Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Carol Bundy was a lonely and unstable woman lurching from one relationship to the next until she met Doug Clark and became enthralled by his talk of capturing sex slaves that they could eventually murder. She bought them both guns at his behest and put makeup on a prostitute’s decapitated head so that the necrophile Doug could have sexual fun with it.

  Alone, these women were bad news. Catherine Wood completely failed to nurture her young daughter. Gwen Graham hit her lovers during drunken arguments. Karla Homolka was so shallow and lacking in empathy that she would have spent her entire life hurting those she came into contact with. Rose West would have been a brutal single parent - indeed, she terrorised her children when Fred, her husband, was away in jail.

  Judith Neelley threatened other girls who were in care with her and may well have ended up being jailed for crimes against property if she’d remained on her own. Charlene Gallego had abused drink and drugs and had two failed marriages behind her by the time she was twenty. As a teenager Catherine Birnie had already committed various burglaries.

  However it’s doubtful that they would have killed if they had remained on their own. They were filled with anger and hostility, but would probably have just taken it out on their children and lovers. It took the arrival of an equally enraged partner to act as a catalyst.

  The exception, again, is Myra Hindley who showed no violence towards children prior to meeting Ian Brady - indeed she was a caring and respected babysitter. She also loved animals and continued to pay for her remaining dog’s keep after she was sent to jail. She wasn’t even promiscuous in the way that the other killers in this book were - indeed, she wouldn’t bathe or undress in front of her less bashful younger sister, Maureen. Most of the women profiled experimented by having consensual sex with same-sex partners, one of the signs of a dominant personality, but Myra didn’t do this prior to imprisonment.

  Your love is king

  When the woman has acted in partnership with a man he is often portrayed by her legal defence as a Svengali figure who swept an otherwise good woman into his web of corruption. And it’s true that some women are hugely influenced by the person they fall in love with. But this is often a psychological flaw in the woman’s psyche, a desperate neediness, rather than any particular charisma on the part of the man.

  Ann Rule delineates this perfectly in one of the true cases at the back of her book The End Of A Dream. The case is called The Girl Who Fell In Love With Her Killer and looks at a fifteen-year-old who wasn’t wanted by her mother and who set off hitchhiking in the vain hope of finding her absent father. She was picked up by a hitchhiker who chatted to her as he drove to an isolated spot. There he raped her multiple times, battered her over the head with his gun, waited till she regained consciousness then laughed at her pleas and shot her in the head, only driving away when he believed she was dead.

  The teenager crawled some distance for help despite her massive injuries and later underwent operations to remove a bullet from her jaw. Once out of hospital she visited her assailant in prison and, incredibly, married him. She chose to remember the fact that he’d given her a lift and chatted nicely to her rather than recall his murderous act. Ann Rule points out that, not surprisingly, the marriage to this violent convict with previous convictions didn’t last.

  Charlene Gallego felt this need to make her man, Gerald, seem extra special, calling him Daddy because she knew it excited him. She told him again and again that he was the best and didn’t intervene when he had incestuous relations with his own underage child. Instead, she helped him flee from these same incest charges and ultimately helped him to lure girl after girl for them to use as their sexual slaves.

  Karla Homolka also pandered to husband Paul Barnardo’s skewed ego, telling him that he was the king, that he was her big bad businessman, that she would do anything for him. She drugged teenage girls for him (and for her) and held the video camera whilst he raped them. She performed with these same girls - and with others - whilst he directed her as if she was a porn movie star. She wrote him hundreds of notes telling him how special he was.

  Judith Neelley also imbued her marriage to Alvin with a magical quality, giving the impression that they could read each others minds. Rose and Fred West said something similar. Ironically, both Judith and Rose would turn against their magical men when being tried in court.

  These men were not gods - Gerald Gallego had been married six times, had done time in prison, had rarely held down a job. And Paul Barnardo had given up work, declared himself bankrupt and was making an illegal living from smuggling cigarettes. Fred West was so animalistic that he rarely showered, ate food out of the kitchen bin and lied incessantly. Hardly ‘one day my Prince will come’. But these men were made to feel invincible by their psychologically-disturbed female partners, and that perception made it easier for them to rape and to kill.

  The exception to this rule is probably Myra Hindley and Ian Brady for he was indeed brighter than she. He had more life experience, having lived in both Scotland and England. He had been to borstal whereas she had only moved between her mother and grandmother’s house, a few doors away.

  Brady read de Sade and Dostoevsky and Myra had read little more than a fashion magazine. Brady could speak German whilst Myra had the restricted speech patterns of her class. She was square jawed and heavy boned whereas he was tall and slim and had the handsome features of an Elvis or a James Dean, both heroes of the day.

  Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka were as attractive as their partners and Charlene had a much higher IQ and better education than her untutored husband Gerald - but both were sufficiently damaged that they felt the need to make these men feel brighter and more important. Myra was less bright and less attractive than her partner so she fell heavily for him, gave in to his murderous plans, and ultimately paid a very heavy price.

