Sunday, March 5, 2017

Breaking the Silence of the Lambs: Female Serial Killers and Collective Amnesia


Title: Breaking the Silence of the Lambs: Female Serial Killers and Collective Amnesia
Author: Richard Stephens
Written for A Voice for Men
Date: March 5, 2017 (1210m); (first draft: Sep. 19, 2015)
Word count: 3,979

***

This article focuses on female serial killers, yet its real subject is the fear of thinking honestly about violence by women.

1. Monster Love

Scott Bonn is an American PhD criminologist who in 2014 published a book titled Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Killers. Bonn is a frequent expert commentator on network and cable television and is, according to Emmy-winning TV host and best-selling author, Rita Cosby, “considered one of the world's top experts on criminal behavior.”  His book’s subject is the public’s perennial fascination with this particular type of criminal.

This is how Dr. Bonn announces his topic:

“In many ways, serial killers are for adults what monster movies are for children — that is, scary fun!”

He follows this observation by noting that this it is not simple clean fun, but rather comes at a certain cost, a feeling of guilt:

“Research … reveals that many people who are fascinated with serial killers refer to it as a guilty pleasure,” we learn. [1]

Fair enough.

The fact is, however, that Bonn’s book discusses, almost exclusively, the phenomenon of public fascination with male serial killers. When he does devotes his attention – just a sliver – to the females, though, he gets it all wrong. Reading about and watching movies about male serial killers is “scary fun,” for lots of people. But there is no “love” for the female of the species – no subculture of devotees and collectors devoted to them as there clearly is with the males.

The male serial killer is the perfect monster, society’s archetype of evil. Yet the female of the type is the sort of monster society would rather pretend does not exist (Elizabeth Bathory, “The Blood Countess” and Aileen Wuornos being the two exceptions). [2] Stories of real-life female serial killers simply do not  provide “scary fun” Bonn describes.

The female psychopath is a type of criminal that is, I shall argue, just too scary to wrap our minds around in today’s “politically correct” culture. We have in the West been conditioned by decades of ideological indoctrination that has caused us to avoid so much as thinking clear thoughts about feminine monstrosity, let alone talking freely to one another about this nearly taboo subject. We are in denial. [2A]


2. Guns and Arsenic

In Why We Love Serial Killers, Bonn trots out big impressive-sounding ideas such as “societal notions” and “paternalism” when describing the one and only FSK that a large number of Americans have heard of, Aileen Wuornos:

“Until Wuornos, the mass media almost always depicted a serial perpetrator as a deranged man due to the erroneous and paternalistic societal notion that women could not commit such crimes. Unlike the obscure and rarely discussed Black Widow killers throughout history, Wuornos became a modern-day celebrity monster and popular culture icon because she defied stereotypes and did not kill demurely as a woman ‘should.’” [3]

We learn from another source that “Bonn believes that is a key reason for her fame” is simply that she “murdered with a gun.” [4]

Bonn is bogged down in stereotypes. He is parroting present-day ideologically orthodox notions that are not based in historical fact. The “societal notion that women could not commit such crimes” is a historically recent invention. The notion is a product of false claims of academic propagandists and is reinforced by intrinsic biology-based male chivalry. The truth is that before the 1960s the idea that female serial killers were relatively common was in common knowledge. And while Black Widows make up a large share of the nearly thousand known female serial killer cases, there have been a great many not in that category.

Take a look at the brief time-slot of 1871 to 1873 and you will see eight cases of female serial killers in the US. [5] The public was at that time well aware of that there were plenty of “female fiends” dotting the landscape (along with the male ones).

Take a look at the crop of female serial killers from the year 1925. You will find eight US cases in this year alone. Yet Professor Bonn and the other criminologists who specialize in the study of serial killers are not even aware that most of these historical cases even exist.

The widely published 1925 newspaper illustration just below shows just how aware of female serial killers the public actually was before the current era of forgetting, the era of political correctness taboos.


Della Sorenson, seen on the right, poisoned nine children and adults, killing seven of them. Said Della after her arrest:

“After the death of my little daughter, Minnie, I had a feeling of elation and happiness. Then, after I got to thinking about what I had done, I was afraid and tried to hide it. I had the same feeling after the death of every one of those I poisoned.” [6]

Mrs. Sorenson represents the “typical” Black Widow type, a poisoner of husband, her own children and neighbors. But female killers are exclusively poisoners.

