Some people are fascinated by monsters; they think about them all the time. Some people are professional monster chasers and monster researchers: like law enforcement people, criminologists and the forensic psychologists. These are the people I want to talk about: the experts. My discussion focuses on a specialized topic, monsters – those of the “serial killer” variety – yet my real subject, as you will see, is the broad topic of human aggression and violence and how our understanding of it is undermined by deceptive manipulation of data and through gate-keeping – in other words, through systematic sabotage prompted by ideological agendas. In the Summer of 2008 a major international conference on serial murder took place in San Antonio, Texas, sponsored by the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The conference was designed to be a comprehensive treatment of the topic of serial murder, as the official FBI report, published following the event, shows: “A total of 135 subject matter experts attended the five-day event. These individuals included law enforcement officials who have successfully investigated and apprehended serial killers; mental health, academic, and other experts who have studied serial killers and shared their expertise through education and publication; officers of the court, who have judged, prosecuted, and defended serial killers; and members of the media, who inform and educate the public when serial killers strike.
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In the U.S., at least 51 percent of documented female serial killers have killed another woman. More than 30 percent have murdered a child. The average female serial killer murders for much longer than a man. Serial Killer Statistics Data Number of classified Serial Killers worldwide since 1980 154 Number of classified Serial Killers in the U.S. Since 1980 87 Number of active serial killers at.
The attendees also reflected the international nature of the serial murder problem, as there were attendees from ten different countries on five continents.” 3 135 experts from 10 countries – very thorough, very impressive. The 14,000-word official report, Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigations,' has quite a lot to say about the phenomenon of serial murder and about serial killers. The text sets out to dispel quite a few myths about serial killers and aims to improve professional response to this type of crime.
The report's introduction tells us that “the symposium’s focus was on obtaining a consensus of participants’ views on the causes, motivations, and characteristics of serial murderers, so as to enable the criminal justice system to improve its response in identifying, investigating, and adjudicating these cases.” The FBI's big Serial Murder report was, however, almost completely silent about the female of the species. In the section titled “ Motivations and Types of Serial Murder,” in which the question of financial gain is addressed, mentions, as an entry in a list of various types of cases involving financial gain, “black widows.” This is the whole of the discussion of the female serial killer. Elsewhere in the report, in a myth-debunking section under the heading “ Myth: Serial killers are all white males,” this is the rebuttal: “ Contrary to popular belief, serial killers span all racial groups. There are white, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian serial killers. The racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. Population.” The myth that serial killers are always 'white males' and even that they are almost always 'white males' in the US is widespread and is still sometimes repeated. The text offers five examples of non-white males to make its point.
The racial aspect of the stereotype is dealt with directly yet the gender aspect is ignored completely. The US Department of Justice, parent agency of the FBI, has recently been a bit more generous in acknowledging that some women indeed have been known, from time to time at least, to engage in habitual homicide. The author of a 2011 academic study on female serial killers, Amanda L.
Farrell, titled Lethal Ladies,” an effort to understand what they term an “elusive population to study” due to “the scant information published about these rare offenders.” In preparation for their examination of the phenomenon they consulted US Justice department data which, the “Lethal Ladies” authors tell us “indicated 36 female serial killers have been active over the course of the last century. Another factor has muddied the waters, interfering with discovering facts and details on female perpetrated serial homicide. Since the 1970s, when interest in the topic of serial murder came to the fore many lively scholarly debates have occurred challenging the very definition of “serial killer,” one scholar invoking one set of criteria, and another scholar invoking a different one altogether.
This state of affairs does not lend itself to the systematic collation (which is a painstaking processes) of a usable list of “known” cases. The most surprising fact resulting from this delving into newspaper archives – a fact which, if you think about it deeply, should not be in the least surprising – is that prior to the era when serial killers became a household term (the 1970s to the present) it was common knowledge for at least a century-and-a-half the idea that female serial killers were a fairly common type of criminal, and that that these “wholesale murderesses,” these 'Borgias,' these “female Bluebeards” were very dangerous characters indeed. A breakdown in the dissemination of factual knowledge, and of critical thinking within educational system has ensued. Conformism to a collectivist ideology, has been achieved through peer pressure- instigated demand for spineless conformity. The result: complacency, “going along with the program,” dependence on and uncritical adoption of rote-learned models, paradigms and patterns, obsessive concern about having “offensive” thoughts – taking over the educational process. Thus is makes sense that a mass-forgetting is undermining scholarly inquiry, including the one that is the subject of this article. Actually, there’s a whole book that goes about explaining this phenomenon, specifically as it applies to the study of violence by women.
