Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  When Karla Homolka’s lawyer came forward with her offer to testify against Bernardo in exchange for a lenient sentence, the prosecutors readily accepted for they had come up with no evidence in the house linking Bernardo with Mahaffy and French. For a guilty plea to manslaughter and her testimony against Bernardo, Homolka negotiated a sentence of twelve years. She would be eligible for parole in four years, and if denied, eligible for automatic statutory release in eight under Canadian penal law. The prosecution agreed not to contest her parole application.

  While these negotiations with Homolka were taking place, Bernardo sent his lawyer to the Port Dalhousie home with a hand-drawn map he had prepared, once the police search was over. Left alone in the house, the lawyer went up to the bathroom, got up on the vanity, unscrewed a ceiling lamp, reached in with his hand under the roof insulation, and withdrew a bundle of six small Hi-8 video cassettes—the rape and torture videos that the police failed to find in their seventy-two-day search of the small house! The lawyer then promptly concealed the existence of the tapes for fifteen months. He had recovered the tapes a week before the deal with Homolka had been made by the prosecutors. Had the tapes been turned over to them then, a deal with Karla might not have been necessary.

  Karla testified against Bernardo, portraying herself as just one more of his victims. Her testimony, however, was hardly necessary—the tapes that Paul and Karla made were entered into evidence in court, shown only to the jury, while the spectators and press heard the audio. The jury saw Karla willingly participating and enjoying the rapes and tortures of the victims. But there was nothing they could do. The deal was done.

  Paul Bernardo admitted to raping the girls. In view of the videotapes, he could take no other position. He denied, however, killing Mahaffy and French. He insisted that both girls died while in Karla’s custody. Near the end of his testimony, Bernardo admitted that he had some “problems” with his sexuality. “Down the road, I’m going to have to seek professional help for it,” Bernardo flatly stated, not understanding why a wave of scornful laughter rippled through the courtroom.

  Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 (Canada has no death penalty) and he will not be eligible for parole for twenty-five years. It is unlikely that he will ever get it.

  In chatty letters from prison to her friends, Homolka wrote on her arrival there: “There are some people, like you, who know that this horror is not of my own making.” She wrote that prison was an opportunity for her to take some university courses: “I want you to know that life in here isn’t as bad as most people think…Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish my degree while I’m here. I’m eligible for parole in four years and intend to be out—for sure!” Her only worry about prison: “I hope they let me do my hair in jail. I would just die if my hair went to hell.”

  Karla did not get out in four years, nor in eight. Public indignation over the deal and a constant barrage of media coverage of Karla’s every prison party, her lesbian relationships, her love affair with a male prisoner convicted of murdering his girlfriend, her prison psychiatric file, her personal letters and photographs, forced the correctional system to keep Karla in prison until she had served her full term of twelve years. Her mandatory release on Independence Day in July 2005 received frenzied helicopter-convoy coverage in Canada. The media dogged her for another six months or so and then tired of it. She lives somewhere in Montreal under the name of Teale, a name she and Paul Bernardo had adopted shortly before their arrests, based on the serial killer portrayed by Kevin Bacon in the movie Criminal Law—Martin Thiel, one of their favorites.

  Despite the public fear that Karla will reoffend or become a homicidal muse for another serial killer, the prognosis for never hearing about her again is good, unless the press ferrets her out at a bus stop, doing nothing other than waiting for a bus, which is what they precisely did recently.* Statistically speaking, high-profile female offenders like Karla, who either escaped prison or were released, have not been discovered committing a new series of crimes. Charlene Gallego continues to live in anonymity—hopefully in innocent anonymity.

  Everest

  Explaining Karla is a more difficult task. There is nothing in her history prior to meeting Bernardo that is common to that of other serial killers (or psychopaths for that matter). In prison, Karla had been administered practically every psychological test known to man and scored normal profiles. Her score on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) was five; a score of at least twenty is required to designate the subject as a psychopath.211 On the other hand, while in prison Karla completed a degree from Queen’s University in psychology, including courses in deviant psychology. She could have manipulated her responses to the tests.

  Homolka remains a mystery. It was not so much that Homolka was evil, as she was vacant. She was as colorless and as soul-dead as the anonymous housing tracts and shopping malls she and her Exclusive Diamond Club friends inhabited. Karla was conscious of only her Beastie Boy “right to party.” Her family was a numb and shriveled middle-middle-class hive of greed. All her poor sister Tammy wanted for her sixteenth birthday was a Porsche—something usually just beyond the means of the middle-middle. Karla Homolka could rattle off cosmetic-counter brand names in the midst of an unfolding rape-homicide, but was incapable of the simplest moral judgment—of not submitting her sister to a rape; of releasing a frightened and battered girl when she had the power to. Her capacity to do the right thing was totally extinct.

  For Homolka, Bernardo was as perfect as the cover of a cheap romance novel—a blond, large, nicely styled Big Bad Businessman. His values were as vacant as hers and as such, they made a perfect couple. The walls of Bernardo’s study were covered with pictures of expensive sports cars and slips of paper with slogans like “Poverty is self-imposed.” “Time is Money.” “Money never sleeps.” “Think big. Be big.” “I don’t meet the competition—I crush it.” “Poverty sucks.” Wall Street was his favorite movie.

