Serial Killers

[carpetmojo]

[QUOTE=Critteranne; There are some scary women out there![/QUOTE]


Tell me about it...............


[Sorry, infantile mind couldn't resist it ]

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

Vronsky has a rather thick book about female serial killers.

Thanks for the link -- just sent the sample to my Kindle.

What fascinated me about female killers initially was the question of anthropology: the gender-defined cultural programming that conditions valid expressions of anger. It isn't that men are trained to be SKs but rather that they're taught to identify manhood with the resolution of conflict through aggression. Whether or not this is stated overtly, the rebus of symbols plays through our culture like an equation: movies, television news, comics, games and even locker room gossip have always tended to center on men standing up to others through transcendent acts of aggression.

The civilized version of this is the man who is able to threaten violence credibly but has the self-restraint to refrain from it once his counter-aggressor submits. Even when the result itself is not violence, the role played by violence in defining his manhood is still intact.

I would argue that people with damaged object relations (narcissists and therefore sociopaths) often seek self-aggrandizement through lethal distortions of that idea.

The gender difference -- which I would argue is cultural and is slowly being minimized by feminism and increasing portrayals of women as successful aggressors in films and other cultural expressions of conflict resolution -- was that women had been taught not to display anger and even to direct it inward. Historically visible female killers tended to be poisoners or covertly dominant partners; instances of direct violence were either more rare or difficult to trace due to practiced anonymity. We tended to see more female poisoners and collaborators than confrontational sadists in the past several hundred years.

In the 60s and 70s, a transitional female killer seems to emerge: a sociopath who directs anger inward and outward. Marlene Olive has always fascinated me for that reason: She essentially hypnotized her boyfriend into killing her parents -- it was entirely her idea -- but reeled him in by seeming to be submissive even as she exerted greater and greater control.

She'd been negated as a person in all of the classic ways sociopaths usually are before morphing from chrysalid to killer. Yet because she was a woman growing up in that transitional period, I would argue that Olive felt disallowed from aiming her violent impulse directly at the object. Her arms were always scarred from the time she was an adolescent, but the scars were due to her own bite-marks long before Olive ever picked up a syringe. I believe Elliot Leyton reported they appeared at roughly the time Olive's foster mother began telling Olive that she was destined to be a whore and her real mother was a gutter tramp, etc., etc.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Had a look at Vronsky's book and found so much unprofessional opining that I don't think it's credible work. Never before have I read a true-crime book which, in discussing previous theories, employed the ORLY Owl to make editorial comments or dismissed feminists as "femifascists". It doesn't matter whether one agrees with those opinions or not -- once the author's voiced them in the middle of a summary of previous theories, all credibility is completely shot.

For the same thing done infinitely more correctly, see J. Reid Meloy's The Psychopathic Mind. The text might be a tad weathered and slightly out of date, but it is credible, which means it's more relevant.

I would have had no problem with Vronsky dissecting positions and conclusions he found questionable based on evidence and/or additional sources. Making his exposition an excuse for a diatribe against "femifascists" puts him in camp with people like Limbaugh and Beck, not Meloy, and announces that a useful summary of different theories and classifications of female serial killers is to be found elsewhere.

That book might possibly be the worst on the subject of SKs I've ever seen.

In an earlier book, Vronsky states he is no expert on serial killers or even a credible investigative journalist. Rather, he is an amateur moved to write about the subject because of his experience with two different serial killers he encountered in real life. He alludes to this in the book under discussion as well and it is a pitiful excuse for writing a book of this kind.

A memoir would have been much less problematic, and would have misled far fewer readers to wave opinions and ad hominem in others' faces as if these were as important as facts.

Vronsky might not approve of 70s feminist sociologists' methodologies and trained journalists' conclusions, but at least they had methodologies and some modicum of professional discipline. There are too many books in the world already without marketing amateur blogs as books.