The author, Patricia Pearson, in her 1997 book, When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, calls the phenomenon we have been discussing “collective amnesia.” 14 The term appears in her discussion of the weird phenomenon of culture’s long-term remembering of male serial killers (Jack the Ripper) while forgetting the females (and not because of their having been less vicious). Pearson observes – “Our collective amnesia about female serial killers was so pronounced that when Aileen Wuornos was arrested in 1992 and charged with the shooting deaths of seven men along I-75, she was immediately proclaimed America’s first serial killer.” Pearson’s observation is an important one and the term, “collective amnesia,” she uses to describe it is perfect. Just what is behind this bizarre collective amnesia? Looking farther afield, beyond the formal study of the crime of murder – into the world of academic study of Domestic Violence (sometimes labeled as “PV,” Partner Violence, or, “ IPV,” Intimate Partner Violence) – we get a glimpse of whence the problem has arisen. In 2007, just a year before the FBI-sponsored international Serial Murder conference, sociologist Murray A. Straus, who specializes in the study of Partner Violence published in a peer reviewed journal a highly unusual article in which he boldly exposed a long list of methods that have for decades been aggressively deployed within the academic community by academics whose adherence to their chosen ideology led them to deliberately sabotage and prevent the pursuit of accurate objective scholarship on the field of Domestic Violence. 16 Straus detailed seven specific methods.
“Patriarchal control,” the central tenet of Marxist feminist ideology is the universal and a priori explanation of all conflict between members of the opposite sex. Any scientific evidence that might contradict this dogma, thereby undermining the entire Marxist feminist position (and the jobs that depend on implementing that dogma), would be in jeopardy. Thus feminist academics, in concert, have – with perfect justification based on their faith in their dogma and their unflagging desire for “progress” – systematically sabotaged the scientific discourse, in order to get the conclusions that fit their politics. It is worth noting that Dr. Straus, just like journalist Patricia Pearson (author of When She Was Bad), describes himself as a “feminist.” My understanding of their use of the label is that both see themselves as professionals whose area of interest is the understanding and welfare of women.
They use “feminist” to describe an attitude that has nothing to do with promotion of ideology, dogma, the pursuit of political power or the re-engineering of society to comport with a predetermined utopian vision. Not terribly long before the period of rapid growth of feminist power in institutions that took place in the 1960s-1970s, a groundbreaking book challenging stereotypes about female criminality was published. The Criminality of Women, by sociologist Otto Pollak was published in 1950. 19 In his book he took a comprehensive approach, both “summarized previous work on women and crime” and then challenging basic assumptions concerning the extent and quality of women’s involvement in criminal behavior.” “Pollak is the first writer to insist that women’s participation in crime approaches that of men and is commensurate with their representation in the population,” as the 2002 Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice notes.20.
Judge Florence E. Allen – First Criminal Court Judge, in 1922 elected to Ohio Supreme Court – 1922: “Men have always sat on juries and men instinctively shrink from holding women strictly accountable for their misdeeds.
Now that women sit on juries I expect the percentage of convictions in cases of women to be greater. Women are more clever than men in arousing sympathy. I had one woman, a hardened criminal, stage a terrific fainting spell in my courtroom after the jury found her guilty.
It took four men to carry her to jail. She continued having these spells, so long that I had to defer pronouncing sentence. Finally I sent her word that the longer she acted so, the longer she would be in jail. Within a few moments she sent up word that, she would be good and received her sentence meekly, with no trace of feeling.” 23. When we take powerful ingrained old-fashioned male tendency to defer to the welfare of women – that sways the perceptions of males among law professionals just as it does the larger population – and combine it with aggressive pressure tactics of professional shaming, boycott, sabotage, censorship, false allegations and the threat of false allegations – plus the overt promulgation of an ideologically motivated “gender” narrative that is designed to hide evidence of aggression and violence initiated by females, wee see the reason for the bizarre collective amnesia that has taken hold. Taking together what we learn from Straus’s epose that outlines the long-standing campaign of open sabotage and censorship of social science knowledge on the part of “gender” ideologues, plus an acknowledgment of everyday fundamental chivalry, plus the tendency of communities of bureaucrats to devolve into conformity and groupthink, we have an explanation for the existence of the collective amnesia concerning female serial killers (and, by extension, concerning female aggression and violence in general). Why we love Serial Killers, a 2014 book by criminologist Scott Bonn is devoted to the examination of popular interest in serial killers.
