The female serial killer often remains unobserved, hidden in the background and obscured by her male counterpart. Her actions are rare and uncommon, but never fail. She acts in a more subtle and precise way and she is lethal and merciless. The majority of her heinous crimes have not been apprehended. The concept of the female serial killer herself still lies within the sphere of ambiguity.It is time, however, to apprehend this quiet serial killer and bring her crimes to the forefront of our attention.

Before entering any detailed discussion of the female serial killer, it is essential to identify what distinguishes a serial murderer from any other murderer. A murderer is usually defined as serial based upon two factors: one, the number of murders that take place; and two, the time framework within which the perpetrator operates and hence the period that elapses between each killing. The number of murders committed may range between the minimum of two to as many as four and more. Although the time period within which the killer is acting may be the subject of controversy, criminologists and researchers usually agree on an interval of thirty days as adequate to define a number of murders as being serial in nature and hence the perpetrator as a serial killer.Thus, according to Kelleher, one common definition of serial murderer is the person that engages in “the act of murdering three or more individuals in a period of thirty days or more”(Kelleher, 4).

Although this definition is sufficient in identifying the serial murderer, it does not distinguish between male and female perpetrators.There is however, a fine line separating the serial killers of opposite sexes. For instance, the average period of active killing for the females is eight years whereas for the males it is only four. Female serial killers rarely torture their victims or commit any atrocities on their victims’ bodies. They prefer more subtle ways of killing using weapons that are difficult to discern such as poison, lethal injections and induced accidents. The crimes carried out by female serial killers further exhibit a different victim typology from the male serial murders. The latter, usually acting as sexual predators, tend to target adult female victims. The former on the other hand, rarely choose their prey based on sex. Moreover, the female serial killer usually attacks victims that are familiar to her, such as children, relatives and spouses. In the rare situation when she does turn against a stranger, it is usually one who can be dominated easily, such as an elderly person under her care or a child. The age at which a female serial killer claims her first victim ranges from the age of fourteen to the age of sixty-four. The average female serial murderer begins killing after the age of twenty-five. The female serial killer is more complex than the male and is oftentimes more difficult to apprehend. Since the initial definition of the serial killer is inadequate in satisfactorily explaining this quiet female killer, classifying her becomes a necessity in fully apprehending both her and the nature of her crimes.

According to Robert K. Ressler, both male and female serial killers may be classified in one of two groupings: the ‘organized’ and the ‘disorganized’. The organized killer usually exhibits qualities of high intelligence and sociability, a stable employment history, normal sexual functioning and an outstanding ability of controlling her emotions during the act of murder. On the contrary, the disorganized killer has average intelligence, underdeveloped social skills, a turbulent employment past and sexual dysfunction. Kelleher argues that although this evaluation might be helpful, it sheds little light towards understanding the female serial killer. As it has already been established, the female and male serial killer have little in common, thus making any classification that applies to both sexes rather futile. Thus, the female murderer should be better apprehended within the sphere of her own crime typology. According to Kelleher’s classification, female serial killers may fall in any one of the following categories: Black Widow; Angel of Death; sexual predator; revenge; profit; team killer; question of sanity; or unexplained and unsolved.

 

BLACK WIDOWS
Black Widows are perhaps the most lethal female serial killers and the ones who are identified as the most organized, successful and prevalent. A Black Widow is defined as a woman who systematically murders a number of spouses, family members, children, or individuals outside the family with whom she has established a close relationship. She commonly begins her deadly career in her late twenties and may be active for a whole decade before giving rise to any suspicions. Her crimes are revealed only after the increasing number of deaths around her may no longer be discarded as a coincidence.The victims of the Black Widow usually number between six and ten. Their ages and sex is generally unimportant. Her methodology ranges between poison, suffocation, strangulation and shooting.Poison is the most favored of her methods, used 87% of the times.

The Black Widow kills for two motives. The first of these is profit. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Black Widows are lured into murder by the proceeds of life insurance or the assets of the victim. Usually both the life insurance money and other assets will eventually fall into the possession of the perpetrator after the victim’s death. In fact, it is not uncommon for these women to insure the victims themselves shortly before they execute a crime, thus giving substantial proof of how calculating, methodical and devious a female serial killer can be.

