نتیجه گیری

Conclusion

Horror

The half-life of murder is forever. The pull of a detective story is strong. And so there are about a million things to wonder about serial killers, a million angles to examine, a million stones to turn over. This in and of itself is kind of a freaky fact. Why is it possible to theorize so extensively about these people? Shouldn’t we just wash our hands and be done with ‘em? Why are we so obsessed? Why did that one friend scoot her chair away from me when I told her I “empathized but didn’t sympathize” with every woman in this book?

People typically have one of two reactions when I mention that I’m writing about female serial killers: a frenetic, “That’s hilarious!” or an aghast, “That’s horrible.” (Secret option number three: a nervous chuckle, accompanied by a tiny step backward.) I understand all of these approaches, but taken alone, each one is a fallacy. I believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death.

Recoiling from crime is natural, but recoil too far and it becomes a delusion. Psychologists have theorized that we love separating ourselves from “evil” because it makes us feel good about ourselves: “Locating evil within selected individuals or groups carries with it the ‘social virtue’ of taking society ‘off the hook’ as blameworthy.” And being blameless certainly sounds lovely. But as Aleksandr Solženicyn wrote after undergoing a series of terrible experiences (prison, forced-labor camp, exile), “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I also love the way Joyce Carol Oates puts it: “To examine the mind of the serial killer is to examine the human mind in extremis, and should anything ‘human’ be alien to us? Where the ‘human’ crosses over into the ‘monstrous’ is after all a matter of law, theology, or aesthetic taste.” Ladies

Female serial killers often go undetected for a long time, yes. But just for the record, a lot of the rhetoric about how “nobody even realizes that there are female serial killers” can quickly veer into the realm of the ridiculous. Lady killers exist, but underestimating that reality does not mean we are literally putting our own lives at risk every time we talk to a woman. One otherwise-great book on the subject includes a line implying that the “cute girl behind the deli counter slicing our bread” could actually be a heartless murderess. Dude, just order the sandwich, you’re going to be fine.

Still, female serial killers haven’t been studied very extensively, and when they are, the studies are far from exhaustive: they often focus solely on killers in the United States, or killers over the past hundred years, etc. Because of this, I haven’t included very many stats in this book; they frequently seem either limited or unreliable. Here’s a stat you may enjoy, though: in the United States, the chances that you will be murdered by a female serial killer could be as low as one in ninety million.

The odds that you will be murdered by a woman in this book, of course, are zero. The choice to keep these lady killers fairly “vintage” (Nannie Doss is the most recent killer, and she hung around in the 1950s) was largely an aesthetic one; with victims and perpetrators long dead, the stories hopefully err on the side of spooky and mesmerizing rather than simply . . . depressing. Today’s serial killers are certainly worthy of study, but there’s a heaviness and a sadness to modern crimes that history tends to erase, for better or for worse. Anyway, today is not the era of the serial killer. Those sorts of murderers are a rare breed now, an endangered species, unlike during the 1970s and 80s when they roamed the streets in seemingly unstoppable numbers. If crimes reflect the anxieties of our time, then today is the era of the mass murderer, the terrorist. Our violent delights still lead to violent ends, but the ends change as the decades ebb and flow.

One stat that does get confirmed again and again in various studies is that the majority of serial killers, both male and female, are white. (Are we surprised?) Of course, stats come with their own sets of biases. I would say the majority of serial killers who are written about in the media, who appear in the historical record, are white. When it comes to the “pre-1950s female serial killer of color” category, the information is slim, inaccessible, or else was seemingly never documented at all. Plus, there’s a lot of misinformation; if you manage to find a list of historical female serial killers broken down by race, you’ll notice many of the women of color who are listed as early “serial killers” are actually mythical figures, bandits, or evil queens. My own research, of course, can’t help but be flawed and incomplete, but I’ll tell you who I was hoping to include: Clementine Barnabet, a young black girl from New Orleans, and Miyuki Ishikawa, a Japanese midwife. Unfortunately, little has been preserved about them beyond the facts of the crimes themselves, even (for Miyuki) in Japanese, and I was unable to find the degree of detail required to make them fully come alive.

In general, I wonder if female serial killers haven’t been studied extensively because at the end of the day, in our heart of hearts, we don’t consider them worthy antagonists. Let them slice the bread; let them glare at us from behind the deli counter. We are simply not afraid of them.

Heartache

Being a lady killer is quite lonely, it turns out. Not a single woman in this book appears to have had any close friends. Tillie had her cousin Nellie, Raya had Sakina, Anna and Alice had their beloved sons. That was about it. Marriage and children weren’t sources of comfort for most of these women, for obvious reasons. And as far as I can tell, the only people who really reached out to them or tried to understand them were pastors, journalists, and the occasional doctor or defense lawyer—in other words, people who were sent to them after they’d been locked up, when it was too late to save them from themselves.

Speaking of loneliness, the term “mise en abyme,” which literally means “placed into abyss,” has started to remind me of these women. The phrase evokes the feeling of a hall of mirrors: an image of an image, something multiplying into infinity. I hear it and I see Erzsébet Báthory standing in her cavernous halls, jangling in the abyss, no one there to reflect anything back at her other than her own twisted reality. I see Mary Ann Cotton, doomed to repeat herself over and over again, forever playing out a dark parody of marriage and motherhood. I see the peasants of Nagyrév, with each of their murders like the play within a play of Hamlet, a tiny story reflecting back on the larger one, contributing to the idea that what had happened and what was about to happen was all totally inescapable.

Somehow it doesn’t stress me out that we’re all obsessed with serial killers. Maybe it should. (Mark Seltzer, a professor at UCLA who’s written extensively about violence, calls this obsession “wound culture”—our tendency to gather around trauma, unable to avert our eyes.) I don’t think our obsession stems from the fact that we are all secretly violent, using the serial killer to enact our darkest fantasies. I think it comes from our enduring love of stories. That being said, I have been haunted time and again while writing this book with a nagging sense of moral responsibility. I don’t want to accidentally make murder sound trivial or hilarious. I don’t want to make female serial killers sound like the ultimate feminists. I don’t want to be part of the long tradition of glamorizing serial killers, though I’m sure I’ve slipped up from time to time. But I believe in the healing and illuminating power of narrative, and I think there’s something to be gleaned from looking at evil, trying to understand it, wondering if perhaps we are all a little bit responsible. Should anything human be alien to us? That question is terrifying, and beautiful.

I cried twice while working on this book, both times over the same moment: the part where Anna Marie Hahn completely loses it on her way to the electric chair. Anna’s murders are some of the most coldhearted in the book—but, when faced with her own death, Anna couldn’t take it. I think that’s so poignant, so sad. It shows how desperately the human body wants to live, no matter how evil or reckless the soul within it has become. Even the most psychopathic woman can realize, when staring death in the eyes, that what she valued, in the end, was life all along.