Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Signature is the opposite of the MO in that it is what the offender does not need to do to complete the murder. For example, to bind a victim who is not resisting, to torture a victim who is cooperating, to pose the body in some particular way, to dismember the corpse for purposes other than ease of disposal, to take a trophy or souvenir, deliberately leave behind some kind of message or clue. While the MO defines how the murder was done, the signature is often the key to why and it rarely changes through the years.

  The female serial killer, on the other hand, usually leaves the same simple signature—the actual murder. Sometimes the murder itself is misinterpreted as part of the female serial killer’s MO leading to categorizations such as Black Widow or Angel of Death. The murder is seen as a method to attain other goals—profit usually the most often cited motive. On closer examination, though, murder is often entirely unnecessary for the attainment of the goals. There are easier and safer ways to steal than murdering someone. Why kill then?

  That is not a helpful question to ask. Because when we say “easier to steal” without killing we put a different value on human life. For a female serialist a human life is as valuable as a used tissue. It actually is easier for them. The hedonistic comfort of material gain outweighs the price of human life.

  But many kill because that is what they want to do the most.

  It’s about the pleasure of the kill—the sense of power she gets—the buzz. Taking property is just a warm snack in the feast of control—a little further satisfaction, a tingling in the killer’s tummy.

  That’s how murder happens for cigarettes or pennies.

  Many Black Widows actually kill for motives far more complex than simple material profit—rage and need for control often super-cede the desire for material gain.

  However, none of this is particularly helpful for profiling female serial killers by crime scene analysis because often there is no crime scene to analyze. There is no scene because nobody knows a crime has occured. The female killer rarely surfaces as an “unsub”—an “unknown subject” in FBI profiler parlance—because she is so often already known and somehow related to the victim. That is, if someone realizes that there is a victim—because for a long time there’s a good chance that nobody will.

  SURVEYING SERIAL KILLERS MALE AND FEMALE

  Between 1979 and 1983, FBI agents from the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) conducted intimate and detailed interviews in prisons with thirty-six convicted male sex murderers, of whom twenty-nine were serial killers.55 They were exhaustively questioned, from their earliest childhood recollections to the most horrifying details of their crimes and motives.

  The families, friends, and acquaintances of the killers were also extensively interviewed, as were their surviving victims. The BSU also made a detailed study of the 118 victims who didn’t survive: their occupations, their lifestyles, vital statistics, where they encountered their killers, their autopsies, and the conditions in which their bodies were found.

  No equivalent study of this type currently exists for female serial killers. The closest thing to it is a similar study attempted by Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, who approached 26 incarcerated female multiple murderers and secured the cooperation of seven.56 Not all of the seven were serial killers—at least one, and maybe more, was a mass killer, torturing and murdering five victims on a single night. One major difference between male and female serial killers that can be noted immediately is that females tend not to favor discussing their crimes and lives with researchers, while male serial killers are quite chatty and eager to talk.

  The seven offenders in the Schurman-Kauflin survey killed a total of 36 victims—an average of 5.14 victims per killer; a much higher figure than the 3.8 victims on average of the 29 serial murderers in the FBI study. (Assuming that the other 7 offenders in the FBI study killed one victim each.)

  A study by Eric Hickey at California State University, Fresno, is probably the most comprehensive statistical study on the subject, analyzing the data on serial killers in the U.S. between 1800–1995. Hickey identified 337 male serial killers with an accumulated range of victims estimated between 2,613 and 3,807: an average of between 7.8 and 11.3 victims per male killer in the low and high estimates.57 The same study found 62 female serialists attributed with a range of total victims between 417 and 584, with an average of 6.7 and 9.4 victims each.58 The high-end estimate of average victims for female serial killers exceeds the low-end estimate for males.

  But just to illustrate how little we know precisely about female serial killers, another data study of 14 female serial killers identified 62 potential victims: an average of 4.4 per offender.59 (But the women were actually convicted of killing 27 victims. Frequently in serial murder prosecutions, particularly those committed in several jurisdictions, the serial offender is not tried for all the murders they are known to have committed. This further confounds statistical analysis.)

  AVERAGE AGE

  The average age of the male serial killer when he first murders is 27.5 years.60 This is consistent with the onset of acute psychopathy in adolescence and its relationship to the offender’s isolation and evolution of aggressive sexual fantasies during their adolescence, teens, and early twenties.

  In their study of female serialists, B. T. Keeney and K. Heide found that the average killing starting age for women was 32.9 years, with the youngest offender 19 and the oldest 53.61 Schurman-Kauflin determined a similar average age of 32.5 with an age range of offenders from 17 to 58 years old.62 Thus females are likely to start killing at a later age and continue killing beyond middle age, with some females killing when they are in their sixties and even seventies. Male serial killers rarely kill once they are over forty, which has been linked to the apparent diminishment of the effects of psychopathy in middle age. It appears that while middle age renders the male killer docile, menopause galvanizes the female into murderous action.

