By the time the light left the afternoon sky, the shovels of several sweating men had grated against human bone. By the end of the weekend, eight bodies would be disinterred from shallow graves across the garden. Along with Bert Montoya, seven others came up from the earth. But Puente didn’t stay for the final tally. For hours, as the dig progressed on that last day, she sat silent in her upstairs kitchen. Then she rose. She freshened up. She packed an expensive red handbag. Stiff-shouldered and prim, she marched downstairs and asked the officers if she could go to a nearby hotel bar for a cocktail to calm her nerves. So utterly nurturant and harmless did she seem that the officers nodded.
It took one of the most massive hunts in California history, not to mention the most frantic police department spin control efforts, before they reclaimed the fugitive. They found her holed up in a fleabag motel in Los Angeles. By that time, all her victims had been identified. Benjamin Fink, the alcoholic upstairs from John Sharp, and James Gallop, and Betty Palmer, and Vera Faye Martin, and Leona Carpenter, and Dorothy Miller. They were all registered as still alive by government agencies. Their checks and benefits had been posted monthly to their murderess for as long as two years.
When Dorothea Puente was unveiled as a serial murderess, newspaper headline writers dubbed her the “Arsenic and Old Lace Killer,” referring to the title of a 1941 drawing-room comedy in which two sweet little old ladies poison their doddering gentlemen friends. It was hardly a moniker that captured the fear Puente’s tenants felt, or the physical agony of those who died slowly before her, or the rank defilement of their bodies, shoved headless and twisted into garbage bags.
But the media had no other frame of reference for the crime. Not because there weren’t other female serial killers—about 17 percent of known American serial killers are women, and at least twenty-five of them have been arrested and convicted since 1972. The tally doesn’t include the team killers or the Munchausen syndrome by proxy mothers but reflects only the solo operators, preying on a sequence of more than three victims, who might be family members, acquaintances, or strangers, often a blend of the three. All of the women were local sensations in their time, freaks of nature to be gawked at and joked about. But they failed to take hold in our collective psyche as monstrous, and therefore as resonant. No female serial killer has the mythic force of the classic predator. We find it impossible to perceive them as frightening creatures. There is no Jane the Ripper.
Reviewing the nicknames given to multiple killers by media and law enforcement over the century, criminologist Eric Hickey has found that, while men are referred to as “The Ripper,” “The Night Stalker,” “The Strangler,” or “The Slasher,” women receive names that make light of their crimes—and by extension, of their victims. Comical monikers like the “Arsenic and Old Lace Killer,” and “Giggling Grandma” and “Old Shoe Box Annie” are utterly undescriptive of the brutality of murder, while sexual monikers like the “Beautiful Blonde” and “Black Widow” hook almost jocularly into men’s sexual fear of women. The monster is tamed in her feminine guise. As two academics wrote recently, we respond to female predators with curiosity rather than dread: “We can be fascinated without being afraid.”
One of the reasons we don’t fear real female predators is that they tend to be “place-specific” killers. They don’t prowl. They operate in one home, hospital, or board-and-care. As such, they don’t touch the chord of anxiety we feel about The Dark, about the World Out There in the shadows behind our own houses, that makes male killers such potent figures. Men who commit serial murder invariably strike us as senseless in their motive and random in their targets; their action is nothing more tangible than the impulse for destruction, pure evil in a human shell, a vision captured by the director John Carpenter with his masked killer in Halloween.Women, on the other hand, seem to kill more purposively. They seem to have a reason. Dorothea Puente poisoned for money, a motive that everyone recognizes. That slots her into a different category in our minds from her monstrous male counterpart, more nearly related to organized crime or serial bank robbery, where the killing is essentially incidental.