Belle Gunness is probably one of the earliest and most notorious Black Widows killing for profit.Gunnes was born in 1859 in Norway as Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset. At the age of twenty-one, already showing signs of her ambitions, she emigrated to the United States and changed her name to Bella. In 1884 she met Mads Sorenson who was also a Norwegian immigrant. They married a year later and Gunnes settled into a decade of an otherwise uneventful life until her love for money - and the lack of it - drove her to extremes in 1896. In that year she and her husband opened a confectionery shop, which was mysteriously destroyed by a fire caused by a kerosene lamp - a lamp that was inexplicably not found. During the same period, another tragedy would hit the Sorenson family, as their oldest child Caroline suddenly died of what medical personnel believed to be acute colitis.Insurance profits from both incidents proved sufficient to alleviate the pain of the grieving mother, who used the money to buy a new house. Surprisingly enough, the new house burned too in 1898, a misfortune that was soon followed by the death of another child, Alex. Gunnes received yet another insurance settlement and this time, too, she used the money to buy a new house. In 1900 Mads Sorenson suddenly died of undiagnosed ailment that exhibited the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. This unexplained death also passed unobserved, and Gunnes used the money from the insurance to buy a farm for her and her three surviving children. Two years later, in 1902, Gunnes married another Norwegian immigrant named Peter Gunnes. The marriage was short lived and in 1903 Gunnes would be a widow again; Peter died when a sausage grinder happened to fall from a shelf and strike him on the head as he was passing underneath. Shortly after this tragic event, Gunnes begun to hire local laborers to help her with the farm. Unfortunately, most of them mysteriously disappeared. In 1906, Gunnes stepdaughter, Jennie Olsen also disappeared. She was allegedly sent to a school in California. In 1908 the Gunnes’ farmhouse was completely destroyed by a fire of – again - unexplained origin. Investigators searching the house for signs of arson found the bodies of three children and an adult female in the basement. Oddly enough, the woman’s body was decapitated and investigators could not locate the head. The remains of other mutilated bodies were found throughout the farm. Ray Lamphere, who had worked in the Gunnes’ farm, was arrested and charged with arson and murder. Even though the exact number of victims was never identified, it is believed to have numbered anywhere between sixteen and twenty-eight. Lamphere argued that Gunnes was the one who had set the fire and that she was responsible for as many as forty-nine murders. According to his testimony, Gunnes was alive and that he himself had helped her escape. He further argued that the decapitated body belonged to an unfortunate woman who had been lured to the farm with money.To this day we do not know whether Gunnes died in the fire or whether she had managed to commit the perfect crime and elude apprehension.

Even though the Black Widow murdering for profit might appear to be unparalleled by any other serial killer, the second type of Black Widow that murders out of jealousy and rejection is equally merciless - as the example of Vera Renczi shows. Vera Renczi was born in 1903 in Hungary. She suffered from a pathological fear of rejection that eventually led her to a series of murders that lasted throughout her adult life. She murdered thirty-five individuals including her husbands, lovers and son. By the age of sixteen, she had run away with several local men, considerably her senior. Like all her relationships, her marriage to a local businessman did not last more than a brief period of time. This was generally because of her pathological jealousy found expression in frequent and violent fits of anger against her mates, and because of her husband’s mysterious disappearance. Shortly afterwards, she remarried but her new husband too disappeared, after Renczi had convinced herself of his infidelity. Throughout the following years, Renczi acquired a number of lovers - thirty-two to be exact - all of whom mysteriously disappeared from her life. The vicious Black Widow became so obsessed that she did not hesitate to take the life of her own son once he had discovered the truth about her vanishing lovers and husbands. The fact that her own son had dared to blackmail her marked the ultimate form of treachery in Renczi’s eyes. After murdering thirty-five victims, Renczi was finally discovered when the wife of one of her lovers became suspicious and called the police when her husband failed to return home. Renczi admitted to lifelong deadly practices and led the police to the basement of her home where the remains of thirty-five men were preserved in lavish zinc coffins. Each one of the victims was poisoned by lethal doses of arsenic.