Let’s consider Bonn’s peculiar speculation about Wuornos’ fame deriving from her use of weapon. As far as guns are concerned we can count quite a few FSKs of the “shoot ‘em up variety,” scores of them. [7]

When criticizing serial killer stereotypes in the future, Bonn and his colleagues might want to give a hard stare at the pair of pictures below. First, here’s a still from the movie-version of Aileen Wuornos’ life, the 2003 film Monster, showing actress Charlize Theron playing the “heroine.” [8]


Compare this 2003 film image to the 1924 newspaper illustration of Winona Green (later known as Winnie Ola Freeman), a young woman who was, in the 1920s, already a double murderess, yet to become a full-fledged serial murderess that was to be her destiny decades later. [9]


Nice parallel of depictions, wouldn’t you say? Back in 1924, the “societal notion” was in reality that women could be most definitely be violent monsters. Before the onset of political correctness, there was no fear of frankly depicting and discussing female aggression and violence by women. Our current demureness, the taboo, the various forms of censorship backed by disinformation about violence by women is the product of a mentality that only took hold in the 1970s.

Gun-wielding Winona shot her mother-in-law and father-in-law to death in 1924 and had also plotted to kill her husband. After serving time she went on to, in 1946 and 1953, murder two more men. Winnie was what you might call a really cheeky type of sociopath. Listen to what she had to say for herself in 1924:

“Who ever heard of a woman being electrocuted or hanged in Arkansas?” she demands whenever the death penalty is mentioned to her. Furthermore she is not remorseful. “I’m not sorry for my deeds, she repeats again and again. “I planned both murders, thinking them all out thoroughly in advance. Now that I have admitted everything, I am willing to meet whatever fate awaits me.” [10]

Winnie served some time, escaped, was recaptured, got released, and went on to murder: again and again. She was the type of historical criminal that ideology-bound scholars like Bonn are simply incapable of imagining.

Aileen Wuornos was not, as is commonly averred, a Lesbian Avenger Wonder Woman carrying out the battle against the “patriarchy,” but merely an ordinary bandit. There have been plenty of female serial killer bandits in the past and criminals of this type continue to crop up. [11]


One of the pervasive stereotypes of female serial killers is that poison, a method used by a large share of female serial killers, is a gentler sort of killing method. This assumption is just plain wrong. As Harold Schechter, a leading authority on historical crime, observes: “The truth is that, compared to the lingering agonies suffered by the average poisoning victim, the deaths meted out by male serial killers like Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, or the Boston Strangler – the swift executions by knife blade, bullet or garotte – seem positively humane.” (The Ripper’s grotesque mutilations were executed upon the corpse, not as acts of torture.). [12]

Beyond guns and poison as methods used by female serial killers we must add hatchets, axes, arson, strangulation, drowning, starvation, battery with blunt objects (hoe, drum sticks, hammer, iron bar) [13]

Let’s take another pictorial stab at Bonn’s assumptions about the past’s demure “societal notions,” a pair of illustrations of  one of the crimes of prolific and wildly savage serial killer Lizzie Halliday (incarcerated from 1893 to her death in 1918). The reproduced artists’ conceptions of Halliday’s final murder date from 1906. [14]


These illustrations of a once internationally known and reviled female serial killer have been utterly forgotten for 109 years. They do not fit the official academic narrative that experts like Bonn were trained to believe and to perpetuate.

3. Collective Amnesia

Wuornos was not only not America’s first female serial killer, but was more like the 275th and she was, according to my current count, the 13th to be executed in this country. [15]

The experts have determined that “female serial killers are rare” (in comparison with their male counterparts). The experts, represented, for example, by 135 participants from 10 countries in the FBI’s 2008 international conference on “Serial Murder,” [16] base their claims on incomplete research (without ever stopping to wonder whether availablre historical research has been even slightly systematic, let alone as complete as can be reasonably managed). [17]

The “official” number of historical US female serial killer cases (up to the last few years) often stated is “62,” and the most commonly cited estimate of the ratio of male to female serial killers is 1:6. In contrast, my own list of US cases from the period 1829-2008 includes 330. [18] We might ask just how rare are these criminals when there are in reality 5 times as many as the experts have reported there are?


The longest published roster of female serial killers (internationally) I have come across totals 140. My own list, based primarily on research in archival newspapers, now numbers over 950. [19]

Why such extreme disparity? What on earth is going on here?

There is bot only an answer but there is even a term to explain the anomaly. Patricia Pearson’s brilliant and hard-hitting book, a 1997 exposé on violence-by-women, When She was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. [20] Pearson makes a crucial and precisely accurate observation regarding the hullabaloo in 1990 over the Wuornos case and the attendant false claim that she was America’s “first female serial killer.” Pearson points out the falsehood of the claim and convincingly explains that this forgetful fantasy was an indication of what she called “collective amnesia.” This is a profoundly important observation.