In reality, however, gender differences in serial murder are superficial. They speak, as criminal psychologist Candice Skrapec observes, “to modus operandi, not to motive.” Belea Keeney and Kathleen Heide looked at twenty-two solo female serial killers arrested in the United States between 1972 and 1992 and found enough information about fourteen of them to do an analysis. The fourteen women (nine of whom were Southerners) were estimated by law enforcement officials to have killed more than eighty-eight people and were confirmed as having killed sixty-two. Forty-three percent of their victims were “in the custodial care of the murderers.” Most of the dead were relatives, but 20 percent were strangers or acquaintances. Fifty-seven percent were killed with poison, 29 percent were smothered, 11 percent were shot. The women, the authors found, were evenly divided between those with “affective goals,” meaning they killed exclusively for some interior emotional purpose, and those with “instrumental goals,” meaning that, like Puente, they profited from their slaughter as well. All of the women were white (as was Puente, who took her last name from a brief marriage with an Hispanic man). Thirteen were living with others at the time of the murders. Eleven were employed. Over a third of their victims had been dismembered or mutilated.
Films about male serial killers are always enacted as suspense dramas—will the cops catch him in time? Will the heroine save herself in time? The victim is invariably a brave young co-ed or, more rarely, a vulnerable young man. But the only docudrama about a female serial killer—Aileen Wuornos—is billed as a relationship drama. The tag line: “A friendship torn apart by murder.” Apparently, her victims are secondary to her relationship to her best friend and lover, Tyria Moore. When the TV Wuornos goes out to work the streets, her friend worries about her safety: “Hooking is dangerous,” Tyria says in the TV dialogue. “I don’t want you to get hurt.” As if Wuornos hadn’t figured that out twenty years ago and adapted herself, become tough, canny, and opportunistic like the pimps and thieves with whom she moved. But the movie is set to the idealized tempo of female friendship. It is the tale of two waifs against the world, good-hearted in an inexplicably naive way—considering their life experience—who try to protect each other and fail. Tyria is nothing if not tenderly concerned. What if, for some reason, seven men in a row threatened Aileen’s life? What if she were obliged to kill them all, and leave them naked in forests, and steal their belongings, even though she’d never had to shoot a john before in her entire career as a prostitute? What if the two of them were up against the strong-armed law, like Thelma and Louise? In the end, however, since this is a true story, they don’t hold hands and jump into a canyon. Tyria betrays Aileen by turning state’s evidence. So they are “torn apart by murder.”
In purely fictional dramas about female predators, the victims are also men, who, like Wuornos’s victims, are depicted as having been led astray by their own lust. Only, here the women are smooth as silk, smilingly clever in their lingerie, and the theme is sexual danger. They are Linda Fiortino in The Last Seduction, Sean Young in A Kiss Before Dying, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. All of them are gorgeous bitches, man-eaters, the kind of women that men just love to fear. Unlike Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which considers the banality of violence, or Rampage, which ponders the madness of serial murder, these films beautify their villainesses and ascribe a certain responsibility to their victims, who should have known better. What we never see are the real victims of female serial killers: the very young, the very old, the disabled, and the lonely. The message is not that women brutalize the innocent, but that if men follow their dicks, they’ll get into trouble. It is the theme, really, of journalist Ron Rosenbaum’s cover story in the March 1995 issue of Esquire, entitled “In Praise of Dangerous Women.” “For men,” he writes, “the real attraction is the thrill of disempowerment. Think about it. Doesn’t it take more nerve to give up … contro
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The tendency to “forget” female serial killers has been a recurrent phenomenon throughout Western history. There are countless examples of men who became legendary horror figures, while their female counterparts recede into the humdrum of ordinary crime. Many of us have heard of Bluebeard, for instance, a mythic figure based on the French Baron Gilles de Rais, officer and confidant of Joan of Arc. He was allegedly responsible for murdering scores, possibly hundreds, of children. But we have never heard of the mid-fifteenth-century Countess Elisabeth Bathory, of Hungary, who bled to death 610 peasant girls, whom she abducted and kept in her castle dungeon so that she could fill rejuvenating beauty baths with their youthful blood. Similarly, the English speaking world was riveted by Jack the Ripper, but no one has heard of Jane Toppan, and no one paid much attention to Belle Gunness, who fled Chicago in 1908 after killing forty men and four children, having transformed her lush farmland into a cemetery. No lore exists about Louise Peete, either, born in Bienville, Louisiana, in 1883, to high-society parents, a psychopath who drove all four of her husbands to suicide, shot and killed at least two other men, bludgeoned to death a woman, and had another man committed to an insane asylum so that she could take over his bank account.
