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THE NATURE OF THE FEMININE BEAST

The Psychopathology of Female Monsters

How and why? How do females become serial killers and why do they kill? The why is easy: They can kill for the same reasons that male serial killers do: for power, for control, for sexual lust, for profit, for thrills, for self-esteem, for revenge and madness.

But there are some notable differences. Male serial killers frequently commit kidnapping, confinement, rape, and mutilation to express their rage and desire for control; female serial killers usually throw themselves straight into the kill—no stopping for mutilation or for a bite along the way. No polaroids or masturbation at the scene or sex with the corpse.* The female serial killer is all business…and it’s murder. In that sense she is infinitely deadlier than the fantasy-driven male predators.

HOW FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS ARE DEADLIER THAN MALES

Male serial killers can sometimes actually overlook killing some of their victims, because murder is not always a central part of their fantasy. Their fantasy could be to dominate their victim through physical and sexual assault without murder necessarily being a part of it. Once their assault is exhausted for the time being, the victim is of no further interest to the offender—dead or alive. If the victim survived the physical assault, the offender might kill to avoid having a witness to the assault or rape. The offender may kill the victim out of shame. Or not kill at all. A few might even trip-out on the power of granting mercy.

Richard Cottingham in the late 1970s, for example, left the horribly mutilated and dismembered corpses of street prostitutes in hotel and motel rooms after drugging and torturing them for hours; he chopped the heads and hands off some of his victims.54 How can anyone survive a homicidal maniac like that? But some women did, regaining consciousness by a roadside or on motel room floors, bruised and battered but alive. Why? He did not kill them because they did not die in his attack. Simple as that. He never set out to kill them—only to torture and humiliate them. But once he was done, they did not matter—dead or alive, they were just garbage to him. So he dumped them—some dead, some living. Some died in the process; they weren’t strong enough to take it—skinny street girls all jacked up on nothing but Coke and chips. Those that he mutilated, he did so not for pleasure, but to destroy their identities—severing their heads and hands not as souvenirs, but to impede the investigation. Of the ones he chose to kill he did so to coldly eliminate witnesses. It was a necessary task and not a pleasure for him.

Occasionally some victims survive the male serialist’s post-cathartic flagging interest or vague and sudden remorse. Sometimes it could be what the victim says or does that deflects an attacker’s intent to kill. When I wrote about male serial killers, I concluded with a chapter on how to improve the chances of surviving a serial killer based on accounts from surviving victims and on explanations offered by killers themselves as to why they let some of their victims live. There will be no such concluding chapter for female serial killers.

Other than those victims who survived by some twist of angel-borne luck, there are almost no accounts from survivors of female serial killers. Women killers do not change their minds once they make the decision to murder and they rarely go through any kind of fantasy torture ritual on the way there—they go straight for the kill. (Although female serial poisoners have been known to prolong the deaths of some of their victims by manipulating dosages of poison, the reasons why have never been conclusively determined.)

Female serial killers rarely, unless accompanied by a male partner, kidnap and rape their victims. Female serial killers rarely if ever kill to harvest the corpse or some body part of their victim for their own hedonistic lust. They almost never capture, bind, confine, and torture their victims before killing them. The female serial killer’s gratification begins with the victim’s death and often continues for days, weeks, and months afterwards. While for many serial killers death is only a conclusion to their fantasy or a function of it, females kill to kill. It is their mode of expression.

One frequent reason given by male serial killers as to why they did not kill a particular victim is because they learned something about them. This triggers a personalization of the victim in the offender’s perception and misdirects their killing desire. This phenomenon reflects the proclivity of male serial killers to target strangers whom they objectify, imposing their own lethal fantasy upon them. Yet if they come to somehow see the victim for who they really are, the fantasy can be interrupted.

According to FBI behaviorists, the best way of surviving a serial killer’s attack is to attempt to talk to them and let them get to know you as a person, to deflate the serial killer’s fantasy construct of you as their victim.

None of this is going to help the victim of a typical female serial killer. First, it is probable that the female killer is already intimately familiar with her victim: She is working, living, or sleeping with them. She already knows who they really are—there is no victim fantasy.

Second, the victims are unlikely to realize that they are in danger as the female often uses the cover of the established killer-victim relationship within which to kill—nurses kill patients, mothers kill their children, wives kill their husbands, landladies kill their tenants. Thus the attack occurs in accepted social and professional relationships while the means is often surreptitious like poison or a drug overdose or sudden suffocation. The murder is invisible and the body is usually found where it belongs, not dumped by a roadside or in a shallow grave.

Finally, as the female serial killer does not bother with torture or rituals but goes straight to the kill, there is rarely time for the unsuspecting victims to respond if they even realize they are in danger. Who expects a wife, lover, mother, or daughter might try to kill them? This is what made Aileen Wuornos so different: She was targeting strangers, killing them almost as soon as she met them.

With some female serial killers you might not find out you are being murdered, until you are dead. You just get a little too sick and weak for your age and the next evening suddenly you can’t speak or move and when the night comes you die in the dark in your own snot behind a closed door with nothing but the sound of your own congested whimpering to comfort you. It all appears to be of natural causes—nobody will even suspect you were murdered. Two phone calls and three hours later a night shift will lift and wheel your pronounced body away and by morning you will be prepped for embalming. There can be no lonelier way to die than that.

MURDER AS THE FEMALE SIGNATURE

The “signature” is the opposite of the MO—the modus operandi, or method used in committing the crime. Profilers carefully differentiate crime scene characteristics between signature and MO.

The MO is what the serial killer needs to do to accomplish the crime—pose as a repairperson, force a window open, offer a hitchhiker a ride, use a weapon to gain control, wear a mask, wash evidence away, perhaps dismember a corpse for ease of disposal, set a fire to destroy evidence. The MO usually changes—it improves as time passes because serial murder is very much a learning process. Over time, serial killers need to improve their tactics because as they repeatedly murder they increasingly raise their risk of apprehension. At the same time, they are also driven by an addiction to narrow the margin between their fantasy and reality—between the intense pleasure of the fantasy and the dissatisfaction they feel with its reality. They can never satisfactorily bridge their act with their desire. They need to try it again, but better. For all these reasons, serial killers are fantasy-driven killing machines fueled on both need and desire—pragmatism and madness.

