31

Women Serial Killers

On average there is a murder committed in Australia every day. And on average women commit one-third of them. With this in mind it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that of the thirty cases of serial murder in Australia’s history, almost a third (nine) of them involve a woman either killing on her own or murdering in tandem with a man.

The reason that this fact is so unusual is because while women who kill are commonplace, women serial killers throughout the world, especially those who murder alone, are rare in comparison to men and considerably less than Australia’s average of one in three. There seems to be no logical explanation why Australia’s average is so much higher.

‘Female serial killers are not as common in numbers as the men because the extreme violence that usually surrounds a homicide is much more common in males,’ explains Dr Rod Milton, leading Sydney forensic psychiatrist who worked on such cases as the Granny Killer murders, in which serial killer John Wayne Glover violently murdered six elderly woman on Sydney’s lower north shore in the late 1980s.

‘Women are much less violent than men and of the few that do commit serial murder, their crimes are usually more of a passive nature such as quietly poisoning their victims or suffocating babies or elderly women in hospitals where they are least likely to be caught,’ Dr Milton says.

‘Most women serial killers, for whatever reason they are killing, go about their business in a quieter, subdued, yet deadlier manner than their male counterparts. The classic example would be the 1944 movie Arsenic and Old Lace, where two old dears befriended tramps off the streets, fed them, gave them a drink and then poisoned them and buried their bodies under the house,’ Dr Milton says.

‘Mind you, they were caught, but I think there’s a lot more female serial killers out there than are given credit for,’ he added.

Statistics show that the USA has 76 per cent of the world’s serial killers, of which only approximately 15 per cent of the cases involved a female either acting alone or in partnership with a male who was almost always a lover, but very rarely a husband.

Take away the women who acted as an accomplice and you find that solo women serial killers are a very rare breed indeed, possibly as low as five per cent. And husband-and-wife serial killer teams are the rarest of them all at around two per cent.

True to form, it was the American media, where serial killer hype was first born following the coining of the term by FBI agent and serial-killer profiler Robert Ressler in the mid 1970s, that claimed Aileen Carol Wuornos, a hard-drinking, ex-convict prostitute, as the world’s first female serial killer. She murdered seven men on separate occasions by shooting them in the torso with a small-calibre handgun after they picked her up as she hitchhiked throughout Florida in 1990. But in the true sense of serial multicide, where the killer takes three or more lives over a period of time, irrespective of the method of murder, Aileen Carol Wuornos is on the end of a horrific, if not very long list of women serial killers, whose crimes date back to before the turn of the century. And a lot of them are from Australia. In that Wuornos left a trail of victims linked by bullets from the same gun and not by poison – which 45 per cent of female serial killers prefer when despatching adults – it could be said that she was the first female serial killer of adult males. She was executed by lethal injection on 9 October 2002. South African actress Charlize Theron won a Best Actress Academy Award for portraying Wuornos in the 2003 movie Monster. It’s worth a look.

It was the 1965 case of the Moors murderer, Myra Hindley, and not the Wuornos homicides, which brought women serial killers to the fore, though back in the ’60s killers of Hindley’s ilk were known as ‘mass’ or ‘spree’ murderers, which was defined in later years under the broader term of ‘multicide’.

Hindley, an attractive 24-year-old blonde office worker and her 28-year-old factory worker lover, sexual sadist Ian Brady, committed atrocities that defy comprehension. Even more so because they were against children.

On 6 October 1965, police were taken to a house by a man who had witnessed Brady and Hindley murder 17-year-old Edward Evans with fourteen blows to the skull from an axe. Inside the house in Hattersley, near Manchester, England, police found Evans’ body and two left-luggage tickets that corresponded with two suitcases left at Manchester Central railway station.

What police found in the suitcases would brand Hindley as arguably the most callous female serial killer of all time. As well as an assortment of sex and torture books, whips, coshes and other items used for perverted activities, there was a collection of photos and two tape recordings.

Some of the photos were pornographic poses of 10-year-old Leslie Anne Downey, who had gone missing on Boxing Day in 1964. Other photos were of Hindley posing next to what would turn out to be the shallow grave of 12-year-old John Kilbride, who had been missing since November 1963, and was murdered and buried on bleak Saddleworth Moor by Hindley and Brady. These photos enabled police to eventually locate not only the boy’s grave but little Lesley’s as well.