  The horror is that there probably was not an ounce of murder in Karla Homolka’s heart before she met Bernardo, and probably none remains today. Yet on contact with a Bernardo, a vapid and vacant little Barbie princess like Karla becomes an effective homicidal bitch. We know that there are lots of Paul Bernardos out there, but one wonders: How many young men and women are out there—with moral discretion as malnourished as Homolka’s—waiting to meet their mate?

  Some might argue that until Bernardo met Karla he had not committed any rapes or murders; until Ian Brady met Myra Hindley; until Doug Clark met Carol Bundy. Were these women—as women sometimes tend to do when killing—using these men as their proxies for their own homicidal desires? Possibly. Would these men have gone on to rape and kill if they had not met these women? Very likely. One thing we know for sure, however, in modern history there has not been a single known case of a Karla Homolka or a Myra Hindley or a Charlene Gallego without a male. (The notable exception, perhaps, is the lesbian female team of Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood, who murdered elderly patients in a retirement home for sexual thrills.)

  Although he applied it to the victims as well as accomplices of females, as Patrick Wilson concluded in his study of Home Office statistics of nearly every woman executed in Britain since 1843, “The husband or lover of a murderess invariably plays a part in causing the murder, if only, because, like Everest, he is there. The same cannot be said of male crimes of violence.”212

  7

  NAZI BITCHES AND THE MANSON KILLER GIRLS

  Making Female Missionary Cult Serial Killers

  When the movie Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS* was released in 1975, it reminded us of our belief that women did not kill or torture—unless they were Nazis. This infamous exploitation movie was set in a Nazi slave labor camp (actually shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes). Ilsa (played by Dyanne Thorne) is the female camp commandant, a deranged sex maniac and SS mad scientist. She enjoys forcing male prisoners to have sex with her, castrating those who fail to satisfy her. She also
conducts medical experiments designed to test whether women can withstand more pain than men, which, of course, involves lots of graphic footage of the torture of buxom, naked women. This genre was not new. It was firmly rooted in a torrent of men’s pulp adventure magazines from the 1950s and 1960s with titles like Argosy, Stag, Man’s Action, True Adventure, which sometimes ran stories with sexy evil torturous Nazi females who demanded sexual satisfaction from their male sex slaves, whose lives depended upon their performance.

  A year after Ilsa, Italian film director Lina Wertmüller followed on the same theme in Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebellezze), with Shirley Stoler (who played Martha Beck in The Honeymoon Killers) portraying a female SS camp commandant who demands sexual service from inmate Giancarlo Giannini, in a sequence that the website IMDb claims, “Remains one of the most harrowing and fascinating scenes ever filmed.”213

  One can debate endlessly the meaning of the mostly male sexual fascination with beautiful blonde Nazi killer bitches, but its roots are indisputably founded in historical events—recent ones at that—unfolding in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.

  STATE SERIAL MURDER IN THE THIRD REICH

  By now we realize that serial killers are neither exclusively male nor are they exclusively driven by sexual impulses. They include profit and power killers and Mafia contract killers and although it would have been argued a decade ago that the definition of a serial killer did not include military and genocidal killers, it especially includes them—and particularly those of the Third Reich. In fact, the Third Reich practiced state serial killing—serial mass murder. Probably the first state in history to do so in the way it did.

  In the twelve years that it existed, Nazi Germany murdered approximately twelve million people—that includes the Jews, who made up nearly half of those victims. We are not talking here about people killed by aerial bombing, in sieges, by starvation or deprivation by occupied populations at home, or in urban battle crossfire. What we are talking about is one-on-one collective acts of murder—teams of killers firing single gunshots from small arms into the backs of victims’ heads; hangings; beatings; injections of phenol into the heart; stompings; burning people alive; killing by medical experimentation and through so-called “sport” killing, and other individual acts of brutality. Toward the end the Nazis picked up the pace with mass killing in gas chambers, but those never really worked very well and broke down often. But still, they worked well enough to kill three million victims. But most of the remaining nine million were murdered person-to-person by thousands of serial killers who killed day after day, victim by victim, shot by shot, until they could kill no more.

  For the longest time, we believed in the Nazis’ defense that they were “only following orders.” We did not forgive it, but we believed in it as an explanation, and that is one of the reasons that we have until recently excluded Nazi war criminals from the category of serial killer. We presumed they were not doing what they did by choice and that their victims were selected for them, the act of killing ordered at the pain of dire punishment if refused. Recent scholarship has completely put that notion to rest. We now know that direct participation in killing was mostly an optional and voluntary choice and no German trooper was punished for refusing to shoot unarmed men, women, and children. If they refused, and some did, they were not shot themselves, they were not sent to a concentration camp, nor were they even sent to the Eastern Front. At worse, they were teased by their fellow troopers for being “weak” and perhaps passed over for promotion.