Serial killing requires a certain kind of studious discipline. And some can show it out of the gate, but four years is usually as far as the males get. Four years can often be equally the odds for successfully sustaining a marriage, business, or partnership—undertakings at least as challenging as serial murder. So the MO needs to change and evolve from murder to murder, increasing the odds of surviving those four years.

Signature is the opposite of the MO in that it is what the offender does not need to do to complete the murder. For example, to bind a victim who is not resisting, to torture a victim who is cooperating, to pose the body in some particular way, to dismember the corpse for purposes other than ease of disposal, to take a trophy or souvenir, deliberately leave behind some kind of message or clue. While the MO defines how the murder was done, the signature is often the key to why and it rarely changes through the years.

The female serial killer, on the other hand, usually leaves the same simple signature—the actual murder. Sometimes the murder itself is misinterpreted as part of the female serial killer’s MO leading to categorizations such as Black Widow or Angel of Death. The murder is seen as a method to attain other goals—profit usually the most often cited motive. On closer examination, though, murder is often entirely unnecessary for the attainment of the goals. There are easier and safer ways to steal than murdering someone. Why kill then?

That is not a helpful question to ask. Because when we say “easier to steal” without killing we put a different value on human life. For a female serialist a human life is as valuable as a used tissue. It actually is easier for them. The hedonistic comfort of material gain outweighs the price of human life.

But many kill because that is what they want to do the most.

It’s about the pleasure of the kill—the sense of power she gets—the buzz. Taking property is just a warm snack in the feast of control—a little further satisfaction, a tingling in the killer’s tummy.

That’s how murder happens for cigarettes or pennies.

Many Black Widows actually kill for motives far more complex than simple material profit—rage and need for control often super-cede the desire for material gain.

However, none of this is particularly helpful for profiling female serial killers by crime scene analysis because often there is no crime scene to analyze. There is no scene because nobody knows a crime has occured. The female killer rarely surfaces as an “unsub”—an “unknown subject” in FBI profiler parlance—because she is so often already known and somehow related to the victim. That is, if someone realizes that there is a victim—because for a long time there’s a good chance that nobody will.

SURVEYING SERIAL KILLERS MALE AND FEMALE

Between 1979 and 1983, FBI agents from the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) conducted intimate and detailed interviews in prisons with thirty-six convicted male sex murderers, of whom twenty-nine were serial killers.55 They were exhaustively questioned, from their earliest childhood recollections to the most horrifying details of their crimes and motives.

The families, friends, and acquaintances of the killers were also extensively interviewed, as were their surviving victims. The BSU also made a detailed study of the 118 victims who didn’t survive: their occupations, their lifestyles, vital statistics, where they encountered their killers, their autopsies, and the conditions in which their bodies were found.

No equivalent study of this type currently exists for female serial killers. The closest thing to it is a similar study attempted by Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, who approached 26 incarcerated female multiple murderers and secured the cooperation of seven.56 Not all of the seven were serial killers—at least one, and maybe more, was a mass killer, torturing and murdering five victims on a single night. One major difference between male and female serial killers that can be noted immediately is that females tend not to favor discussing their crimes and lives with researchers, while male serial killers are quite chatty and eager to talk.

The seven offenders in the Schurman-Kauflin survey killed a total of 36 victims—an average of 5.14 victims per killer; a much higher figure than the 3.8 victims on average of the 29 serial murderers in the FBI study. (Assuming that the other 7 offenders in the FBI study killed one victim each.)

A study by Eric Hickey at California State University, Fresno, is probably the most comprehensive statistical study on the subject, analyzing the data on serial killers in the U.S. between 1800–1995. Hickey identified 337 male serial killers with an accumulated range of victims estimated between 2,613 and 3,807: an average of between 7.8 and 11.3 victims per male killer in the low and high estimates.57 The same study found 62 female serialists attributed with a range of total victims between 417 and 584, with an average of 6.7 and 9.4 victims each.58 The high-end estimate of average victims for female serial killers exceeds the low-end estimate for males.

But just to illustrate how little we know precisely about female serial killers, another data study of 14 female serial killers identified 62 potential victims: an average of 4.4 per offender.59 (But the women were actually convicted of killing 27 victims. Frequently in serial murder prosecutions, particularly those committed in several jurisdictions, the serial offender is not tried for all the murders they are known to have committed. This further confounds statistical analysis.)

AVERAGE AGE

The average age of the male serial killer when he first murders is 27.5 years.60 This is consistent with the onset of acute psychopathy in adolescence and its relationship to the offender’s isolation and evolution of aggressive sexual fantasies during their adolescence, teens, and early twenties.

In their study of female serialists, B. T. Keeney and K. Heide found that the average killing starting age for women was 32.9 years, with the youngest offender 19 and the oldest 53.61 Schurman-Kauflin determined a similar average age of 32.5 with an age range of offenders from 17 to 58 years old.62 Thus females are likely to start killing at a later age and continue killing beyond middle age, with some females killing when they are in their sixties and even seventies. Male serial killers rarely kill once they are over forty, which has been linked to the apparent diminishment of the effects of psychopathy in middle age. It appears that while middle age renders the male killer docile, menopause galvanizes the female into murderous action.

But just when we think we have the female serial killers pegged in age, along comes an anomaly like eleven-year-old Mary Bell in England. In May of 1968, little Mary strangled a four-year-old boy after luring him into an abandoned building. The boy’s body was discovered the same day but police concluded that his death was accidental. The next day, Mary attempted to strangle an eleven-year-old girl, but was interrupted by the girl’s father who ejected her out of the house. It never dawned on the father that Mary was seriously attempting to murder his daughter. Nobody suspected the little girl.

Mary knocked on the door of the house where the little dead boy once lived and asked to see him. When the parents told Mary that the boy was dead, she replied, “Oh, I know he’s dead, I wanted to see him in his coffin.”

Nine weeks later, accompanied by another girl, Mary strangled a three-year-old boy, stabbed him in the stomach with a pair of broken scissors, and after failing in her attempt to castrate him with them, carved her initial “M” into his abdomen. His body was found between some concrete blocks on a piece of wasteland. When Mary began accusing other children of having committed the murder, suspicion fell on her. After being awakened in the night and taken away for questioning by police, the eleven-year-old boldly refused to answer questions and demanded that the astonished detectives call a lawyer for her before she would say anything further.

Mary Bell was convicted of manslaughter with “diminished responsibility” by the English jury that heard her case. She was sentenced in 1969 to detention for an indeterminate period of time in psychiatric facilities.

