So they get away with it.ĭid you notice any theme or pattern in the ways or reasons women kill?Ī lot of the stereotypes about female serial killers hold up under scrutiny: Women tend to use poison, they tend to kill people they know (as opposed to male serial killers, who often go after strangers), and they don’t use excessive violence or "overkill" (mutilating the body, etc.). Women literally don’t "look" scary to people because they don’t look like killers socially, we are not trained to see women as threats (and, of course, statistics largely back that up). You know how Ted Bundy didn’t initially strike people as a suspect because he looked so "normal" with those suave, ruggedly handsome young lawyer vibes? We have an idea of what a killer has to look like (say, a wild-eyed Charles Manson type with messy hair and some sort of awful tattoo). In my book, I argue that certain, especially nonthreatening-seeming female killers-like Nannie Doss, the "giggling grandma" who blamed her 1950s husband-killings on a search for love gone wrong-don’t scare people because they operate under this guise of, well, normality. In fact, female serial killers tend to kill for longer than male ones because no one suspects them of being killers. If you look at serial killer lore, male killers are actually the ones that terrify people much more. How do people’s reactions to male and female serial killers differ? The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Throughout each chapter, readers begin to feel bad for these criminals-until Telfer reminds you how they dealt with their hardships.īroadly spoke with the author about the many ways female serial killers are misunderstood.
Lady Killers examines how gender norms shaped the rumors around female serial killers like Lizzie Halliday, who was mocked for her looks growing up and became separated from her 12-year-old son after fleeing a violent husband, and Mary Ann Cotton, who lived in poverty and lost four or five infants.
This myth has persisted, Telfer argues, because it’s easier to imagine a vain woman than a purely sadistic one. Humanizing one of the world’s most dehumanized populations, Lady Killers reveals that Báthory was a product of inbreeding, witnessed traumatizing violence during childhood, got engaged at 10, learned to torture and kill from her husband Nádasdy and companion Darvolya, and probably never bathed in blood.
0 kommentar(er)
