The Serial Killer Files (6 page)

The sort of atrocities perpetrated by male serial killers—the kind involving rape, mutilation, dismemberment—seem to be a function of particular masculine traits. More specifically, there are unmistakable parallels between this kind of violence—phallic-aggressive, penetrative, rapacious, and (insofar as it commonly gratifies itself upon the bodies of strangers), undiscriminating—and the typical pattern of male sexual behavior. For this reason, it is possible to see sadistic mutilation-murder as a grotesque distortion (or “pathological intensification,” in the words of Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing) of normal male sexuality.

But if this intensely savage type of serial murder is exclusive to men—a monstrous expression of male sexuality—what, then, is the equivalent female form? Clearly, it must reflect female sexuality. Generally speaking, female serial killers differ from their male counterparts in roughly the same way that the sexual responses and behavior of women typically differ from those of men.

A useful analogy here is pornography. It is a truth universally acknowledged that—while men are aroused by extremely raw depictions of abrupt, anonymous, anatomically explicit sex—women in general prefer their pornography to involve at least a suggestion of emotional intimacy and leisurely romance. Whether these differences in taste are a function of biology or culture is an open question. The indisputable fact is that the differences are real.

An analogous distinction holds true for serial killers. Female psychopaths are no less depraved than their male counterparts. As a rule, however, brutal penetration is not what turns them on. Their excitement comes—not from violating the bodies of strangers with phallic objects—but from a grotesque, sadistic travesty of intimacy and love: from spooning poisoned medicine into the mouth of a trusting patient, for example, or smothering a sleeping child in its bed. In short, from tenderly turning a friend, family member, or dependent into a corpse—from nurturing them to death. (What made Aileen Wuornos unusual was that she was a rare, though by no means unique, example of a woman who killed her victims in the assaultive, phallic style of male serial stalkers like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz.) The majority of female serial killers throughout history have relied on poison to dispatch their victims.

For most people, there is a quaint Arsenic and Old Lace quality associated with such crimes, as though disposing of a few people by feeding them arsenic-laced oatmeal were a rather genteel form of murder.

The truth is that, compared to the lingering agonies suffered by the average poisoning victim, the deaths meted out by male serial killers like Jack the Ripper, “Son of Sam,” or the Boston Strangler—the swift executions by knife blade, bullet, or garrote—seem positively humane. Female poisoners, in other words, differ from the popular stereotype of the dotty old maid getting rid of a burdensome houseguest with a little nip of lethal hot cocoa. Many are terrifying sadists who derive intense perverted pleasure from the sufferings of their victims.

There is no doubt that male serial sex-murder tends to be more lurid—more spectacularly violent—than the female variety. Whether it is more evil is another matter. After all, which is worse: to dismember a streetwalker after slitting her throat, or to cuddle in bed with a close friend you’ve just poisoned, and to climax repeatedly as you feel the body beside you subside into death?

Jane Toppan, the Jolly Psychopath

Like so many other serial killers, Jane Toppan was the product of a severely unstable upbringing. Her real name was Honora Kelley. She was born in Boston in 1857, the child of a poor Irish couple. Her mother died when Honora was a baby, leaving her in the dubious care of her father, Peter, a chronic drunk prone to violent outbursts and so wildly eccentric that his neighborhood nickname was “Kelley the Crack” (as in “crackpot”).

In 1863, Kelley—eager to be free of his family burdens—deposited Honora and her older sister Delia in the Boston Female Asylum, an institution for orphaned and other desperately needy girls. He never saw his children again.

Less than two years later, Honora was “placed out”—signed over as a full-time, live-in servant—to Mrs.

Abner Toppan, a middle-aged widow from Lowell, Massachusetts. Though never formally adopted, she was given the name Jane Toppan. Her position in the household was always equivocal. On the one hand, she was treated as a member of the family. On the other, she was never allowed to forget her lowly origins or her place as a menial. Within the community, her dark Irish looks branded her a permanent outsider. After a childhood of abuse, rejection, and abandonment, she grew up in a constant state of humiliation. It was the perfect recipe for the making of a psychopath.

