Perhaps law enforcement will be more prepared for the roaming female killer, given the focus of their investigative techniques. They have certainly failed in the arena of place-specific murder. Female serial killers, according to Eric Hickey, actually average a greater number of victims than their male counterparts, even though the deaths occur right under their communities’ noses. Since authorities have no framework of suspicion for multiple murder in a family or hospital, they often don’t even suspect there is a killer to pursue. They have on their hands, instead, a series of abrupt natural deaths or unexplained disappearances. It is lack of suspicion, nothing more complex, that enabled a woman like Nannie Doss, of Oklahoma, to kill four husbands, two children, her mother, two of her sisters, and her nephew in the 1930s and 1940s; Marybeth Tinning to destroy her children; Genene Jones to murder an estimated forty infants and small children; and British nurse Beverly Allitt to kill at least four children in a Lincolnshire hospital.
The killers themselves sometimes profess amazement at this blindness. “I got away with the first one,” marveled the young Floridian killer Christine Falling, who smothered five children entrusted to her care as a babysitter between 1980 and 1982, “because they couldn’t tell what actually happened and I wasn’t gonna tell them. If they’re too stupid to figure it out for themselves then why should I tell ’em? I mean, they’re doctors. I couldn’t believe I was getting away with it.” Similarly, Jane Toppan, the nurse in Connecticut at the turn of the century, later scorned the “stupid doctors” and “ignorant relatives” who failed to apprehend her.
If law enforcement officials have been hampered by their own prejudices in identifying women as serial killers, academics have generally failed to set them straight. In the early 1980s, an eclectic group of journalists and academics started to study serial homicide, rapidly becoming the “experts” to whom media turned whenever a new killer went on the prowl. What made the fledgling field so hot was the sudden upsurge in high-profile cases in which the killer was bafflingly ordinary: John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago contractor who strangled thirty-three teenaged boys and buried them beneath his suburban house; Ted Bundy, a handsome law student who killed twenty-eight young women by the time of his final arrest in Florida; and Edmund Kemper, an urbane man in northern California who, after a six-month rampage that left eleven dead, cut his mother’s head off, placed it on the mantlepiece, and used it as a dart board. The question “How could they?” was made more urgent by the apparent normality of these men.
The early stages of serial homicide scholarship was highly speculative. “We had no basis for our research,” recalls Eric Hickey. “We were all over the place.” Not everyone agreed with the FBI definition of serial killers. Were they only predators who attacked strangers, or should one include those who killed family? Did they have to have a sexual motive, or could they profit from the crimes? The criminologist James Allan Fox theorized that most worked in pairs, although the FBI begged to differ. Nobody could agree on how many dead bodies there needed to be. While Ressler at the BSSU said three, others opted for two, others ten. Nobody could explain why contract killers, mercenaries, and mafia hit men were truly an unrelated species of criminal. What about war criminals? Or women like Marybeth Tinning? Perhaps the most gender-inclusive definition would be: men and women who kill a sequence of three or more victims, with a cooling off period in between, without external provocation or incitement.
Feminist scholars might have been the ones to raise and refine questions about women’s involvement, but they didn’t. Instead, they coopted the concept of serial killer into their concerns about sexual violence against women, for which purpose all serial killers had to be male. Or, as Phyllis Chesler described them in The New York Times in 1992, “white male drifters who hate women and are obsessed with pornography.” Since sexual violence against women is viewed, by most feminists, as a political phenomenon, serial killers have come to be seen as engines of misogynistic oppression. Feminist Jane Caputi writes that serial killers act on behalf of all men as “henchmen” in the subordination of women. The serial killer is a “martyr for the patriarchal state.” Phyllis Chesler contended that Aileen Wuornos was not a serial killer; furthermore, the very fact that she was in prison had to do with patriarchal oppression: “It is unlikely that Wuornos and other victims of violence against women will be fairly treated by the judicial system.” Trickling down from ostensible authorities like Phyllis Chesler to other feminist writers, it has become axiomatic that “serial killer” means “man.” The cultural critic Susan McWhinney notes, for instance, that “the State says [Wuornos] is a serial killer. This charge seems implausible, given that the definition of a serial killer is one who kills for sexual arousal within a specific power imbalance.”