  But just when we think we have the female serial killers pegged in age, along comes an anomaly like eleven-year-old Mary Bell in England. In May of 1968, little Mary strangled a four-year-old boy after luring him into an abandoned building. The boy’s body was discovered the same day but police concluded that his death was accidental. The next day, Mary attempted to strangle an eleven-year-old girl, but was interrupted by the girl’s father who ejected her out of the house. It never dawned on the father that Mary was seriously attempting to murder his daughter. Nobody suspected the little girl.

  Mary knocked on the door of the house where the little dead boy once lived and asked to see him. When the parents told Mary that the boy was dead, she replied, “Oh, I know he’s dead, I wanted to see him in his coffin.”

  Nine weeks later, accompanied by another girl, Mary strangled a three-year-old boy, stabbed him in the stomach with a pair of broken scissors, and after failing in her attempt to castrate him with them, carved her initial “M” into his abdomen. His body was found between some concrete blocks on a piece of wasteland. When Mary began accusing other children of having committed the murder, suspicion fell on her. After being awakened in the night and taken away for questioning by police, the eleven-year-old boldly refused to answer questions and demanded that the astonished detectives call a lawyer for her before she would say anything further.

  Mary Bell was convicted of manslaughter with “diminished responsibility” by the English jury that heard her case. She was sentenced in 1969 to detention for an indeterminate period of time in psychiatric facilities.

  Mary Bell’s mother had a psychiatric record and was seventeen when she gave birth to Mary. A prostitute, she often abandoned Mary with relatives and once attempted to give her up for adoption. In 1998, in interviews with author Gitta Sereny, the now adult Mary Bell claimed that she was forced by her mother to have oral sex with her clients when she was a child.

  Mary was described as highly intelligent and manipulative. She told a policewoman guarding her that she wanted to be a nurse so that she could stick needles into people. “I like
hurting people.” During her trial, Mary said, “If I was a judge and I had an eleven-year-old who’d done this, I’d give her eighteen months. Murder isn’t that bad. We all die sometime anyway.”63

  Mary Bell was released at the age of twenty-three in 1980 and had a daughter in 1984, whom she fought authorities to keep, and apparently raised as a loving mother. She lives today in anonymity enforced by a British high court order in 2003, prohibiting the press from disclosing her or her daughter’s current location and identities. She remains the youngest known serial killer in history.

  VICTIM SELECTION

  Victim selection is different for male and female serial killers. Historically, at least 70 percent of male serial killers murder strangers only, while another 16 percent kill a combination of strangers with acquaintances or family. Some 8 percent of males murder acquaintances only and 3 percent family only.64

  This contrasts with the 34 percent of female serialists who kill family only and 19 percent who killed acquaintances only. At least one stranger was murdered by 32 percent of female serial killers and strangers only were targeted by 24 percent. At least one family member was killed by 50 percent of all female serial killers and at least one acquaintance by 35 percent.65 This basically confirms that female serial killers tend to historically target victims with whom they are intimate or acquainted.

  But the percentage of victims who are strangers to the female serial killer has been increasing since 1975 and strangers are now marginally the most preferred category for female serial killers: a total of 24 to 30 percent of victims are strangers compared to 22 and 25 percent of victims who are family followed by 11 and 15 percent who are acquaintances.66

  In terms of victim-type selection, male serial killers prefer young, unaccompanied females as their first choice for victim in both stranger and acquaintance murders, followed by, in order of preference: male children, female children, travelers, and young unaccompanied males. For female serial killers, historically husbands and their children are first choice as victims, followed by friends, male suitors, in-laws, mothers, patients in hospitals or nursing homes, and tenants.

  TABLE 1. Percentage of Offenders Killing Only One Type of Victim (1800–1995)

  TABLE 2. Percentage of Offenders Killing At Least One Type of Victim (1800–1995)

  Essentially we see that male serial killers tend to victimize young adult women while females tend to kill both female and male adults, with a marginal preference for males and children. The female serial killer also frequently prefers elderly victims in contrast to the male killer.

  MURDER SITE

  While only 10 percent of male serial killers are “place specific”—killing between 16 and 19 percent of serial victims at one location to which they would lure the victims or find them there—32 percent of female serial killers are place specific: killing at their home or a health-care facility, for example. The victims went to female serialists either by being lured or by chance and accounted for 42 percent of all their victims. The average number of victims per place-specific female killer was the highest, between 9 and 13.67

  Local female serial killers, who killed at different locations within the same city or state, accounted for a larger proportion of offenders, 45 percent, but for fewer victims—between 33 and 35 percent of victims. These killers also had a lower average of victims: 6 to 8 victims each. (Local male serial killers represented 55 percent accounting for 45 to 48 percent of victims.)

  Migratory or traveling female serial killers represented a lesser total of 23 percent of offenders, killing between 23 and 24 percent of victims but with a higher average kill rate of 7 to 10 victims each. (Migratory males made up 35 percent of male serial killers and killed 36 to 37 percent of all victims.)

