Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Paint it black

  Some women commit terrible deeds then are treated leniently by the legal system. But occasionally, female killers are wrongly made out to be more cruel than they actually were during their criminal life. For example, some internet crime sites say that Myra Hindley tortured her young victims to death. In truth, she didn’t actually kill any of them herself - her partner Ian Brady did. And even the detective who reopened the case, Peter Topping, admits in his biography that torture wasn’t involved.

  In a recent Mori poll of 2004 adults, 83% thought that Myra Hindley should stay in prison - and 26% of them said ‘because she is a woman who has killed a child.’ Surely people should remain locked up, or not, on account of their crimes, not because of their sex?

  Some people think that she has met the grounds necessary to be granted parole. That is, she has admitted the crimes and shown remorse for them. She has served a long sentence. She has improved herself whilst in prison by taking a degree and she is not considered a danger to the public since being freed of Ian Brady’s influence.

  Punishment in prison

  We’ve seen that female serial killers tend to serve shorter sentences than their male cohorts, but is their experience of prison qualitatively different? Former prison officer Robert Adams suspects that it is. Talking of female offenders in general, he told me that ‘women’s physique and biological function - when menstruating, giving birth, etc - puts them in a different situation to men and their needs.’ This may mean that they suffer more.

  He also notes that ‘women offenders tend to be seen more than men as mad not bad. This leads to many being viewed as being in need of medical treatment. Female offenders tend to be prescribed psychotropic drugs more than men.’

  Being imprisoned, the removal of freedom, is supposed to be the sole punishment meted out to prisoners but it seems that female prisoners also suffer by being penalised for failing their gender - some prison officers have apparently told new violent prisoners about Myra Hindley’s crimes, knowing that this will encourage the new prisoners to attack her. One prison officer put a decapitated angel in Carol Bundy’s prison block at Christmas and helped ensure that Bundy was ostracised. Aileen Wuornos claims that her meals are constantly adulterated.

  You can argue that these women have caused intense suffering - but it’s equally true that they themselves suffered appallingly throughout their childhoods and that this contributed to their criminality. Do we really want to create a society where, for some people, suffering never ends?

  Several hundred enlightened charities and pressure groups have advised that it needn’t be this way, that we can create a non-violent society by changing the way we treat our children. The latter part of the next chapter will explore their hugely encouraging research.

  16 Do you really want to hurt me?

  Theories about why women kill

  Because women make up such a small percentage of killers - even in America which boasts the largest number of female serial killers, only 1.5% of the Death Row population is female - most of the research that has been done has focused on men. The few theories about women have centred around their passivity, seeing them as the compliant victims of their murderous male partners. As the profiles in this book have shown, this is rarely true.

  Not compliant victims

  Many of these women couldn’t have been ‘compliant victims’ of murderous males because they acted alone - namely Anna Zwanziger, Martha Ann Johnson, Genene Jones and Aileen Wuornos. They were all single or separated at the time of their solo killing sprees. Jeanne Weber was married when she suffocated and strangled children but her husband wasn’t present. Convinced of her guilt, he left her after her first trial - and she went on to kill again and again. These solo killers were all in the dominant five percent of the population, hardly the weaklings that the authorities would have us believe.

  The female half of the Team Killers were also often part of the dominant five percent. Wealthy Charlene Gallego had an IQ of 160 and travelled the country as part of her work whereas her husband Gerald was a barely educated bartender from an impoverished family. She simply doesn’t fit the pattern of a passive victim. The police were called to some of their fights and their reports showed that Charlene gave as good as she got. (According to author Eric van Hoffmann, Charlene’s mother hit Gerald across the face with a gun to break up one of her daughter’s fights.) Authorities would later determine that Charlene was controlling and manipulative, that she liked to subtly pull the strings of any relationship.

  Similarly, Karla Homolka wasn’t a compliant victim. She had a high IQ and an assertive bent. Her friends described her as aggressive, pushy, a leader and a nonconformist. Karla drugged and sexually assaulted one young girl when Paul, her husband, wasn’t even present and was clearly enjoying herself on the videotape she made of the event. She was equally cool when dealing with the police, her lawyers and the courts.

  Judith Neelley drove her own car, carried out teenage robberies on her own and had a much higher IQ than her husband Alvin. There were times when he was in prison and she was not, but she chose to wait for him. And the one living witness testified that it was Judith who had marched him about at gunpoint, refused to let him speak and callously shot him whilst Alvin wasn’t even in sight.

  Rose West donned a soft voice and a new timidity for her court appearances and tried to blame everything on Fred, her dead husband. But living witnesses testified that she had physically and sexually assaulted them and it was found that little Charmaine had died in her care whilst Fred was in prison. Moreover, Rose assaulted one of the officers who came to arrest her - and she was tape recorded at the station shouting and swearing at the police.