If you want to see one forensics expert shred another's methods credibly, here's an excellent example of two experts using every critical tool at their disposal to gut Dr. Robert Hare for his questionable diagnoses of female psychopaths:

http://www.abiscf.us/articles/index....t01returnid=15

Also: Notice the quote from Jane Toppan three headings down, which is taken from the Vronsky book we're discussing, and note there are three other references to the book. If you do happen to like Vronsky, you can deduce possible validity from that (though I personally would not).

I found Perri and Lichtenwald's summary of Vronsky's most interesting idea much more helpful in that context (see below):

"When women commit violence, the only explanations offered have been that it is either involuntary, self-defense, the result of mental illness, or hormonal imbalances inherent with female physiology (Vronsky, 2007)."

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

That's a good example. When I was in my early teens, I remember seeing woodcuts from an old pamplet about the crimes and torture/execution of a notorious "werewolf" -- I'm pretty sure it was Peter Stumpp, a German werewolf. I also read about Gilles Garnier, a French hermit executed for being a werewolf. The Stumpp pamphlet was a 1590 British translation of the German original. (Stumpp was executed in 1589, so I'm amazed that the British translation came out only a year later. That pamphlet was their equivalent of a CNN broadcast.) Those would count as nonfiction of course, but it shows how far back these accounts go. (And I'm sure they weren't entirely truthful, either. )

After poking the Internetz a while, the first fictional account I can find is the Bluebeard story by Charles Perrault (1697). I always thought that case was based on notorious serial killer Gilles de Rais (1404–1440), but it seems some experts disagree and say he may have been inspired by existing folklore. There might have been earlier examples. It's hard to say as books, pamphlets, etc. didn't always survive.

Later on, another early example is Sweeney Todd -- the original penny dreadful was published in 1846-1847. There is an expert who believed it was based on a real case, but most other experts dispute his findings.

Of course, this also depends on how you define a serial killer. Some experts believe only sexual murders should be called serial killings, while others use the term in a more general form. For example, some experts would not count rulers such as Vlad Tepes, but they would include Countess Elizabeth Bathory because of the sexual aspect of the murders. Other experts include anyone who commits more than two murders for "anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking." So would you include fictional accounts of a historical fiend? Would you include mysteries where one person kills many people for financial gain or out of revenge? In that case, some of the Sherlock Holmes cases and some of the other Agatha Christie cases might count.


Under fictional serial killers, Wiki includes "Barabas the Jew" from Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. Sheehsh! If we include him as a serial killer, then why not Shakespeare's Richard the Third? Or Middleton and Roweley's De Flores from the play The Changeling (even if he killed for financial gain and to have sex with Beatrice/Joanna, not necessarily in that order)? Heck, so would Medea in the play by Euripdes (431 BCE). Argh!

I give up!

Actually most of Medea's murders were family members so she would probably fit the "Family Aniliator" model better. She did kill her father for Jason only to have him abandon her so she was at least provoked by his actions. And of course after killing her children she also killed Jason's new wife to complete her revenge against him.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Thanks for the link -- just sent the sample to my Kindle.

What fascinated me about female killers initially was the question of anthropology: the gender-defined cultural programming that conditions valid expressions of anger. It isn't that men are trained to be SKs but rather that they're taught to identify manhood with the resolution of conflict through aggression. Whether or not this is stated overtly, the rebus of symbols plays through our culture like an equation: movies, television news, comics, games and even locker room gossip have always tended to center on men standing up to others through transcendent acts of aggression.

The civilized version of this is the man who is able to threaten violence credibly but has the self-restraint to refrain from it once his counter-aggressor submits. Even when the result itself is not violence, the role played by violence in defining his manhood is still intact.

I would argue that people with damaged object relations (narcissists and therefore sociopaths) often seek self-aggrandizement through lethal distortions of that idea.

The gender difference -- which I would argue is cultural and is slowly being minimized by feminism and increasing portrayals of women as successful aggressors in films and other cultural expressions of conflict resolution -- was that women had been taught not to display anger and even to direct it inward. Historically visible female killers tended to be poisoners or covertly dominant partners; instances of direct violence were either more rare or difficult to trace due to practiced anonymity. We tended to see more female poisoners and collaborators than confrontational sadists in the past several hundred years.

