Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Black Widow

  The Black Widow, who murders mainly family members, usually does so for financial gain. She will often poison her victims over an extended period and nurse them conscientiously till their deaths, which then look like the result of long term illness. She gains the insurance money or their legacy, moves to another part of the country and remarries. Soon her second husband becomes ill and dies, then her third… Providing she remains mobile and manages to conceal her earlier identity, it may be years before she’s suspected of any crime.

  Anna Zwanziger has some of the Black Widow characteristics in that she used poison and used her nursing skills to confuse witnesses. She killed a woman in order to steal the woman’s husband. But she also killed a man who refused to marry her, which puts her partly in the next category, that of Revenge.

  Revenge

  The Revenge Killer annihilates a lover who has scorned her or she kills a rival. These women often operate under a strong level of neurosis so will see treachery and rivalry when there isn’t any. Their rage can cause them to kill again and again.

  Martha Ann Johnson was a Revenge Killer, murdering her children because of the heartache it would cause Earl Bowen who had jilted her. Unlike most serial killers she had a low IQ, but she still knew exactly what she was doing and took four young lives in the hope of hurting her ex-lover or forcing him to return to her.

  Babykilling nurse Genene Jones also partially fits into the Revenge typology because she killed children who were being cared for by certain other nurses that she hated. She then tried to put the blame on to them.

  Angel Of Death

  Genene Jones also fits into the Angel Of Death category. Women like her often work in an outwardly caring capacity, especially with vulnerable groups like babies or the elderly. They enjoy the drama of life and death situations and may go to supposedly heroic efforts in order to try to save - or pretend to save - the dying child.

  Angels Of Death like to be in control of everything so it gives them enormous emotional satisfaction to be able to decide when a person lives or dies. They often have a history of failed relationships with other adults - but killing their young or elderly charges is something at which they can succeed again and again.

  The Angel Of Death feels no guilt at her own actions for she is able to convince herself that these people would have died anyway, or that they have gone to a better place, so she believes she has done nothing wrong.

  Most Angels Of Death operate alone - but Gwen Graham and Catherine Wood operated as a pair and also fit into the category of Team Killers. Such couples are usually heterosexual, but Graham and Wood were lesbian lovers though both had had heterosexual relationships in the past.

  Team Killers

  Team Killers often have a dominant individual who plays a greater part in the killings than his partner, such as in the Moors Murderers case. Ian Brady was very much the mastermind behind the children’s abductions, with Myra providing the reassuring female presence and the car. Similarly, Catherine Birnie drove the abduction vehicle and asked women if they wanted a lift, then David Birnie raped them again and again.

  But the initially compliant partner often participates in the sexual assaults more and more as time goes by, and may enjoy looking at the victims videoed ordeal or moments of torture captured by photographs. The aforementioned Catherine Birnie later joined her common law husband in assaulting their young victims, and she took photographs of them both alive and dead. Similarly, Charlene Gallego allegedly bit the nipples of her victims and forced them to perform oral sex on her. Karla Homolka was captured on video fondling her teenage victims and instructing them how to please her and her husband, Paul.

  Myra Hindley told a ten-year-old child to put a gag in her mouth and to stop complaining. Her fingerprints would later be found on photos of the girl in pornographic poses. Rose West assaulted young girls with dildos and with her fingers - and may have participated in far worse excesses with the girls that Fred actually abducted. It’s known that she enjoyed blindfolding her consensual lovers, placing a pillow over their heads and terrorising them.

  Profit Or Crime

  The Profit Or Crime murderess has a very different slant on life. She kills alone in order to enhance her income - but unlike the Black Widow she often kills strangers. Aileen Wuornos fits into this category - and as her profile has shown she also fits into the typology of Revenge, as she got her own back on the male sex.

  Profit Killers carefully weigh up potential victims, working out how much they are worth and how easy it will be to kill them. In Wuornos’ case she got the short term use of their cars and also managed to steal their possessions which she pawned to make money to keep her female lover by her side. She even hired a garage in which to keep the stolen goods.

  Wuornos followed the classic Profit Or Crime approach of isolating her victims so that she could murder them and then rob them at her leisure before putting distance between herself and the crime.

  Sexual Predator

  Some crime writers erroneously classified Aileen Wuornos as a Sexual Predator but her motivation wasn’t sexual. Far from it - the last thing a worn out highway prostitute wants is yet more sex. In most of the killings, Wuornos shot her victims before any sexual activity took place, as evidenced by the unused condoms left at the crime scenes. She wanted their money and she wanted the pleasure of watching them die. Sex just didn’t enter into the equation - even her initially lustful relationship with her lover Tyria had subsided into a sisterly one.

  I cannot think of any female sexual predators - although killers like Rose West and Carol Bundy undressed and molested their victims, the sex was a secondary stimulus. The primary motive was dominance and power.