In fact, there is no consensus about the definition of “serial killer.” Nor is there much consensus about causation. A large number of serial killers were abused or neglected as children, including Aileen Wuornos, Dorothea Puente, Marybeth Tinning, and, indeed, all fourteen female serial murderesses in Heide and Keeney’s study. A majority appear to be psychopaths, although the women are more likely to be diagnosed by local psychiatrists as “histrionic” and “manic-depressive.”
Psychoneurologists have turned their attention to the influence of brain damage on episodic or compulsive violence, particularly when the behavior is combined with a brutal childhood. The Rochester serial killer Arthur Shawcross, who went to trial in 1991, suffered from “temporal lobe malformation,” the effect of which was to disin-hibit his impulse control. He also had extremely erratic electroencephalograph readings, which suggested that the electrical impulses in his brain were misfiring, engendering sudden surges of rage.
Paraphilias (sexual deviances) play an important role in motivating many male killers: sadism, necrophilia, pedophilia, fetishes for blood and for body parts. These may necessitate murder, but murder in itself isn’t the drive. In other words, persons with deviant sexual compulsions may not set out to kill, as such, but find themselves having to do so in order to procure what they do want. British killer Dennis Nilsen used to cover himself in white powder and fantasize that he was dead. His necrophiliac fantasies, coupled with a deep and abiding loneliness, eventually drove Nilsen (in the late 1970s) to strangle the men he met in gay bars, primarily to keep them around as his “lovers.” Nilsen bathed them, propped them in chairs while he watched TV, slept with the bodies beside him in bed, and wrote them love poems. He did not murder for murder’s sake.
The overwhelming majority of serial killers, both male and female, are white. Candice Skrapec views this as “a supremely significant window” through which to contemplate their behavior. Why not blacks or Hispanics or Asians? They are vulnerable to abuse as children. They read pornography. They get brain-damaged and head-injured and have sexual deviances. Their ranks can be found in every other criminal category. Is it possible that a sense of entitlement to social esteem is, somehow, a critical ingredient in the crime? Whatever the answer, the fact that a white woman is more likely to commit serial murder than a black, Asian, or Hispanic man by a factor of one hundred to one should end the feminist conversation on this crime as a specifically masculine power trip.
The makeup of the serial murderer is profoundly complex, and if the homicide experts have learned anything in the past decade of furious theorizing, it should be that all of them have a point, and none paints the full picture. Dorothea Puente’s childhood illustrates the interplay of life experience, temperament, gender, and psychological drive in transforming one particular individual into a predator. She was born Dorothy Helen Gray, on January 9, 1929. Her parents followed the crops along a dusty migrant trail, five children in tow, eventually drifting to Redlands, California, where Dorothy’s mother, Trudie, had her sixth child. Seventh-Day Adventists, Trudie and Dorothy’s father, Jesse James Gray, taught Dorothy and her older siblings that service to others was the highest mark of social esteem. “Mother once made me promise to feel sorry for alcoholics
and take care of drunks,” Dorothea later said. But, by the time she was three, her mother herself was catastrophically awash in alcohol, her father, in illness and despair.
Trudie hailed from Oklahoma. Restless at sixteen, she’d married Jesse James, named for the great train robber, who had known Jesse Gray’s father in Missouri. Trudie and Jesse James married for love, but their union was impulsive and ultimately ruinous. Trudie joined a bike gang and began to run with other men. When she came home, she had wild, drunken flights of rage. Her effect on her children was described at the sentencing phase of Puente’s trial by Dr. Mindy Rosenberg, a child psychologist in San Francisco who’d been retained by defense attorneys to investigate factors in Puente’s childhood that might serve to mitigate her sentence. Rosenberg interviewed Puente’s two older sisters, Audry and Sylvia. “Audry recalls that her mother threw a frying pan at her father. Sylvia recalls that [she] threw the top of a milk can [and] gashed his forehead.” She whipped Dorothea with a belt and got arrested for slashing Sylvia with a pocketknife.