Our collective amnesia about female serial killers is so pronounced that when Aileen Wuornos was arrested in 1992 and charged with the shooting deaths of seven men along 1-75, she was immediately proclaimed America’s first female serial killer. Only four years earlier, ten female serial killers had been arrested across the United States. Less than two years before, Dorothea Puente was convicted. And less than a decade earlier, the state of North Carolina executed Velma Barfield, who poisoned five and wrote a memoir from death row. But the media went wild over Wuornos, as if she were a new species of serpent found in the sea. Even criminologists argued that Wuornos was different. She was the first woman to use a gun, some said, and the first to prey on strangers. She was not. Thirty-nine percent of American serial murderesses have used guns, not least of whom was Peete, the last woman to be executed in California. She died at Sing-Sing in 1947, after taunting Supreme Court justices that “no gentleman would put a lady to her death.”
By March 1995, the flurry of excitement over the “first” female serial killer had swallowed itself whole once again. Retired FBI special agent Roy Hazelwood reportedly announced at a homicide conference in Calgary, Alberta, “There are no female serial killers.” Not a one. Not the dozens of women who have killed up to forty patients in hospitals; nor the dozens more who have killed ten men, or twenty; nor Puente and others who have preyed upon tenants. Never mind Marybeth Tinning, or any of the mothers and angels of death.
At the heart of this remarkable denial that female predators exist can be found a complex web of prejudices and misperceptions that inform the semantics of the label “serial killer” itself. The FBI’s Behavioral Science Services Unit, in Quantico, Virginia, is largely responsible for having given this particular type of homicide its name. The coinage is in some dispute, but one man who claims to have come up with it is retired special agent Robert Ressler, who defined the crime in 1978 as a series of homicides perpetrated against a sequence of more than three victims, all of whom were strangers, with a cooling off period in between each kill. Ressler called this type of murderer a “serial killer,” to distinguish him from a mass killer, who explodes all at once, attacking several people simultaneously, as in the massacre of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland.
Ressler and his BSSU colleagues began collecting data on serial murderers by interviewing convicts from around the United States who fit the FBI definition. The objective was not to explain serial homicide per se but to quantify the characteristics of known perpetrators—their motives, methods, and patterns of attack—in order to draw profiles of the unknown suspects still at large. Psychological profiling, as the technique came to be called, is strictly an investigative tool, not an inquiry into the “why” of murder, just the “how.” If 85 percent of known serial killers are Caucasian males between twenty years old and forty, the BSSU can use that data to advise local investigators to rule out women, blacks, and elderly men (among others) from their suspect pool. If the corpses have been arranged at the crime scene in a particularly bizarre or seemingly ritual fashion, then FBI probabilities would point to a mentally ill offender, because those that they interviewed who were mentally ill tended to behave insanely at the crime scene. By contrast, lust killers tend to sexually assault their victims, postmortem, and sadists leave the corpse untouched. So, if it appeared that the offender were mentally ill, then the BSSU would advise local detectives to look for a thin man, because the mentally ill tend to be undernourished. If the corpse was white, then that thin man would also be white, since serial killers tend to strike within their own race. If the crime scene was particularly disorganized, the killer would tend to be young, because younger men are more impulsive and heedless. Hence: “You are looking for a thin Caucasian male in his twenties.”
