Female Serial Killers Read online

  Praise for Peter Vronsky’s

  Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

  “This formidably comprehensive, brilliantly researched book must be the most wide-ranging work on serial killers that has been written so far. The fact that it sprang from the author’s brief encounters with two serial killers lends it a sense of personal urgency.”

  —Colin Wilson, coauthor of Killers Among Us and

  author of Written in Blood

  “Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters is one of the most complete books I have read on serial killers. If you are fascinated by the human mind and by those who are abnormal, this is the book for you.”

  —Roundtablereviews.com

  Titles by Peter Vronsky

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS: HOW AND WHY WOMEN BECOME MONSTERS

  SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

  HOW AND WHY WOMEN BECOME MONSTERS

  PETER VRONSKY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2007 by Peter Vronsky.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vronsky, Peter.

  Female serial killers: how and why women become monsters / Peter Vronsky.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0569-3

  1. Women serial murderers. I. Title.

  HV6517.V76 2007

  364.152'3—dc22

  2007015094

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  FOR MEN AND WOMEN,

  YOUNG AND OLD,

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD,

  THE GUILTY AND THE INNOCENT.

  VICTIMS ALL.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction:

  SERIAL SPARTACISM

  The Politics of Female Aggression

  PART ONE

  The Psychopathology and Brief History of the Female Serial Killer

  1. THE NATURE OF THE FEMININE BEAST

  The Psychopathology of Female Monsters

  2. THE QUEST FOR POWER, PROFIT, AND DESIRE

  A Brief History of Female Serial Killers

  PART TWO

  Selected Case Studies of Female Serial Killers and Accomplices in the Twentieth Century

  3. THE CULT AND PASSION OF AILEEN WUORNOS

  The Postmodern Female Serial Killer

  4. MURDERING FRIENDS AND INTIMATES

  Black Widows and Profit Killers

  5. LOVING US TO DEATH

  Serial Killer Moms, Angels of Death, and Other Murdering Caregivers

  6. SEX, DEATH, AND VIDEOTAPE

  The Female As Serial Killer Accomplice

  7. NAZI BITCHES AND THE MANSON KILLER GIRLS

  Making Female Missionary Cult Serial Killers

  Conclusion:

  RECOGNIZING THE PREDATORY WOMAN

  Profiling Female Serial Killers

  Afterword

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  Endnote References

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  SERIAL SPARTACISM

  The Politics of Female Aggression

  Can you name the serial killer who struck in the back of a military helicopter flying at 4,000 feet on a mission? Or the one who, at the age of eleven, killed two victims? Or the one who danced and socialized with a California governor? Some would know to name Genene Jones, Mary Bell, and Dorothea Puente—three females. But for the rest of us, we never even knew there were female serial killers. That is, except for that Monster lesbian hooker—the one they made the movie about—Aileen Wuornos. While the names of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer or the monikers of the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, the Green River Killer, and BTK are familiar to all, ask us to name a few female serial killers and we usually stop right after Aileen. Were there others?

  Yes, many actually. About one out of every six serial killers is a woman.1

  As atonement for my past negligence in having overlooked them, along with Aileen, Genene, and Mary, I uncovered the legion of their serial killing sisters, and they are many.

  I first came to writing about male serial killers in the wake of my own very brief and casual encounters with two of them before they were identified and apprehended. (One just behind St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow in 1990 and another in a New York City hotel lobby eleven years earlier.)2 At the time I did not know they were serial killers. I only learned who they were and what they had done months and years later through press reports and it made me wonder about the possibility that perhaps I had met more than just those two, and did not know it. Anything can happen once—that I understood and it did not surprise me. But discovering that I had met two—well, twice was entirely a different matter. It inspired all sorts of meditation on the statistical possibilities of life as we live it today. I wondered what the odds were for any of us to have at least once unknowingly sat next to a serial killer on a bus or a train, passed one in a crowd on the street, parked or shopped next to one, or stood behind one waiting in line.

  As far as “my” two serial killers were concerned, I was living a relatively conventional heterosexual male middle-class existence, which I believed unfolded far away from the lonely corpse-littered roadsides, low-rent musty holes, and gloomy cellars where serial killers did their ugly horrible thing. I smugly asserted that my coincidental encounters had nothing to do with my being a potential victim for I was not in a preferred category for serial killer prey: I was not a young unaccompanied female or a late-night service employee, a street sex worker, a promiscuous player, or a child of any gender.