  Some would categorize Nazi perpetrators as missionary type serial killers who are politically, morally, religiously, or ideologically motivated to murder particular types of victims, who they feel deserve to be eliminated from society. But in many cases they did not commit these crimes because they were fanatical Nazis. Historian Christopher Browning studied a mobile killing unit that hunted down and killed thousands of men, women, and children in eastern Polish country villages, shooting them into mass graves one by one. Browning discovered that the killers were mostly reserve police officers approaching middle-age, from the rank and file, of which only 25 percent belonged to the Nazi Party.214 This unit did not consist of indoctrinated, elite, black-uniformed SS troops, security police units, specialized Einsatzgruppen killing commandos, or even vigilante Nazi fanatics; they were ordinary Hamburg traffic cops on temporary assignment in the Polish countryside behind German lines. Thus Browning called his book on the subject Ordinary Men.

  What we are beginning to understand is that the Nazis were able to induce a kind of temporary state of psychopathy in its citizenry, where ordinary, sane, “normal” people were made capable for brief periods of committing serial murder. Brief periods, because with time many began to have mental breakdowns, resorted to alcohol abuse, had nightmares, and even committed suicide, and developed what has been recently termed “perpetration-induced traumatic stress”—a type of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by perpetrators of atrocities.215 Thus the Nazis introduced the gas chambers in the winter of 1941–1942, not for more efficient killing necessarily, but for a less traumatic experience for the perpetrators. Gas was seen as a “humane” way to kill victims, reducing the psychological toll on the killers, who were murdering by the hundreds of thousands in the East.

  While we have come close to understanding how the Third Reich made ordinary men into serial killers, we have yet little information on the “ordinary” women involved in the killing. And they did indeed exist in Nazi Germany, to some degree authentically reflected by the pulp fictional Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

  The fictional Ilsa is inspired by a combination of two actual notorious blonde/redhead Nazi serial-killing women, both initially products of the state: Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and Irma Grese, the “Beast of Belsen.” Both these women were accused of taking personal pleasure in the sadistic torture and mutilation of concentration camp inmates beyond their call of duty. They were more than just state-nurtured serial killers: They were freelancing, opportunistic murderers who excelled in killing because they personally found pleasure in it. As such, they would have been, and to some degree were, condemned by the Nazis, too. Yet, very much like female serial killer accomplices described in the previous chapter, it is doubtful whether Ilse Koch or Irma Grese would have committed the atrocities they did if they were not introduced and prepared for it by the state.

  Ilse Koch—the Bitch of Buchenwald

  Ilse Koch was a 41-year-old, red-haired, green-eyed, buxomly woman when she was put on trial in 1947 for crimes committed in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where some 50,000 inmates had died. Interestingly enough, Ilse was tried three times for different crimes in Buchenwald—by the Nazis in 1943, by the Americans in 1947, and again by the new West German government in 1950.

  The charges laid against her in her trial by the Americans, the most famous of the three trials, were monstrously spectacular. It was alleged that Ilsa, who was the camp commandant’s wife, would assemble newly arriving inmates and order that they remove their shirts. Ilse would then walk the ranks of the prisoners selecting those with tattoos she liked. She would then have them killed, skinned, and have household artifacts made from the tattooed skin like lamp shades, photo album covers, handbags, and gloves. Her house at the concentration camp was alleged to have light switches made from human thumb bones and furniture and decoration made from body parts and shrunken heads. It was alleged that she had murdered approximately forty inmates for this purpose.216

  It was all incredibly creepy stuff and would ten years later inspire a real serial killer back in the U.S. In 1957, Ed Gein, after reading too many men’s pulp true adventure magazines, adopted Koch’s reported decorating style and furnished his own lonely Wisconsin farmhouse in the same way, using the body parts of women he killed or dug up from graves.217

  That would make Ilse Koch a very unique serial killer. She was a hedonist lust type—a rare species among women, the only one known in modern times—a female
killing to harvest body parts through some kind of compulsive sexual deviance. The closest thing to Ilse on the historical record is Elizabeth Báthory, some four centuries earlier.

  There were other charges leveled against Ilse. Any male prisoner who dared to cast his eyes in her direction was beaten to death for impudence and “sexual harassment.” She had crews of inmates worked to death building her personal riding stables on the grounds of the camp. She wandered around the camp reporting prisoners for real or imagined infractions, resulting in their deaths by beating, which she enjoyed watching. There was a distinctly sexual edge to the charges. Ilse was described as a “nymphomaniac,” although her sexual indiscretions were confined to other SS staff at the camp and not inmates. But the accusations that she collected human skin and had had a tattooed skin lamp shade made, distinguished her from the other thirty defendants from Buchenwald standing trial with her. The crimes were so depraved that they became a symbol of Nazis genocidal madness at its most evil and extreme. Newspapers and magazines reproduced photographs of leatherlike patches of tattooed skin, one with a pair of clearly discernible nipples, shrunken heads, and other artifacts, including lampshades, allegedly made of human skin and found in Buchenwald when U.S. troops liberated the camp in 1945. There was newsreel footage of it in movie theaters.