Bonn’s book, coming eighteen years later than Pearson’s, with its paternalism-blaming explanation of this society-wide unwillingness to face up to the hard facts of the female of the serial killer species – with its blindness toward female aggression, female sadism, physical violence initiated by women (not to mention extreme indirect violence) – is, with its self-censored gaping lacunae, in itself an instance of chivalry-based denial. Bonn’s blindness is the product of a chivalry dipped in feminist dogma, a nanny-monitored, a mommy-supervised, maternalistic condescending nod to the thought police of the specious claims of fashionable “critical gender theory” (Neo-Marxist ideology applied to the relations between the sexes).

Bonn’s Why We Love Serial Killers is a most telling and blatant symptom of today’s collective amnesia.

4. Sexual Violence

The perfect monster is, as we are taught, the violent sex pervert, and is therefore (of course) a male. But the fact is that there have indeed been female serial killers who fit this mold. Jane Toppan [21], the prolific serial killer nurse caught in 1901 got orgasms from lying in the death-bed of her victims embracing them as they expired. Martha Grinder [22], a Pittsburgh serial killer executed in 1866, had a decided necrophiliac streak; she loved to watch the agonies of her dying victims.


A Mexican case from the 1890s, publicized in the US reveals the worst kind of monstrosity, worthy of any male monster. In Mexico City, Guadalupe Martinez de Bejarano lured orphan girls and tortured them. Old newspapers report that, “the girl would be enslaved and subjected to torture with a markedly sexual nature. Guadalupe especially enjoyed forcing the girls to sit naked on a burning brazier; she would strip them and hang them from the ceiling by the wrists and flog them with a cattle whip.” One victim “was made to endure every cruelty and privation which the malignity of ingenious fiend could suggest or inspire. Hunger, exposure, blows, burns, scalds, pin thrusts, cuts and every other atrocity that can be inflicted without causing instant death, was the daily lot of this unfortunate girl.” In the end each victim would be starved to death. [23]

There are other examples of female serial killers experiencing sexual excitation in the act of killing such as the infamous arch-pervert Countess Bathory [24]. Then there’s Anna Zwanziger of Bavaria whose “admitted motive was sheer malevolent pleasure. At her trial in 1828, she confessed that the sight of her victims’ death agonies threw her into a transport of ecstasy.” [25] France’s amazingly prolific Helene Jegado, arrested in 1851 who “appeared to have been actuated by a thirst for destruction, and to have taken pleasure in witnessing the agonies of her victims.” [26] There’s Australia’s Martha Rendell (1909) who got her kicks from killing kids [27], and France’s killer nurse, Antoinette Sierri (1926) and what were called her “orgies” of death [28].

There have been many other habitually lethal ladies of yore who got a very special thrill out of witnessing the death throes of the humans whose lives they took. We can only guess at the specific nature of the pleasure so many other female serial killers on record through the centuries who admitted the delight they felt as they murdered, and murdered and murdered again. Among them are certainly more covert sexual sadists.


In June 2016, Mexican police arrested a 28-year-old Los Zetas cartel assassin named Juana, nicknamed “La Peque Sicaria” (The Little Assassin). She was responsible for multiple beheadings and mutilations of the cartel’s murder victims. News reports described her  as confessing to having become sexually aroused by the mayhem and used the blood of her victims as an erotic stimulant.

“[I felt] excited by it, rubbing myself in it and bathing in it after killing a victim and I even drank it when it was still warm.”

The reports further assert that Juana “insinuated” that she “had sex with the cadavers of those decapitated, using the severed heads as well as the rest of their bodies to pleasure herself.” [28A]

We won’t even go into the human-sacrificing female serial killing cultists (Voodoo, etc.), the baby-eating  kidnappers (yes, real-life ogresses), the sundry other female cannibal serial killers, nor the professional child care providers who burned babies alive. You can look all of them up in the online collections of Occult Female Serial Killers and Real-Life Ogresses. [29]

So much for the female being a kinder, gentler, seldom sex-driven and far-rarer-than-the-male sort of serial killer. But wait, this “collective amnesia” rabbit-hole goes even deeper.