Jane Toppan

At no point in her life did Jane appear criminally deranged. On the contrary, she struck most acquaintances as a lively, outgoing person—“Jolly Jane,” they called her. Like others of her ilk, however, she had a hidden self that was hopelessly diseased. She was a lifelong liar and gossip, spreading malicious rumors about people she envied. She was also—like many prospective serial killers

—a secret pyromaniac, who derived intense erotic pleasure from starting fires. Beneath her amiable exterior existed a poisonous well of malevolence, a deep, implacable longing to do harm.

She found the perfect outlet for her dark desires in nursing. Enrolling in the training school of Cambridge Hospital, she impressed many of the doctors with her competence and pleasing personality.

Secretly, however, she was experimenting on her patients, administering various poisons to them late at night when no one else was around. Eventually, she settled on a lethal combination of atropine and morphine as the most satisfactory method. Exactly how many victims she killed during those years is unclear, though the number was at least a dozen. As she later confessed, she became addicted to murder.

Making people die gave her a “voluptuous delight.” Her pleasure was even more intense when she climbed into bed with her victims and held their bodies tight while they suffered their final convulsions.

Eventually, she hired herself out as a private nurse. Her professional skill and personal charm made her a favorite among some of the most respectable families in Cambridge. No one knows for certain how many patients died as a result of her care during this ten-year period of her life, though estimates range as high as a hundred. Among them were her best friend, Myra Conners, and her foster sister, Elizabeth.

As with other psychopaths in the grip of a murderous compulsion, her killings escalated in frequency.

Her undoing came in the summer of 1901 while vacationing in a Cape Cod cottage owned by an old friend, Alden Davis. Within a six-week span, Jane murdered Davis, his wife, and two married daughters.

The shocking obliteration of the entire family aroused suspicion, and Jane was soon arrested.

In custody, she stunned some of Boston’s leading psychiatrists by admitting that her murders were motivated by “an irresistible sexual impulse.” She got a powerful erotic charge from holding her poisoned victims in her arms while they died. This need had grown increasingly powerful over the past year, and during the preceding summer she “had let herself go.”

She was diagnosed as “morally insane”—the Victorian term for a criminal psychopath—and sentenced to spend the rest of her life in a mental asylum. No sooner had her brief trial ended than she shocked the nation by confessing to thirty-one murders.

She spent the remaining thirty-six years of her life in a state mental hospital, dying at age eighty-four in 1938. According to legend, she would occasionally beckon to one of the nurses, and, with a conspiratorial smile, say:

“Get the morphine, dearie, and we’ll go out into the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”

Angels of Death

Jane Toppan falls into a common category of female serial killer, the psychopathic nurse who, instead of serving as an “Angel of Mercy,” acts as an “Angel of Death.” The annals of crime are filled with such homicidal health-care workers.

Anna Marie Hahn

Typical of the breed was Anna Marie Hahn, a German émigré who settled in Cincinnati and took up a career as a live-in nurse, tending strictly to lonely old men with large bank accounts. After getting her hands on their cash, she would dispatch them with various lethal potions, arsenic-spiked beer being a favorite. (One prospective victim became suspicious when some houseflies dropped dead after sampling the mug of brew Nurse Hahn had just served him.) Between 1932 and 1937, she poisoned an indeterminate number of elderly clients, possibly as many as fifteen. Arrested in 1937, she was convicted of first-degree murder and—on December 7, 1938—became the first woman to die in Ohio’s electric chair.

Genene Jones

A more recent—and even more prolific—“Angel of Death” was Genene Jones. Originally a beautician, she switched to vocational nursing in 1977 to pursue her lifelong dream of caring for critically ill children. Unfortunately, this dream was motivated not by any healthy desire to help others but by a psychopathic need to prove that she was a “miracle worker” who could rescue tiny patients from the brink of death.