But it was the tapes that reduced hardened police to tears as they listened to the recording of Leslie Ann Downey frantically screaming: ‘Don’t – please, God help me…’ as she was sexually assaulted, tortured and eventually strangled by Hindley and Brady.

Both were sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In 1986 Hindley confessed to the murders of two other children, 12-year-old Keith Bennett and 16-year-old Pauline Reade and, almost a quarter of a century later in July 1987, Pauline Reade’s body was found on the moors where Keith Bennett’s body still lies despite massive police searches to find it.

Myra Hindley, 60, died in custody of a heart attack in November 2002. Ian Brady, now 64, is in a prison hospital for the criminally insane.

Australia’s equivalent to Myra Hindley, in that she committed serial murder with a male partner, is Western Australian housewife Catherine Birnie, who, as a 34-year-old mother of six, helped her common-law husband, labourer David Birnie, 34, abduct, rape, murder and dispose of the bodies of four women aged between 15 and 31 over a six-week period in Perth in late 1986.

At David Birnie’s instigation Catherine Birnie strangled one of the women herself and spat on the grave of another after she had led police to their burial grounds. But it was Catherine Birnie who instigated the escape of a fifth would-be victim, who fled semi-naked through an open window and alerted police.

Which begs the question: Would either of these women have committed serial murder alone if they hadn’t have been enticed into it by their partners?

‘Extremely unlikely,’ says Dr Rod Milton. ‘In these matters the women play only the secondary part, no matter the bravado they put on, and there is no way that they would have acted alone. I studied the case of husband and wife serial killers Fred and Rose West while I was in England and there is no way that she was capable of murder without him. And I believe that is applicable in most cases of serial killer couples.’

Australia’s first recorded female serial killer was petite Melbourne housewife Martha Needle, who murdered her husband, three daughters and her lover’s brother between 1885 and 1894 with deadly doses of ‘Rough on Rats’ brand rat poison in cups of tea. Martha’s motive was pure greed and every time one of her brood passed on unsuspiciously from a ‘wasting disease’, friends, neighbours and relatives couldn’t believe her unfortunate circumstances.

After hubby and the kids had gone to God and the grief-stricken 29-year-old Martha had collected a total of £466 in insurance claims, a fortune in those days, she took up with Adelaide saddler Otto Juncken, much to the disapproval of Otto’s brother Louis, whom she plied with enough arsenic in his tea to kill ten men. Louis’ other brother Herman became sus-picious of his death and, on one of his visits to Martha’s house, he too became violently ill after drinking tea and was rushed to the doctor where traces of arsenic were found in his vomit. The exhumed bodies of Louis, Henry Needle and her three daughters revealed traces of arsenic and Martha Needle went to the gallows in Melbourne on 22 October 1894.

Another infamous Australian serial poisoner was dear old Caroline ‘Aunt Carrie’ Grills, a kindly lady in her 60s who was described as ‘a person who people looked to in a time of trouble’.

In 1947 Mrs Grills murdered her despised stepmother, Christine Mickelson, by lacing her tea with the slow-acting metallic poison thallium and, in doing so, inherited her house. Then other elderly friends of the Grills family started dying mysteriously. First was 80-year-old Angeline Thomas, followed by 60-year-old John Lundberg, who died after a short illness in 1948 during which his hair fell out. Elderly Mary Anne Mickelson was next to come down with the mysterious symptoms and die. Soon after, the late John Lundberg’s widow and daughter began to lose their hair and feel lethargic.

The only thing that they all had in common was that they were all nursed by Caroline Grills, who delighted in giving them constant cups of tea. They decided to keep an eye on her and when she was seen dropping something into one of her patient’s cups of tea, the cups were swapped and a forensic examination revealed thallium.

Bodies were exhumed and showed traces of thallium. Other friends of the Grills family had died mysteriously, but their bodies had been cremated. Had they not, the death toll could have been higher than four plus two attempted murders.

Aunt Carrie was sentenced to death by hanging, which was commuted to life imprisonment, due to her age, and she died in prison in 1960 where she was known as ‘Aunt Thally’.

Martha Rendell is arguably the most sadistic female serial killer in Australia’s history. In 1906 Rendell lived with carpenter Thomas Morris and his five children, on whom she administered regular thrashings. Soon after Rendell moved in it became apparent that the once healthy and active children had become thin and sickly-looking, and easy prey to colds and other common ailments.