ANGELS OF DEATH
The second of Kelleher’s classifications is that of Angels of Death. These are the lethal caretakers who match, by all standards, the Black Widows in their viciousness. These are the women from whom the elderly seek support, and to whom parents trust their children. Because these women usually act in places where death is a common occurrence, such as hospitals, they not only pass unobserved but it is also oftentimes very hard to apprehend the exact number of victims. One thing, however, is certain: the Angel of Death targets victims who are unable to protect or defend themselves, and who are, in her own eyes, already doomed to die. The Angel of Death, like the Black Widow, uses a weapon that is subtle and hard to detect. When the victim is an adult, she resolves to use lethal injections of chemicals such as potassium. When the victims are young children, she resorts to suffocation. She usually starts in her twenties making bold decisions over the issue of who is to live and who is to die, and might continue this habit over a substantial period of her life. The typical Angel of Death exhibits two characteristics that usually make her apprehension easier. The first is that she is compulsive in her need to kill, and she kills repetitively within her own area of responsibility. The second is that she is often induced to talk about her crimes in an attempt to portray them as acts of mercy and in an attempt to show herself as a heroine. In addition, some victims may survive from her deadly care and thereby assist the police in their investigation. The Angels of Death are motivated by their eagerness to appear as heroines, caring benefactors, and women who should be highly regarded by their co-workers, supervisors and even their own victims’ relatives.

Even though numerous Angels of Death are responsible for taking the lives of hundreds of innocent children and helpless elderly throughout the last quarter of the century, very few of them have been actually apprehended.

One of the most infamous murderesses is Genene Jones, an American vocational nurse born in 1951. She was active from the age of twenty-seven to thirty-one. She was responsible for the death of at least eleven children, all of who had been injected with lethal chemicals. It is suspected that she might have been involved in the deaths of as many as forty-six children. Having changed jobs from the Bexar County Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, to the Kerr County clinic and then to the Sip Peterson Hospital, she allowed suspicions to rise as the numbers of infant deaths in each hospital alarmingly increased while she worked there. Unfortunately, changing location also provided her with more time to carry out the actions that satisfied her perverted need for power, control and recognition. She was finally brought before justice in 1984. She received a sentence of ninety-nine years in prison. To this day, the exact number of her victims remains unknown.

SEXUAL PREDATORS
Although the female serial killers who fall within the grouping of either the Black Widow or the Angels of Death are many, this is not the case with the female serial killers who fall within the grouping of sexual predators. In fact, this is the most rare crime that is committed by a woman. It is so rare, indeed, that the American criminal history has only one reported female sexual predator who was acting alone: Aileen Wuornos.

Aileen Carol Wuornos was born in 1956 in Michigan. Her unhappy lifelong experiences undoubtedly played a determinant role in this woman’s deadly career and must therefore be carefully examined. Her childhood was a miserable one, marked by a psychopathic child-molester father and an irresponsible teenaged mother, both of whom abandoned Wuornos and her older brother Keith in the care of their maternal grandparents. Wuornoswas physically abused by her alcoholic grandfather and at the age of fourteen she became pregnant after being raped. Her grandparents refused to accept her story and referred to her as a ‘whore’. In 1971, Wuornos gave birth to a son, whom she immediately gave up for adoption. In the same year her grandmother died and her grandfather threatened to kill Wuornos and her brother if they did not leave the house. Wuornos began her life of crime and prostitution at the age of fifteen. By the age of eighteen, Wuornos had been raped at least five times. At the age of twenty Wuornos moved to Florida where she continued to earn money as a prostitute, which she supplemented with robberies and other crimes. She also married a seventy-year-old man. The marriage was short lived, and two years after the divorce Wuornos attempted to commit suicide by shooting herself in her stomach. The turning point of Wuornos life came in 1986, when she met Tyria Moore, with whom she began a homosexual relationship. Three years after that, at the age of thirty-three, Wuornos began her lethal career. Between 1989 and 1990, Wuornos took the life of at least seven men who had been involved with her for paid sex. Each victim was shot multiple times. Wuornos claimed that she killed those men in self-defense, but the fact that she robbed her victims and hid their bodies in the woods made her story less credible. Nevertheless, it has been reported that her first victim was a known rapist and it is probable that she killed him in an attempt to defend herself. Given her lifelong physical and sexual abuse by men it is not surprising that she turned against those men even when they did not pose a real threat to her. When Wuornos was arrested in 1991, she explained her crimes to the police:

I shot them because to me it was like a self-defending thing. Because I felt if hadn’t shoot them and didn’t kill them, first of all… I mean I had to kill them…or it’s like retaliation too (Kelleher, 82).

Throughout 1992 Wuornos went through a series of trials, and although she remained firm in her belief that she was acting in self -defense, she was sentenced to death. Her infamy as the USA’s first sexual female serial killer will live long after her execution.

