Traditionally, crimes that are motivated by extreme hatred are crimes that are targeted against a particular individual or individuals, and are thus rarely serial in nature. They also take place within a limited framework of time, when the feelings involved are strong enough to motivate a murder.
There are also crimes of passion which are both deliberate and carefully calculated in their execution. In the case of serial murders, however, feelings of anger remain highly personalized even when the victims vary. That is especially so because the perpetrator holds her victims responsible for whatever may cause her hostility, and she attacks them as a symbolic act of retribution.
As a result, there is an overpowering steadiness among the revenge serial killer’s victims, which are often tragically her own children, murdered in a perverted attempt to hurt her spouse. Like the Black Widow, she prefers suffocation or poison, but her crimes are not carried out with the persistency and precision of the Black Widow. That can be attributed to the fact that the revenge serial killer is a victim of her own feelings, acting impulsively, which could explain why she shows immense remorse after she is caught.
Women Who Murder For Profit
Women who Murder for Profit must clearly kill for profit and must target victims outside their family. She is also very well organized, hard to discern, and may be active for a number of years before she is actually apprehended. The average number of her victims can be as high as thirty people, and she is usually active for ten to fifteen years unless captured before then. Usually, she begins her lethal career in her mid-twenties, and, like the Black Widow, she prefers poison.
Like the Angels of Death, she also has a highly dispassionate approach to murder. Like the sexual predator, she is fearful and vicious, and like the revenge serial killer, she is highly motivated. Nevertheless, she is distinctive in that she kills for somebody else, usually abused wives that pay her to free them from their torturing husbands.
The first known case of a female serial killer who had turned murder into a profitable business was that of a Russian, the notorious Madame Popova. Little is known about her crimes, except that she operated in Czarist Russia between 1880 and 1909. According to her own confession, Popova was responsible for the murder of three-hundred men whose spouses had paid a humble fee in order to free themselves from their brutality. Popova sent those men to death by using poison. Her business was a successful one for nearly thirty years, until one of her clients, in an attack of remorse, confessed to the police. Popova was arrested and subsequently confessed to her crimes.
Team Serial Killers
All the female serial killers that have been discussed so far are distinguished by the fact that they operate under their own initiatives and primarily carry out their deadly activities on their own. It is estimated, however, that only one third of female serial killers act alone.
The remaining two-thirds commit homicides within the context of a team. There are different types of serial killing teams: the female-male, the female-female, and the family. The male-female teams are the most common, and are usually active for a substantial period since the two members are commonly lovers and therefore tend to agree and co-operate more. Furthermore, the female subjects herself to the direction of the male who then becomes the prevailing partner.
The homicides committed by the couple are often well organized, and the female involved is considerably younger than any of her female serial killer counterparts, typically around the age of twenty at the time of her first murder.
Bonnie and Clyde, the most notorious criminal couple, were a serial killing team. Even though they were not as lethal as some modern couples, Bonnie and Clyde will always be the depression era duo that shook the world.
Traditionally, female-female serial killer teams are the second most prolific of the team killers. Although their motives may vary, the killings are usually carried out for profit and use weapons such as, poison, lethal injections, and suffocation.
Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood’s crimes in the Alpine Manor Nursing Home in the 1980s are an example of the female-female killing band. In 1986, Catherine May Wood became supervisor of nurse’s aides at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Walker, Michigan. At the time she was only twenty-four and weighed 450 pounds. After her seven-year marriage had dissolved, she met Graham who had just received a job in the nursing home as Wood’s supervisor, and fell deeply in love with her new.
Wood, who once again felt both wanted and needed, immediately surrendered herself to Graham’s dominance and perverted sexual desires. Unfortunately, her desires included committing murders with the aim of enhancing their sexual encounters. Their sexual relationship had already involved rough play and choking for some time, and Graham apparently wanted to experience the real thing. Even though Wood discarded her mate’s abnormal ideas as mere talk, the ideas soon materialized as reality. In January of 1987, Graham attacked and murdered her first victim, the beginning of a macabre plan that aimed at taking the lives of six elderly people whose last names spelled ‘murder.’
The plan however, proved too elaborate and soon the two lovers settled into targeting the most vulnerable victims. Within four months, the women attacked ten patients of the nursing home and succeeded in killing five of them. Graham used a dampened washcloth to kill her patients while Wood acted as a lookout. After each murder, the women would make love in a vacant area of the nursing home, aiming to relive the excitement of the act of murder.
By April of 1987, the couple’s murderous acts ended when Graham and Wood argued over Wood’s failure to actively engage her in any of the murders. By this time, Graham had already found another lover and soon left Wood. Alone and deserted again, Wood confessed the murders to her ex-husband, who contacted the authorities. Wood and Graham were then arrested and Wood pleaded guilty, agreed to testify against Graham, and received a sentence of twenty to forty years in prison. Graham received six life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Three or more individuals who may or may not be biologically related comprise family serial killing teams. Regardless of their biological relationship, they typically live in the same house and act like a family. The dominant figure is usually a male and the team commonly engages itself in sexual serial murders that tend to be extremely violent. The active period of the team tends to be rather short, since relationships between members and co-operation collapse very easily, leading to disorganization and final apprehension.
Charles Manson, born in 1934 in Kentucky, can be argued to be one of the most perverted minds the American Criminal history has ever seen. Being both articulate and extremely intelligent, Manson was able to gather around him a group of rebellious young females and males to form the family that he never really had, a family that soon turned into a growing cult. The Manson family engaged in marathon sessions of unrestricted sex and drug use. At its peak, the family numbered fifty members, all of whom earned their living from a variety of illegal activities. The family eventually settled into an abandoned film studio ranch in California, where Manson continued to poison the minds of his young followers with an incessantly more aggressive philosophy that escalated to the beginning of a brutal murder spree.