The True Crime Thread (tw: all)

Ooh, actually, I just listened to the two latest last podcast on the left episodes while I was driving home today, and they did a two-parter (1) (2) on black widow killers. Which doesn't just cover ladies who murder their husbands, but extends to like, other family members or personal acquaintances. Very personal, domestic murders, I guess.

But apart from the actual killers, there's some really interesting stuff in there about how collecting data on female serial killers is hard, in part because there are fewer of them, but also because that of those killers, a much lower proportion of them are willing to talk about their crimes, compared to the men. I think it was like... 27 imprisoned female multiple-murder killers were approached to ask if they'd be willing to be interviewed about their crimes, and only 7 said yes (not sure I have those numbers quite right, but it's close). I don't have numbers on the proportion of men who talk, but definitely a lot of men quantity-wise have talked about their murders.

And then I can't connect chains of causality, only speculate, but that means the FBI profile for serial killers probably has some major holes for female serial killers (these episodes emphasized the ones who fit the black widow model, but it's come up in other places). It's like, for years the standards for diagnosing ADHD favored boys, because they studied mostly boys when trying to figure out the signs of ADHD. Some killers like Rosemary West and Myra Hindley are a closer match to the expected serial killer model, but those two were both working with a male partner (and also rosemary west got away with it for ages), or there's the Mexican woman who strangled old ladies racked up like 49 kills before she was caught. But in general, female serial killers tend to have really long runs before anyone catches them.

But violent female serial killers seem to be in the minority. They're more common for one-off kills, but a lot of the female serial killers I'm able to think of used methods like poison, or they smothered babies, things like that. There are the female angels of mercy, who have access to medical supplies and often have the knowledge to make things look unsuspicious. There are a lot of women who killed in ways that could plausibly be accidental or natural causes. If that's the case, they don't necessarily have to worry about body disposal, they just act like they're as surprised as everyone else and make noises about 'who would have guessed, he was the picture of health, etc., etc.' A lot of female serial killer victims aren't disappearing, they're being taken to the hospital and dying and being buried like all the people where it happened naturally. In those cases, I think they tend to get caught if they get careless or overconfident and someone notices the pattern. It's less easy to get away with it these days, when you can test a body for arsenic pretty easily, but there were a lot of gruesome illnesses and random child deaths before modern medicine kicked in, and it was pretty easy for a careful lady to get away with lots of murder.