When the local doctor prescribed throat swabs for the children’s colds and sore throats Martha Rendell administered the treatment. Within months the two Thomas daughters were dead from what was diagnosed as the deadly bacterial disease diphtheria. A year later 14-year-old Arthur died in agony after having his throat regularly swabbed by his de-facto stepmother.

Young George Thomas was the next to fall ill, but he fled the house rather than tolerate the excruciatingly painful throat swabs. Neighbours alerted police and told them of the agony the children had gone through prior to dying. Their bodies were exhumed and a post-mortem revealed that their throats had been washed with hydrochloric acid after Rendell had first laced their drinks with acid and swabbed their throats with more of the same.

On 6 October 1909 Martha Rendell became the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia.

Frances Knorr made ‘baby minding’ a profitable business. Not from tending the infants, but from murdering them. In Melbourne in the 1890s it was frowned upon to be a single mother and it was common practice to put the unwanted child in the care of ‘child-minders’ on a full-time basis and pay a monthly fee. It didn’t take Frances Knorr long to realise that it was much more profitable if she simply collected the child-minding fees each month and didn’t have to feed or tend to the infants. The obvious answer was murder.

In July 1893, the new tenant of a house in Melbourne’s Brunswick was digging in the backyard when he unearthed the remains of one girl and two baby boys. An autopsy revealed that one had been strangled and the other two had been suffocated.

The previous resident, Frances Knorr, now living in Sydney, was arrested and extradited to Melbourne, charged with the murders, tried and sentenced to death by hanging, much to the delight of the huge crowds that gathered outside the courthouse during her trial. She was to become the first woman hanged in Victoria in 30 years.

However, as the hanging day approached, the hangman, Thomas Jones, not altogether at ease with the prospect of hanging a woman, took to the bottle and two days before the hanging date took his own life by cutting his throat. A replacement was quickly found and on the morning of 15 January 1894, the despised baby killer Frances Knorr hummed hymns as she dropped to her death in Pentridge Prison.

Given the period of time that Frances Knorr was in the child-minding business, and the amount of women who clandestinely came forward and told police that they had given her their babies, it is believed that she could have murdered as many as 13 of the unfortunate infants.

In 1892 the bodies of 12 infants were found buried in the backyard of a house in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale. The previous tenants, Sarah and John Makin and their four daughters, were quickly rounded up and all were charged with the murders of the babies. It turned out that the Makins were also ‘baby farmers’ who had chosen to murder the bubs in their care, yet still go on accepting money from their wretched mothers. The Makin children escaped retribution, but John Makin was hanged and his evil missus did 19 years in jail before disappearing into oblivion.

In Perth, Western Australia, from 1900 to 1906, another child minder, middle-aged Alice Mitchell, was responsible for the deaths of at least 37 babies who were left in her care for the fee of five shillings a week.

When a mother of one of the dead babies complained to police, they visited Mitchell’s child-minding centre to find soiled napkins were heaped in a huge bundle in the corner, flies massed on the sores on the children’s eyes and maggots crawled over filthy, soiled bedsheets. Those toddlers who could walk or crawl were allowed into the fowl yard where they were left to immerse themselves in the mud and droppings.

Police also discovered that in the six years from 1900, 37 infants had died in homes managed by her – and they were only the ones on record. Police could only assume that there were many more unrecorded children who had either died of starvation, dehydration or disease, or had been murdered by Alice Mitchell.

Extraordinarily, Alice Mitchell escaped the charge of wilful murder and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment with hard labour for manslaughter.

Every parent’s nightmare was Helen Patricia Moore who, in Sydney between May 1979 and early 1980, suffocated a 16-month-old and a two-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy, and attempted to murder two other infant boys, aged one and two, by suffocating them while they were in her care as a babysitter. Helen Moore was just 17 at the time of the killings.

Moore was caught when she was asked about scratches on her hands and her victim’s face after the seven-year-old had supposedly fallen down the stairs and died. She willingly confessed to her crimes. Helen Patricia Moore was sentenced to life imprisonment and was released in 1993, after serving her minimum term of almost 14 years in prison. She was placed on parole until 2005 and one of the conditions of her release was that she was forbidden to be in the company of any child under the age of 16 without supervision.

Helen Moore complicated matters somewhat when, in late March 1995, aged 33, she gave birth to a daughter, Lauren. Moore said that she had no intention of having anything further to do with the father of the baby, who she claimed was one of her first lovers.

