Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Doug Clark would prove to be another Ian Brady or Gerald Gallego, men who pick up insecure women and confuse them with a mixture of insults and pretend love until the woman feels she is nothing on her own.

  Carol’s eyesight had now improved enough for her to go back to work as a vocational nurse. Doug was an engineer in a factory but he made it clear that he was an educated man who could do better. He seemed to like Carol’s sons and they initially liked him, so life was looking up. Carol had always enjoyed bondage and humiliation and Doug was eager to try it so they had fun in the bedroom. Doug took her to her sadomasochistic limits and Carol was eager to find out how far she was willing to go.

  She got in all Doug’s favourite foods and fixed him all his favourite meals. Soon she was even bringing his lunch to him each day at the factory. She bought a station wagon for herself because he admired it, but when she found it hard to drive she gave it to him. Carol bought Doug clothes and gifts and praised him lavishly in an attempt to keep him by her side.

  Deep down Doug hated almost everyone, perhaps because his parents had sent him abroad to boarding school and hardly ever visited. His mother had migraines and his father worked long hours and was rigid in his behaviour, but psychiatrists were later convinced that something much darker than this must have happened in Doug’s early home life.

  Now he no longer had to hide his contempt of Carol - after all, she loved him no matter what he did. She left him notes saying that their minds were exactly similar, that no one had made her feel the way he made her feel.

  He started to stay away for days at a time, clearly sleeping with other overweight and unloved women. Carol was so distraught that she drank, which played havoc with her diabetes and her always volatile disposition. She also answered an advert in a singles magazine and started seeing another man through it. Her new partner, who was very rich and very overweight, wanted marriage but soon saw that Carol was emotionally lost. She would sleep with Jack Murray one week if his other girlfriends weren’t available, and sleep with Doug Clark the next.

  Carol told this new man all about the sadness in her life and he urged her to start protecting herself from these exploitative men and to close the joint account with Jack Murray. But Carol didn’t want to hurt Jack’s feelings so kept the joint account open, sure that he wouldn’t abuse the privilege. She simply couldn’t believe that she was a worthwhile companion to be with for her own sake and in the end the new lover walked out of her life.

  Folie à deux

  Reassured that he had her unconditional love, Doug now said that he’d always wondered what it would be like to abduct a girl for sex and commit a murder. Pleased that he was sharing his fantasies with her, Carol asked him for further details. Doug said that he’d like to have a woman fellate him as she died. They started to talk more and more of murder and of keeping love slaves, and Carol convinced herself that this gave them a special bond. Incredibly, she let Doug bring his other girlfriends home and sometimes sleep with them in her bed. Carol felt sad and hurt and worthless as she sat alone in the adjoining room. Doug had said that she was completely unattractive to him and that he preferred other women. But at least he was sharing his murderous daydreams with her…

  In April 1980 he asked her to buy two guns - and Carol did so. He asked her to come out with him to find a prostitute. The desperate Carol did this too. She even paid the prostitute to go down on Doug in the front seat whilst she, Carol, watched quietly from the back. The session was not a success as Doug, whose sexuality had always been fantasy and masturbation-based, was becoming impotent during ordinary sex.

  Doug now knew that he could do anything he wanted and Carol wouldn’t object. He hit her sons - and persuaded her to hit them too. She even used a belt on them as her father had done to her. He also took her car and brought it back damaged - he’d later admit that a death struggle with a sex partner had caused the gearshift to break.

  Doug allegedly injures a prostitute

  He came home with scratches on his face and blood on his clothes and Carol tried to persuade her sons that he’d been in an accident. Later he came back to Carol with blood all over him and told her he’d been in a fight. In truth, he may have stabbed a prostitute who was giving him oral sex in his car, but she had managed to kick the door open and throw herself onto the street. Carol knew that Doug was lying, that he’d started to act out his fantasies, but she pretended to believe his tales.

  She now - early June 1980 - sent her sons away to live permanently with their father, who immediately sent them on to his parents. For years she had seen her role as that of wife and mother, had cooked and cleaned the house and did the laundry, so that her children were well fed and beautifully dressed. Now she had turned her back on that role and found herself a new role as the unshockable accomplice of a potential murderer, a man with whom she was totally obsessed. Carol sold the children’s bunkbeds and planned to move to a house closer to Doug’s work. Her own nursing career had to take second place.

  This plain overweight woman with the increasingly damaged psyche had failed to please her father or her many lovers. But she had another chance, could become the most special person in Doug Clark’s big talking but underachieving life. In the next few weeks he would kill several times and she would either assist him or be shown the dump sites where the corpses lay.

  Doug kills two victims

  A few days after her sons left home, in mid June 1980, Carol found bloody clothes and blood soaked tissues in Doug’s car. Most of us would have run a mile, but Carol apparently threw away the most scarlet-stained garments and laundered the rest, then asked him what had happened. Doug said he’d met two teenage siblings aged fifteen and sixteen and offered them a lift. The girls, Gena and Cynthia, were later described by one witness as looking totally out of place in their surroundings. They had been regularly whipped by their mother so had run away from home.