  Carol Bundy didn’t score as highly as her co-killer Doug Clark in the IQ stakes, but she was still very controlling. She tried to buy his time, his clothes, and even his sexual favours by providing him with an eleven-year-old girl they could have threesomes with. She shot and killed her ex-lover Jack when Doug wasn’t around and mutilated his corpse with a knife. Psychologists suspected that she was in competition with her necrophiliac lover Doug - he decapitated one of his victims, Exxie, and then Carol decapitated Jack.

  These were all high dominance, if very damaged, women who knew what they wanted - dangerous sex that would help them to keep a roving partner, that would make them the aggressors rather than the victims they had been as children, that would temporarily make them feel incredibly strong.

  Lower dominance women team killers

  But not all female serial killers are in the dominant five percent. Myra Hindley was medium dominance and therefore something of a traditionalist - she was religious and romantic and looked forward to marriage and children. Then she met the more dominant Brady and was gradually ensnared into his self-serving world. The medium dominance woman finds the high dominance man both frightening and compelling - and as we’ve seen Myra had a similar relationship with her own violent and distant father, making her especially needy and eager to please.

  As Colin Wilson has written, whilst in no way excusing her actions, ‘she was literally brainwashed,’ by this soft voiced and opinionated man.

  Catherine Birnie was also submissive towards her common law husband David. She would express this in physical ways, regularly licking around his anus. She had decided to make him her entire life and remained constant to this viewpoint even after they were both sent to prison, writing him numerous letters and arguing that it was unjust that they should not be allowed to see each other again. Catherine told detectives that she had been everywhere that David had been and was determined to be sentenced with him, to put herself firmly in the frame.

  Of the lesbian Team Killers Cathy Wood and Gwen Graham, it was Gwen who was sexually dominant. She had been the aggressor from her early teens, enjoying a power in her sexual relationships that had been denied her during her abusive childhood. Cathy at first presented herself as medium or low dominance to the world, but as her profile shows, she w
as more than capable of pulling the strings. Cathy dominated at home in a passive way - refusing to do housework so that her husband had to do it. She often refused to cook so her child would go out and bring home takeaway food.

  Cathy’s dominance came to the fore when she found that she could inspire both love and fear in her new workplace - and she took that power to its limit by helping Gwen to terrorise their elderly charges. As her need for power intensified, those patients began to die.

  Not bad seeds

  Killing, as we’ve seen, is about regaining control, about having total dominance over others. Criminologists who believe in the genetic theory would have us believe that these women were born with such control issues, that they inherited specific genes that made them cruel and amoral and murderous. Those writers who believe this often cite murderer Gerald Gallego as a prime example - he never knew his violent father yet went on to kill multiple times, just like dad.

  In truth, baby Gerald was raised by his violent teenage mother, who had herself been abused throughout her childhood. She took to prostitution and Gerald was then violated by her many clients. His crimes weren’t due to nature but to nurture - or rather the lack of it. As former prison officer and Professor of Human Services Development Robert Adams told me during my research ‘You never forget your experiences of being abused as a child.’

  Sexual explorers

  One of the traits that the women profiled here share is promiscuity, a common symptom of women who have been abused. The exception is Myra Hindley who was a virgin prior to meeting Ian Brady and so self conscious that she wouldn’t even bathe or undress in front of her younger sister Maureen. She also objected when others used what she thought of as bad language - yet within months of meeting the hugely influential Brady she was swearing and posing pornographically for his camera.

  Several of the women profiled also had lesbian experiences though only Aileen Wuornos and Gwen Graham wholly identified themselves as lesbian. The others were sexually experimental, as the dominant five percent of the population tend to be.

  Most of these women lied compulsively, tried to manipulate their co-workers and were sadly lacking in empathy.

  Schooled in sadism

  But the most crucial thing that these female serial killers have in common is that they weren’t raised in loving or stable homes. Anna Zwanziger and Catherine Birnie both had mothers who died when they were young and they were then passed from one relative to another, with Catherine’s grandparents being controlling and abusive. Aileen Wuornos mother deserted her and left her at the mercy of her violent grandfather. Myra Hindley’s parents gave her to her lonely grandmother - and when she did see her dad he often hit her or her mum.

  Judith Neelley’s father died and her mother started sleeping with men whom she’d picked up via her CB radio. Judith soon ended up in a home for teenagers and claims that she was sexually abused there. (Such establishments are magnets for paedophiles.) Gwen Graham and Cathy Wood both came from families where they were physically abused and shown little love.

  Rose West’s father was a violent and controlling man, at times a madman. And though Charlene Gallego’s father doted on her she was forced to grow up incredibly quickly to take her mother’s place after Mercedes’ automobile accident. We know very little about this family unit - but Charlene was sufficiently lost that she turned to drink and drugs and sex by age thirteen. Like Catherine Birnie she thought that women didn’t matter - so she devoted her third marriage to a violent man.

