Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (31 page)

Some crime writers erroneously classified Aileen Wuornos as a
Sexual
Predator
but her motivation wasn’t sexual. Far from it - the last thing a worn out highway prostitute wants is yet more sex. In most of the killings, Wuornos shot her victims before any sexual activity took place, as evidenced by the unused condoms left at the crime scenes. She wanted their money and she wanted the pleasure of watching them die. Sex just didn’t enter into the equation - even her initially lustful relationship with her lover Tyria had subsided into a sisterly one.

I cannot think of any female sexual predators - although killers like Rose West and Carol Bundy undressed and molested their victims, the sex was a secondary stimulus. The primary motive was dominance and power.

So Sexual Predators are rare amongst females - as opposed to
Thrill
Killers,
usually half of a team, who have been portrayed extensively in this book. Myra Hindley, Judith Neelley, Rose West, Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka and their male partners all fit into this category. They killed partly for kicks, to enliven their otherwise dull world and bolster their flagging relationships.

Unexplained murders by women are those in which a clear motive hasn’t been found but where there is no question of the killer’s sanity. As most students of human behaviour know, there will always be a reason for the crime though it may be very obscure to someone who isn’t following the same internal script. None of the murders in this book are Unexplained - though the reasons that some of the women committed the murders may seem ludicrous to readers who have had less traumatic lives.

Finally, the
Unsolved
category pertains to crimes which are widely believed to have been caused by a female or females - perhaps because the victims wouldn’t have opened their doors to a male caller. Antonio Mendoza suggests in
Killers
On
The
Loose
that some unsolved deaths may be the result of female killers. It is easier for a woman to get away with murder as our society sees her as loving and unthreatening.

15 Everybody wants to rule the world

Fabrications of femininity

Society tends to see the female killer as totally at the mercy of her emotions, a mentally-frail being who acts on impulse to please a bullying lover. But none of the women in this book acted on impulse. Rather, they carefully planned their crimes so that they could spend as long as possible with their terrified victims and avoid being traced.

Karla Homolka went round her pretty pink house hiding the phones so that her captives couldn’t contact anyone. Catherine Birnie, conversely, made her victims phone their friends - or write to their parents - and say they were fine so that the police wouldn’t search for them. Rose West terrified her children so that they wouldn’t tell of their physical and sexual abuse at her hands. She pretended to both civilians and police that she’d never met one of her missing lodgers and made up a story about another having emigrated, whereas in truth their remains were buried beneath her house.

Myra Hindley drove to a relative’s home and ensured that her elderly gran remained there. This was vital as she and Ian Brady were holding a ten-year-old girl hostage at her gran’s house. She bought a wig and a
headscarf so that she could talk to children and remain disguised.

Charlene Gallego drove for miles to abduct girls from county fairs and rejected one potential victim when she found that the girl’s uncle was nearby and was a security guard. Aileen Wuornos hitched the
highways
so that she could kill her punters at lonely
woodside
spots. These weren’t hysterical or spontaneous acts.

Jeanne Weber waited until her relatives were out of the way before she assaulted their children - and when a relative returned suddenly, Jeanne pretended she was trying to revive the half-strangled child.

Judith Neelley drove her victims to quiet woods to kill them and leave their bodies. She drove Lisa to a remote canyon and tortured her there before throwing her into a ravine.

Genene Jones also planned her attacks on babies carefully, turning up at the pharmacy with prescriptions for strong drugs and pretending they were for her workplace. She took little Chelsea from her mother’s arms and said she’d take her to the play area, but instead used the time alone with the child to make her violently ill.

Carol Bundy would go out driving with her partner Doug Clark in her old car, looking for hitchhikers and prostitutes to rape and murder - in other words, victims that might not be reported missing. She laundered
bloody clothes and wore gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and even decapitated a man she’d shot, taking the head away so that her bullets wouldn’t be found.