Mary Bell’s mother had a psychiatric record and was seventeen when she gave birth to Mary. A prostitute, she often abandoned Mary with relatives and once attempted to give her up for adoption. In 1998, in interviews with author Gitta Sereny, the now adult Mary Bell claimed that she was forced by her mother to have oral sex with her clients when she was a child.

Mary was described as highly intelligent and manipulative. She told a policewoman guarding her that she wanted to be a nurse so that she could stick needles into people. “I like hurting people.” During her trial, Mary said, “If I was a judge and I had an eleven-year-old who’d done this, I’d give her eighteen months. Murder isn’t that bad. We all die sometime anyway.”63

Mary Bell was released at the age of twenty-three in 1980 and had a daughter in 1984, whom she fought authorities to keep, and apparently raised as a loving mother. She lives today in anonymity enforced by a British high court order in 2003, prohibiting the press from disclosing her or her daughter’s current location and identities. She remains the youngest known serial killer in history.

VICTIM SELECTION

Victim selection is different for male and female serial killers. Historically, at least 70 percent of male serial killers murder strangers only, while another 16 percent kill a combination of strangers with acquaintances or family. Some 8 percent of males murder acquaintances only and 3 percent family only.64

This contrasts with the 34 percent of female serialists who kill family only and 19 percent who killed acquaintances only. At least one stranger was murdered by 32 percent of female serial killers and strangers only were targeted by 24 percent. At least one family member was killed by 50 percent of all female serial killers and at least one acquaintance by 35 percent.65 This basically confirms that female serial killers tend to historically target victims with whom they are intimate or acquainted.

But the percentage of victims who are strangers to the female serial killer has been increasing since 1975 and strangers are now marginally the most preferred category for female serial killers: a total of 24 to 30 percent of victims are strangers compared to 22 and 25 percent of victims who are family followed by 11 and 15 percent who are acquaintances.66

In terms of victim-type selection, male serial killers prefer young, unaccompanied females as their first choice for victim in both stranger and acquaintance murders, followed by, in order of preference: male children, female children, travelers, and young unaccompanied males. For female serial killers, historically husbands and their children are first choice as victims, followed by friends, male suitors, in-laws, mothers, patients in hospitals or nursing homes, and tenants.


TABLE 1. Percentage of Offenders Killing Only One Type of Victim (1800–1995)



TABLE 2. Percentage of Offenders Killing At Least One Type of Victim (1800–1995)



Essentially we see that male serial killers tend to victimize young adult women while females tend to kill both female and male adults, with a marginal preference for males and children. The female serial killer also frequently prefers elderly victims in contrast to the male killer.

MURDER SITE

While only 10 percent of male serial killers are “place specific”—killing between 16 and 19 percent of serial victims at one location to which they would lure the victims or find them there—32 percent of female serial killers are place specific: killing at their home or a health-care facility, for example. The victims went to female serialists either by being lured or by chance and accounted for 42 percent of all their victims. The average number of victims per place-specific female killer was the highest, between 9 and 13.67

Local female serial killers, who killed at different locations within the same city or state, accounted for a larger proportion of offenders, 45 percent, but for fewer victims—between 33 and 35 percent of victims. These killers also had a lower average of victims: 6 to 8 victims each. (Local male serial killers represented 55 percent accounting for 45 to 48 percent of victims.)

Migratory or traveling female serial killers represented a lesser total of 23 percent of offenders, killing between 23 and 24 percent of victims but with a higher average kill rate of 7 to 10 victims each. (Migratory males made up 35 percent of male serial killers and killed 36 to 37 percent of all victims.)

WEAPON OF CHOICE

As the most frequent source of prepared meals and drinks, the female serial killer’s overwhelming choice of method of death is poison. At least 45 percent of females used poison sometimes, and 35 percent only poison. Some shooting was used by 20 percent of female serial killers; some bludgeoning by 16 percent; some suffocation by 16 percent; some stabbing by 11 percent; and some drowning by 5 percent. Only suffocation was used by 11 percent; only shooting by 8 percent; and only stabbing by 2 percent. Some combination of the above-described methods was used by 33 percent of female serial killers.

Most evident was the contrast between the male’s use of force, weapons, ropes, chains, duct tape, and other forms of restraint to incapacitate and render victims helpless compared to the female’s preference for victims who are already helpless or unsuspecting—children, the elderly or sick—or for the use of a surreptitious means of murder such as poison, drugs, or suffocation while the victim is asleep or unconscious.

FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS COMPARED TO SINGULAR FEMALE MURDERERS

There are evident differences between female serial murderers and “ordinary” female singular killers who killed only once.

A study of all incarcerated female murderers found that on average 77 percent were unemployed when they committed their offense, 65 percent were African-American, and 76 percent had children. Their median age was 27.68 The average female murderer is young, poor, and often kills in a socioeconomic environment where interpersonal violence is more frequent and part of the street culture of respect and intimidation.

The statistics for female serial killers are substantially different: 95 percent were white, their median age was 30, and only 8 percent were known to be unemployed while 10 percent were professionals, 5 percent were skilled workers, 15 percent were semiskilled, 10 percent unskilled, and 11 percent were other, such as self-employed or business proprietors (and 41 percent unknown).69 Their higher socioeconomic class, where interpersonal violence is less the norm, suggests some kind of psychopathology behind their killing. These frequently middle-class female serial killers contemplated and planned their murders carefully, far from the pressures of the street.

The apparent motives of female serial killers are substantially different from those of the female singular killer. On average, 74 percent of female serial killers in this study appeared to be at least in part motivated by personal financial gain, both a sad reflection on the aspirations of the middle-class but also a behavioral artifact of those who desire to control their victim after death by seizing their property.70

COMPARING MALE WITH FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS AS CHILDREN

The FBI study found that male sexual and serial killers often came from unstable family backgrounds where infant bonding was likely to be disrupted. Only 57 percent of killers had both parents at birth and 47 percent had their father leave before the age of twelve. A mother as the dominant parent was reported in 66 percent of the cases and 44 percent reported having a negative relationship with their mother. A negative relationship with the father or male parental figure was reported by 72 percent of convicted male sex killers.