5. Girl Secrets

“I like hurting people,” was the stunning confession made by British girl, barely 11-years-old who murdered two boys in 1968 and had attempted to strangle others only to be interrupted in the act. Mary Bell’s case is famous – as an anomaly. This child was indeed a serial killer despite the fact that her efforts – serial efforts – were in occasion successfully thwarted. [30]

But what if this apparently “unique” case were not unique after all? In fact, my research has turned up over twenty cases of this sort. One involves a pre-teen Irish girl named Mary Maher, who, in 1906 on three separate occasions murdered three sisters, deliberately making each tragedy seem an accident or a “natural death.” After getting away with three killings little Mary then tried to murder a fourth sister, but sensing the grown-ups were finally on to her game and that she was in big trouble, committed suicide – at the age of 11! [31]

Among the other serial killer girls (and would-be serial killer girls) from the United States that turned up in my research on historical female serial killers are these four from the late 1800s:

In 1872 a 16-year-old nurse girl in St. Louis, Missouri, named Martha Whetstone killed four children, including her own sister, in a space of four months. [32] In 1874 Henrietta Weibel of  New York City, 15-years-old (or 13 according to one source) murdered one child and attempted another. Henrietta confessed she was subject to an uncontrollable mania for setting fires and burning babies. [33]

1892 was a bumper year for such cases.

In June 1892 a 6-year old girl in Atoka, Kentucky, whose family name was Bottoms planned the murder of her 18-month-old sister long in advance, succeeded in doing the deed and delighted in the result. After being caught this precocious tyke expressed the burning desire to kill more babies in the future. [34] In July, Ella Holdridge, of Tonawanda, New York, age 14, made a number of attempts to murder other children who were saved by medical intervention, but finally succeeded in killing one. Her motivation was her passion for attending funerals. When a lull in burials had come about, allowing little Ella no opportunities to enjoy her favorite form of amusement, she solved the problem by poisoning other children. with respect to the corpse of the one she did kill, Ella remarked that her victim “made the prettiest corpse ever put under New York soil.” [35] Sometime in 1892 a girl named Annabell, aged 11, of Fairfield County, South Carolina, committed her first murder, killing a baby. Three years later, in June 1895, Annabell murdered and dismembered another. She then tortured a 6-year-old boy in an effort to force him to confess to the crime she had committed. [36]


Thirty years later on, precocious Alsa Thompson, the “Baby Borgia,” in 1925, at the age of seven [yes, that’s 7!], confessed to poisoning eleven persons, starting with her twin baby sisters who died, and a caretaker lady she didn’t like. [37]

The girl’s separated parents had temporarily placed her in a Hollywood, California family, which saw Alsa wielding a razor against her baby sister and the foster family’s daughter. The girl admitted to poisoning two canaries and a cat. She said she had, on various occasions, put ant poison in the coffee and in the pork chops and sulfuric acid in the stewed peaches. Illnesses ensued. The case made headlines nationally. The papers quoted Alsa answering her official questioners – alienists (psychiatrists) and a social worker – who had asked about her motives, replying:

“I like to see them die, that’s all.” [38]

Similar cases of little girls as serial killers, some of them quite prolific have been discovered in in Australia, England, Germany, and France.

For example, In 1894 a 14-year-old nurse girl in Novgorod, Russia, confessed to murdering seventeen babies “because they bothered her, and she disliked the trouble of attending to them.” [39] German Ida Schnell, caught in 1906 at the tender age of 13, serially murdered at least eight babies. I found these forgotten old news reports by doing ambitious systematic keyword-searching of  digital newspaper archives, not by combing through the corpus of professional literature on forensic psychology and criminology.

6. Taboo-Busting

These “killer kid” cases, along with many other cases involving solitary homicides on the part of young girls that my research has uncovered (yet which have been completely overlooked by scholars), need to be no longer ignored by researchers on violence and aggression. There is much work to do on the facts of female agression and the experts need to get onto it, and pronto.

There are lots of myths (founded on specious claims of “gender theory”) to be dispelled.

Even the harshest critics of fashionable post-modernist falsehoods are often in the dark when it comes to the nature of female aggression. Camille Paglia, once famously quipped: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper." [40] Yes there is, Camille; and not just one. Far from it.

When Lizzie Halliday was captured in 1893, some writers speculated that since Halliday had traveled to England, she might have been the “Ripper.” [41]

Most people do not realize that “Jack” did not perform his gruesome acts on his living victims, but cut them up after death. Not so with Tamara Samsonova, serial killer, serial dismemberer, captured in St. Petersburg, Russia, on July 27, 2015, who admitted cutting away at her final victim, whom she had drugged, while the elderly woman was still living. [42]

It is an established, well-documented fact that feminist ideologues have deliberately distorted systematically and on a large scale, the academic scholarship on violence between the sexes. Dr. Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who specializes in the study of domestic violence, has identified seven distinct methods of academic and intellectual sabotage and coercive censorship practiced by feminists in academia. [43] Dr. Straus’s exposé on scientific gate-keeping goes far in explaining how our post-1960s collective amnesia concerning to psychology and incidence of violence by women has come about.