In 1981, after four years of work at various hospitals in and around San Antonio, Texas, she accepted a position at the Bexar County Medical Center. Not long afterward, administrators began to notice an alarming increase in the deaths of little patients. An investigation was quickly launched and suspicion quickly focused on Nurse Jones. Like other compulsive killers who continue to commit their horrors even while under official scrutiny, Nurse Jones kept right on going.

Resigning from Bexar in March 1982, she joined the staff of the Kerr County clinic. Almost immediately, Kerr found itself plagued with a rash of inexplicable medical emergencies involving young children, who were seized with violent respiratory attacks while undergoing routine checkups. Once again, the link between these events and Genene Jones was impossible to ignore, particularly when an incriminating bottle of muscle relaxant turned up in her possession.

Eventually, a jury took just three hours to convict her of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. Her motives sprang from the depraved narcissism characteristic of psychopaths. To prove herself a heroine, she would inject her victims with medications that precipitated respiratory failure or cardiac arrest, then rush to their rescue. Sometimes, she did, in fact, manage to save them, but all too often they succumbed. She is thought to be responsible for the deaths of as many as forty-six babies and young children.

These women take great delight in their secret hidden power. In watching the suffering and slow death of her victims, she receives the utmost stimulation… . She strives for the will to power which is characteristic of her sadistic nature and obtains this through the anguish and suffering of her victims.

—J. Paul de River, The Sexual Criminal

Black Widows

Since serial killers seem almost supernaturally evil, they are often given the kinds of lurid nicknames accorded to comic book supervillains. Just as homicidal nurses are known as “Angels of Death,” another common type of female psycho-killer is known as the “Black Widow.”

Named after the poisonous female spider that devours its own mate, this criminological category refers to women who murder a whole string of husbands—along with anyone else they perceive as an obstacle to their own happiness, such as burdensome children, interfering in-laws, inconvenient acquaintances, and the like. In their book, Murder Most Rare, Michael and C. L. Kelleher identify the essential traits that make this kind of serial killer particularly deadly:

The Black Widow is typically intelligent, manipulative, highly organized, and patient; she plans her activities with great care. Her crimes are usually carried out over a relatively long period of time, and she is rarely suspected of murder until the victim count has become significant or the number of deaths among her relatives and acquaintances can no longer be considered coincidental. In many cases, the Black Widow begins to murder relatively late in life (often after the age of thirty) and therefore brings a good deal of maturity and patience to the planning and commission of her crimes. She relies on her ability to win the confidence and trust of her victims as a precursor to any attack. For this reason, she is seldom viewed as a suspect, even after she has committed several murders… . The average Black Widow will claim between six and thirteen victims during her active period, which generally ranges from ten to fifteen years.

Nannie Doss

One of the more notorious Black Widows of recent times was the pudgy, bespectacled Nannie Doss, dubbed the “Giggling Granny” because of her habit of chortling in amusement while discussing her crimes. The product of a harsh and abusive upbringing, Doss was a lifelong addict of true romance magazines, seeking refuge from the unpleasant realities of her existence in sugar-coated fantasies of undying love. Unfortunately, the men she met and married—generally through classified lonely hearts ads—were anything but Prince Charmings. Most were philandering alcoholics. When each new mate proved less than ideal, Nannie dispatched him with a generous dose of rat poison, mixed into whiskey or coffee or stewed prunes. Between 1929 and 1953, she murdered four husbands. She might have added to that tally if the doctor who treated her final husband hadn’t grown sufficiently suspicious to order an autopsy, which turned up enough arsenic in the victim’s body to have killed eighteen men.

Under arrest, she indignantly denied that she murdered for profit—and, in fact, the money she realized from her husbands’ savings account and life insurance policies was barely enough to cover their funeral expenses. Her motive, she claimed, was love. “I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life,” she told interrogators. Of course, that didn’t explain why she also poisoned two children, a grandchild, two sisters, and her mother.

In 1955, Doss was sentenced to life in prison, where she died of leukemia ten years later after writing her memoirs for Life magazine.