REVENGE SERIAL KILLERS
Unlike the Black Widows, the Angels of Death and the sexual predators, Kelleher’s fourth category of female serial killers – namely those who kill with the ultimate aim of getting even – is not as easy to grasp. Whereas it is not hard to understand why an embittered, vengeful female seeking revenge might engage in a single act of murder, it is exceptionally difficult to understand why she would engage in a series of murders. Traditionally, crimes that are motivated by extreme hatred are crimes that are targeted against a particular individual or individuals, and are thus rarely serial in nature. They also take place within a limited framework of time, when the feelings involved are strong enough to motivate a murder. They are also crimes of passion and are hence both blatant and uncalculated in their execution. In the case of the serial murders, however, feelings of anger remain highly personalized even when the victims vary. That is especially so because the perpetrator holds her victims indirectly responsible for whatever may cause her bitterness and attacks them as a symbolic act of retribution. As a result there is an overwhelming consistency among the revenge serial killer’s victims, which are often tragically her own children, murdered in a perverted attempt to hurt her spouse.According to Gutlmacher, revenge serial killers use indirect aggression and attack a person “that is held dear by the person who is the real object of the attack” (Guttlemacher, ). Like the Black Widow, she prefers suffocation or poison, but her crimes are not carried out with the persistency and precision of the Black Widow. That can be attributed to the fact that the revenge serial killer is a victim of her feelings, acting on the spur of the moment, which could explain why she shows great remorse after she is apprehended.
Martha Ann Johnson was born in 1955, in Georgia. By the age of twenty-five she had given birth to four children by three different husbands. Like her first two marriages, her third one, to Earl Bowen, was dysfunctional and stormy. Her husband would often leave the house for days before returning. Their fierce arguments besides being upsetting to Bowen, would prove to be lethal to the children. On September 25th, 1977, after yet another argument, Johnson brought her two-year-old son to the hospital, claiming that she was unable to wake him up in the morning. By the time she got there however, the boy was already dead, his death attributed to Sudden Death Infant Syndrome. The child’s death ironically brought the couple back together, but only for a brief period of time. Soon the arguments were resumed, and in 1980 another of her children was sacrificed in Johnson’s attempt to both seek revenge and to lure her husband back to her.In 1981, Johnson would carry out yet another murder. This merciless mother had succeeded in eluding apprehension since her victims were young and their death could be easily attributed to Sudden Death Infant Syndrome. When, however, in 1982, she turned her viciousness against her eleven-year-old son, already-established suspicions flourished. An autopsy was carried out on the body of the last victim and it was discovered that the child had died from asphyxia. Despite the findings, no inquest was held and it was in 1988 that the case was brought to the forefront again, after a reporter launched an investigation.In 1989, Johnson was arrested for murder. She confessed to killing the first two children by rolling her 250-pound weight on them while they slept. She remained firm on her argument of having nothing to do with the murder of the last two children. She admitted however, that she had killed her children in order to punish her husband for leaving her after each argument. In 1990, Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to death.

MURDER FOR PROFIT
Because the Black Widow too murders for profit, it is essential to posit some characteristic blueprints which separate her from Kelleher’s fifth category of female serial killer – the serial killer who kills for profit. The first characteristic is that they must clearly kill for profit; the second is that they must target at victims outside their family.According to Kelleher, the best definition that applies to these female serial killers is “a woman who systematically murders individuals in the course of other criminal activities, or for profit, but who is not a member of a team of killers”(Kelleher, 93). She is also very well organized, very hard to discern, and may be active for a number of years before she is actually apprehended. The average number of her victims may be as high as thirty, she might be active for ten to fifteen years, and she begins her lethal career in her mid-twenties. Like the Black Widow, she prefers poison.Like the Angels of Death she has a highly dispassionate approach to murder.Like the sexual predators she is fearsome and vicious, and like the revenge serial killer, she is greatly motivated. But she is unique in that she kills for somebody else, usually abused wives that pay her to free them from their torturing husbands.

The first known case of a female serial killer who had turned murder into a profitable business was that of a Russian, the notorious Madame Popova. Little detail is known about her crimes, except that she operated in Czarist Russia in the turn of the century, between 1880 and 1909. According to her own confession, Popova was responsible for the murder of three-hundred men, whose spouses had paid a modest fee in order to liberate themselves from their brutality. Popova sent those men to death by using poison. Her business was a successful one for nearly thirty years, until one of her clients in an attack of remorse, confessed to the police. Popova was arrested and admitted to having poisoned more than three hundred men.