In the 60s and 70s, a transitional female killer seems to emerge: a sociopath who directs anger inward and outward. Marlene Olive has always fascinated me for that reason: She essentially hypnotized her boyfriend into killing her parents -- it was entirely her idea -- but reeled him in by seeming to be submissive even as she exerted greater and greater control.

She'd been negated as a person in all of the classic ways sociopaths usually are before morphing from chrysalid to killer. Yet because she was a woman growing up in that transitional period, I would argue that Olive felt disallowed from aiming her violent impulse directly at the object. Her arms were always scarred from the time she was an adolescent, but the scars were due to her own bite-marks long before Olive ever picked up a syringe. I believe Elliot Leyton reported they appeared at roughly the time Olive's foster mother began telling Olive that she was destined to be a whore and her real mother was a gutter tramp, etc., etc.

I think part of that is also that traditionally women have been seen as weaker in body so that they aren't perceived as a threat a lot of the time. It's also why they use poison most often I think. A man is more muscular and would probably come out on top of the situation in a physical attack, but slip something in his drink and he's a dead duck. Aileen Wuornos used sex to get her victims into a position where she could kill them I understand. She shot them but I can imagine sex was the lure. There aren't as many female SK's I don't think as there are male ones. At least you don't hear about them in the news as often, things like poisoned pain reliever capsules not withstanding.

[CWatkinsNash]

I'm glad this thread got revived - I hadn't seen it before and appreciate the link to Schechter's Kindle offerings. I read the Serial Killer Files a few years ago as part of my research for a film project, and I had intended to get back to that subject for a project of my own but life interfered. This thread has renewed my motivation.

[Penforhire]

Is there a well defined transition between serial killers and assassination or war crimes? I'm thinking of, say, Shakespeare's Macbeth. Sort of a husband and wife team.

I'm thinking serial killing is about abnormal compulsions and emotional rewards (sexual or otherwise). Assassination, regicide, and war crimes have other primary motivations?

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Is there a well defined transition between serial killers and assassination or war crimes? I'm thinking of, say, Shakespeare's Macbeth. Sort of a husband and wife team.

I'm thinking serial killing is about abnormal compulsions and emotional rewards (sexual or otherwise). Assassination, regicide, and war crimes have other primary motivations?

Serial Killers seem to kill from their own twisted need to exert power over another without sanction from a higher power (the state) but with war crimes (like the Nazi's) the state was the one responsible for the murders being ordered and the actual killers were either just carrying out what they were told to do or simply accepted that the state wanted it done. In other words they (in their own minds at least) weren't responsible for the murders because the state had said it was ok to do it. Assassination is somewhere in between I think. While an assassin could be working alone and have a delusion that he/she is working the will of the people usually an assassin is hired by someone in opposition to the leader who is to be removed. They might not be part of the group that wants the man/woman dead and might in fact only have financial gain in mind when they take action.

[Prestidigitweeze]

The singular motive isn't always clear-cut, especially since sociopaths tend to be both con men and sadists (though you could argue that a con man who enjoys cheating (and therefore negating) people is a sadist already). Take the case of my personal favorite among serial killers, H.H. Holmes: he was clearly a sadist who enjoyed exerting power, but he seems to have killed for financial gain, to avoid discovery, and after he'd tired of willing female playthings. According to The Scarlet Mansion (which Amazon mistakenly calls "lightly fictionalized" -- they mean lightly dramatized), he's said to have committed his first murder as a child. I have yet to hear anyone call Holmes something other than a serial killer. Read the descriptions of the murderous machinery in his house.

Remember that Robert Ressler, the man who coined the term serial killer, intended purely to distinguish between numbers and methods. His serial killers aren't all sociopathic spy-flick supercriminals who kill for pleasure (as they tend to be in movies). They are often disorganized killers, such as schizophrenics, who sometimes believe they have valid reasons to snuff out lives. (Ressler is also the person who created the organized/disorganized typology.)