  After encountering my first serial killer in a trashy part of town near a hookers’ stroll in New York, I contentedly described myself as “trespassing” on a serial killer’s hunting ground and getting “bumped” by a monster for going where I did not normally belong.

  But I had gotten it all wrong. While I was vigilantly looking over my shoulder for a masculine threat from the seedier side of town, I should have been instead looking first closer to home—to whose bed I comfortably slept in and who slept in mine. If a white, heterosexual, middle-aged male ends up murdered, most likely his kille
r is a woman who he knows and knows intimately. When serial death comes calling on lonely, single middle-class guys with jobs and condos, or for that matter on horny old widower farmers, it comes with kisses and caring.

  But all the serial killers I imagined myself randomly passing by on the street were always males, while women remained entirely off my paranoid radar as anything other than victims. I was conditioned to perceive the serial killer as a “he” and “she” as “his” victim.

  That is not just a male point of view. Women until very recently had felt the same way. The presence of another female, even a stranger, still disarms many women’s primal fears of finding themselves alone with a male stranger. Our belief in an intrinsic nonthreatening nature of the feminine is deceiving both genders.

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS: HOW MANY?

  One in nearly every six serial killers in the U.S. is a woman, acting as a solo perpetrator or an accomplice. Of a total of about 400 serial killers identified between 1800 and 1995, nearly 16 percent were females—a total of 62 killers.3 While that might not be an overwhelming majority, it is not an insignificant number either—those 62 women collectively killed between 400 and 600 victims—men, women, and children. Three female serial killers alone—Genene Jones, Belle Gunness, and Jane Toppan—might account collectively for as many as 200 suspected murders. Another study, which included cases from other countries, named 86 known female serial killers.4 The appendix at the end of this book lists 140 known female serial killers and the number of their victims. More disturbing is that three-quarters of female serial killers in the U.S. made their appearance since 1950, and a full half only since 1975!5

  Yet somehow the notion of a female serial killer has not entered our popular consciousness of fear or into our alarmed imaginations in the same menacing way that the figure of the male serial killer has. Women serial killers seem to border on the comic or titillating for many of us. Compare the monikers we give male serial killers (Jack the Ripper, Boston Strangler, Night Stalker, Skid Row Slasher, Bedroom Basher, Slavemaster) with the female ones (Lady Bluebeard, Giggling Grandma, Lonely Hearts Killer, Lady Rotten, Black Widow, Angel of Death, Barbie Killer, Death Row Granny). We have not been taking female killers seriously enough.

  Part of the explanation is found in who we think female serial killers have been murdering and where. Many female serialists kill at home and their victims have often been family members or intimates: husbands, lovers, and children. Where one first nursed is not necessarily the safest place to be, yet how many of us are even remotely prepared to imagine our mom as a serial killer?

  Other female serial killers murder at work in their professional capacity as trusted caregivers—nurses, babysitters, bearers of medicine, food preparers, and trusted social services contractors. Nurses killing on their job—killing where they belong: on the frontline of the war between life and death where people do die; nurses as angels of death with the catheter and syringe in their hands, nobody suspecting them, realizing that the death of their victim was anything but a medical emergency.

  But in our popular imagination the serial killer lurks faceless after dark behind the wheel of his cruising car with a trunkful of rope and duct tape. We neglect to look beyond the sexy, cool cotton-white of the nurse who draws our blood, the cheery home-care worker calling on Granddad, the cute girl behind the deli counter slicing our bread, the miniskirted one with scissors cutting hair, or the one looking into our eyes from across the table while sipping her drink.

  MONSTER—THE UNQUIET KILLER

  Amazing how fast movies today can still change everything. Our collective awareness of female serial killers was recently taken up to a new level thanks to Monster, a 2003 movie starring Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci, along with a host of documentaries and television reports, all about Aileen Wuornos, a Florida roadside prostitute who was convicted of murdering seven men. A lot of promotion and commentary around the case suggested that Wuornos was “America’s first female serial killer.” Far from it—she was more likely somewhere around the fifty-seventh.

  Wuornos was at best, perhaps, America’s first mass media celebrity female serial killer—giving countless interviews to press, media, and documentary filmmakers before she was put to death by lethal injection in 2002. What made Wuornos so unique was that she appeared to murder just like a male serial killer—she killed strangers with a handgun in a car and left their bodies in public places.

