they act as accomplices of male serial killers. Over a period of three years, Charlene Williams Gallego and her husband, Gerald Gallego, lured and kidnapped ten teenage girls from shopping malls, parking lots, and roadsides, taking them away in their van. Together they both raped and tortured the girls in a mutual, sadistic, sex slave fantasy, and when they were finished, as Charlene watched or waited in the van, Gerald would murder the girls and dump their bodies in remote fields and desert flats.

  Karla Homolka drugged her 15-year-old younger sister and offered her as a “Christmas present” to her fiancé Paul Bernardo while her parents slept upstairs on Christmas Eve. She videotaped Bernardo as he raped her sister. She died during the assault from the effects of the sedatives Karla had slipped into her drink. Karla later videotaped and participated in the kidnappings, rapes, and murders of two more adolescent girls.

  In her early twenties, Myra Hindley assisted her boyfriend, Ian Brady, in the rape and murder of perhaps as many as ten male and female children and adolescents, taking photogra
phs of them and audiotaping their cries as Brady assaulted them. Rosemary and Fred West, Judith and Alvin Neelley, Carol Bundy and Doug Clark, Catherine and David Birnie, Cynthia Coffman and James Marlow, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, were all couples who together kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous victims.

  FEMALES AS ACCOMPLICES IN SEXUALLY SADISTIC SERIAL MURDERS

  Of the sixty-two known female serial killers in the U.S. between 1800 and 1995, a third (33 percent) were acting as part of a team or a couple.198 In most cases, the female was only technically a killer by definition of law—she did not physically commit the actual murder, but participated in the crime by luring victims or assisting in their captivity, torturing, sexual assaulting, disposing of their bodies, or destroying evidence. In the majority of cases, the female serial killer’s accomplice was a male, who ostensibly dominated the female, although there are exceptions to this, as we shall see. There are also cases of exclusively female teams or lesbian couples and family teams or cult groups—three or more killers operating together, in which, often, the male once again figures as the dominant element.199 The Charles Manson “family” is probably the most notorious of modern-day killer cults to which young females belonged.

  Female-male couples overall remain the most common serial-killing teams in the United States. It is in these teams that females approach most closely the stereotypical role of the sadistic, predatory, male sexual serial killer. Until most recently, female accomplices were almost exclusively treated as battered victims of their male partners and sentencing has often reflected this perception. While convicted male partners are sentenced to death or life imprisonment, their female accomplices are sometimes released after serving relatively shorter sentences—the cases of Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka are perhaps the most notorious examples of female killers successfully defending themselves by claiming to be submissive victims battered by their spouses into participating in horrendous crimes.

  The focus on male dominance in this type of killing team is underscored by the fact that the male is almost always older than the female partner. He often has an extensive history as a solo sexual predator before he met the female. The female is, on average, younger (20 years old at the first murder) than typically solo female serial killers (average age 30).200 While the male accomplice might have accumulated a substantial criminal history prior to meeting the female, she often has no history of any substantial criminal activities prior to encountering the male. In fact, in the cases of Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka, both women had what might be described as a “normal” middle-class upbringing with no signs of any abuse, delinquency, or mental disorders in their histories.

  Female-male team killers are usually highly organized, carefully planning their crimes and selecting their victims. Interestingly enough, their joint killing careers are often much shorter than the average for solo females: one year for couples compared to the four-year average for single female serial killers. Frequently, the apprehension of the couple can be attributed to disorganization or loss of control by the male partner. The male partner frequently “imprints” a typical sexual predatory profile on the crime—highly visible victims, public disposal of bodies, the use of knives and guns, rape and mutilation. This is not the typical pattern of the solo female serial killer, who kills “quietly” with poison or suffocation and whose victims frequently are not even recognized by authorities as having been murdered. What is frighteningly striking, however, is the extent and capacity of the female accomplice to journey into the male killing pattern.

  Wives and Girlfriends of Sexual Sadists

  How does an apparently normal female become a homicidal accomplice? There are few reliable studies on that question. In 2002, Janet Warren and veteran FBI profiler Ron Hazelwood published the results of interviews with twenty former wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists, seven of whom participated in the killing of a total of nineteen victims.201 Four of the women involved with murderers were actually present at the murder and were charged as accomplices and two can be easily identified as Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka, even thought the study does not identify the participants by their actual names.