  Thrill Killer

  So Sexual Predators are rare amongst females - as opposed to Thrill Killers, usually half of a team, who have been portrayed extensively in this book. Myra Hindley, Judith Neelley, Rose West, Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka and their male partners all fit into this category. They killed partly for kicks, to enliven their otherwise dull world and bolster their flagging relationships.

  Unexplained

  Unexplained murders by women are those in which a clear motive hasn’t been found but where there is no question of the killer’s sanity. As most students of human behaviour know, there will always be a reason for the crime though it may be very obscure to someone who isn’t following the same internal script. None of the murders in this book are Unexplained - though the reasons that some of the women committed the murders may seem ludicrous to readers who have had less traumatic lives.

  Unsolved

  Finally, the Unsolved category pertains to crimes which are widely believed to have been caused by a female or females - perhaps because the victims wouldn’t have opened their doors to a male caller. Antonio Mendoza suggests in Killers On The Loose that some unsolved deaths may be the result of female killers. It is easier for a woman to get away with murder as our society sees her as loving and unthreatening.

  15 Everybody wants to rule the world

  Fabrications of femininity

  Society tends to see the female killer as totally at the mercy of her emotions, a mentally-frail being who acts on impulse to please a bullying lover. But none of the women in this book acted on impulse. Rather, they carefully planned their crimes so that they could spend as long as possible with their terrified victims and avoid being traced.

  Karla Homolka went round her pretty pink house hiding the phones so that her captives couldn’t contact anyone. Catherine Birnie, conversely, made her victims phone their friends - or write to their parents - and say they were fine so that the police wouldn’t search for them. Rose West terrified her children so that they wouldn’t tell of their physical and sexual abuse at her hands. She pretended to both civilians and police that she’d never met one of her missing lodgers and made up a story about another having emigrated, whereas in truth their remains were buried beneath her house.

  Myra Hindley dro
ve to a relative’s home and ensured that her elderly gran remained there. This was vital as she and Ian Brady were holding a ten-year-old girl hostage at her gran’s house. She bought a wig and a headscarf so that she could talk to children and remain disguised.

  Charlene Gallego drove for miles to abduct girls from county fairs and rejected one potential victim when she found that the girl’s uncle was nearby and was a security guard. Aileen Wuornos hitched the highways so that she could kill her punters at lonely woodside spots. These weren’t hysterical or spontaneous acts.

  Jeanne Weber waited until her relatives were out of the way before she assaulted their children - and when a relative returned suddenly, Jeanne pretended she was trying to revive the half-strangled child.

  Judith Neelley drove her victims to quiet woods to kill them and leave their bodies. She drove Lisa to a remote canyon and tortured her there before throwing her into a ravine.

  Genene Jones also planned her attacks on babies carefully, turning up at the pharmacy with prescriptions for strong drugs and pretending they were for her workplace. She took little Chelsea from her mother’s arms and said she’d take her to the play area, but instead used the time alone with the child to make her violently ill.

  Carol Bundy would go out driving with her partner Doug Clark in her old car, looking for hitchhikers and prostitutes to rape and murder - in other words, victims that might not be reported missing. She laundered bloody clothes and wore gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and even decapitated a man she’d shot, taking the head away so that her bullets wouldn’t be found.

  This careful planning by female serial killers isn’t a modern trend. When the nineteenth century housekeeper Anna Zwanziger was dismissed by one employer, she carefully plotted her revenge, putting white poison in the sugar and salt canisters which she knew would be used by everyone. And she gave a little baby a poisoned sweet or biscuit as she left the house for good.

  Cherchez la femme

  Nurses like Genene Jones are the last people that hospital personnel suspect when the death toll heightens. Similarly, kindly babysitters such as Jeanne Weber and concerned housekeepers such as Anna Zwanziger aren’t high on the list of suspects when the very young or the very old suddenly expire. Society’s romanticised view of motherhood means that women like Martha Ann Johnson can get away with murder multiple times.

  But even when a woman operates in tandem with a man her very presence tends to throw law enforcement off the scent. After all, the traditional view of the serial killer is that he’s a lone operator who prowls the highways. A man with a girlfriend or wife and children looks respectable, so he just doesn’t fit the bill.

  Police had visited Paul Barnardo when they were investigating the Scarborough rapes. He was guilty - but the picture of him and his beautiful blonde wife Karla Homolka initially convinced detectives that he wasn’t their rapist. And when two young women were abducted and murdered, Karla’s parents talked to her about it, never thinking for a moment that she was to blame.

  One of Karla’s other victims was a teenager identified as Jane by the courts who Karla drugged and sexually assaulted. Paul also raped and sodomised the unconscious teenager. Jane’s mum was suspicious of Paul’s motivation - but Karla’s presence in the house initially helped allay her fears.