The serial killer is sequential and finds victims over time; the mass killer is multiple and rapid. These are the main distinctions in the original sense.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think part of that is also that traditionally women have been seen as weaker in body so that they aren't perceived as a threat a lot of the time.

One has to distinguish between the appearances themselves and the reason for them. I doubt that Delphine LaLaurie, the first known American female serial killer, was much concerned with passive poisoning or any "weakness in body." The site of her grim fun, unearthed by local firefighters, was as gruesome and fetishistic as anything contained in the movie Se7en: "Upon being refused the keys by the LaLauries, the bystanders broke down the doors to the slave quarters and found 'seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated . . . suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other'"; victims with their lips sewn shut, victims that had been completely skinned; a man whose genitals had been altered to resemble a woman's; etc., etc. And remember: LaLaurie was the first.

The (chronologically) second American female killer, Lavina Fisher, used poison and in that sense fits the classic profile. But anyone who reads of her last attempt to escape execution, and her final words to the crowd that had gathered to watch, will realize she was far from passive.

The third, Belle Gunness, was formidable in size and only drugged her victims to more easily bludgeon or otherwise dispatch them. In that, she was no different from many famous male serial killers.

Many writers have noted that female serial killers are often active for far longer stretches of time than men, and suggest they're often better than their male counterparts at not being caught.

One theory of mine is that, for a female killer, ultimate power itself can be enough. Sexual power is narrowly focused by comparison. The point might be to make someone else the victim and in that sense follow the male serial killer's ritual of transferring powerlessness to the victim and killing their own internal and hated weakness through an effigy.

Originally Posted by crich70

It's also why they use poison most often I think.

It sounds as if you might not have seriously considered what I said about poison being the most common method for the moment. That statistic seems to be changing.

My theory, as I said, is that it will continue to change as women become socialized to express aggression more actively.

There aren't as many female SK's I don't think as there are male ones. At least you don't hear about them in the news as often, things like poisoned pain reliever capsules not withstanding.

This blogger has something to say which seems so obvious you wonder why you don't hear it more often:

Which reminds me of something a prominent Australian forensic psychiatrist once told me about the way a serial killer’s crimes are studied to produce a “profile” to help catch the suspect. Such profiling techniques, pioneered by the FBI, are based on studies of serial killers in jails.

The problem with that technique is that authorities are learning to profile unsuccessful serial killers. . . . It tells you nothing about the number of successful serial killers who don’t make mistakes. . . .

In that, women have had a certain advantage in the past, as they were socialized to be background figures no matter how strenuously they fought to overcome that fate. The result is that their chameleonic qualities are often enhanced, which makes them difficult to detect and too elusive to pigeonhole.

It would be interesting to find yourself the only man in a world full of women who had reproduced by other means and never seen a member of the opposite sex. They wouldn't have been conditioned to find men attractive and would probably consider you grotesque. Nor would you necessarily seem fully human to them, since you'd have no historical or cultural precedent. Erotic fantasies notwithstanding, you'd probably end up in a circus or a a cage or, possibly, the morgue.

I say this not to impugn women's characters in particular but because human beings in general have a history of dehumanizing the unfamiliar. I'm also arguing that the ways in which we express aggression are learned and not genetic.

[pk1999]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Thanks for the link -- just sent the sample to my Kindle.

What fascinated me about female killers initially was the question of anthropology: the gender-defined cultural programming that conditions valid expressions of anger. It isn't that men are trained to be SKs but rather that they're taught to identify manhood with the resolution of conflict through aggression. Whether or not this is stated overtly, the rebus of symbols plays through our culture like an equation: movies, television news, comics, games and even locker room gossip have always tended to center on men standing up to others through transcendent acts of aggression.

The civilized version of this is the man who is able to threaten violence credibly but has the self-restraint to refrain from it once his counter-aggressor submits. Even when the result itself is not violence, the role played by violence in defining his manhood is still intact.

I would argue that people with damaged object relations (narcissists and therefore sociopaths) often seek self-aggrandizement through lethal distortions of that idea.

