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Overwhelmingly, men kill for sexual pleasure and control - the most infamous, including Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, share this rationale.
Go play along serial serial#
Perhaps the starkest contrast between male and female serial killers is motive. In a 2013 paper analyzing the characteristics of female serial killers, sociologist Amanda Farrell wrote that they kill, on average, over longer stretches of time than their male counterparts. They also tend to kill at home or at work, drawing less attention than the random, far-flung sprees common among men. They prefer poison - in 50 percent of all cases - and smothering to conspicuous knives and guns. They’re often described as “quiet” killers: They typically don’t butcher, nor torture. (Credit: Cody Cottier)īut some wonder whether the devious tactics of murderesses mask their numbers, helping them to evade capture. Hickey tends to “discount those huge numbers,” but the fact remains that women, too, are responsible for untold bloodshed - they just follow a subtler modus operandi.Įven as numbers for male serial killers soared above 700 people in the 1980s, they remained relatively stable for women. Around the turn of the 16th century, Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess, supposedly tortured and killed hundreds of young girls. "We just didn’t acknowledge them.” Other reports suggest they’ve been around even longer. In his subsequent work, Hickey has looked at cases as far back as the 1800s. Their response? “There are no female serial killers.” He told the agents which sex he suspected.
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The unidentified offender had murdered eight people over two years, all poisoned. The dearth of research on this demographic belied a dangerous assumption: Women are incapable of the depravity needed for such horrific crimes. Early in his career, in conversation with FBI agents at a conference, Hickey described a case on which he was consulting. In 1985, criminologist Eric Hickey published the first - to his knowledge - academic paper on female serial killers.