TEAM SERIAL KILLERS
All of the female serial killers that have been discussed so far are distinguished by the fact that they operate under their own initiatives and primarily carry out their deadly activities on their own. It is estimated, however, that only one third of female serial killers act alone. The remaining two thirds commit homicides within the context of a team’s criminal activities.There are three different types of serial killing teams: the female-male, the female-female, and the family teams.Overall, female serial killers who are part of a team have an average age of twenty to twenty-five at the time of their first murder, have an average number of victims between nine and fifteen and have an averageactive period of one to two years.

The male-female teams are the most common, and are usually active for a substantial period of time, since the two members are commonly lovers and therefore tend to agree and co-operate more. Furthermore, the female subjects herself under the direction of the male who becomes the dominant character in the male-female serial killing team. The homicides committed by the couple are oftentimes well organized in nature and the female involved in this range of murders is considerably younger than any of her female serial killer counterparts, rarely averaging more than twenty at the time of her first murder.

Female - male serial killing teams have been associated with the names of Bonnie and Clyde, the most notorious couple on the run. Even though not as lethal as some contemporary couples, Bonnie and Clyde still remain the depression era duo that shook the world. Bonnie Parker was born in 1910 in Texas, in the family of a hard working laborer. Bonnie had always been a rebellious youth, and tended to get bored easily and – as her later life would show - to seek excitement in unconventional ways. At the age of sixteen she got married, but was divorced a year later. Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born in the family of a poor tenant farmer from Texas in 1906.He was himself too easily bored and knew that life could offer more.Bonnie and Clyde were meant for each other, and in 1927 they discovered that themselves. Clyde was already involved in criminal activities when they started dating and was soon in prison. Bonnie helped him escape by a smuggling a gun to him; that was the offset of her criminal career. Determined to follow her beloved wherever he went, the couple began a strenuous life, marked by “jumping in and out of stifling autos, hiding in clammy backwoods, and maybe dodging the heat of a hundred roadblocks” till the end of the road (Geringer, ‘Bonnie Participates’ 3). What started to be an adventure ended up being an endless chase, as Clyde and his accomplice Ray Hamilton shot two policemen. Already wanted for the murder of an old man, Clyde and Hamilton became alarmed at the sight of the two policemen turned their guns at them. One of their victims died and the other one was severely injured.Carrying the responsibility for the murder of a policeman, Bonnie and Clyde knew that there was no turning back. That was only the beginning: a series of murders would follow and Bonnie and Clyde would become front-page material.However, they never stayed in a town long enough to be apprehended. It was only when they had decided to stop their activities for a while and celebrate the reunification of Clyde and his brother Buck Burrow, who had just been released from prison, that the couple risked being caught. They managed to escape, but they were already worn out by the hectic life they were leading. Yet the police were on their track and there was barely time to breathe. By some twisted turn of luck, the couple was slowed down by a car accident, which severely burned and damaged Bonnie’s thigh.It was on the night of July 18th 1933, that Bonnie and Clyde, Clyde’s brother Buck and sister-in-law Blance and another young accomplice, arrived at the Red Crown camp, outside Platte City.Despite their cautiousness, the night clerk recognized them, the police arrived shortly afterwards. In the confrontation that followed, Clyde’s brother received two bullet wounds to his head and a piece of glass pierced his wife’s eyes. Buck was dying, Blanche was half blind, Bonnie was injured, and Clyde was for the first time really worried.This time too they had managed to escape, but at the cost of Blanche’s and Buck’s life. The next time it would be Bonnie’s and Clyde’s. Although the couple was successful in eluding the police for a couple of more months, the police were, alarmingly, getting closer with each failed attempt to capture the couple.They had also learned the valuable lesson that with killers like Bonnie and Clyde you do not give a hands-up, “you shoot first, then you read them their rights”( Geringer, ‘Beginning of the End, 3).And so it was when the police tracked them again in May 23rd, 1934. They shot the couple without giving them the advantage of warning. Within seconds Bonnie and Clyde were dead, but not their legend. According to the historian Jonathan Davis : “Anybody who robbed banks or fought the law [was] really living out some secret fantasies [for] a large part of the public” (Geringer, ‘Depression Era Duet’, 2).Whether this was the case or not, is trivial. The importance lies in the fact that Bonnie and Clyde are, even today, the most infamous male-female serial killer couple.

