FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

The first recorded female serial killer was Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Transylvania. Born in 1560 to a wealthy and renowned family, she was known to be particularly brutal to her servants and tortured them on many different occasions. She began murdering young girls after she discovered their blood revitalized her skin. In 10 years, she killed over 650 young women. At first, she was very careful with the disposal of the bodies. Farmers would find the corpses in their fields completely drained of blood (which might have fueled legends of vampires). But after a while, she knew no one could or would do anything to her, so she supposedly had servants toss the bodies off the top of the castle. When she was finally caught, she was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment and she was bricked into her bedchambers (an opening was left so her guards could feed her). She died at the age of 55.

Since then, there have been several other female serial killers, and close to 44% of them committed their crimes as an accomplice. They are usually partnered with a male, and when these duos are captured, the women usually testify against the men and get significantly shorter sentences. The 1980s in Los Angeles saw the emergence of Carol Bundy and Douglas Clark. This pair killed at least six young women who were either hitchhiking or working as prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard. Clark would pick up his intended victim, then shoot them in the head while they were performing oral sex (I don’t know about you, but this seems like a very risky way to kill somebody. What if the bullet goes through their mouth, or they clench their jaws after they are killed?). He would then have sex with their cadavers. Carol didn’t have much to do with the murders. On one occasion, she sat in the back seat while Clark murdered a victim in the front. She also applied make-up to a severed head so Clark could have sex with it in the shower. When Clark’s interest in her started to wane, she attempted to impress him by murdering a male victim and severing his head.

Carol had tried on at least one occasion to turn her partner into the police. She never identified herself, and it was assumed that she was a crank caller, but she had detailed information about each murder. Unfortunately, the call was accidently disconnected, and Carol never called back. It wasn’t until she told a coworker about the murders that they were arrested. Clark was sentenced to die, while Carol was given two consecutive life terms.

Another famous killer duo was Charlene and Gerald Gallego. This pair was responsible for the murder of 10 victims, mainly teenage girls, between September 1978 and November 1980. They normally kidnapped girls from the Sacramento shopping malls, but they also killed in Nevada and Oregon. They would rape them, and then beat their heads in with a tire iron or shoot them with a .25-caliber pistol.

Charlene came from a stable family background. She was a violin player and had an IQ of 160. Like most teens/young adults, she rebelled against her middle class family and started doing drugs and having sex. She met Gerald while buying drugs at a club. Gerald had a long history of sex offenses, beginning when he was 13 (he raped a 7-year old girl). For whatever reason, Charlene was drawn to his “bad boy” persona. When the pair was finally caught, Gerald was sentenced to death, and Charlene received a 16-year sentence for testifying against him.

Perhaps one of the strangest cases of a man and woman teaming up to kill others was husband and wife Ray and Faye Copeland. Ray was 75 at the time of his trial, and Faye was 69. They had been accused of murdering five drifters, although seven more remained unaccounted for. They would lure the men into their home, send them to pay for cattle at auctions with bad checks, then shoot them in the back of the head when they were no longer needed. They were buried on the couple’s property, and it is said that Faye made a quilt out of their clothes.

At her trial, Faye claimed that she had no idea Ray was committing the murders. Her defense attorneys tried to claim that she suffered from battered wife syndrome. While it is probably true that she was an abused spouse, the jury didn’t buy it and sentenced her to four counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. Apparently, the quilt and a list with all of the drifter’s names written in Faye’s hand were enough to implicate her. Unlike many of the other female accomplices, Faye was sentenced to death by lethal injection. She was never executed, though, because in August of 2002, she suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed, and in September of the same year she was paroled into a nursing home. She died on December 30, 2003. Her husband died in prison of natural causes while awaiting his death sentence.

There is one account of two women teaming up together to commit murder. These women were Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood. Wood was a 450-pound recently divorced supervisor in a nursing home, and Graham was a nurse’s aid. They entered into a lesbian relationship, and Graham thought it would be a sexual thrill to murder six elderly patients. Things didn’t work out exactly as they planned, but Graham did kill five victims while Wood stood guard. When they were caught, Wood received a 20- to 40-year sentence in exchange for her testimony, while Graham was given six life sentences.

Female serial killers who don’t work with a partner are rarer, accounting for “nearly one out of five serial murderers.”1 Male serial killers usually kill for sexual gratification, and they target strangers. A community knows they have a male serial killer on the loose because they find the victims. Women serial killers are harder to identify and catch because they usually target victims in hospitals, retirement homes, boardinghouses, hotels, or within their own families where the killings can go unnoticed or are not recognized as murders. Women serial killers are classified into three categories: Black Widows, Angels of Death, or Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Black Widows are the most common type of female serial killer. They focus on victims with whom they have an established extensive relationship such as their husbands, children, and lovers. “Almost 85 percent of these types of killers use poison to murder their victims,”1 and their motive is material gain. Belle Gunness was probably the most prolific Black Widow serial killer in the U.S. She was born November 11, 1859, in Selbu, Norway. She was 5’8” and over 200 pounds. It is a fact that she killed most of her suitors, boyfriends, and two daughters, and she is suspected of murdering both of her husbands and all of her children.