Of ten female serial killers for whom childhood data was available in the Keeney-Heide study, 40 percent were adopted by nonrelatives, 40 percent were raised in nontraditional homes composed of some relatives and nonrelatives, and only 20 percent were raised in traditional families by both biological parents until the age of 18.71

The history of the parents had also a great role to play in the child’s future. A Washington School of Medicine study found that biological children of parents with criminal records are four times as likely to commit criminal acts themselves as adults—even if they have been adopted by law-abiding parents! The FBI study showed that 50 percent of the male offenders came from parents with criminal pasts and 53 percent from families with psychiatric histories.72

Schurman-Kauflin’s study indicated 71 percent of her female multiple killers came from families with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. However, only 14 percent had parents with a criminal or psychiatric history—but that only represents one out of seven females in the study, so it is impossible to draw reliable percentile conclusions here.

CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

Many male serial killers had truly traumatic childhoods: 42 percent reported physical abuse, 74 percent psychological abuse, while 35 percent reported witnessing sexual violence as children, and 43 percent reported being sexually abused themselves. “Sexually stressful events” were reported by 73 percent of sex killers and 50 percent admitted that their first rape fantasies began between the age of twelve and fourteen.

A full 100 percent (7/7) of female multiple killers in the Keeney-Heide study reported physical, psychological, and sexual abuse in their childhood and 71 percent in their adolescence. Four women (57 percent) identified nonrelatives as their abusers while another two women (29 percent) identified relatives. The study found data for eight female serial killers, five of whom reported sexual abuse (63 percent), which in the case of four women occurred before the age of 18; four reported physical abuse (50 percent), and two reported witnessing sexual abuse or violence in their family (25 percent).

THE MACDONALD TRIAD: CRUELTY TO ANIMALS, ARSON, BED-WETTING

Cruelty to animals, fire setting, and bed-wetting are a behavioral set (called the Macdonald triad) that is most often identified with the childhood histories of serial killers. The appearance of all three behaviors in a child could signal a higher likelihood of a future violent adult. One of the most common childhood attributes of serial killers is the torture and killing of animals. The FBI study indicated that 36 percent of male subjects displayed cruelty to animals in their childhood and 46 percent by the time they were adolescents.

There appears to be no studies of childhood history of the triad per se in female serialists but the Schurman-Kauflin study reports acts of cruelty to animals in her female subjects. Two women reported hanging cats, one drowned them, two strangled them, and one reported eviscerating a cat with a knife. The remaining woman in the study reported killing her mother’s small terrier with rocks.

THE NATURE OF AGGRESSION IN GIRLS

One of the reasons that we might not see the manifestation of the classic behavioral triad in women as children and adolescents is that female aggression takes a different form in young girls and continues to do so into adulthood as well. Females often commit aggression through others—by manipulating others to commit a violent act or manipulating the circumstances around an intended victim leading to their exposure to harm.

Newly emerging studies of female violence in various societies, both primitive and modern, reveal that preschool-age girls are as violent as their brothers. They are equally prepared to push and punch and use physical force to achieve their goals. But when they reach the age of ten or eleven it appears that females become less physically aggressive.

This does not mean that females are no longer aggressive at that age, but that their aggression begins to take a different form than it does in males. In the male a public display of aggressive prowess is encouraged, while the female begins to use her newly acquired linguistic and social skills to practice aggression surreptitiously. Females begin to use indirect or “masked” aggression, manipulating others to attack or somehow using the social structure to harm their intended victim.73 The use of gossiping, exchanging derogatory notes, and excluding a victim from groups, the forming of hate clubs and recently hate websites are common media for adolescent female aggression and sometimes these forms can lead to serious physical repercussions.

Anthropologist Ilsa Glazer observed that in both Zambia and Israel, female leaders tended to scapegoat and gossip about other ambitious subordinate women in an attempt to exclude them from power. In nearby Palestine, where often women are murdered by their fathers or brothers to “defend family honor,” Glazer discovered that the killing was actually instigated by women who first insistently spread accusatory gossip, which spurred the men to act.74 In North American youth gangs, girls sometimes instigate violence by deliberately calculated acts of “bad-mouthing” that compel their boyfriends to commit acts of violence. This kind of evidence points to a longer-standing notion of female “masked criminality” where as an offender the woman is perceived as instigating and inspiring violence rather than partaking in it directly.75

OBESITY, LONELINESS, AND FANTASIES IN FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

Schurman-Kauflin further reports that 100 percent of the female offenders she interviewed reported childhood obesity and 43 percent reported teenaged acne. Today, obesity is all too common but when these women were growing up it could have, along with the acne, contributed more severely to their social isolation.

And social isolation—loneliness—might be arguably the most common characteristic of the childhood of serial killers. Male or female. It is in their isolation from playmates and peers that future serial killers begin to dwell upon violent fantasies of revenge and domination so closely linked to their lack of self-esteem. And fantasy appears to be a key factor. The FBI study of male sexual murderers rejected the notion that they murdered as a defensive-reactive response to extremely abusive experiences in their life. What troubled the FBI analysts was the fact that not all the serial killers they were interviewing suffered severe abuse in childhood. The FBI concluded that serial murderers “programmed” or conditioned themselves in childhood to become murderers in a progressively intensifying loop of fantasies. The most common childhood trait of serial killers, which also extends into adolescence and adulthood, is daydreaming and compulsive masturbation. As defined in the study, daydreaming is “any cognitive activity representing a shift of attention away from a task.” Fantasy is defined as an elaborate thought with great preoccupation, sometimes expressed as images, or feelings only, anchored in the daydreaming process.76 The study found that 82 percent of offenders reported daydreaming in their childhood. An equal 82 percent reported compulsive masturbation (probably accompanying the daydreams.)77 When the offenders reached their adolescence and then their adulthood, there was only a one percent drop in their daydreaming and compulsive masturbation.

Fantasies serve to relieve anxiety or fear and almost everybody has them to one degree or another. A child that is abused may understandably develop aggressive fantasies in which the child develops a power and means by which he or she can destroy the tormentor. But the trigger of these fantasies does not necessarily need to be an extraordinarily abusive or violent event—relatively common events such as parental divorce, family illness, or even rejection by a friend can all give a child a sense of loss of control, anxiety, and fear, and may as a result spark aggressive fantasies as a method of coping with the stress.