Traditionally, female-female serial killer teams are the second largest category of the team killers.Two or more women who are jointly active serial killers usually comprise these teams.Although their motives may vary, the killings are usually carried out for profit.On average, the members of the female-female team are older than the members of the male-female team and are active for a longer period of time.Unlike the male-female teams, and like their female counterparts that act alone, the female-female teams prefer subtle weapons such as poison, lethal injections and suffocation.

Gwedolyn Graham’s and Catherine May Wood’s crimes in the Alpine Manor Nursing Home in the 1980s have received particular attention asfemale-female serial killer homicides because the two women were “deeply involved in a torrid sexual relationship, that culminated in repetitive acts of murder” (Kelleher, 143). In 1986, Catherine May Wood became supervisor of nurse’s aides at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Walker,Michigan.At the time she was only twenty-four, unattractive,weighing 450 pounds, and alone, after her seven year marriage had dissolved. In that year, Wood met Graham, who had just received a job in the nursing home and who fell deeply in love with her new supervisor.Wood, who once again felt both wanted and needed, immediately surrendered herself to Graham’s dominance and perverted sexual desires, which included committing murders with the aim of enhancing their sexual encounters.Their sexual relationship had already involved rough play and choking for some time, and Graham apparently wanted to experience the real thing. Even though Wood discarded her mate’s abnormal ideas as mere talk, the ideas soon materialized. In January 1987, Graham attacked and murdered her first victim, the beginning of a macabre plan that aimed at taking the lives of six elderly people whose last names spelled ‘murder’. The plan however, proved too elaborate and so the two lovers settled into targeting the most vulnerable victims. Within four months the women attacked ten patients of the nursing home and succeeded in killing five of them.Graham used a dampened washcloth to kill her patients, while Wood acted as a lookout. After each murder, the women would make love in a vacant area of the nursing home, aiming to relive the excitement of the act of murder. By April 1987, the couple’s murderous acts came to an end when Graham and Wood argued over Wood’s failure to actively engage herself in any of the murders. By this time, Graham had already found another lover and she soon left Wood. Alone and deserted again, Wood confessed the murders to her ex-husband, who contacted the authorities. Wood and Graham were arrested. Wood pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Graham.Wood received a sentence of twenty to forty years in prison, and Graham received six life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Three or more individuals who may or may not be biologically related comprise family serial killing teams. Regardless of their biological relationship, they typically live in the same house and act like a family.The dominant figure is usually a male and the team commonly engages itself in sexual serial murders that tend to be extremely violent. The active period of the team tends to be rather short, since relationships between members and co-operation collapse very easily thereby leading to disorganization and final apprehension.

Charles Manson, born in 1934 in Kentucky, can be argued to be one of the most perverted minds the American Criminal history has ever seen.Being both articulate and extremely intelligent, Manson was able to gather around him a group of rebellious young females and males to form the family that he never really had, a family that soon turned into a growing cult. The Manson family engaged in “marathon sessions of unrestricted sex and drug use” (Kelleher, 158).At its peak, the family must have numbered fifty members, all of whom earned their living from a variety of illegal activities. The family eventually settled into an abandoned film studio ranch in southern California, where Manson continued to poison the minds of his young followers with a continuously more aggressive philosophy that escalated to the beginning of a brutal murder spree. Manson convinced himself and the members of the family that a racial war was to take place and that it was the family’s responsibility to initiate it. The plan was simple: the family would murder a number of prominent figures and make it look like the perpetrators were African American. Within forty-eight hours of August 1969, members of the Manson family – which also included a couple of females -carried out seven murders. The first five of the murders took place at the house of actress Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski. The other two murders were carried out in the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. All of the victims were stabbed and shot, and Sharon Tate (who was eight month pregnant at the time) was stabbed and hanged by the neck. In both cases the blood of the victims was used to mark the crime scene.Two months later the police arrested a number of the Manson family members for an unrelated minor offense. Among those arrested was the twenty-one year old Susan Atkins who was present in both the Tate and the LaBianca murders.While in custody, she began discussing details of the murder with her cellmates, a discussion that helped to seal the fate of the family’s criminal activities. Several members of the family including female ones, were found guilty of homicide and sentenced to death. However, the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty. Even after the trial, members of the family who had not been arrested continued the murders of many individuals, including Manson’s defense attorney.More than twenty murders are now linked to the Manson Family and the cult that Manson had created around his name.