Although the bizarre fairy-tale notion that females do not initiate violence (but only act violently in response to male-initiated violence) held by marxian feminist ideologues is long-discredited, yet it still has wide currency today among feminists, both elite and common.

As a result of “this investment in a model of gender-based oppression,” the National Organization of Women and associated “Gender Bias Task Forces” helped create VAWA (the Violence Against Women Act), which was less of a practical response to real crime in real-life situations than it was an effort to construct a violence-free utopia (and a massive bureaucracy providing a huge number of jobs for feminist ideologues), based on the bizarre belief that women are “inherently non-violent.” [44] It has taken decades of coordinated trickery and coordinated and widespread intimidation of academic scholars to accomplish the successful suppression of the fact that domestic violence is characterized by gender symmetry, as Dr. Straus has definitively proven. [45]



News reports keep appearing that give evidence that politically correct theories fail to describe reality. On February 15, 2015, serial killer Elena Lobacheva, aged 25, was captured. This young lady confessed that got an orgasmic thrill out of savagely thrusting her knife, dozens of times, into the twelve men she stabbed to death. [46] There have, it turns out, been many female serial killers who have mutilated their victims, but they are not discussed much. The image of the “monster” in the age of political correctness has to be male.

The facts, when they are exposed, demonstrate that the entire subject of female aggression needs a comprehensive re-evaluation by social scientists – in order to discard the deliberate distortions created by ideologues. This “audit” is needed and it is needed now.


The silence of the lambs must be broken.

Scholars need to stop being cowards, terrified to speak out about the facts that the real-life Orwellian “thought police” of repressive political correctness forbid from being disseminated. My recommendation for the experts on violence and “gender” is to start their effort to initiate crucially necessary reform with an in-depth study and of historical cases of violent female children. They can start with online sources “Serial Killer Girls” and “Youthful Borgias: Girls Who Murder – The Forgotten “Lizzie Bordens.” [47]

Further, Peason’s book, When She Was Bad, will be an indispensable introduction to the basics and the YouTube videos of three major female critics of marxian feminism, Erin Pizzey, Karen Straughan and Janice Fiamengo will serve to debunk most of the dogmas and fallacies of establishment academia. [48]