This careful planning by female serial killers isn’t a modern trend. When the nineteenth century
housekeeper
Anna Zwanziger was dismissed by one
employer
, she carefully plotted her revenge, putting white poison in the sugar and salt canisters which she knew would be used by everyone. And she gave a little baby a poisoned sweet or biscuit as she left the house for good.

Nurses like Genene Jones are the last people that hospital personnel suspect when the death toll heightens. Similarly, kindly babysitters such as Jeanne Weber and concerned housekeepers such as Anna Zwanziger aren’t high on the list of suspects when the very young or the very old suddenly expire. Society’s romanticised view of motherhood means that women like Martha Ann Johnson can get away with murder multiple times.

But even when a woman operates in tandem with a man her very presence tends to throw law enforcement off the scent. After all, the traditional view of the serial killer is that he’s a lone operator who prowls the
highways. A man with a girlfriend or wife and children looks respectable, so he just doesn’t fit the bill.

Police had visited Paul Barnardo when they were investigating the Scarborough rapes. He was guilty - but the picture of him and his beautiful blonde wife Karla Homolka initially convinced detectives that he wasn’t their rapist. And when two young women were abducted and murdered, Karla’s parents talked to her about it, never thinking for a moment that she was to blame.

One of Karla’s other victims was a teenager identified as Jane by the courts who Karla drugged and sexually assaulted. Paul also raped and sodomised the unconscious teenager. Jane’s mum was suspicious of Paul’s motivation - but Karla’s presence in the house initially helped allay her fears.

Later Jane’s mother’s anxieties resurfaced - just what did this twenty-something couple want with her fifteen year old daughter? She suggested to Jane that her visits weren’t a good idea - but the young girl loved Karla and didn’t connect her subsequent illness with her friend. After all, why would a teenager suspect a young married woman of doing her sexual harm?

Leslie Mahaffy - soon to be strangled or suffocated in Karla’s home - was initially relieved to hear that the second person she was expected to satisfy sexually was a female. She would soon learn that Karla was as compassionless as any psychotic male…

Rose West, usually weighed down by shopping, was also an unlikely murderess on the surface - which is why no one searched her and her husband Fred’s home for years whilst lodgers, babysitters and even her own children went missing. And blonde twenty-three-year old Myra Hindley talked to her neighbours about the young people who were disappearing from the Manchester streets and no one suspected she was involved.

Police also looked for a male killer when men began to turn up dead in wooded areas around Florida and there were several deaths before they issued Aileen Wuornos description. Hospitals spent a great deal of time checking their equipment and medical supplies when babies fell ill rather than suspect the hardworking nurse Genene Jones.

Many such killers have, like Genene, adopted the caring and benevolent persona of a nurse. Others are outwardly good mothers or devoted housekeepers. We tend to have a healthy respect for men, to spend time getting to know them before trusting them. But we are mainly brought up to believe and trust women, to see them as at best loving and at worse benign. This allows the female serial killer to continue on her homicidal path long after a male would be taken in for questioning. (The male serial killer is statistically caught after four years, his female equivalent after eight.)

Martha Ann Johnson took child after child to the
emergency room but the deaths were regarded as natural, despite the fact that the children were outside the normal age range for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Even when her eleven-year-old daughter Jennyann told social workers that she feared for her life, little was done - and Jennyann became the last victim to die.

Jeanne Weber was alone with her own children and those of her relatives when they suddenly died - yet no one suspected her and even when she was brought to court she was originally found not guilty. And when one of Judith Neelley’s victims, John Hancock, staggered into a hospital emergency room and said that a strange woman had shot him, the medics initially thought he was making it up. They had seen their share of violent or self defending wives wounding their husbands and they’d seen abused daughters wounding their fathers, but the notion of a woman shooting a male stranger just for thrills didn’t strike a chord.

The police, too, initially suspected that John Hancock had killed his girlfriend Janice then deliberately injured himself to make his story of a female killer look more believable.

Even when she’s convicted of premeditated murders the female serial killer is often given a more lenient
sentence than her male cohort; Myra Hindley, Britain’s longest serving prisoner being one of the rare exceptions.