The gender difference -- which I would argue is cultural and is slowly being minimized by feminism and increasing portrayals of women as successful aggressors in films and other cultural expressions of conflict resolution -- was that women had been taught not to display anger and even to direct it inward. Historically visible female killers tended to be poisoners or covertly dominant partners; instances of direct violence were either more rare or difficult to trace due to practiced anonymity. We tended to see more female poisoners and collaborators than confrontational sadists in the past several hundred years.

In the 60s and 70s, a transitional female killer seems to emerge: a sociopath who directs anger inward and outward. Marlene Olive has always fascinated me for that reason: She essentially hypnotized her boyfriend into killing her parents -- it was entirely her idea -- but reeled him in by seeming to be submissive even as she exerted greater and greater control.

She'd been negated as a person in all of the classic ways sociopaths usually are before morphing from chrysalid to killer. Yet because she was a woman growing up in that transitional period, I would argue that Olive felt disallowed from aiming her violent impulse directly at the object. Her arms were always scarred from the time she was an adolescent, but the scars were due to her own bite-marks long before Olive ever picked up a syringe. I believe Elliot Leyton reported they appeared at roughly the time Olive's foster mother began telling Olive that she was destined to be a whore and her real mother was a gutter tramp, etc., etc.

It seems to me that you know nothing of Marlene olive,and the things you wrote are from the book that Richard Levine wrote in the 80s.sad how people belive everything they read! Yes some of it is true in the book but for the most part it was made up!

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by pk1999

It seems to me that you know nothing of Marlene olive,and the things you wrote are from the book that Richard Levine wrote in the 80s.sad how people belive everything they read! Yes some of it is true in the book but for the most part it was made up!

Such as... references please...

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by pk1999

It seems to me that you know nothing of Marlene olive,and the things you wrote are from the book that Richard Levine wrote in the 80s.sad how people belive everything they read! Yes some of it is true in the book but for the most part it was made up!

Actually, the events described are from the third part of Canadian anthropologist Elliott Leyton's book from the 90s, Sole Survivor: Children Who Murder Their Parents, which cites several sources for the case history and analysis of Marlene Olive.

I'm curious about (and not offended by) the passion with which you responded. If you feel that reading books teaches us nothing about Marlene Olive, then you must have had another way of learning about the events of her life and psychology. If so, then how exactly have you learned about them, and how exactly do the facts as you understand them differ from those described by Richard Levine (whose book I haven't read)?

If you dismiss the idea of learning about her by reading books and articles, then how do you suggest people learn about her instead?

What about her later life? I've read that, for a long time, she was consistently in trouble for drugs, shoplifting, prostitution and, in the 90s, a longstanding ID-card-counterfeiting operation. ("Police say they have rarely come across a street-level forger believed to be as prolific or as skilled as Olive.")

How has her life been different from the descriptions offered in books and newspaper articles about her over the past several decades?

Leyton isn't at all unsympathetic to Olive, BTW. Rather, she suggests that, given the cultural programming she received and the systematic negation of her sense of identity through circumstances and the actions of her parents, her actions were predictable if not justifiable. He describes her as a whipsmart girl who wrote literate Plathian poetry at a precocious age, and concludes that her life could have been very different if she had been treated differently by her adoptive parents. I've always been fascinated by her personally.

I've also read that the judge at her boyfriend Chuck Riley's trial described him as the most easily manipulated person he'd ever had in his courtroom. I can't agree or disagree, as (1) the judge was being hyperbolic and (2) I've never spoken to the boyfriend. But it does seem clear that a sadomasochistic dynamic allowed the initiator of the crime, a young girl who seemed to be in the submissive role, to direct the man involved to commit acts he wouldn't never have contemplated otherwise.

As accounts of the case have become increasingly popular, more and more people have claimed to know Olive or Riley personally (see the posts below the article). But if we can't trust books to tell us about them according to you, then shouldn't we be even less inclined to trust unsubstantiated accounts from anonymous people on the internet?