  The one thing most of us believe about female serial killers, if anything, is that they generally tend to use poison and that their victims are known or related to them. Male serial killers stalk and hunt strangers; females trap and poison intimates—kill on their own home territory or on that which they share with their victim. The only really popular conception that has endured of a female serial killer through the decades is of the one who kills a string of husbands or lovers for profit. We even have a readymade moniker for her: the Black Widow.

  For some reason we imagine the Black Widow as a creature of the past, from a time long ago when poisons were readily sold over the counter, marriage was often contractually functional, and record keeping of identities was haphazard. She could lure, seduce, marry quickly, discreetly kill, and vanish several times over before anybody would notice. When the Black Widow appears today, we think she only does so in Hollywood films in the guise of Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner, or Linda Fiorentino. Mrrrrreow. So titillating—sex to die for.

  What we rarely saw was the type of predatory sexually charged Ted Bundy/Green River Killer–type of female perpetrator leaving an alarming trail of visible corpses in her wake. Wuornos came closest to that. She was “the unquiet killer.” Unlike the typical female serial killer who leaves her victims expired in their beds or cribs or discreetly buries them in the garden out back, Wuornos dumped her victims’ bodies by the rest stops and roadsides of Florida’s interstate system. Corpses on the roads to Disney World! And unlike most female serial killers who historically murdered their victims in the capacity of a wife, lover, babysitter, nurse, or landlady, Wuornos barely had any relationship with her victims, other than hitchhiker, motorist in distress, or roadside prostitute with client, ironically the very same relationship that many male serial killers themselves exploit when they murder their female victims.

  Wuornos, however, confuses our perceptions of real female serial killers by not only being a lesbian, but by being a particular type of lesbian. She was not the pretty and feminine L Word lipstick-lesbian, but a hard-edged dyke type, oozing a beefy, drunken-stoned, sloppy kind of muscular knucklehead violence we typically associate with males. As a serial killer, it is easier to correlate Wuornos’s violence with an overabundance of the masculine rather than with any intrinsic femininity gone awry.

  THE NATURE OF FEMALE VIOLENCE

  Wuornos exposes the core of our perceptual problem—violence is still almost universally associated with the male and the masculine. It was thought to be implicit in the male physique, a function of testosterone. Men commit violence; women and children suffer from it.

  When women commit violence the only explanation offered has been that it is involuntary, defensive, or the result of mental illness or hormonal imbalance inherent with female physiology: postpartum depression, premenstrual syndrome, and menopause have been included among the named culprits. Women have been generally perceived to be capable of committing only “expressive” violence—an uncontrollable release of bottled-up rage or fear, often as a result of long-term abuse at the hands of males: Battered Woman Syndrome or Battered Spouse Syndrome. It has been generally believed that women usually murder unwillingly without premeditation.

  “Instrumental” violence, however, murder for a purpose—political power, rape, sadistic pleasure, robbery, or some other base gratification—remains the domain of the male. After all, every male is a potential killer in the form of a warrior—and he only becomes a murderer when he misuses his innate physical and socialized capacity to kill for ignoble, immoral, and impoli
tic reasons. While the male is built and programmed to destroy, the female nests, creates, and nurtures. Or so the story goes.

  History, of course, is full of instrumentally violent women: Valeria Messalina, Queen Boadicea, Agrippina the Younger, Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth the First, Madame Mao, Golda Meier, Margaret Thatcher. Some of these women can be characterized as serial killers; many had on numerous occasions killed and tortured serially, or ordered it to be done in the name of political power, patriotism, vengeance, or material greed and lust—and they did it as ruthlessly and obsessively as their male contemporaries—and sometimes even more so.

  But most of these women are cultures, centuries, and classes distant from the modern Western woman—from the welfare moms in the Laundromat to the soccer moms in the mall and those without kids at all. It could be argued that as empresses or high priestesses they were beyond the common distinction of gender—they were heirs to divine power as manifestations of their political state. Yet it is precisely that deadly divine power that so many serial killers obsessively attempt to replicate through murder: power over life and death. It’s almost always about the power. But in the end, when we negate the feminine, all that remains is a potential murderer.

  THE STUDY OF FEMALE AGGRESSION

  We really do not understand much about female violence because we have only recently begun to pay careful attention to it. Of 314 scientific studies on human aggression published by 1974 only 8 percent exclusively addressed violence in women or girls.6 But that was before the frequency of female serial killers in the U.S. had dramatically doubled by 1975 over the previous two decades, and would double again by 1995!7