  Even less is known about Jeanne Weber’s early life, but the fact that she left her home village at fourteen and quickly became an alcoholic may speak volumes. It’s very common for parental alcohol abuse to be copied by a daughter or a son.

  Carol Bundy was physically abused by both her parents and after her mother’s early death she was sexually abused by her father. Karla Homolka’s father went on drinking binges and her parents were always arguing. She told a friend after a family argument that she was afraid and had locked her bedroom door.

  Abuse is still seriously under reported. I was told by a leading British social worker that when they hold training courses for employees, they find that a third of the females and slightly less of the males come forward to talk about their childhood experiences of being abused.

  Violentization

  But many people are abused by their parents yet still go on to become compassionate adults who abhor violence. So was there some extra component in those killer’s lives which propelled them towards homicidal acts?

  Criminologist Lonnie Athens, himself the survivor of a violent working class home, has identified this extra component. (Lonnie’s life and theories are the subject of Why They Kill by Richard Rhodes.) Lonnie believes that very violent people are literally ‘violentized’, that is socialised into very aggressive ways. Lonnie has worked mainly with violent males so uses the term ‘he’ throughout his work. But when I studied his results I found that most of what he said is equally applicable to violent women, so for the purposes of this chapter the prefix ‘she’ is used.

  In the first stage of violentization, the child is forced to submit to an aggressor, usually a parent, carer or someone from her peer group. Most of the women in this book were brutalised in this fashion. She also sees others close to her, often siblings or her mother, being struck and belittled. Again, this is applicable in our profiles. She notes that violence is used to settle arguments.

  In the second stage, known as belligerency, she mentally promises herself that next time there is a fight she’ll join in and be violent too. Myra Hindley grabbed at her father’s legs in a vain bid to stop him hitting her mother. Judith Neelley stood up to her mother’s dirty and drunken clients. Gwen Graham physically fought with her violent mother and by seventeen was also coming to blows with the woman she was living with.

  The girl then enters the third stage of violent performance and notes how - perhaps for the first time - the person she has beaten and any witnesses to her violence respect or fear her. Rose West turned from a cry baby into a tough girl who would even fight the older boys. Myra Hindley took up judo, and wouldn’t release competitors from holds until they screamed. Aileen Wuornos became so harsh that she was given a wide berth by all of the other girls in her class.

  The fourth stage of virulency can now take place in which she decides to use violence to settle all other disputes. She now sees herself as a violent woman - or at least as a woman who, as Rose West put it, ‘isn’t a soft chair to be sat upon.’ Such damaged women now see potential enemies everywhere - Judith Neelley originally said that her husband was the only person in the world who she trusted and psychologists said that Karla Homolka was obsessed with themes of victimisation and hostility.

  Coached to kill

  Lonnie Athens notes that violentization can also involve coaching, where the aggressive party encourages the more submissive one to display aggression or cruelty towards others. This coaching can probably occur up to the age of around twenty-five as psychiatrists estimate that until then the ego is still developing. Many of the young women profiled here have had such coaching experiences prior to age twenty-five.

  For example, the teenage Myra Hindley was taken to war atrocity films and given books about torture and existential philosophy by her older lover, Ian Brady. He also persuaded her to join a gun club and to indulge in painful sodomy sessions. He told her that most people were worthless, that they should crush them like ants. When she was totally convinced by his philosophy, a process that took several years, he asked her to procure the first teenager for him to kill.

  Seventeen-year-old Karla Homolka was happy to initiate sadomasochistic games with her lover, Paul. She bought and wore a dog collar, offered him her anal virginity and handcuffed herself for his sexual pleasure. But Paul, unlike most harmless erotic-power-exchange players, wasn’t content with the consensual aspect. He started to humiliate her in their day to day existence and by the end of the relationship he gave her two of the bl
ackest eyes that the local hospital had ever seen.

  Paul also coached Karla in violent ways, bringing home books about killers and their victims. He would later coach Leslie and Kristen, who he abducted, on what to sexually do and say. Later Karla borrowed such books from the library and insisted on reading the most brutal passages out to her offended co-workers. It was part of her increasing sadism, a desire to shock.

  Charlene was similarly coached by her older husband Gerald Gallego and was persuaded to act like his young daughter who he was having an incestuous relationship with. He encouraged Charlene to call him Daddy and to dress in outfits like those his daughter wore. She bought a gun and ammunition for him - and, according to author Eric van Hoffmann, she enjoyed biting and having lesbian sex with the bondaged girls. This would certainly explain why the Gallegos often abducted a pair of victims at a time - one each - rather that the more usual one.

  Gwen Graham was coached by her father on how to kill animals on their farm - including farm animals that she loved and pets that she had grown up with. She was taught how to use a gun at an early age.

  This ‘violent training’ explains why so few women become seriously violent, for a violent father is more likely to coach his son to emulate him than he is his daughter. The women in this book were exceptional in that a man did coach them in vicious ways.