  One of the girls had gotten into the front with Doug and he’d shot her in the head, after which he shot her half sister. Then he drove both girls to his garage and had oral sex with one and sodomised the other. One girl was dying as he abused her and the other was already dead so he cut off part of her clothing and indulged in necrophiliac sex.

  His semen would be found in one girl’s throat and vagina and in the other girl’s rectum - and he would make a phone call to a girl in their address book saying how much he’d enjoyed raping them. This necrophiliac orgy took place in the second week of June 1980, and was apparently Doug’s finest hour.

  Thereafter he went to a girlfriend’s house and borrowed her camera to photograph his blood smeared dead victims, spending several more hours with them. Then he wrapped up the bodies and dumped them far away from his rented garage.

  Doug told Carol all of this - and she felt flattered that he trusted her with this special knowledge. (Prosecutors would later suspect that Carol witnessed this double murder or at least saw the corpses, but they couldn’t prove it.) Carol would later say that Doug took her out for a drive and showed her approximately where the bodies lay.

  Doug’s previous killing

  He then went on to tell how he’d previously killed another girl at the end of May, in Carol’s car. The victim was a beautiful blonde prostitute called Marnett Comer. That was why the gearstick was broken, as the seventeen-year-old had struggled before he managed to shoot her dead. Doug had then stripped Marnett and sexually abused her corpse.

  He would later tell a friend that if you drove to a secluded area and put a dead girl on your car bonnet with the engine running then you could feel the vibrations going through her corpse as you had sex with it. Doug then slit the dead Marnett’s stomach open so that the insects would invade it faster and help it to decompose.

  Doug had given some of Marnett’s clothes to Theresa, an eleven-year-old neighbour of Carol’s who he was intent on seducing. He kept Marnett’s panties for himself as he still enjoyed wearing woman’s clothes.

  Carol would later tell police that at thi
s stage she thought she’d better co-operate with Doug in case he killed her and her kids. In truth, the children were away at their grandparents and Doug was often at other girlfriends’ houses. She could have phoned the authorities when he was out of the house and he’d have been arrested at his work the next day. The reality is that she wanted to please him no matter what he did - and she saw no especial worthiness in preserving other young female lives.

  Police don’t believe a woman is involved

  She did phone the police at one stage, giving a false name and saying that the murders had been committed by her boyfriend, but they refused to believe that a woman was involved in the deaths and thought she was a crank. They were so dismissive of her on the phone that they alienated her completely. After all, Carol was desperate for attention, a few words of praise.

  They’d later find that bullets had been fired from guns like the ones she’d bought - and would find that a woman exactly matching her description had bought the box that one of the dead girl’s heads was later found in. But they didn’t attempt to track her down, convinced that they were looking for a man.

  In fairness to the police, Carol sounded confusingly edgy, hurt and arrogant on the phone. After all, Doug, the love of her life, was still having sex with other women. She’d given up her children and her colleagues didn’t like her. Plus Jack Murray was alternately ignoring her or just using her to give him head. The desperately needy Carol had always tried to romanticise her relationships, but even she had to admit that her Prince hadn’t arrived.

  As a result she was only sleeping for five hours a night and was sometimes drinking to elevate her mindset. She was also taking tranquillisers in an ever increasing dose.

  Child molestation

  She had good reason to be depressed and guilty and afraid, for she was now joining Doug in molesting her eleven-year-old neighbour Theresa. Carol had originally refused to have sexual relations with the child but Doug had accused her of being jealous of the well built and outwardly mature looking eleven-year-old. He and Carol took the girl into the shower with them and to bed where Doug would ultimately take her virginity.

  Carol would rationalise that the child didn’t seem to mind, conveniently blocking out the fact that lonely children are desperate to please outwardly friendly adults. Carol took photographs of her lover and little Theresa engaged in various sexual acts.

  The couple took the girl to the cinema and to burger restaurants and on shopping expeditions where they paid for everything. On other occasions Doug took Theresa out in the car and asked her to pick him out the wildest prostitutes. He sometimes had sex with them in the front seat whilst Theresa watched from the back.

  Carol often had oral sex with Doug and Theresa, just as her father had had oral sex with her and her eleven-year-old sister. Theresa’s mother saw Carol as a homely woman, a matronly type, and had no idea that her child was being abused.

  Carol kills

  On the 20th June 1980 Carol and Doug were out cruising late when they saw a cute teenager hanging around. They offered her a lift and she hesitated but then accepted. The seventeen-year-old said she was called Cathy and accepted forty dollars, her price for giving Doug oral sex.

  She went down on him with Carol sitting in the back of the car. Carol had her gun ready. Doug had suggested that Carol might like to kill the next victim so that she would be as involved in the murders as he. What happened next is open to dispute - Carol would later claim that Doug changed his mind and shot the girl himself. Doug would say that Carol did it. She would be found guilty of this teenager’s death.