  Seventeen (85 percent) of the women in the survey were raised in an intact family and had no previous arrest histories prior to meeting their mates. The other three were arrested for minor charges: stealing a tube of lipstick at the age of fourteen, a typewriter from work, a check from work. Seventy-five percent of the women had graduated high school or had some college education and 50 percent were in either a skilled or professional labor category. Twenty percent were students at the time they met their partner. Only four of the women reported alcohol or drug abuse, suicide attempts, or mental health issues prior to their relationship with the sadist. The researchers concluded that the majority of these women “lived rather conventional, stable, and noncriminal lives, before the initiation of the relationship that culminated in rather radical changes in their behavior.”202

  This is diametrically opposite to what we know of solo female serial killers, who tend to have unstable family histories, relatively poor academic performances, juvenile criminal records, and psychiatric histories.

  Other aspects of their childhood histories, however, more closely resembled those of solo female serialists and male serial killers as well. Thirty-five percent of the women reported abusive family discipline, and nearly half (45 percent) reported continual sexual abuse in their childhood; 30 percent identified their father as the abuser when they were between the age of 4 and 8. The sexual abusers included fathers, brothers, a grandmother, an aunt, a sister, and other acquaintances. There were no cases of sexual assault by strangers reported.

  When asked why they became involved in abusive and sadistic relationships, 75 percent of the women replied that it was out of love and desire to please the man. Two women described themselves as extremely naïve, two indicated that they wanted to get away from home, and one could offer no explanation.

  The majority of women (85 percent) stated that the men were gentle and caring when they first met them, gave them surprise gifts (65 percent), took them on trips (40 percent), and had a “great deal of money to spend on them” (85 percent). When asked why they remained in the relationship, only three of the twenty women attributed it to love; eight said they were either naïve or stupid and hoped their partner’s behavior would improve; one for financial dependency and one for emotional dependency. Only seven women reported they remained out of fear of their partner. Asked why they left the relationship, eight said out of fear for their lives; three out of fear for their children’s lives; three because their partners were arrested; five for other reasons; and one was left by her partner. Fear appeared to be almost equally (35–40 percent) the motive in a large minority of cases why the women either remained or left the relationships.

  The authors of the study characterized these women as “compliant.” They concluded that while all the women “express a willingness to exchange their compliance in return for the attention and affection of the sadistic male, there also appears to be a more subtle dynamic operative in which some of the women became assimilated into the sexual aggression of their partner.” They believed that all of the women who engaged in this type of behavior did so only after meeting their partner, and in those cases where the women participated in murder, they would not have done so on their own, independent of the men. Alternatively, the authors felt the males would have murdered even if they had not met their female partner—at least in those seven cases out of the twenty.

  Finally, the study concluded:

  It is also our opinion that these men and their behaviors do not reflect the more extreme end of the continuum of behavior associated with “wife batterers.” Although some men who batter their wives may also be sexual sadists, it is our impression that the majority of them are not.203

  High-Dominance Women

  During the mid-1930s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow undertook a number of studies of sex
ual behavior related to dominance. He noted that in captivity, the most dominant monkeys engaged in almost constant sex, and that the nature of that sex was often “abnormal”—male monkeys mounting other males and even instances of dominant females mounting males. Maslow concluded that sex in those circumstances was often an expression of dominance, rather than the primates’ sex drive. He also noted that when a new monkey was introduced into the group, the lower-dominance monkeys would act extremely violent toward it. Maslow linked these attacks to low-esteem violence of the type seen in human beings.

  Maslow then turned his attention to young college girls, whom he interviewed at great length. In 1939, Maslow concluded that female sexuality is also linked to dominance. He found that people fall into one of three categories: high-dominance, medium-dominance, and low-dominance.

  High-dominance women were more promiscuous, sexually adventurous, and uninhibited. Medium-dominance women tended to also be very sexual, but would usually relate to one male partner at a time. Low-dominance women had a very low opinion of sex, engaged in it infrequently, and felt its only purpose was for reproduction. Maslow noted that the sexual characteristics of each category had nothing to do with sexual desire—while the sex drive was equal in each type, the amount of sex that the women actually engaged in would differ.

  Maslow also discovered that women preferred males who were slightly more dominant than themselves but within the same dominance group. High dominance women rejected most males because of their lower dominance. One woman, who claimed that she could orgasm by simply looking at an attractive male, explained to Maslow that she couldn’t orgasm when having sex with some males because they were too weak and she could not imagine herself “giving in to them.”

  Medium-dominance women found high-dominance men too frightening, while low-dominance women found the medium-dominance man intimidating. Each would mate with slightly more dominant men, but from within their dominance class. For Maslow, this was the normal course of male-female relationships. It is often applicable to homosexual relationships as well.