I’ve always been fascinated with female criminals. Being such a goody-two-shoes for much of my life, I felt like the idea of a woman being ghastly was something worth investigating. My job as a news reporter put me in the perfect position to get my hands dirty; I was never going to join the ranks of these ladies, but at least I could write about it.
It started when I was cutting my teeth as a young radio news reporter in Western Australia in 1989. The words on everybody’s tongue at the time were ‘the Birnies’ – Catherine and David Birnie, who went on a rampage, kidnapping, raping and killing four young women. Their horrific crimes were only halted when one woman managed to escape and took off into the streets, naked and running for her life. I was eager to cover the story because I loved doing the court round, which was always an adrenaline rush.
My over-protective news director did not want to subject me, an unsullied young woman, to the sordid details of that case. Yet the story was so horrific it was impossible to escape it. Everybody in Perth was talking about the Birnies. My then boyfriend lived around the corner from one of their victims, and every time we passed the house he couldn’t help pointing out, ‘That’s where one of the dead girls lived.’
Then I befriended a woman who was sleeping with a man linked to Catherine Birnie’s legal team. Eager for gossip, I tempted my friend with a drink, only to discover her lips were almost sealed. Almost. She let one bit of information about Catherine Birnie slip: ‘Apparently she is even crazier than he is.’
Women are supposed to be law-abiding, loving, nurturing Madonnas – not crazy gun-toting or knifewielding killers, not hijackers, not bogus vampires and definitely not people who would be up for an earlymorning strangulation episode in their lover’s wife’s garage. Women should be willing to die for their children, not to kill them. Yet it’s no secret that the number of female criminals is increasing, and there’s no shortage of women throughout history who’ve been anything but law-abiding. Many experts blame drugs and alcohol abuse, as well as the rise of a culture in which some young women are behaving as badly as men. (In the UK, it’s referred to as the ‘ladette culture’.) The New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research claims that from 2011 there has been a 15 per cent rise in crime involving women – a statistic that has increased twenty-one times faster than the rate of male crime. Yet, in spite of the rise in crime at the hands of the ‘fairer sex’, a woman usually has to do something incredibly bad to get a significant sentence.
If a woman is found guilty of being an evil child killer, it’s easier for society to brush it off with, ‘Well, she must be crazy’ – even if the female criminal is found to be perfectly sane. A man is more likely to be seen as ‘bad’, while a woman committing the same crime is usually written off as being ‘mad’. (Abattoir worker and murderer Katherine Knight might have had borderline personality disorder, but psychiatrists who testified in court claimed that she was not insane.)
If there’s one thing criminologists will agree on, it’s the fact that men are more likely to commit murder and to be a victim of murder than women. Usually when women kill, they take the life of a partner or a child. Yet the motivation for a woman to murder a partner is generally different from that of a man. Women are rarely motivated by jealousy or depression (the dominant themes for men); most women who kill a partner are responding to violence. Of course, there will always be exceptions of the headlinemaking kind; who could possibly forget the one that read, ‘Killer was devil’s wife with power to control minds’?
We are all capable of doing something stupid. Who’s to say some of the women in this book weren’t just having a bad day – or a bad month – and snapped? Next time we go to brand a female criminal ‘crazy’, maybe we should ask ourselves a question: how many of us, crazy or not, are just one bad day away from a catastrophe?