  Later Jane’s mother’s anxieties resurfaced - just what did this twenty-something couple want with her fifteen year old daughter? She suggested to Jane that her visits weren’t a good idea - but the young girl loved Karla and didn’t connect her subsequent illness with her friend. After all, why would a teenager suspect a young married woman of doing her sexual harm?

  Leslie Mahaffy - soon to be strangled or suffocated in Karla’s home - was initially relieved to hear that the second person she was expected to satisfy sexually was a female. She would soon learn that Karla was as compassionless as any psychotic male…

  Rose West, usually weighed down by shopping, was also an unlikely murderess on the surface - which is why no one searched her and her husband Fred’s home for years whilst lodgers, babysitters and even her own children went missing. And blonde twenty-three-year old Myra Hindley talked to her neighbours about the young people who were disappearing from the Manchester streets and no one suspected she was involved.

  Police also looked for a male killer when men began to turn up dead in wooded areas around Florida and there were several deaths before they issued Aileen Wuornos description. Hospitals spent a great deal of time checking their equipment and medical supplies when babies fell ill rather than suspect the hardworking nurse Genene Jones.

  Many such killers have, like Genene, adopted the caring and benevolent persona of a nurse. Others are outwardly good mothers or devoted housekeepers. We tend to have a healthy respect for men, to spend time getting to know them before trusting them. But we are mainly brought up to believe and trust women, to see them as at best loving and at worse benign. This allows the female serial killer to continue on her homicidal path long after a male would be taken in for questioning. (The male serial killer is statistically caught after four years, his female equivalent after eight.)

  Martha Ann Johnson took child after child to the emergency room but the deaths were regarded as natural, despite the fact that the children were outside the normal age range for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Even when her eleven-year-old daughter Jennyann told social workers that she feared for her life, little was done - and Jennyann became the last victim to die.

  Jeanne Weber was alone with her own children and those of her relatives when they suddenly died - yet no one suspected her and even when she was brought to court she was originally found not guilty. And when one of Judith Neelley’s victims, John Hancock, staggered into a hospital emergency room and said that a strange woman had shot him, the medics initially thought he was making it up. They had seen their share of violent or self defending wives wounding their husbands and they’d seen abused daughters wounding their fathers, but the notion of a woman shooting a male stranger just for thrills didn’t strike a chord.

  The police, too, initially suspected that John Hancock had killed his girlfriend Janice then deliberately injured himself to make his story of a female killer look more believable.

  The kindly courts

  Even when she’s convicted of premeditated murders the female serial killer is often given a more lenient sentence than her male cohort; Myra Hindley, Britain’s longest serving prisoner being one of the rare exceptions.

  Paul Barnardo got life - whilst his partner Karla who provided the drugs and anaesthetic to knock the girls out, and who was adamant that Paul couldn’t let them go, was sentenced to twelve years. Gerald Gallego got the death penalty but Charlene Gallego served almost seventeen years and is now free, despite the fact that she was the one who lured the female victims into her van. They responded to the tiny blonde girl with the high IQ and the cute voice, whereas they would have been very suspicious of her burly ill-educated spouse.

  The overweight and under educated Alvin Neelley was sentenced to life despite the fact that law personnel thought he was the most unlikely serial killer they’d ever seen - but tall and strong Judith, who originally got the death penalty, later had it commuted to life imprisonment. Some people fear she will be paroled, especially as she is fighting to get her children back.

  Doug Clark got the death penalty but his partner Carol Bundy, who talked some of the prostitutes into their car and who killed at least two out of the known six victims, was given a life sentence that can potentially lead to parole.

  If a man killed his four children one at a time over several years he would ultimately get the death penalty or a life sentence. Yet Martha Ann Johnson had her death sentence quashed and may ultimately be paroled.

  Folie a deux

  Many of the team killing cases are considered to be results of what was once called folie a deux but is now known as shared paranoia. It tends to occur when the most charismatic partner, who ironically is also the most disturb
ed, persuades the other that the outside world is in some way threatening or lacking and that this gives them carte blanche to live by their own cruel script.

  Catherine Wood found that several of her lesbian colleagues were attracted to her and that she got promoted at work despite breaking various rules there. She started to believe that she could do anything and get away with it - and persuaded her lover Gwen Graham that they wouldn’t get caught if they killed.

  Karla and Paul were physically beautiful and impeccably groomed young people. They got away with the unintentional murder of Karla’s sister during a drugged rape - and went on, feeling invincible, to abduct and kill two more girls and to drug and rape more.

  Similarly, Rose West got away with killing her stepchild - and Fred West got away with killing his former wife and a girlfriend. Together they abused and killed at least ten women and buried most of them beneath their feet.

  Judith was simply an angry and unloved young girl who despised her prostitute mother - until she met Alvin Neelley who already had a prison record. Together they held people at gunpoint and committed various theft and fraud crimes before abducting young girls for Alvin to rape and for Judith to terrorise and ultimately kill. Apart they were misfits, but together they felt special and invincible.