# # #

NOTES:
* Feature image: detail from title page: Anonymous, Narrative and Confessions of Lucretia P. Cannon (1841), New York. Cannon was America’s earliest known FSK (there is no credible evidence that Lavinia Fisher was a serial killer, despite the legend). The image shows Cannon burning to death a 5-year-old.
[1] Scott Bonn, Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Killers, New York: 2014, Skyhorse; Quote: Scott A. Bonn Ph.D. “Here’s Why We Love Serial Killers: Examining Our Curious Fascination with “Celebrity Monsters.” Psychology Today, Sep 22, 2014. Promotional information and quotes are found on docbonn.com
[2] Wuornos was celebrated by radical feminists who liked to see her as an avenger ion the “war between the sexes.” Elizabeth Bathory, the early 17th century “Blood Countess”  is the archetypal evil woman, inspiring the name of a Death Metal band, novels, numerous films, plays and other artistic productions.
[2A] Helen Geisen-Volk; image shows exhumation of Agnes Toohey (18 mo.), who died Dec. 15, 1924.
[3] Quote: [Scott A. Bonn Ph.D. “Why Some Women Kill Again and Again. Female killers are rarely driven by sexual sadism like men.” Psychology Today, Jan 12, 2015]
[4] quote from: Julie Beck, “The Grisly, All-American Appeal of Serial Killers, The Atlantic, Oct 21, 2014.
[5] 1871-1873: 1871 – Catherine Batchelor – Lockport, Indiana;  1871 – Lydia Sherman – New Brunswick, New Jersey; New Haven & Danby, Ct.; 1871 – Elizabeth Wharton – Baltimore, Maryland; 1872 – Charlotte Lamb – Trimbelle, Wisconsin; 1872 – Emily Lloyd – Leesburg, Virginia; 1872 – Martha Whetstone – St. Louis, Missouri; 1873 Kate & Katie Bender (“Bloody Benders”) – Cherry Vale, Kansas; 1873 – Sarah Earhardt  – Germantown, Ohio; see: Female Serial Killers of 19th Century America
[6] 1925 female serial killers in the USA: Anna Cunningham – Chicago, Illinois; Helen Geisen-Volk – New York, New York; Pearl Jackson – Birmingham, Alabama; Julia Shepherd – Chicago, Illinois; Della Sorenson – Dannenborg, Nebraska; Birdie Strome – Springfield, Ohio; Alsa Thompson – Hollywood, California; Martha Wise – Valley City, Ohio.
Della Sorenson quote: [“Gave Poison To Children And Husband - Nebraska Mother Admits Long List of Crimes to Police Following Arrest - Killed Mother-In-Law Slayer Mentally Unbalanced and Will Be Sent to State Asylum,” syndicated (AP), The Bismark Tribune (N.D.), Apr. 20, 1925, p. 1]
[8] Monster, 2003, directed by Patty Jenkins Charlize Theron playing Wuornos, Academy Award for Best Actress.
[9] Winona Green (Winnie Ola Freeman) – “Outlaw Blood Made This Choir-Girl A Demon! - Alienists See in Her Self- Confessed Slaying of Two Relatives a ‘Throwback’ to Weird ‘ Indian Tribal Vengeance,” syndicated, Springfield Republican (Mo.), Dec. 28, 1924, (p. ?). See: Winnie Ola Freeman (Winona Green), “The Cat Woman”: Arkansas Serial Killer - 1954
[10] Winona Green (Winnie Ola Freeman), quote: [“Girl Who Killed Two Thinks Her Sex Will Save Her From Death,” syndicated (NEA), Nov. 1, 1924, p. 1]
[11] Maria Oliviero; Inessa Tarverdiyeva; see: “Female Serial Killer Bandits”
[12] poison deaths – Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files, Ballantine, 2003, p. 31
[13] Female Serial Killers: Weapons, Poisons & Methods
[14] Halliday images: 1) 2) “Screaming she sank …” Ada Evening News (Indian Territory, Ok.), Nov. 5, 1906, syndicated, found in other papers as well; “She Began Stabbing …” The Bryant Democrat (Ohio), Nov. 2, 1906, p. 6, syndicated, found in other papers as well.
[15] The Dirty Dozen: 12 Female Serial Killers Executed in the USA – 1816-2002
Female Serial Killers Executed
[16] FBI conference: Aug. 29 – Sep. 2, 2005 in San Antonio, Texas; report: Robert J. Morton, editor,  Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, U. S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2008, (corporate author), National Ctr for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) United States of America;
For a critique of the FBI report, see: Robert St. Estepohe, “Monsters Too Scary for Words,” Sep. 7, 2915, Female Serial Killer Index (blog), http://female-serial-killers-index.blogspot.com/2015/08/monsters-too-scary-for-words.html
[17] “Rarity” statistics, ratio pf male to female at 1:6 – Eric W. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims, (Wadsworth), 1991; 6th edn. 2015
[18] US cases; 330 cases 1829-2008; see: Female Serial Killers of the USA
[19] the longest roster of FSKs: Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters, 2007, Berkley Books, N.Y.; see:  Index: FSKs
[20] Patricia Pearson, When She was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, Viking, 1997.