  The forgotten killers

  When the courts convict a female team killer, society quickly forgets about her. (Again, Myra Hindley is the notable exception.) At the time of writing, summer 2000, Gerald Gallego is still in the news - but his killing accomplice Charlene simply isn’t mentioned in many of these contemporary news flashes. Instead, they refer solely to ‘serial killer Gerald Gallego.’ She has been released and as far as younger members of the public are concerned, she never existed to lure young females to her van of death. Yet those of us who are familiar with the case know that Gerald Gallego didn’t kill before he met her - and she had a higher IQ and more access to money and a vehicle than he ever did.

  The same is true of Doug Clark and Carol Bundy. Some of the serial killing sites on the internet mention her almost as an afterthought - yet she killed her lover Jack when Doug Clark wasn’t present and she was also convicted of killing a young girl that she and Doug picked up for that very purpose. She has admitted that if she is ever freed she will probably kill again.

  Catherine Birnie gets less press coverage than David Birnie, and Rose West would probably have been given less prominence than Fred West if he hadn’t hanged himself in jail. Admittedly, Fred West himself contributed to this state of affairs by telling everyone that Rose was innocent and that he’d acted alone when she and the children were in bed.

  Judith Neelley is probably exceptional in gaining more publicity than her husband, Alvin, but that’s only because at age eighteen she was the youngest woman ever sentenced to Death Row. Even she is being portrayed by some religious groups as a victim rather than a sadistic murderess - and these groups exhort strangers to write to ‘poor Judy’ because she doesn’t get many letters in jail.

  Men only

  It’s clear, then, that the female accomplice is quickly forgotten. But even when the female killer acts alone, potential witnesses often refuse to believe that she has killed. It’s an attitude which allowed Genene Jones to inject baby after baby with potentially lethal medication. Even when one hospital became very suspicious it preferred to sack all its nurses and give Genene a reference rather than contact the authorities.
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  Similarly, the French medical profession stood behind Jeanne Weber twice and swore that the dead children in her care had died of natural causes. Their mistaken faith in female goodness and mother love allowed her to kill again and again.

  Anna Zwanziger was dismissed by at least one employer after he became suspicious of the weight of illness the new housekeeper left in her wake but he, too, chose not to go to the authorities. Zwanziger’s trail of death and suffering continued. She vehemently denied the poisonings throughout her extended trial and only admitted to the deaths when new forensic tests proved that there was arsenic in the exhumed bodies of her former employers.

  When Martha Ann Johnson lost three formerly healthy children she was still allowed to keep in touch with the fourth and so few checks were made that the child was ultimately returned to her, whereupon she killed her too. Hospital authorities did not feel that they had enough evidence to accuse this mother and it was a determined investigative journalist who reopened the case.

  Some female killers have even dropped huge hints about their crimes yet still encountered no response from society. Gwen Graham and Catherine Wood separately hinted to many of their co-workers that they were killing helpless patients but the co-workers decided the pair must have a macabre sense of humour. When one supervisor went to the authorities and suggested that Wood and Graham shouldn’t work together because they were acting inappropriately, she was ignored.

  Even when the elderly people themselves said that they’d been threatened by staff they were merely considered delusional. A loving relative of one patient noticed that she was terrified when a washcloth was produced - it would later be explained in court that the patients were partially suffocated by a washcloth. But it simply didn’t occur to anyone that Cathy and/or Gwen might be remorseless killers. After all, we aren’t taught to view women in this way.

  The dominant five percent

  Although perceptions of women have changed markedly since Victorian times, they are still largely viewed as the gentler and more nurturing gender. Many women have careers, mortgages, cars and sporting interests - but are also expected to have children, to care for their elderly parents and to be less aggressive than the male.

  Two of the women profiled here were dominated by their murderous male partners - notably Myra Hindley and Catherine Birnie. And the child killer Martha Ann Johnson, with her lack of ambition and her fear of being alone, wasn’t a dominant woman. But the others fall into the category of the dominant five percent.

  The dominant five percent of the population comprises go-getters, natural leaders. They are strong willed - and if they are female they want a male partner who is even more dominant than themselves. If the couple isn’t criminally minded then this can make for an exciting, intelligent and adventurous partnership. But if they are of a criminal bent then these energetic and driven people can do a great deal of harm.

  Such women are usually highly sexed. Rose West certainly was, having intercourse with up to five men during an average day of prostitution. On other mornings she had lesbian sex with a neighbour or she went out in the van at night to pick up other paying customers. Afterwards she posed pornographically for her husband Fred. Rose made lesbian advances to her children’s nannies, had sex with her male lodgers and took part in the sexual abuse of her stepdaughter Anne Marie.

  Karla Homolka was equally highly sexed, taking a plane ride in her teens to give her virginity to a former boyfriend. She had sex with Paul Barnardo the night she met him. She drugged and sexually assaulted various young girls and also had sex with Leslie and Kristen who she or Paul would go on to kill. Shortly after she left Paul, Karla picked up a man in a nightclub and went back to his house for intercourse. Even when she was awaiting trial she found the enthusiasm to send him bare breasted photographs of herself.

  Charlene Gallego similarly had many sexual experiences behind her and one of her ex-husbands would say that her sexual demands were outlandish. As a schoolgirl she had boasted of having a black lover, later had a married white lover and had sex with other women whilst living with her third husband, Gerald.