Paul Barnardo got life - whilst his partner Karla who provided the drugs and anaesthetic to knock the girls out, and who was adamant that Paul couldn’t let them go, was sentenced to twelve years. Gerald Gallego got the death penalty but Charlene Gallego served almost seventeen years and is now free, despite the fact that she was the one who lured the female victims into her van. They responded to the tiny blonde girl with the high IQ and the cute voice, whereas they would have been very suspicious of her burly ill-educated spouse.

The overweight and under educated Alvin Neelley was sentenced to life despite the fact that law personnel thought he was the most unlikely serial killer they’d ever seen - but tall and strong Judith, who originally got the death penalty, later had it commuted to life imprisonment. Some people fear she will be paroled, especially as she is fighting to get her children back.

Doug Clark got the death penalty but his partner Carol Bundy, who talked some of the prostitutes into their car and who killed at least two out of the known six victims, was given a life sentence that can potentially lead to parole.

If a man killed his four children one at a time over several years he would ultimately get the death penalty or a life sentence. Yet Martha Ann Johnson had her
death sentence quashed and may ultimately be paroled.

Many of the team killing cases are considered to be results of what was once called
folie
a
deux
but is now known as
shared
paranoia.
It tends to occur when the most charismatic partner, who ironically is also the most disturbed, persuades the other that the outside world is in some way threatening or lacking and that this gives them carte blanche to live by their own cruel script.

Catherine Wood found that several of her lesbian colleagues were attracted to her and that she got
promoted
at work despite breaking various rules there. She started to believe that she could do anything and get away with it - and persuaded her lover Gwen Graham that they wouldn’t get caught if they killed.

Karla and Paul were physically beautiful and
impeccably
groomed young people. They got away with the unintentional murder of Karla’s sister during a drugged rape - and went on, feeling invincible, to abduct and kill two more girls and to drug and rape more.

Similarly, Rose West got away with killing her stepchild - and Fred West got away with killing his former wife and a girlfriend. Together they abused and
killed at least ten women and buried most of them beneath their feet.

Judith was simply an angry and unloved young girl who despised her prostitute mother - until she met Alvin Neelley who already had a prison record. Together they held people at gunpoint and committed various theft and fraud crimes before abducting young girls for Alvin to rape and for Judith to terrorise and ultimately kill. Apart they were misfits, but together they felt special and invincible.

Carol Bundy was a lonely and unstable woman lurching from one relationship to the next until she met Doug Clark and became enthralled by his talk of capturing sex slaves that they could eventually murder. She bought them both guns at his behest and put makeup on a prostitute’s decapitated head so that the necrophile Doug could have sexual fun with it.

Alone, these women were bad news. Catherine Wood completely failed to nurture her young daughter. Gwen Graham hit her lovers during drunken
arguments
. Karla Homolka was so shallow and lacking in empathy that she would have spent her entire life hurting those she came into contact with. Rose West would have been a brutal single parent - indeed, she terrorised her children when Fred, her husband, was away in jail.

Judith Neelley threatened other girls who were in care with her and may well have ended up being jailed for crimes against property if she’d remained on her
own. Charlene Gallego had abused drink and drugs and had two failed marriages behind her by the time she was twenty. As a teenager Catherine Birnie had already committed various burglaries.

However it’s doubtful that they would have
killed
if they had remained on their own. They were filled with anger and hostility, but would probably have just taken it out on their children and lovers. It took the arrival of an equally enraged partner to act as a catalyst.

The exception, again, is Myra Hindley who showed no violence towards children prior to meeting Ian Brady - indeed she was a caring and respected
babysitter
. She also loved animals and continued to pay for her remaining dog’s keep after she was sent to jail. She wasn’t even promiscuous in the way that the other killers in this book were - indeed, she wouldn’t bathe or undress in front of her less bashful younger sister, Maureen. Most of the women profiled experimented by having consensual sex with same-sex partners, one of the signs of a dominant personality, but Myra didn’t do this prior to imprisonment.