[21] Jane Toppan: see the superb book on the case by Harold Schechter, Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Serial Killer, 2003, Pocket Star Books.
“Jane Toppan, Massachusetts Serial Killer Nurse – 1901”
[22] Martha Grinder – “Martha Grinder, Pittsburg Serial Killer Executed in 1866”
[“Martha Grinder, Arch Murderess Of Pittsburg – Women Who Poisoned Men, Woman and Children for Pleasure of Witnessing Their Dying Torments, Hanged – Monomaniac Carried Death In Her Pocket,” The Pittsburgh Press (Pa.), Nov. 15, 1910, p. 5]
[23] “BejaranGuadalupe Martinez de Bejarano, Sadistic Sexual Female Serial Killer of Girls – 1892”
[Wikipedia in Spanish; newspaper: [‘A Female Fiend. – Remarkable Career of a Mexican Woman Who Loved Young Girls. – Every Form of Torment Visited Upon Helpless Orphans. – The Widow Bejarano and Her Strange Passion – Tortures Young Girls Just For the Fun if the Thing – Her Sons Partake of Her Cruel Spirit – A Celebrated Case.’ St. Louis Dispatch (Mo.), Apr. 24, 1892, p. 25]
[24] Bathory – “The Blood Countess,” Hungarian Serial Killer & Sadist Elizabeth Báthory - 1610
[25] Anna Zwanziger – Harold Schechter, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, Ballantine, New York, 1996, p. 122.
Anna Zwanziger (Nannette Schoenleben), German Serial Killer – 1809”
[26] “Hélène Jégado, French Serial Killer – 1851”
[27] “Martha Rendell, Australian Serial Killer Step-Mother – 1909”
[28] “Antoinette Sierri, French Serial Killer Nurse – 1925” (the nale is often, erroneously, spelled “Scieri and “Scierri”)
[“Poisoned Her Patients - The Guillotine Now Awaits Antoinette, the French Nurse, Who Couldn’t Resist Mixing Arsenic in the Medicines as She Hurried 30 Victims to Their Graves,” The American Weekly (San Antonio Light) (Tx.), Jun. 6, 1926, p. 7] [“Poisoned Victims to Watch Them Squirm,” Prescott Evening Courier (Az.), May 29, 1925, p. 1]
[28A] 2016 – Juana “La Peque Sicaria” – Baja California, Mexico
[29] Ogresses – “Ogresses: Female Serial Killers of the Children of Others”
Cannibals – “Cannibal Murderesses”
Occult – “Occult Female Serial Killers”
Baby Burners – “The Baby Burners: Female Serial Killers Who Burned Babies Alive”
[30] “Mary Bell, 11-Year-Old Serial Killer, England – 1968”
[31] “Mary Maher, 11-Year Old Irish Serial Killer – 1906”
[“11-Year-Old Murderess. – Irish Child Kills Three Of Her Sisters. - Sensational Revelations.” Evening News (Sydney, Australia), Jan. 10, 1907, p. 2]
[32] Martha Whetstone – “Martha Whetstone, 16-Year-Old Serial Killer – Missouri, 1872”
[“Mysterious Fatality. – The Singular Deaths of Four Children – An Unlucky Nurse Girl.” (from: St. Louis Times), Wilmington Journal (North Carolina), Aug. 2, 1872, p. 2]
[“A Fatal Nurse Girl.” The New York Times (N. Y.), Jul. 29, 1872, p. 4]
[33]Henrietta Weibel, aged 15, "The Baby Burner" - New York, 1874”
[“A Young Murderess,” The Singleton Argus and Upper Hunter General Advocate (NSW, Australia), Sep. 30, 1874, p. 3] [“Henrietta Weibel, The Child Burner.” (reprinted from, New York Sun, Aug. 3), The Evening Star (Washington, D. C.), Aug. 4, 1874, p. 1] [“The Baby Burner. – The Heartless Domestic, Henrietta Weibel. – A Strange Story of Precocious Iniquity. – An Attempt to Burn Her Next Door Neighbor’s Child.” New York Herald (N.Y.), Aug. 5, 1874, p. 4] [“A Fiendish Girl. – A Child of Thirteen with a Mania for Baby Burning – The Mother’s Testimony – An Interview With the Youthful Prisoner.” (from New York Herald), The Atlanta Constitution (Ga.), Aug. 5, 1874, p. 2]
[34] Bottoms –  [“Another Demon – Kentucky Produces a Veritable Female Jesse Pomeroy, – Who Chuckled With Glee After Murdering Her Baby Sister. – She Says She Is Glad She Killed the Infant, and Wants a Chance to Butcher Some More – Community Horror-Stricken Over the Deed.” Public Ledger (Maysville, Ky.), Jun. 24, 1892, p. 3]
[35] “Ella Holdridge, Funeral-Loving Teenage Serial Killer from Tonawanda, New York – 1892” 
[“She Murdered For Fun. – The Morbid Passion of A Child Leads Her to Crime.” The Philadelphia Record (Pa.), Jul. 21, 1892, p. 7] [“A Pair of Juvenile Fiends.” The Tuapeka Times (Lawrence, New Zealand), Nov. 2, 1892, p. 5] [“They Looked Nice Dead. – Little Girl Near Buffalo Liked Funerals. - For This Reason She Gave Seven-Year-Old Louisa Stermer Poison. - She Was Not Suspected Till Many Children Were at Death’s Door.” The Boston Daily Globe (Ma.), Jul. 20, 1892, p. 4] [“Young Borgia. - She Had a Morbid Desire to Attend Funerals. - To Gratify Her Whim She Poisons Her Playmates. - She Feeds Them on Rough on Rats and When One of Them Resisted She Rammed the Deadly Stuff Down Her Throat - Horrible Crime.” Daily Public Ledger (Maysville, Ky.), Jul. 20, 1892, p. 3]