Jesse James was a better parent than his wife, according to his children, but his short life was suffused with trauma. He collapsed in the trenches of the First World War, exposed to mustard gas and suffering from shell shock. When he came home, he was volatile and depressed, drinking too much and getting into knife fights in local bars. Then he contracted tuberculosis, and died from it slowly, for years. Sometimes, his humiliation and sense of doom grew so intolerable that he just wanted to kill himself, get it over with. Once, he climbed up a water tower, swinging on the ladder one-handed and waving a gun, his defiant wish for self-destruction met by the sobs of his children down below.
What love Jesse James Gray had to offer was a flame always flickering and fading, threatening to darken and die. “The children,” Dr. Rosenberg testified, “describe the mother as not very affectionate, and that the father, once he became ill … was really unavailable to them. At one point he had been a good father, but was no longer.… any little bit of attention was fought over, like starving children would basically fight over a crumb.”
When Puente was seven, Jesse left Trudie and fought for custody of his children. “I don’t want to live with Momma,” Dorothea wrote to the court. “She gets drunk … I can tell when my mother drinks because she gets so mean I can smell it.” Custody was awarded to Trudie anyway, and she left the children alone for two- and three-day stretches, without food or explanation. Afraid of the dark, unable to reach the lamp and no one else to do it, not that night and maybe never, because Momma didn’t say she would be back, just left. What would that be like for a child?
“Many years ago,” wrote Dennis Nilsen, articulating, perhaps, something of what Puente felt, “I was a boy drowning in the sea. I am always drowning in the sea … down amongst the dead men, deep down.” Like Puente, Nilsen, who was raised in poverty on the eastern coast of Scotland, experienced his early life as devastatingly unpredictable. His only bond was with his grandfather, a sailor, who would abruptly disappear for months at a time and finally perished at sea. The grandfather returned to Nilsen as a corpse in a casket when the boy was six. “Come see your granddad,” the family beckoned, not explaining that the reunion would be with a man who no longer answered the child or reached for him.
Puente’s parents died within a year of each other before she was ten, her mother in a motorbike accident. Like Nilsen, she wasn’t prepared for this final abandonment. She was ushered into a funeral home by orphanage officials who hadn’t told her what she’d find. “Your mother’s in there,” they said. No one spoke of Trudie with her again. The abandonment was so profound as to be almost incomprehensible. It must have felt, as Nilsen said, like drowning. The child survives, but the heart is lost. From then on, to love is to drown.
Many male serial killers attack types of people—symbolic targets—who evoke an early source of vulnerability and terror in them. John Wayne Gacy, who had often been violently attacked and abused by his father, went after homosexual youths with a yearning that abruptly switched to savagery. Edmund Kemper had been viciously taunted and denigrated (among other things) by his mother. He worked his way through a series of young women who resembled the type that his mother had told him he’d never win. He won them by obliterating them, and then he obliterated his mother.
Some female serial killers also attack symbolic targets. When Aileen Wuornos said that she killed in self-defense, she was, indeed, defending herself against a childhood of horrendous treatment from her stepfather and other men. The men that she killed (after the first one) were no more culpable than anyone who crosses paths with a drive as ruthless as hers was to rage against remembered trauma. “In most cases,” Sharon Smolick, a former counselor at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women in New York State, told Psychology Today in 1993, “women will not or cannot avenge themselves upon their attacker, but they do not remain silent and passive forever. It is often an innocent person who winds up paying with their lives.” One Bedford inmate, identified as CJ, was so angry at the abuse she received as a child that she began working as a prostitute to “set [men] up.” They thought they were going to have sex, but “I would beat them, pistol-whip them, and take their money.” She did this twenty or so times. “Money was never the reason why I did it. I needed to rob them of their dignity first, and taking money they had was just another way of hurting them.”