  One of the killers shot Cathy through the head but she continued to struggle. Doug snapped at Carol that she mustn’t freak out, but Carol calmly reminded him that she was a nurse who saw blood and death all the time. She was now as caught up in her role as a killer as she’d been in her role as the all-American mom.

  She got into the front seat of the car and undressed the badly injured teenager. The girl was bleeding and writhing and soon making the death rattle, but the two sociopaths were impervious. Carol simply put Doug’s jacket over Cathy so that no one would see what was going on. They drove to a quiet area and dumped her naked body. Presumably, given that they’d stripped her, they abused her corpse.

  Doug kills another two girls

  That same month - on 23rd June 1980 - Doug went out driving on his own and paid a twenty-year-old prostitute called Exxie Wilson to get into the car with him. He drove to a car park where she started to give him oral sex. At the point of orgasm he shot the mildly retarded young woman through the back of the head. She bit him in her death throes and he was so angry that he threw her out of the car, ripped off her clothes and used a knife to hack off her head. He left the torso where it was and bagged the still warm head.

  He then drove back to the area where he’d picked her up and found her friend Karen Jones who he feared could identify him. He shot her in the head then dumped the body, before taking Exxie’s head back to Carol’s apartment. He had sex with it then put it in her freezer for future fun.

  Carol would later say that she found the head gross - but if that’s true she didn’t say so to her lover. Instead she got out her makeup kit and prettified the thawing head so that Doug could have sex with it again. She then bought a chest for them to hide the head in, wearing gloves when she went to buy the piece of furniture. They dumped the chest and its grisly contents in an alley where it would be found by a horrified passer-by.

  A celibate life

  Carol had hoped that these shared acts would make Doug love her more - but instead he seemed to like her less and would only sleep with her as part of a threesome with eleven-year-old Theresa. He spent more time at other women’s houses leaving Carol to drink alone or phone her sons at their grandparents house. The grandparents kept wanting to send the children home and Carol said this wasn’t a safe place for them just now.

  In desperation, she called her former lover Richard, the writer, and told him all about Doug and his killing spree. Then she had second thoughts and called back saying that the murders were fictitious, that she was writing a short story with that plot and wanted to know if it sounded tenable. Given her drinking, her mood swings and her tranquilliser dependence, Richard was not surprised by the content of this call.

  Another suicide attempt

  More lonely and friendless than she’d ever been, Carol went to her garage and injected and ingested insulin and tranquillisers. It was more of a cry for help than a genuine attempt to end it all for she called her work saying that she planned to take her own life. She also left a ‘goodbye-cruel-world’ note for Doug. She was found semi-conscious and taken to hospital by the paramedics where she had her stomach pumped out. Jack Murray reluctantly drove her home the next morning, bringing a female friend with him to keep Carol at bay.

  Carol’s morality slipped even lower now and she brought eleven-year-old Theresa to Jack and let him fondle her. But she wouldn’t let him have sex with her, saying that this privilege belonged only to Doug.

  Carol kills Jack

  Doug continued to treat Carol like shit and Carol began to go to bits. She also found out that Jack had taken a great deal of money from their joint account and that he had lied about what he spent it on. Her work performance became so poor that no one wanted to share a shift with her. She had always talked nervously nineteen to the dozen and now - on 3rd August 1980 - she went to the country and western club and began to tell Jack that Doug had killed several girls and that she had been involved.

  Jack, in turn, told the group he was with. They urged him to contact the police, but he seemed to have a change of heart and said he was sure that Carol was only joking. In truth, he’d probably realised that if she went to the police she’d tell them that he’d fondled an eleven-year-old girl and asked if he could have intercourse with her.

  Later Carol said she wanted to talk to Jack in his van. He agreed and got inside with her where she allegedly offered to perform his favourit
e sexual act, that of licking his anus. He took off his trousers and lay down on his stomach and she shot him through the head. But he didn’t die immediately so she shot him again.

  Carol then began to stab him through the back and the buttocks. She would later say that she did this to make it look as if Jack had been attacked by a total psycho. It’s more likely that she was venting her rage on him for all of the insults, the stolen money, the lies about leaving his wife and the broken dates.

  She then realised that both the bullets in his head could be traced to her gun - so she cut his head off. It’s likely that she also carried out this act to gain Doug’s approval. After all, he had cut off Exxie’s head. Carol left Jack’s bloody torso in the van, where it swelled up horribly in the heat and became discoloured. It would be several days before it was found.

  Meanwhile she proudly told Doug of what she’d done - but he reminded her that she’d left the shells in the van and that these could be traced to her. He told her that she wasn’t bright enough to get away with murder without him. He now started to sleep with one of Jack’s former girlfriends, pouring salt into Carol’s emotional wounds.

  Carol’s mood deteriorated further, though when she was told of Jack’s death she acted as if she were devastated, screaming and crying and wailing that it couldn’t be true. Deciding that he’d had enough, Doug said that he was leaving her. Carol, who feared being alone, begged him not to go but he was adamant.