ISSUE OF SANITY
Although the twisted sense of reality of the female member’s of Manson’s family could be argued to have entered the realm of insanity, their case was never treated as such.They were rather considered to be perverted psychopaths who allowed Manson to exercise immense influence on them.Therefore, Kelleher’s seventh classification of the insane serial killer is a very subtle and controversial one.And this is especially the case in serial killings in which each perpetrator could be easily – yet wrongly - assumed to be acting within the borders of insanity and hence not held responsible for his actions. In the light of this understanding, it becomes necessary to establish what distinguishes an insane person. The best way to deal with this disputed issue is to directly quote from the McNaughton test, which is the one that is used today to determine the degree of insanity of a serial killer:


To establish a defense on the ground of insanity it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as to not know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong (Kelleher, 161).

The claim of insanity is rarely a valid one in the cases of serial murder, since a sequence of murders requires both planning and clear state of mind in order to avoid apprehension. Given the heinous nature of her crimes, the female serial killer is almost always considered legally sane.In the uncommon cases when a female perpetrator was acknowledged to have been insane, the serial killer was always an Angel of Death and suffering from the Munchausen syndrome by proxy.The Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a psychological disorder characterized by a compulsive behavior of fabricating illnesses in and inducing injuries on a dependant individual in order to attract attention from medical personnel. The victim of a female suffering from the Munchausen Syndrome by proxy is usually a young child under the age of six or an elderly person.

Bobbie Sue Terrell began her nursing career in 1976, at the age of twenty-two.Shortly afterwards she married Daniel Dudley but her happiness was shattered when she found out that she could not have any children. She reacted to the news with a combination of anger and depression, which did not seem to go away even after the couple adopted a boy. As her fits of depression and violent anger increased alarmingly, Terrell was forced to seek professional help and was put under the treatment of strong tranquilizers. The medication further deteriorated Terrell’s situation. She fed a nearly lethal dose of the tranquilizers to her own son. Fortunately the boy was saved, but this event marked the end of her marriage. Deserted and confused and suffering from manic depression, Terrell admitted herself to a mental hospital for the treatment of schizophrenia. After a year she was released and was able to return to her profession as a nurse.However, she remained unable to control her emotions that worsened in the stressful environment of the hospital. Her peculiar behavior culminated in 1984 with the sudden death of ninety-seven year old Aggie Marsh, Terrell’s first known victim. Within thirteen days Terrell succeeded in killing twelve elderly people by injecting them with lethal doses of insulin, before being apprehended. On November 24th, 1984, the local police received an anonymous telephone call claiming that a serial killer was operating in the hospital staff. Upon arrival, the police found Terrell suffering from a severe knife would on her side that had been allegedly inflicted by the serial killer. However, the investigators could find no other staff that could support Terrell’s story. Although Terrell’s mental history and her suffering from the Munchausen Syndrome by proxy was brought to light, it was not until 1985 that all the pieces were put together. By that time, Terrell had been hospitalized again and after her release married Ronald Terrell. She was finally arrested in 1985 and charged with murder. For the next years, until 1988, Terrell was subjected to a number of psychological tests, all of which pointed towards her insanity. She was finally charged with a single count of murder, found guilty and sentenced to sixty-five years in prison.

THE UNEXPLAINED
All the classifications of female serial killers that have been discussed so far - namely, the Black Widows, the Angels of Death, the revenge serial killers, the profit perpetrators, the team killers and the insane female murderesses – are admittedly elusive. Nevertheless, in every single case certain motives can be identified. There is, however, a classification of female serial killers whose motive has never been satisfactorily understood, even after the perpetrator herself was discovered and arrested. According to Kelleher, a female perpetrator can fit the category of the Unexplained if she is “a woman who systematically murders for reasons that are wholly inexplicable or for a motive that has not been made sufficiently clear for categorization” (Kelleher, 173). It is interesting to note that, in the overwhelming majority of these situations, even the killer herself is unable to identify an understandable motive for her crimes.