Puente’s symbolic targets were the drunks of Sacramento, who elicited the specters of her mother and father and brought flooding back to her a fear she needed to suppress at all costs. Her own alcoholism seemed to connect her to this fear; it was the portal of memory, reminding her of a reality she had long since rewritten and disguised.
Many children are abused, of course, and don’t become predators. Why do these rare few grow up to do what they do? The role of temperament is, perhaps, another critical ingredient in determining which maltreated child will evolve to strike out in this way. None of Dorothea Puente’s siblings became dangerous adults. They all tried to “pretend [their early life] didn’t happen,” as Dorothea’s daughter, whom she gave up for adoption, said at her trial. Dorothea’s eldest brother, Jim, is a Christian missionary in southern California. Another brother, Jesse Everett, self-destructed with alcohol in the 1970s. Dorothea’s sisters Audry and Sylvia managed to lead quiet lives. A third sister, Wilma, died in a motorbike accident. Only her youngest brother, Ray, became somewhat dangerous: He was in prison on yet another drunk driving charge at the time of Dorothea’s trial.
“Dorothea was more extroverted,” Dr. Rosenberg said at her sentencing hearing. “She was openly resentful of the kinds of things that happened to her. Sylvia was more introverted, quiet, eager to please. Her pain was directed more inward.”
In his book Crime and Personality, Hans Eysenck argued that human conscience is “a conditioned reflex.” We are not born with a sense of right and wrong. Since those concepts shift from culture to culture, we learn the appropriate responses and determine how to direct our base impulses accordingly. People with introverted temperaments, Eysenck believed, condition “much more readily than do extroverts.” (Women as a sex, he maintained, are inherently more conditionable. That wasn’t true of Dorothea’s mother, Trudie, and it wasn’t true of her.) Her need to conform was wholly secondary to her need to be admired. “There was this overwhelming need for attention,” Dr. Rosenberg said, “to be looked upon as somebody unique, special.” The need unfurled itself, at first, in fantastical lies. Fellow children at the orphanage learned that Dorothea was Portuguese. Others were told that her mother was a pattern maker for the stars, working for Hollywood costume designer Edith Head. As she grew up she continued to lie about herself, telling people she was a doctor, a former movie star, a war heroine, that she had cancer, that she was rich. Nothing in life can matter but escape from your own life story. So you must re-imagine the narrative. Start over. Redeal the cards. This time, be loved and respected, adored. Hence the respectability achieved by killers like
Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Dorothea Puente. People are shocked that they could have put up such a facade. But it isn’t us they were trying to fool, it was themselves.
The British journalist Colin Wilson once proposed a theory called the “right man syndrome,” according to which men (he wasn’t interested in women) perched their egos atop such intricately structured delusions of grandeur that, eventually, any challenge to the delusion became catastrophic, compelling them to lash out at the challenger. “Expose me for what I am and I will destroy you.” The need to maintain her new identity fueled Puente’s compulsion to steal, poison, and murder—to get the money to buy what she feared she would not be given, and to keep the dark specters at bay.
In her twenties and thirties, Puente was a con artist, check forger, and thief. For a time, she worked as a prostitute; then she ran a brothel, which gave her the business experience she needed to start boardinghouse operations in the 1970s. (It also gave her a rap sheet, which would later be overlooked.) By 1976 Puente began to prosper, stealing two hundred to three hundred dollars per tenant, molding herself into a wealthy and munificent citizen. She also used her feminity as a form of empowering disguise. The beautiful and sexually voluptuous youth became, with no interlude of waning, a little old lady. She deliberately forsook middle age, because that is a time in a woman’s life when she loses sexual allure but hasn’t yet gained public sympathy, when physique compels her to be an unadulterated self. There’s little manipulative power for women in such frank presentations. So when Puente was still in her forties, she began to costume herself as a much older woman.
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