It is only at this point that the other factors noted in the serial killers’ childhood take effect. The child that lacks bonding and contact with others will internalize fantasy and cloud the boundary between fantasy and reality. Living in a private world the child begins to repeat and elaborate on fantasy, finding comfort while continually narrowing the perimeters between fantasy and reality. Of the killers interviewed in the FBI study, 71 percent reported a sense of isolation in their childhood. As they grew into adolescence, the sense of isolation apparently increased to 77 percent of subjects.78 Such increased social isolation only encourages a reliance on fantasy as a substitute for human encounters. Schurman-Kauflin reported that 100 percent of her female subjects recalled being isolated from others in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood and that their time alone was spent engaging in violent fantasies.

The individual’s personality development becomes dependent on the fantasy life and its themes rather than on social interaction. The total escape and control that the child has in the fantasy world becomes addicting, especially if there are continued stresses in the child’s life.

If the particular fantasy involves violence, revenge, or murder, they become part of that addiction and when combined with masturbation, a sexual component to the fantasy is developed. This process is a form of deeply rooted conditioning where the repeated pairing of fantasized cues with orgasm results in the acquisition of sexually arousing properties. Violence and the sexual drive become merged into a murderous obsession, which often is kept secret. As one unnamed killer in the FBI study said, “Nobody bothered to find out what my problem was, and nobody knew about the fantasy world.”

We have scant data on the fantasy life of female serial killers and no or few studies of the relationship between fantasy and masturbation in female adolescents. Nonetheless, the seven women in Schurman-Kauflin’s study reported homicidal fantasies in their childhood. The study reports that fantasy appears as a critical component of the female killer’s childhood and suggests that not only does it result from social isolation, but contributes to it as well. According to Schurman-Kauflin, at least one of her subjects reported being aware of the inappropriateness of her murderous fantasies toward others and as a result further isolated herself from social contact.79 This, of course, confirms the nondelusional nature of female serial killers: They are highly aware of the character of their fantasies.

Schurman-Kauflin reports that many of the women reported at first simple and vague fantasies involving the murder of another human being. These fantasies included a specific method of killing. Five reported they fantasized strangling or suffocating their victims, one reported shooting, while the remaining subject refused to discuss the specifics of her fantasies. In the early stages of these fantasies, no identifiable individual figured in them. The fantasy victims were generically identified: children, men, the elderly, women, etc. But after months of this generic fantasizing, the women reported that they began to fixate on a specific individual, usually somebody they knew.80

The closer the women came to killing, the more detailed and elaborate the fantasies became. The fantasy eventually incorporated the actual MO to be used to ensure that the murder would not be detected and that the evidence would be destroyed. The fantasy became increasingly violent, detailed, repetitive, and intrusive until it gradually became a plan. When there was nothing further to elaborate on, the offender would proceed to the next stage—the realization of the homicidal fantasies.

Several of the women in the study admitted to careful research in forensic pathology, investigative procedures, and criminal psychology. They reported feeling a rise in self-esteem with the success of their multiple murders: They were doing something nobody else could.

Eventually, in a pattern typical for all serial killers, the problems of their daily life would submerge the euphoria they were experiencing in the wake of their successful murder. They would sink back into depression and isolation and return to their fantasies to seek solace. And the killing cycle would begin again.

Schurman-Kauflin’s study is problematic: She only had seven subjects, which skews the percentile figure by a huge 14 percent for each subject. Moreover, not all of her subjects were serial killers—at least one if not more was a mass killer, which involves a totally different psychological dynamic more akin with suicide than with serial murder.

The Keeney-Heide study is also problematic as it relies on records and media reports to collect its data on female offenders. These studies of female serial killers, however, are the best we have, and nothing for females currently approaches the study the FBI conducted when its agents extensively interviewed the twenty-nine male serial killers.

Despite this lack of parity between male and female studies, gender issues should not entirely obscure our understanding of women serial killers. While there are some significant differences, much of the psychopathology of female serial killers is similar to that of male killers—what we know about males can often be applied to understanding female serialists as well.

THE MAKING OF SERIAL KILLERS

We know that an overwhelming majority of serial killers experienced traumatic childhoods usually in the form of physical and sexual abuse. This applies to males as equally as females (with the exception of female partners of males). This observation is not intended to defend the serial killer—lots of children are abused and do not become serial killers. The point is that abused children can develop psychological states that facilitate the emergence of a serial killer—psychopathy in particular, which will be discussed below in more detail.

A history of chaotic and unstable family life is common to a majority of serial killers. Most serial killers come from broken homes with frequent parental histories of drug and alcohol abuse and criminality.

Along with abuse, an early disruption of an infant’s physical and emotional attachment to its mother and even father can also result in lifelong behavioral disorders. There are cases of adopted children who are raised in apparently loving and stable families who nonetheless become serial killers. Irreparable damage had already occurred prior to adoption when the child was an infant. But again, none of these factors alone sufficiently explains the mind of a serial killer because there are hundreds of thousands of adopted children who do not become killers.

Brain injuries can cause violent behavioral patterns and many serial killers have a history of head injuries when they were children or recent injuries prior to the onset of killing. But again, this is not the cause alone of their murderous behavior—already other behavioral problems are frequently present. Most people who sustain head injuries do not become killers.

Serial killers frequently test positive for abnormal levels of chemicals in their body associated with depression or compulsive behavior, such as monoamine oxidase (MAO) and serotonin. Other biochemical or physiological conditions in serial killers have included cortical underarousal, EEG abnormalities,81 the presence of an extra Y chromosome* and high levels of kryptopyrrole—“hidden fiery oil” (or bile)—a rare biochemical marker sometimes found in severe mental dysfunctions: a natural human organic metabolite with a chemical structure resembling man-made substances similar to LSD.82

There is also evidence suggesting that there might be some type of congenital genetic abnormalities resulting in brain damage common to many serial killers. One study found twenty-three physical abnormalities common to serial killers, including: bulbous fingertips, fine or electric wire hair that will not comb down, hair whorls, head circumference outside a normal range, malformed ears, curved fifth finger, high-steepled palate, singular transverse palmer crease, third toe is longer than second toe or equal in length to second toe, and abnormalities in teeth and skin texture.83

Finally, loneliness, an inability to form attachments with peers, social rejection, and isolation combined with the emergence of violent fantasies also characterize the childhoods of most serial killers. Again, it is a chicken-or-egg type of quandary: What comes first—rejection by peers that leads to behavioral disorders or disorders that lead to rejection by peers? Or a cycle of both? Again, not all lonely children become serial killers, some only end up writing books about them.