Christine Falling, as is often the case with serial killers had a disruptive and impoverished childhood. She was born in 1963 in Florida, to the sixteen-year-old Ann and the sixty-five-year old Thomas Slaughter. Falling was developmentally disabled, prone to obesity, suffered from fits of epilepsy and aggression, and was never able to acquire developmental skills beyond those of a sixth-grader. Due to the extreme poverty of her parents, Falling and her older sister were given up for adoption to the Falling family. Not long afterwards, the two girls found themselves in a children’s home, because of their constant conflicts with their adoptive parents. By that time, Falling had already demonstrated her violent nature, her favorite past-time being the torturing and killing of cats to see if they really had nine lives. At the age of twelve, Falling left the children’s home. Two years later, she married a man ten years older than her.The marriage soon collapsed after a series of violent encounters between the couple. That sparked off a new and inexplicable behavior in Falling.Within the next couple of years she visited the hospital multiple times, with an endless series of medical conditions that the medical stuff was never able to diagnose.Despite the fact that Falling was apparently suffering from mental illnesses, she had gained a reputation as a good baby-sitter. However, at the age of seventeen, Falling began to attack and murder the children that were placed under her care.On February 28th, 1980, Cassidy Johnson (aged two) died from what was assumed to be encephalitis. Autopsy reports showed that the girl had actually succumbed to a severe skull injury. The police interviewed Falling, but since no evidence could be brought against her, the matter was not pursued any further. Shortly afterwards, Falling moved to Lakeland, Florida, where she killed another baby under her care. Even though the death of four-year old Jeffrey Davis was also deemed suspicious, no extensive investigations were carried out, thus allowing Falling to attack a new victim. Within three days after Jeffrey’s death, Falling was asked to baby-sit Jeffrey’s two-year-old cousin - Joseph Spring - while the bereaved family attended Jeffrey’s funeral.Joseph’s death was attributed to viral infection, and thus Falling once again escaped apprehension. After the double murder, Falling moved to Perry, Florida where she found a job as a housekeeper in the home of seventy-seven-year-old William Swindle. On the first day of her job, Swindle suddenly died in his kitchen. Due to his old age and his deteriorating health, no suspicions arose. Falling’s next victim was her eighteen-month-old niece who allegedly stopped breathing while under Falling’s care. This time too, and for the last time, the vicious serial killer was able to escape apprehension.A year later, in 1982, ten-week-old Travis Coleman also stopped breathing while Falling was attending to him.An autopsy was requested, and it was discovered that the infant had died from suffocation. Authorities immediately questioned Falling. She confessed to having killed three other babies by what she described as “smotheration”. According to her testimony, she had heard voices that ordered her to kill the babies by placing a blanket over their faces. Her motive still remains unknown.She said:

I don’t know why I done what I done.The way I done it, I seen it done on TV shows.I had my own way though.Simple and easy.No one could hear them scream (Kelleher, 176).

Falling was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.Even though her motives have not been satisfactorily explained and she was known to have suffered from mental illnesses, Falling was not classified as legally insane.

THE UNSOLVED
Unfortunately, not all cases of serial killings are solved. It has already been shown that Black Widows and Angels of Death are able to elude apprehension for a significant period of time. Sometimes, their identities remain unknown forever, and their crimes are suddenly brought to a halt, either because the perpetrator died, or because the perpetrator was imprisoned for other felonies, or for other unknown psychological factors.At any rate the serial murders remain unsolved.

William Hodges Bingham and his family worked in the historical Lancaster castle in England. After thirty years as a supervising caretaker Bingham suddenly died in 1911. Within a few weeks Bingham’s daughter, Margaret, was found dead too.Despite his excellent health, Margaret's brother too died shortly afterwards. An autopsy report was requested and it was found that he had died from arsenic poisoning.Post-mortem examinations on Bingham and Margaret showed that they had died from the same causes of poisoning.Edith Bingham, the only surviving relative of the family, was accused of the three murders, but was soon acquitted as no evidence could be found against her. Since Edith would inherit an estate from her deceased relatives and hence benefit from their death, it was commonly accepted that she was the killer. However, the case remained officially unsolved. If Bingham indeed murdered her father, brother and sister, this would make her the first Black Widow of twentieth-century England.

The female serial killer had always been protected by the obscurity that embraced her – not anymore.She can longer hide behind our ignorance.Black Widows, Angels of Death, sexual predators, revenge killers, murderesses killing for profit, team killers, insane killers, and the unexplained and the unsolved have all been exposed.Kelleher’s classification has been successful in piercing the veil that surrounds the female serial killer.Females, the loving and caring protectors of our species and the ones that are more susceptible to danger, are in fact the most dangerous because they are the least suspected of the serial killers.Like their male counterparts, they show no remorse and have no mercy for their victims.Should we still call them the weaker sex?