[36] Annabell of Fairfield County, South Carolina. – [“Negro Girl’s Crimes.” The Topeka Daily Capital (Ka.), Jul. 21, 1895, p. 1]
[37] “Alsa Thompson, the “Baby Borgia” – Los Angeles: 1925”
[38] Alsa Thompson quote: “Child Admits Killing Twins – Seven Year Old Girl Said to Have Confessed to Poisoning Sisters,” The Oregon Statesman (Portland, Or.), Feb. 4, 1925, p. 1; R. St. E. note: Not too many days after the story first broke, making national front page news, however, the papers carried the story of how little Alsa had recanted her confessions. My close examination of all the reports leads me to believe, and against my original opinion, that the evidence strongly points to guilt (at least, at a bare minimum, with regard to the razor attacks and poisonings not resulting in human death) and that the recantation stories seem to be mere official expediency. After all, what can the cops and the alienists reasonably do with a 7-year-old murderess except to try to make her get better?
[39] “Serial Killer Girls” – includes over 20 cases.
[40] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (1990), p. 247.
[41] [“Suspected of Whitechapel Crimes.” The Huntington Weekly Herald (In.), Dec. 29, 1893, p. 7]
[42] Tamara Samsonova, Russian Serial Killer Who Dismembered Her Victims – 2015”
[43] Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence,” European Journal on Criminal Policy, published online 14 July 2007). Method 1. Suppress Evidence; Method 2. Avoid Obtaining Data Inconsistent with the Patriarchal Dominance Theory; Method 3. Cite Only Studies That Show Male Perpetration; Method 4. Conclude That Results Support Feminist Beliefs When They Do Not; Method 5. Create “Evidence” by Citation; Method 6. Obstruct Publication of Articles and Obstruct Funding Research That Might, Contradict the Idea that Male Dominance Is the Cause of PV; Method 7. Harass, Threaten, and Penalize Researchers Who Produce Evidence That Contradicts Feminist Beliefs.
[44] “inherently non-violent” – “In response to the construction of ‘the lesbian’ as abnormal and deviant, many Western lesbian-feminists in the 1970s (and some continuing in the 1980s and 1990s) (largely middle-class and white, although not exclusively) constructed notions of ‘lesbian utopia’, based on the assumption that women are inherently non-violent, caring and gentle, and that all lesbian relationships are based on an equal sharing of power. While this was not a monolithic or stable discourse (Ross, 1995), it has continued to influence the conceptualization and formation of lesbian identities and relationships as the polar opposite to the pathological construction (Taylor & Chandler, 1995; Ristock, 1997). The lesbian utopia discourse constructed a ‘normal’ lesbian as a strong woman engaged in healthy, stable, conflict-free, woman-loving-woman relationships. This has the effect of masking power relations and violence between women and works to keep systems of domination intact by reproducing the binary constrict of the normal/abnormal. As a result of this investment in a model of gender-based oppression and the construct of lesbian utopia, many women feel that they will not be believed when they disclose or report same-sex abuse. …’ [p. 12, Cindy Hoimes, The Politics Of Naming The Violence: Examining Constructions Of ‘Lesbian Abuse’ In Community-Based Educational Discourses,’ Masters thesis, Sociology, University of Toronto, Ontario, 2000]
[45] Murray Straus,  PhD, “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment,” Partner Abuse Journal, June 2010.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V71-Straus_Thirty-Years-Denying-Evidence-PV_10.pdf [46] “Elena Lobacheva, Sexual Sadist Serial Killer – Russia 2015”
[47] “Serial Killer Girls” – includes over 20 cases.
“Youthful Borgias: Girls Who Murder – The Forgotten “Lizzie Bordens.”
List of youngest murderesses from the “Youthful Borgias” collection which includes 148 (as of the moment) cases:
Age 3 – 1906 – Ziapasa daughter
Age 4 – 1885 – Lizzie Lewis
Age 4 – 1897 – Retta McCabe
Age 6 – 1892 – Bottoms Girl
Age 6 – 1899 – Lizzie Cook
Age 7 – 1887 – Virginia Hudson
Age 7 – 1925 – Alsa Thompson
Age 8 – 1867 – Martin Girl
Age 8 – 2001 – Jummai Hassan
Age 8 – 1900 – Valentine Dilly
Age 9 – 1885 – Mary Cooper
Age 9 – 1884 – Annie Beebles
Age 9 – 1890 – Eleanor O’Neill
Age 9 – 1902 – Anna Peters
Age 9 – 1896 – Hattie Record
Age 9 – 2005 – “East New York girl”
Age 10 –1873 – Sarah Reeves
Age 10 – 1897 – Geneva Arnold
Age 10 – 1886 – Jane Walker
Age 10 – 2010 –  “Sandy Springs girl”
Age 10 – 2012 – Kelli Murphy
[48] See the ongoing series, “The Fiamengo Files,” from StudioBrulé on YouTube;.
Erin Pizzey on Wikipedia,

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