The prevailing theory is that there is a delicate balance between a chaotic or abusive childhood, disrupted attachment to parental figures and peers, and biochemical factors that can trigger murderous behavior. Healthy social factors can intervene in a biochemically unstable individual otherwise predisposed to criminal behavior; or on the other hand, healthy biochemistry can protect a person with a turbulent childhood from growing up a killer.

Violent offenders emerge when all or most elements are out of balance. This theory goes a long way to explain why some children with difficult childhoods do not become serial killers or why not everyone with a head injury behaves criminally. It also gives us clues as to the type or profile of serial killers that emerges: It is like the bass and treble adjustment on a sound system. Some serial killers are self-confident and highly organized; others are extremely shy and chaotic. The combinations of degrees of the above-described childhood factors not only can produce a serial killer but also will determine what kind of serial killer he or she will be.

DIAGNOSING SERIAL KILLERS: PSYCHOPATHY AND ASPD

A vast majority of female and male serial killers are psychopaths. Psychopathy is currently called antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) although some argue the two are different disorders. “Psychopath” is a popular and policing term and not an official psychiatric diagnostic term and does not appear in the DSM-IV.

The psychopath should not be confused with the psychotic, who is often delusional, paranoid, and suffering from an organic disease in the brain like schizophrenia. Psychotic serial killers are extremely rare because psychosis is not conducive to the long-term maintenance of a serial-killing career. Psychotics are clinically and legally insane, and are more often a danger to themselves than to others. The psychotic is unaware of the reality of their situation or of the acts they are perpetrating and are driven by voices in their head and hallucinations. Sometimes these symptoms can be controlled by medication. The psychotic is rarely able to maintain the so-called “mask of sanity”—an appearance of normality—that is required of the serial killer between murders.

THE PSYCHOPATH

The psychopath is an entirely different creature. Psychopaths are acutely aware of reality. They fully understand the harmful nature of the acts they commit but simply do not care. The closest things to insanity in psychopaths are their fantasies and their inabilities to resist the compulsion to realize their fantasies. But these fantasies are not delusional. Serial killers are perfectly aware of the criminal and homicidal nature of the fantasies they harbor.

Psychopaths are essentially incapable of feeling a normal range of emotions but there is more to it than that: Psychopaths are capable of simulating, for various periods of time, those emotions. They display very convincing shows of sympathy, love, attachment, and caring. This is the so-called “mask of sanity.” Psychopaths learn to call on a repertoire of simulated emotions for the benefit of others, while themselves feeling either nothing or entirely opposite emotions. This is critical to understanding the female serial killers, as so many of them kill victims they appear to be intimate with. For the female, this intimacy can be entirely simulated.

The unique nature of psychopathy has been identified for at least three centuries now. In France in the late 1700s, the often-called “father of modern psychiatry,” Philippe Pinel, noted that some of his patients committed impulsive, destructive acts despite their awareness of the irrationality and harmful nature of the acts. These patients did not appear to have their reasoning abilities impaired and Pinel called the disorder manie sans delire (insanity without delirium.)

THE QUESTION OF SANITY

In criminal justice the notion of insanity as a defense goes back to medieval times but was formalized in modern law in England in 1843 with the M’Naghten Rule, named for a mentally ill man, Daniel M’Naghten, who was charged with murder but found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined in a mental asylum instead. It is used in many Western countries today, including the U.S., to define insanity in the courts. The rule states that to establish a successful defense on the grounds of insanity:

It must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.84

The M’Naghten Rule does not obviously describe psychopaths who are completely aware of “the nature and quality of the act” they are committing. Nonetheless, courts at one time accepted an insanity plea in the defense of psychopaths based primarily on the argument that they suffered from an “irresistible impulse” to kill. In the 19th century, psychopathy was described as “moral insanity” or “moral imbecility” and was grounds for an insanity plea.

By the 1970s, juries in the U.S., in the face of a rising number of serial killers, began to reject the “irresistible impulse” insanity plea, fearing that the serial killers may eventually be released from their confinement in psychiatric facilities. In 1984, after John Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity for his attempt to gun down President Ronald Reagan, Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act. It conclusively excluded “irresistible impulse” as a ground for an insanity plea.

The last major serial murder trial where the plea was made was that of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1992, who was charged with the murder of fifteen men and boys. He kept some of their body parts in his fridge, occasionally eating them. He constructed altars from their skulls while reducing the remains of their corpses in drums of acid stored in his bedroom. He attempted to transform several of his still-living victims into sex zombies by drilling through their skulls and injecting their brains with battery acid. One would think if that were not crazy, then what is? And that is precisely the argument his attorney attempted to present. It did not work.

No modern-day female serial killer to the best of our knowledge has yet come even close to replicating the gruesome behavior of Jeffrey Dahmer. The insanity plea itself has become rare in serial killer cases, male or female, no matter how gruesome or “insane” their acts appear to be. However, some female serial killers have attempted to mitigate their sentences with a plea that they suffered from Battered Woman Syndrome, resulting in temporary insanity.

THE NATURE OF THE PSYCHOPATH

Our modern definition of the psychopath stems from the research of Hervey Cleckley, a professor of psychiatry in Georgia who published his results in 1941 in a book still studied today, The Mask of Sanity. Essentially, the psychopath, according to Cleckley, is grandiose, arrogant, callous, superficial, and manipulative. Psychopaths are often short-tempered; get bored easily; are unable to form strong emotional bonds with others; lack empathy, guilt, and remorse; and behave in irresponsible, impulsive ways—often in violation of social and legal norms.