In the two decades since the BSSU program began, the agents have refined their profiles considerably, devising ever more specific subsets of violent serial offenders. In 1992, for instance, special agent Roy Hazelwood gave a lecture at the First International Conference on Serial and Mass Murder, in Windsor, Ontario, on the “sexual sadist,” a type of killer (like Paul Bernardo) who is aroused by the fear and pain he elicits in his victims. Killing them is, in a sense, secondary. The victim must be silenced so as not to identify the killer. Hazelwood noted that at least a third of such men who’d been interviewed by the FBI owned a copy of the John Fowles novel The Collector, about a man who keeps a woman locked in a cellar. They were also likely to keep photographic or audio records of the crime. Many had hard-core pornography collections.
The precision of the BSSU data makes it a superb tool for narrowing the range of suspects in the real world, but only if the suspects behave within the parameters already devised. Since the FBI is principally concerned with helping homicide detectives locate a suspect after they have found a body, they are going to concentrate on types of killers who dump the bodies in a place they aren’t connected to. From a law enforcement perspective, there’s no practical application for profiling “place-specific” killers, because as soon as you find the body you have an obvious pool of suspects. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, was the only inhabitant of his apartment. Detectives in Milwaukee encountered him simultaneously with his victims. There was no need to predict what he would be like. Consequently, Dahmer’s particular psychopathology is of less concern to the FBI than that of a “roaming” killer who leaves bodies along a trail. The BSSU’s mandate is to develop knowledge that can assist an ongoing investigation. One reason, then, that the FBI has decided there are “no female serial killers” is because the overwhelming majority of serial murderesses are place-specific criminals, which is not the sort of crime the FBI is called upon to investigate. Nurses who kill in hospitals, for example, may very well be preying upon a series of more than three strangers, with a cooling-off period in between, but they stay in one place.
Academics who study serial murder refer to the site of attacks as the “comfort zone,” a geographic area in which the perpetrator feels familiar enough to kill, like the hunting range of an animal. The most literal example of this is the Alaska killer Robert Hansen, who abducted transient prostitutes in Anchorage and flew them up to wilderness areas well known to him, where he set them free and hunted them down. Hansen felt most comfortable (and confident he wouldn’t be observed) in a hunting range he’d known all his life. When Paul Bernardo was committing serial rape before his marriage, he stalked the streets he’d known since childhood, in Scarborough. When he escalated to killing, with Karla Homolka, the venue changed. The comfort zone became their home. Women have historically felt most comfortable and masterful in their homes, and that is where they have tended to kill. The next most frequent sites are hospitals, boardinghouses, or private residences they visit as nurses or baby-sitters: all z
ones that women can move through without being scrutinized. A woman would not feel comfortable attacking a child in a dark alley or poisoning her husband in a red-light district. Serial killers need to build up a certain confidence before they attack, and part of that psychological process involves feeling secure in their surroundings.
The selection of place has important implications for the selection of victims and has led to an emerging concept in criminology called “routine activities theory.” Serial offenders, including rapists and robbers, tend to commit their crimes along routes they already travel routinely. A rapist, for example, will not hike off into a densely wooded area he has never explored before in the hopes of chancing upon a suitable victim. It is far more likely that he will pass by the same bus stop every morning on his way to work for a month, seeing the same person or same type of person, nursing his fantasy, building up his confidence, until finally he assaults him or her. Similarly, male serial killers who troll red-light districts, bus stations, gay bars, and stretches of highway where hitchhikers can be found will already have traveled these routes, sometimes for years, before formulating the intent to commit murder.
Until recently, women have had much more constricted geographic mobility in both their routine activities routes and their comfort zones. As a result, as Rossmo, now a serial homicide theorist at Simon Fraser University, puts it, female predators are “trappers” rather than “stalkers.” They “select a victim who happens to come, by design or by chance, into their comfort zone.” Dorothea Puente didn’t pursue Alvaro Montoya, he was delivered to her by the Sacramento social work community. Genene Jones killed babies who came into the San Antonio hospital where she worked. Aileen Wuornos murdered out on the highway, a route she routinely hitchhiked and solicited along. It was a much wider zone than is characteristic of women, and Wuornos may mark a transition for female serial killers in the upcoming decade.
When She Was Bad Page 19