  WEAPON OF CHOICE

  As the most frequent source of prepared meals and drinks, the female serial killer’s overwhelming choice of method of death is poison. At least 45 percent of females used poison sometimes, and 35 percent only poison. Some shooting was used by 20 percent of female serial killers; some bludgeoning by 16 percent; some suffocation by 16 percent; some stabbing by 11 percent; and some drowning by 5 percent. Only suffocation was used by 11 percent; only shooting by 8 percent; and only stabbing by 2 percent. Some combination of the above-described methods was used by 33 percent of female serial killers.

  Most evident was the contrast between the male’s use of force, weapons, ropes, chains, duct tape, and other forms of restraint to incapacitate and render victims helpless compared to the female’s preference for victims who are already helpless or unsuspecting—children, the elderly or sick—or for the use of a surreptitious means of murder such as poison, drugs, or suffocation while the victim is asleep or unconscious.

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS COMPARED TO SINGULAR FEMALE MURDERERS

  There are evident differences between female serial murderers and “ordinary” female singular killers who killed only once.

  A study of all incarcerated female murderers found that on average 77 percent were unemployed when they committed their offense, 65 percent were African-American, and 76 percent had children. Their median age was 27.68 The average female murderer is young, poor, and often kills in a socioeconomic environment where interpersonal violence is more frequent and part of the street culture of respect and intimidation.

  The statistics for female serial killers are substantially different: 95 percent were white, their median age was 30, and only 8 percent were known to be unemployed while 10 percent were professionals, 5 percent were skilled workers, 15 percent were semiskilled, 10 percent unskilled, and 11 percent were other, such as self-employed or business proprietors (and 41 percent unknown).69 Their higher socioeconomic class, where interpersonal violence is less the norm, suggests some kind of psychopathology behind their killing. These frequently middle-class female serial killers contemplated and planned their murders carefully, far from the pressures of the street.

  The apparent motives of female serial killers are substantially different from those of the female singular killer. On average, 74 percent of female serial killers in this study appeared to be at least in part motivated by personal financial gain, both a sad reflection on the aspirations of the middle-class but also a behavioral artifact of those who desire to control their victim after death by seizing their property.70

  COMPARING MALE WITH FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS AS CHILDREN

  The FBI study found that male sexual and serial killers often came from unstable family backgrounds where infant bonding was likely to be disrupted. Only 57 percent of killers had both parents at birth and 47 percent had their father leave before the age of twelve. A mother as the dominant parent was reported in 66 percent of the cases and 44 percent reported having a negative relationship with their mother. A negative relationship with the father or male parental figure was reported by 72 percent of convicted male sex killers.

  Of ten female serial killers for whom childhood data was available in the Keeney-Heide study, 40 percent were adopted by nonrelatives, 40 percent were raised in nontraditional homes composed of some relatives and nonrelatives, and only 20 percent were raised in traditional families by both biological parents until the age of 18.71

  The history of the parents had also a great role to play in the child’s future. A Washington School of Medicine study found that biological children of parents with criminal records are four times as likely to commit criminal acts themselves as adults—even if they have been adopted by law-abiding parents! The FBI study showed that 50 percent of the male offenders came from parents with criminal pasts and 53 percent from families with psychiatric histories.72

  Schurman-Kauflin’s study indicated 71 percent of her female multiple killers came from families with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. However, only 14 percent had parents with a criminal or psychiatric history—but that only represents one out of seven females in the study, so it is impossible to draw reliable percentile conclusions here.

  CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

  Many
male serial killers had truly traumatic childhoods: 42 percent reported physical abuse, 74 percent psychological abuse, while 35 percent reported witnessing sexual violence as children, and 43 percent reported being sexually abused themselves. “Sexually stressful events” were reported by 73 percent of sex killers and 50 percent admitted that their first rape fantasies began between the age of twelve and fourteen.

  A full 100 percent (7/7) of female multiple killers in the Keeney-Heide study reported physical, psychological, and sexual abuse in their childhood and 71 percent in their adolescence. Four women (57 percent) identified nonrelatives as their abusers while another two women (29 percent) identified relatives. The study found data for eight female serial killers, five of whom reported sexual abuse (63 percent), which in the case of four women occurred before the age of 18; four reported physical abuse (50 percent), and two reported witnessing sexual abuse or violence in their family (25 percent).

  THE MACDONALD TRIAD: CRUELTY TO ANIMALS, ARSON, BED-WETTING

  Cruelty to animals, fire setting, and bed-wetting are a behavioral set (called the Macdonald triad) that is most often identified with the childhood histories of serial killers. The appearance of all three behaviors in a child could signal a higher likelihood of a future violent adult. One of the most common childhood attributes of serial killers is the torture and killing of animals. The FBI study indicated that 36 percent of male subjects displayed cruelty to animals in their childhood and 46 percent by the time they were adolescents.

  There appears to be no studies of childhood history of the triad per se in female serialists but the Schurman-Kauflin study reports acts of cruelty to animals in her female subjects. Two women reported hanging cats, one drowned them, two strangled them, and one reported eviscerating a cat with a knife. The remaining woman in the study reported killing her mother’s small terrier with rocks.