In the earlier editions of his work, Cleckley argued that psychopathy was actually a form of psychosis not technically demonstrable and concealed by an outer surface of intact function—a mask of sanity—and only manifested in behavior. In the 1950s this was challenged because, according to one critic, Richard Jenkins:

A psychosis is a major mental disorder. A psychopathic personality shows not a disorder of personality but rather a defect of personality, together with a set of defenses evolved around that defect. The defect relates to the most central element of the human personality: its social nature. The psychopath is simply a basically asocial or antisocial individual who has never achieved the developed nature of homo domesticus.85

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual replaced the term psychopath with “sociopathic personality” and the psychopath came to be informally called the sociopath. One of the major problems with the definition of psychopath and sociopath at the time was that it did not account for criminal behavior and the use of the term in the legal system. Under the definitions of these terms, one could easily find not only serial killers and sex offenders but functioning business executives, physicians, judges, politicians, movie stars, and a host of other seemingly “successful” members of society. Cleckley acknowledged this issue:

It must be remembered that even the most severely and obviously disabled psychopath presents a technical appearance of sanity, often with high intellectual capacities and not infrequently succeeds in business or professional activities for short periods, some for considerable periods. Although they occasionally appear on casual inspection as successful members of the community, as able lawyers, executives or physicians, they do not, it seems, succeed in the sense of finding satisfaction or fulfillment in their own accomplishments. Nor do they, when the full story is known, appear to find this in an ordinary activity. By ordinary activity we do not need to postulate what is considered moral or decent by the average man but may include any type of asocial, or even criminal activity…86

This lack of consensus of defining the disorder led to the adoption in the 1990s of yet another term: antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). This is currently the “official” psychiatric definition of what we used to call psychopathy as described by the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Edition IV (DSM-IV) which defines it by the following symptoms:

  1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.
  2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
  3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
  4. Irritability and aggressiveness.
  5. Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.
  6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain work behavior or honor financial obligations.
  7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by indifference to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

PROBLEMS IN DEFINING PSYCHOPATHY AND ASPD

Some psychiatrists argue that the diagnosis of ASPD is too behaviorally based and neglects persistent personality traits. There is a faction in psychiatry that suggests that ASPD is actually a disorder that some psychopaths suffer from—in other words, a symptom of psychopathy—not the disorder itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian psychologist Robert Hare returned back to Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity definitions and found that while all psychopaths can be diagnosed with ASPD, not all those diagnosed with ASPD are psychopaths.

Hare developed a different type of diagnostic test for psychopathy to differentiate it from ASPD and it is used extensively in psychiatric testing. Known as the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) the test relies less on questions requiring the scoring of self-reported symptoms, which—according to Hare—psychopaths can learn the correct responses to and manipulate, and instead relies on a scoring matrix focused on observable factors that a therapist can collect and score without securing the subject’s cooperation.

The PCL-R scores the presence of psychopathy based on criteria such as: glibness or superficial charm, grandiose sense of self, pathological lying, conning or manipulative quality, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness or lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions, constant need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, early behavioral problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, juvenile delinquency, revocation of probation, promiscuous sexual behavior, many short-term relationships, and criminal versatility. Arrays of factors like those are scored on a 3-point scale (0 = does not apply; 1 = applies somewhat; 2 = definitely applies). A final score of 30 or more identifies a psychopath.

Hare discovered that nearly 50 to 80 percent of criminals can be diagnosed as having ASPD according to criteria of the DSM-IV but only 15 percent to 30 percent of those same subjects score as psychopaths on the PCL-R test.88 The difference between ASPD and psychopathy is not so much in the definition of the disorder as in the diagnoses of the symptoms—the DSM-IV definition for ASPD, according to Hare, relies too much on the presence of criminal behavior and inappropriate interpersonal acts as criteria; the PCL-R test, on the other hand, expands the criteria to persistent personality traits rather than focusing so heavily on interpersonal behavior and criminal history. Where all this will lead in the future remains to be seen, but the PCL-R is the diagnostic tool for psychopathy today, available in forensic versions specifically for criminal offenders.

WHAT CAUSES A PSYCHOPATHY?

It is believed that the interruption of an infant’s physical bonding with its mother or childhood trauma—typically physical or sexual abuse—can trigger a basic animal instinct for “fight or flight.” Obviously, the child unable to fight instead stores, redirects, or suppresses the rage necessary to fight and goes into the flight mode by emotionally detaching from or numbing the pain of separation and/or trauma.

The human mind is unable to selectively switch on or off this emotional detachment—it becomes permanently welded to the subject’s personality along with a number of other defensive mechanisms ranging from fantasy to other personality traits already described above. The psychopath’s mind is permanently rewired—as if certain emotions are amputated like limbs that will never heal and grow back. To this day there is no “cure” for psychopathy. The only thing that happens is that psychopaths in their middle-ages—at least male ones—tend to “act out” fewer behavioral aspects of their disorder.

Nevertheless, females, who more frequently kill in late middle-age, conversely rarely score on ASPD diagnostic tests once over the age of 44. This leaves questions unanswered as to what may be driving them to kill if not their psychopathic state.

The development of psychopathy is linked to attachment theory advanced by developmental psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s. After observing the effects on children suddenly separated from their primary caregivers in England during World War II, Bowlby became convinced that when dealing with disturbed children psychiatry was overemphasizing their fantasies instead of focusing on the children’s real-life experiences. According to Bowlby, “the young child’s hunger for his mother’s love is as great as his hunger for food.”89 Bowlby argued that a child’s healthy development is entirely dependent on its reliance on access to its primary caregiver. If this access is interrupted, the child develops defensive mechanisms that may assist the child in emotionally surviving the separation, but that may cause irreparable damage in the child’s ability to bond with others and develop a normal emotional range as an adult.

In the 1970s, experiments were conducted on infants, known as the “Strange Situation,” where primary caregivers were separated from the infants and substituted with strangers. The infants’ responses were measured and showed three distinctively different patterns of attachment:

It is the insecure/avoidant category of infant that is troubling. These infants do not re-establish attachment to their primary caregiver once reunited, nor do they establish an attachment to anybody else. They focus on objects or on themselves and are only cursorily sociable with others. Some theorize that these infants interpret attachment as a precursor to hostility and develop defensive “preemptive aggression” toward those becoming emotionally close to them.

These infants grow up to become adolescents and adults with no feelings of empathy, no attachment, and no remorse or concern how family, peers, neighbors, school, employers, or society might judge their behavior. Again, this alone cannot be attributed to the making of a serial killer, nor even guarantees the making of a psychopath, but it becomes a significant factor when combined with other circumstances. A child with interrupted parental attachment plus physical or sexual abuse plus rejection by peers plus perhaps a biochemical imbalance plus head injury, or a selective combination of the above at different intensities together can spawn a serial-killing monster. (To make matters even more complex, the DSM-IV also offers the Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), which is characterized by “markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts that [occurs] before the age of 5 years and is associated with grossly pathological care.”91 Yet another step to psychopathy—a kind of childhood psychopathy.)

