Female Serial Killers

While the short, lethal careers of serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrew Cunanan terrorize the public and provide morbid inspiration for the entertainment industry, few people realize that it is the female serial killer, seldom heard of, who deserves most to be feared. Murder Most Rare provides startling information about the female serial murderer, who is shown to be far more deadly and determined, difficult to apprehend, and complexly motivated than her male counterpart. While serial murder by women is relatively rare, a surprising number of female serial killers are identified by the authors, nearly 100 in this century, with half of them having committed their crimes in America. By examining these women's backgrounds, motives and methods of killing, the book sheds new light on dozens of overlooked cases of murder and uncovers callous crimes and passions gone awry.

In 1872 Susan Eberhart was convicted of murder for helping her lover to kill his wife. The Atlanta Constitution ran a story about her hanging in Georgia that covered slightly more than four full columns of text. In an editorial sermon about her, the Constitution said that Miss Eberhart not only committed murder, but also committed adultery and "violated the sanctity of marriage." An 1890 article in the Elko Independent said of Elizabeth Potts, who was hanged for murder, "To her we look for everything that is gentle and kind and tender; and we can scarcely conceive her capable of committing the highest crime known to the law." Indeed, at the time, this attitude was also applied to women in general.

By 1998 the press's and society's attitudes had changed dramatically. A columnist from Texas wrote that convicted murderess Karla Faye Tucker should not be spared just because she was a woman. The author went on to say that women could be just as violent and aggressive as men; the idea that women are defenseless,and need men's protection "is probably the last vestige of institutionalized sexism that need to be rubbed out."

In "The Penalty Is Death, " Marlin Shipman examines the shifts in press coverage of women's executions over the past one hundred and fifty years. Since the colonies' first execution of a woman in 1632, about 560 more women have had to face the death penalty. Newspaper responses to these executions have ranged from massive national coverage to limited regional and even local coverage. Throughout the years the press has been guilty of sensationalism, stereotyping, and marginalizing of female convicts, making prejudicial remarks, trying these women in the media, andvirtually ignoring or simply demeaning African American women convicts. This thoroughly researched book studies countless episodes that serve to illustrate these points.

Shipman's use of reconstructed stories, gleaned from hundre

Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case-studies from the US, UK and Australia, this book looks at the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than actors in the crimes they commit. Morrissey argues that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human. Case studies cover among others the battered wife, Pamela Sainsbury, who garrotted her husband as he slept, the serial killer, Aileen Wournos, who killed seven middle-aged men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, Tracey Wiggington, the so-called "lesbian vampire killer", and Karla Homolka who helped her husband kill two teenage girls in St. Catherines Ontario in 1993.