Confronted with what to do in such an unprecedented circumstance, the Parole Board eventually decided that both mother and baby must be kept under 24-hour supervision in their home and that the baby must never be left alone with the mother at any time during the parole period. In 1995 the supervision ended when the parole period expired. Helen Moore and her daughter, by then aged 10, then began a new life together somewhere in Australia.

The last recorded case of serial murder by a female in Australia is that of Kathleen Folbigg who, like Helen Moore, murdered children. But unlike Helen Moore, the children were Kathleen Folbigg’s own.

Born Kathleen Megan Marlborough, she was just 18 months old in 1969 when her father fatally stabbed her mother 24 times in the street outside their suburban Sydney home. Kathleen was placed in an orphanage and fostered out at the age of three to a family who lived in Newcastle.

Kathleen left school in 1982, when she was just 15. With limited education, she moved from one minimum-wage job to another before marrying 25-year-old steel worker Craig Folbigg at the age of 20. Their first child, a son named Caleb, was born in February 1989. The child was dead just 20 days later. The official cause of death was listed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

Kathleen gave birth to another son, Patrick, in June 1990. At 3.30am on 19 October 1990, Craig woke to the sound of his wife screaming. Rushing in to the infant’s room to find his wife standing over Patrick’s cot, Craig noticed that the small child was still breathing, albeit faintly. The distressed father administered CPR until an ambulance arrived. According to a police statement, ‘Patrick regained consciousness, but was [later] found to now have epilepsy and be blind.’

The infant lived another four months. On the morning of 13 February 1991 young Patrick was taken to hospital, but was dead on arrival. According to an autopsy, an epileptic fit resulted in death by an ‘acute asphyxiating event’.

The Folbigg’s next child, a daughter, Sarah, was born in October 1992. Sarah was healthy and happy for the first 11 months of her life. Then Kathleen said she got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and discovered her daughter in the bed, deceased. The official cause of death was once again put down to SIDS, although the chairman of the world SIDS organis-ation, who conducted the post-mortem, noticed small abrasions on Sarah’s chin, as well as ‘something unusual’ about her throat.

Kathleen and Craig moved to Singleton in the Hunter Valley and two years later their fourth child, Laura, was born in August 1997. On 1 March 1999 Kathleen called an ambulance after Laura allegedly stopped breathing. The medical team arrived but it was too late. An autopsy found that the child was too old to have died from SIDS. The cause of death was recorded as ‘undetermined’. A police investigation was ordered. Detective Sergeant Bernie Ryan was assigned to lead the case. When he learnt that Laura was the fourth Folbigg child to die in similar circumstances, alarm bells rang.

By this time Kathleen had left Craig. When Craig found Kathleen’s diaries in the house the case took a major turn. Many of the entries were of major concern. The pages were filled with Kathleen’s doubts about her skills as a mother and concerns about her inability to breastfeed, despite repeated attempts with all four children. More worrying were the stories of how stress ‘made her do terrible things’, and that she felt ‘flashes of rage, resentment and hatred’ towards her children.

Once authorities saw the diaries they decided they did indeed have a murder case on their hands. Still, it wouldn’t be an easy case to prove. Detective Ryan took two years getting an argument together that he believed would provide a conviction. On 19 April 2001 Kathleen Megan Folbigg was arrested and charged with murdering her four children.

At the two-month trial at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Supreme Court, the circumstantial evidence was plentiful and damning. The prosecution portrayed Kathleen as a woman ‘preoccupied with her own life and looks, more interested in going to the gym and nightclubs than in looking after her own children’, and asserted that Kathleen murdered her four infant children by smothering them because she couldn’t deal with her parental responsibilities.

It took the jury just under eight hours to find Kathleen Megan Folbigg guilty of murdering three of her four children and the manslaughter of the other. She was taken to Mulawa Women’s Detention Centre and placed in protective isolation away from the other prisoners, who would kill her in a heartbeat. A lot of them were mothers. In August 2002 Kathleen Folbigg returned to court and was sentenced to 40 years in prison with a nonparole period of 30 years.

On 17 February 2005, in the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal, Justice Brian Sully reduced Kathleen Folbigg’s maximum sentence by ten years and her nonparole period by five years. Her minimum sentence became 25 years and she will be due for parole in 2028.