What we do not know is where the “red line” is located for psychopathy or even serial killers, because again, not all psychopaths are serial killers, and not all children who suffer trauma or detachment become psychopathic. There are many other causes under consideration for the development of psychopathy, including prenatal and postnatal hormones, prenatal alcohol poisoning, neurotransmitter turnover, and head trauma, but none of these theories have been conclusively resolved at this point in time.92

So in the end, it is not childhood abuse and trauma alone that create serial killers; they may spawn psychopaths, and some psychopaths can act out as serial killers—others we might elect to Congress. The road to making a serial killer is a long and twisted one with many byways, stopovers, and detours to the final destination. Not all psychopaths arrive there, but the ones that do are spectacularly deadly.

THE FEMALE PSYCHOPATH AND ASPD

There are some distinguishing features of the female psychopath. First, ASPD in the U.S. can be diagnosed in approximately 0.5 percent of the population—in one out of every two hundred people.93 Clearly if they were all serial killers, we would be in serious trouble, although the fact that we might be electing them to office, working for them, hiring them as our attorneys, and watching their movies, listening to their music, or reading their books, might not bode well for our society either.

The rate of ASPD, however, is significantly lower for females: 0.2 percent or one in five hundred. Males have a four times higher rate of prevalence: 0.8 percent or one in one hundred twenty-five. Studies of subjects diagnosed with ASPD in the 1960s showed that females tended to have a later onset of childhood behavioral problems compared to boys, but were more frequently engaged in sexually deviant behavior.94 Episodes of arson, cruelty to animals, physical aggression, and bullying were more rare among girls than boys. (Although Schurman-Kauflin contradicts that for at least the seven female offenders in her study, who all reported killing animals as children and adolescents.) Again, perception is the problem—aggression in females slips below the radar because they tend to express early aggression through social and verbal forms. Today few would deny that girls commit physical bullying: Schoolgirl bullies are a huge juvenile issue these days. In the past, females tended to first use gossip and social exclusion as a form of aggression among their peers, but today that expression is frequently a prelude to conventional physical violence.

The murder of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk in British Columbia in 1997 by seven girls and one boy is indicative of the nature adolescent female violence can take today. The girls beat their acquaintance, Virk, and burned her with lit cigarettes before attempting to set her hair on fire. Virk survived the first round of beatings after most of the girls lost interest and left, but was then attacked a second time by a boy and girl who remained behind. Without apparently speaking to each other, the two beat her again and then drowned her by holding Virk’s head in a creek. All the adolescents swore to a pact of silence and the crime was only revealed when Virk’s body was discovered eight days later. The fifteen-year-olds who actually murdered Virk were sentenced to life imprisonment, but the female, Kelly Marie Ellard, was granted a retrial on appeal. While awaiting the new trial, Ellard was charged, along with another female acomplice, in the beating of a 58-year-old woman.95

During the retrial, witnesses testified how Ellard had bragged about “finishing off” Virk and had conducted tours of the murder scene for her friends. After a mistrial during the appeal, a third trial finally resulted in Ellard receiving a life sentence in 2005. Two of the girls convicted in the initial beating allege that Virk stole one of the girls’ phone book and started calling her friends and spreading vicious rumors about her. That girl stubbed a lit cigarette into Virk’s forehead.

Gender stereotyping still plays a major role in the underdiagnosis of females as psychopaths. Women are traditionally perceived as nurturing and passive and to classify them as dangerous repeat offenders contradicts typical conceptualization of the female. Moreover, diagnosing somebody as a psychopath means condemning them to a morally reprehensible category associated with incurable, dangerous, lifelong criminal behavior.

Gender bias often leads to women being diagnosed with another behavioral disorder called Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD), the diagnosis of which includes five or more of the following symptoms:

In 1978 an experiment was conducted using 175 mental health professionals as subjects. They were given hypothetical case histories with similar mixed symptoms indicative of ASPD and HPD. When the therapists were told that the patient was a female, they tended to diagnose ASPD in 22 percent of the cases and HPD in 76 percent. However, those cases in which the therapists were told the patients were men, the same symptoms were diagnosed as ASPD in 41 percent of the cases, and HPD in 49 percent. (There were six other possible diagnostic options offered to the therapists.)96

Clearly mental health professionals were attributing the same set of symptoms to psychopathy in men but to hysteria in women. Feminists argue, with good reason, that mental diagnosis of women is entirely related to socially constructed stereotyping of femininity. (Remember “nymphomania” for example? It no longer exists in the psychiatric catalog of disorders and is instead labeled “sexual addiction” and applied to men and women equally.)

A study of equal groups of males and females diagnosed with ASPD indicated certain social characteristics in the subjects.97 Women with ASPD who tended to be married showed a higher incidence of marriage breakdown than the average population—and higher than married men with ASPD. Women with ASPD were four times more likely to be receiving welfare payments than women without. They were more likely to be less educated and unemployed and living in rental housing than females without ASPD. Both males and females with ASPD were more likely not to have been raised by both their parents until the age of fifteen. Yet another study found that in males the lack of contact with the father increased probability of ASPD while in females it was the lack of contact with the mother.98 Women with ASPD were found to be pervasively troubled with relationship problems, followed by job problems, violence, and lying.99

Women (and men) diagnosed with ASPD tended to also have related problems that were not directly linked to ASPD. Both males and females had higher rates of suicide attempts. Women with ASPD were ten times more likely than those without to be alcoholic or drug addicted (compared to men with ASPD who were three times more likely).100 Unlike males with ASPD, women with it were more likely to be depressed than women without. Women with ASPD were also more likely to have phobias than those without, which contradicts the early notion that psychopaths are less likely to be anxious or fearful because of their emotional numbness—at least in females.101

The relationship between psychopathy and male killers has been extensively studied. Male inmates incarcerated for homicide had higher rates of psychopathic symptoms than those who committed other crimes.102 There are no major studies in the U.S. of the relationship between psychopathy and homicide by females. The one current study comes out of Finland. When compared to the general female population of Finnish females, the prevalence of ASPD in murderers was 12.6 percent compared to 0.2 percent among the average population there.103 The author of this Finnish study, however, warned that it applies to countries with relatively low rates of violent crime, and would not be applicable to the United States.

At this point in time we do not know anything conclusively about the relationship between psychopathy and ASPD. Is one a symptom of the other or are they different ways of diagnosing the same thing? In the end consensus in psychiatry is as elusive as string theory in quantum physics.

SUMMING UP