  Gwen Graham was an aggressive lover, who had extensive experience of lesbian sex in her teens. Gwen’s preference was for lesbian relationships, whereas many other high dominance women simply try lesbianism in the way that they try out many sexual options. Most wouldn’t classify themselves as lesbian.

  The dominant woman often has more than one lover at a time - especially if they are medium dominance males who she soon tires of. Carol Bundy had multiple affairs whilst living with the writer Richard who loved her. She would experiment with male and female lovers and, later, with a child. Whilst in custody Carol suggested that the policemen have sex with her and she later wrote an inappropriate note suggesting a date with the judge.

  Aileen Wuornos’ preference was for women and she went to bed with Tyria on the first night they met. Judith Neelley handcuffed her female victims to the bed or to the inside of her car and sexually assaulted them again and again.

  Genene Jones was said to go into a near-orgasmic frenzy when around dying children and her first ex-husband hinted to an investigative journalist that there was something unusual about her sexuality.

  Anna Zwanziger tried to lure men into bed when she was over fifty, despite the fact that the years had not been kind to her. Both she and Jeanne Weber turned to prostitution towards the end of their murderous lives, though this was probably for economic rather than sexual gain.

  The dominant woman is sexually-driven, but there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be. It’s her body to do with as she desires.

  She also wants a partner that has status in the outside world in financial or career terms. It’s no accident that Karla Homolka nicknamed Paul Barnardo her ‘big, bad businessman.’ Paul’s fantasy was that his teenage wife would fellate him as soon as he walked in the door with his briefcase - and Karla was happy to oblige. Though a strong, self-opinionated young woman in many ways, she wrote him notes saying that she was ‘his little whore, his little cocksucker’. Ironically this sent his already misogynistic viewpoint of women spiralling further downhill.

  Rose West was a loud mouthed, hard hitting mother who made aggressive sexual passes at lodgers and nannies. But when Fred came home he took over and the already strained atmosphere got even more tense. Rose would write Fred slave contracts in which she promised to do whatever he wanted and Fred would later tell the police that he’d ‘gotten Rosie young’ and had trained her to obey.

  Charlene Gallego had travelled on planes and boats with her successful father and she later travelled the country in her own right as part of her work for a food processing firm. But she also wanted a strong man - and quickly ended her two marriages to men who were less dominant than she.

  Charlene opted to make the outwardly strong looking but emotionally weak Gerald Gallego her husband and was determined to remain his leading lady, to the extent of helping him to procure teenage sex slaves. Her father had been a hugely strong presence in her life and she told the courts that she would never tell the man what to do.

  Actions speak louder

  Many of these women have lied to the police, to the courts, to their relatives and even to themselves, as do male criminals. It is people’s actions more often than their pretty appearance or honeyed words which show the type of person that they are - or that they are trying to be. Thus Myra Hindley posed for photographs over children’s moorland graves, showing her lover Ian Brady that she was as nonchalant as he about his crimes. And Catherine Wood told her ex-husband about the murders because they implicated her lesbian ex-lover and she wanted revenge.

  Anna Zwanziger also craved revenge and enjoyed watching the upper classes die in poisoned agony. She should have been part of this class but life had robbed her of her station - and now she would gloat over the dying, content in the knowledge that she still had her life and her health.

  Charlene Gallego wanted to keep Gerald at all costs and was willing
to lure girls to her van to provide him and herself with youthful sex objects. Karla Homolka had a very similar motivation. These young women were willing to snuff out human lives so that they could keep their lover’s interest and enjoy better sex.

  Similarly, Genene Jones made helpless infants suffer so that she could intervene and appear like a heroine in a medical soap opera. She was also willing to put the parents through the hell of bereavement whenever her intervention didn’t work in time. Most of us have a natural urge to protect children and animals or anyone else who is more frail than we are - but in Jones this urge was subverted so that she put her own false image first.

  Rose West would paint herself as Fred’s victim - but she was the one who killed Charmaine when he was in prison. She was the one who sat on Anne Marie’s face whilst Fred raped her. She was the one who phoned Stephen’s school and asked them to send him home, whereupon she beat him with her belt until he was hysterical with fear and pain. Rose also sexually assaulted Caroline Owens and frightened her consensual lesbian lovers. She was in control of her life at least part of the time.

  Judith Neelley would try to tell the world that Alvin terrorised her, but law enforcement said they’d rarely seen such an ineffectual male prisoner. She claimed that she was totally under his influence twenty-four hours a day - but they had separate cars and sometimes he was in prison for fraud whilst she was free. And the victim who lived, John Hancock, would testify that it was Judith who mocked him and shot him whilst Alvin was out of sight.

  Carol Bundy also chose to portray herself as a nice respectable woman in court, trying to put all of the blame onto Doug Clark, her accomplice. But it was clear that she’d killed her ex-lover Jack Murray by herself, so she then opted to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Ultimately she admitted having shot and stabbed Jack whilst sane and similarly shot dead at least one female prostitute. There were also at least two photographs showing her behaving inappropriately with Theresa, an eleven-year-old child.