UBC: Vronsky, Female Serial Killers

[truepenny]

Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters by Peter Vronsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This makes an interesting pair with Ann Jones' Women Who Kill. Vronsky is not a feminist--he's not a misogynist, either, and honestly, after some of the feminists he quotes, I can't blame him for being dubious. There are people who have said some very stupid things about Aileen Wuornos.

Vronsky talks about the fact that women were serial killers long before Jack the Ripper, and he talks about the very different way female serial killers operate. They tend to kill their family members, and they tend to use poison. He argues that they don't present a signature as male sexual serial killers (and Aileen Wuornos) do; that for them, the death really is the goal. It's quite possible that they get their superfluous-to-death kick before, from watching their victim's suffering or through Munchausen's by Proxy. Or both. (Really, if it bothers you terribly to watch your loved ones suffer, Munchausen's by Proxy isn't going to work very well for you.)

He has a couple chapters of history, starting back with Messalina and Agrippina, discussing Elizabeth Bathory, and a number of cases that are familiar to me from Patrick Wilson's Murderess (Mary Ann Cotton, Mary May, Sarah Chesham (he is strictly limited to Anglophone murderers)), the astonishing Americans Lydia Sherman, Sarah Jane Robinson, and Jane Toppan.

He has a chapter on Aileen Wuoros, and he doesn't downplay the horrific conditions of her childhood and adolescence, nor the grim daily desperation of her adult life. Ditto for Velma Barfield. But he also doesn't downplay the horror of what they did.

He also discusses Dorothea Puente, Genene Jones, Marybeth Tinning, Christine Falling, serial killer pairs Martha Beck & Raymond Fernandez, Myra Hindley & Ian Brady, Carol Bundy & Douglas Clark, Charlene & Gerald Gallego, Karla Homolka & Paul Bernardo, and then for ideological/cult killing Ilse Koch (the Bitch of Buchenwald) and Irma Grese (the Beast of Belsen), and the Manson girls Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten.

I didn't always agree with Vronsky, and I found him in some places callously flippant, but this was an excellent and thought-provoking book.



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