Her first victim was her husband, Mads Ditlev Anton Sorenson. He died on July 30, 1900, suspiciously the day that his two life insurance policies overlapped. His body was inspected by two doctors--one who believed he had suffered from strychnine poisoning and the family doctor, who believed that he died from heart failure (he had been treating him for an enlarged heart). An autopsy was never performed. The insurance company awarded her the $8,500, and she used it to buy a farm on the outskirts of La Porte, Indiana, where she moved with her three daughters.

Belle then married Peter Gunness on April 1, 1902. One week after the ceremony, his infant daughter died of unknown causes while in Belle’s care. In December of 1902, Peter died in a tragic accident. Apparently, he had been working in the shed when part of a sausage-grinding machine fell from a high shelf and split his head open, killing him instantly. This death netted Belle $3,000. Jennie Olsen, a 14-year old adopted daughter of Belle, supposedly told a classmate that her mother killed her father, but she denied the claim later. Unfortunately for her, it was enough to have her killed and buried on the property (but that wasn’t until later).

Belle was a suspect in the murder of her husband, but the jury found her not guilty. After her hearing, she hired a man named Ray Lamphere to help run the farm, and it was later in this same year that Jennie disappeared. It was also around this time that Belle ran a personal in the Chicago daily newspapers. Basically, she claimed to be searching for a husband with equal means so that they could combine their fortunes. All of the suitors who answered the ad never made it off the farm alive, except for one.

Ray Lamphere was still working for her at this time, and he became incredibly jealous of all the suitors. For some reason, he was deeply in love with Belle, and grew tired of seeing her with other men. He began making scenes, so she fired him in 1908. After she got rid of him, she went to the local courthouse and demanded that they perform a sanity trial on Lamphere. He was found to be in his right mind, so she went back later and claimed that he was a threat to her family. He was arrested for trespassing, but he kept coming back, and she kept driving him away.

Between Lamphere and the brother of a suitor that had been murdered, Belle needed to cover up her crimes. She told a lawyer in La Porte that she feared for her life and her children’s lives because Lamphere had threatened to kill her and burn down her house. She made a will that left everything to her children, then on April 28, 1908, her house was destroyed by a fire. They found four bodies in the cellar, one of which was a woman who could have been Belle, but the head had been cut off, so they couldn’t identify her. The other bodies were those of her children. Of course, the blame was put on Lamphere. He was accused of murder and arson, but on November 26, 1908, he was cleared of murder and sentenced to 20 years for arson.

Shortly after the fire, investigators unearthed the remains of more than 40 men and children that had been buried in shallow graves on the property. On January 14, 1910, the Reverend E.A. Schell came forward with a confession from Lamphere that revealed Belle’s crimes and swore that she was still alive. According to the confession, when a victim arrived, Belle would make them comfortable and cook them a large meal. She would drug his coffee and wait for him to fall into a stupor, then split his head open with a meat cleaver. On some occasions, she would wait for him to go to bed, then chloroform him in his sleep. She would then take the body down to the basement and dissect it. The remains would either be bundled and buried in the hog pen and in the ground around the house, dumped into the hog-scalding vat and covered with quicklime, or merely chopped up and fed to the hogs in the middle of the night. Lamphere also told the priest that the headless woman in the basement was a woman from Chicago who was lured to the farm under the pretense of becoming a housekeeper. Belle drugged the woman, bashed in her head, decapitated her, then threw the head into a swamp.

According to some reports, Belle accumulated over $250,000 from her victims. She was sighted in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles for decades after her supposed murder. To this day, they still do not know the fate of Belle Gunness.

Angels of Death have a tendency to be women who murder patients in their care. The motives behind the killings range from profit to the praise they receive when they revive a patient (usually unknown to others that the emergency was induced by the killer). Some Angels of Death commit the crimes because they receive a sense of power or thrill from taking a life. Others believe that they are missionaries; these individuals think that certain types of patients do not deserve to live or that they are saving their patients from unnecessary pain.

Genene Jones is an Angel of Death. She was a pediatric nurse in several medical clinics around San Antonio, Texas. It is purported that she killed between 11 and 46 infants who were in her care, but she was only sentenced for the murder of Chelsea McClellan and the attempted murder of Rolando Jones. Jones supposedly killed the babies so she could feel like a hero and needed by others.

Jane Toppan could also be considered an Angel of Death. She was born in 1854, and confessed to killing 31 people. She began training as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital in 1885, and during her residency, she used to experiment on her patients with morphine and atropine. Apparently, she altered their prescribed dosages to see what it did to their nervous systems. In 1889, she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital where she claimed several more lives; she was fired the following year. She went back to Cambridge, but was fired from there because she recklessly prescribed opiates. After that, she began a career as a private nurse.

In 1895, she began a poisoning spree by killing her landlords, and in 1899, she murdered her foster sister. By 1901, she had moved in with an elderly man, Alden Davis, and his family to take care of him after the death of his wife, who she killed. It only took a few weeks before she killed him and two of his daughters. She then moved back to her hometown to court her late foster sister’s husband. Toppan poisoned him so she could nurse him back to health, and even poisoned herself to illicit his sympathy. Unfortunately, her ruse didn’t work, and he threw her out of his house.

The surviving members of the Davis family were suspicious, so they ordered toxicology exams on the youngest daughter. They found that she had been poisoned, and the local authorities arrested Toppan on October 26, 1901. In 1902, she confessed to 11 murders, and on June 23, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital where she died.

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is a convoluted syndrome, but most of the killers who are classified here are looking for attention. The syndrome was named after Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Munchausen who was an eighteenth-century German baron and mercenary officer in the Russian Cavalry. When he returned from the Russo-Turkish wars, he entertained his friends by telling them stories of his many exploits. As time went on, the stories grew more and more expansive, and he gained some notoriety after a collection of his tales were published.

In 1877, Charcot observed adults who attempted to gain hospitalization and treatment through self-inflicted wounds or fake medical documents. In 1951, Asher noticed a similar pattern in patients who made up histories of illness. Invariably, these stories led to complex medical investigations, hospitalizations, and some needless surgeries. Today, it is recognized as a psychiatric disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.

Genene Jones would fall into this category, along with some women who have killed their children for the attention they get from their families. They like to be the center of attention. Marybeth Tinning is a good example because eight of her children died between 1972 and 1985. At first, it was believed the children had died from SIDS, but after the eighth child died (her 9-month old daughter), concerned relatives insisted on an autopsy. The findings were that the child had been suffocated, and Tinning confessed to the murder of the infant and two other children, but claimed she did not kill the others. She also claimed to be poisoning her husband. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in 1987.

Most female serial killers fit nicely into one of the above categories, but there always has to be one that defies all the rules. That one is Aileen Wuornos, who targeted victims she picked up while prostituting. Wuornos was 35 years old and killed six men in Florida. She robbed her dead victims, but her motive for killing was not for money; her murders stemmed from revenge or rage that was induced from a life-time of real and perceived abuse. During her trial, she claimed her murders were committed in self-defense, which could have been true of her first victim who was a convicted rapist, but the other five had no records of sexual assault. She was executed on October 9, 2002.

Wuornos’s family life is comparable to many male serial killer’s lives. She was born February 26, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan. Her mother was 16 years old and divorced from Aileen’s father, who was a child molester who spent most of his life in and out of prison. When Aileen was born, he was imprisoned for the rape and murder of a 7-year old girl (it might not have been a bad thing that she never knew him), and he hung himself in his cell. In 1960, Aileen and her older brother were abandoned by their mother, who left them with their maternal grandparents.

Wuornos engaged in sexual acts with multiple partners (including her brother) from a young age, and she gave birth to a son at the age of 13. She claimed that she had been raped by an unknown man, and her son was given up for adoption. Her grandmother died of liver failure on July 7, 1971, and at age 15, Aileen was rendered homeless by her grandfather, so she entered into prostitution. Aileen had a long list of arrests. Her first murder occurred on November 30, 1989, and she was apprehended on January 9, 1991.

During her trial, she “became a cause for some factions of the feminist movement, who believed that her crimes were a response to systemic abuse at the hands of men.”1 There is no denying that abuse had taken place, but whether it was by the men in her life or by her, that is a different story. Many of her arrests were due to confrontations at bars where, in one incident, she was accused of throwing a cue ball at a bar tender’s head. Her husband (70-year old Lewis Gratz Fell) took out a restraining order against her after she hit him with his own cane.

Most of her victims were found in wooded areas, and they had been shot in the back of the head. Like a male serial killer, Aileen is often presented as a sexual killer, mainly because the murders took place while she was working as a prostitute. Although, it is debatable whether or not the killings gave her sexual gratification.

The vast majority of female serial killers are white with a median age of 30. They are usually employed and come from a higher socioeconomic class. Like their male counterparts, they generally contemplate and plan their murders carefully. Unlike male serial killers, women’s killing careers last for about 8 years, which is twice as long as a male serial killer. Although the occurrence of female serial killers is rare, they are not any less deadly than men, and the nature of their crimes makes it difficult to catch them. It is possible that there may be more out there that have gone undetected.