Bonn: “In many ways, serial killers are for adults what monster movies are for children — that is, scary fun! However, the pleasure an adult receives from watching serial killers can be difficult to admit, and may even trigger feelings of guilt. In fact, the research conducted for this book reveals that many people who are fascinated with serial killers refer to it as a guilty pleasure.” 25. The reality is that until the 1960s-1970s period there was nothing “obscure” about Black Widow killers, nor is it even remotely true that they were “rarely discussed.” In the United States, from the 1869 Martha Grinder case onward Black Widow killers were not only widely discussed but they made the headlines just as sensationally (taking into account the more limited means of older media).
In fact, in 1908, one of the earliest feature length films (around 20 minutes duration being “feature length” at this stage) a “true crime” film – comparable to today’s tabloid-style TV-reenactment series such as Investigation ID’s hit cable series Deadly Women – titled “Female Bluebeard” was made just weeks after the headline-grabbing Belle Gunness “murder farm” case involving dozens of murders of men lured by spouse-soliciting “personal ads” came to light. The film, which was seen across the continent, was a big hit. My hypothesis this this: despite the fact that a great number of people are fascinated with stories of serial killers, it is, for most people the result of a fascination with male monsters. The pleasure, the “scary fun” that Professor Bonn accurately identifies is not applicable, generally speaking, to the female of the species. (Wuornos is an exception, specifically because the media, under the influence of feminist Marxian theories, reinvented her as a heroine of “gender liberation,” fashioning a common thief and cold-blooded murderer into a feminist saint, a mythical super-heroine, a down-to-earth Wonder Woman, a Lesbian Robin Hood of the Resistance of Patriarchal Oppression.).
Scary Gate-Keepers When it comes to professionals who have an interest in serial murder, such as the “135 subject matter experts” who participated in the FBI’s mammoth-scale 2008 Serial Murder conference there is, it would seem, an overwhelming and multifaceted spirit of fear hovering in the air. This is a fear that shuts down discussion of half the population (according to my own estimation of the ratio of female to male serial killers, which is about 1:1, rather than 6:1) of the criminals claimed to be the topic on examination. Female serial killer stories lack the special quality that, for men, excites their deep-seated protective chivalry (both as instinct and custom).
Real-life female serial killers, unlike the males, rarely leave corpses of their victims strewn about the landscape, alerting the public and investigators to a clear-cut crime of murder. Seldom is a female serial killer the subject of a hunt or chase and a clue-following hot pursuit. Under these conditions – the “classic” female serial killer profile – its hard for a detective to become a hero killer-catcher – a knight in shining armor, a savior who has saved lives by preventing likely future murders. Serial killer catchers want to bag a Hannibal Lechter, not an “Arsenic and Old Lace” character, even if she is just as vicious, just as perverse and just as prolific a murderer as Hannibal the Cannibal. Present-day crime scholars and law enforcement practitioners – the great share of them at least – seem to have accepted the unfounded claims made by ideology-driven activists who operate in the guise of social scientists (who have created a false narrative, skewed studies, and cooked statistics that were designed confirm their belief-system) and are satisfied to put aside critical thinking and dutifully adopt the wildly inaccurate standard literature.
The public has no idea what is going on in the hallowed halls of elite institutions such as Ivy League universities FBI’s famous Behavioral Analysis Unit. The public doesn’t know what big tough judges, prosecutors, forensic psychologists, Special Agents and professors know: that going against the grain of feminist orthodoxy is a career killer. Sabotage + Chivalry + Conformity = Silence The formula rules. When it comes to the discussion of the realities of female serial killers – and all other aspects of the topic of violence by women and female aggression – is not only enforced silence and automatic self-censorship among academics and professionals, but society-wide collective amnesia – exactly as Patricia Person said. This amnesia (surrounding the spectre of the female monster) is the result of a fear that runs deeper (and quieter) than the fear of the sort monsters that gives people the pleasure of a scary thrill, the survival-instinct-based fear and that gives professionals a the prideful feeling of enforcing a moral valiantly protective imperative to hunt down those scary monsters that fit the accepted idea of what a monster ought to be. This article offers the opportunity to open up this discussion of this scary subject matter (violence by women) and to encourage the Department of Justice, the FBI, and all other crime professionals, to rise above their fear of the gate-keepers and begin to conscientiously reassess their personal beliefs and then to reassess the entire professional literature on crime and crime psychology in light of what we can now learn about female aggression – if only we would seriously commit do the necessary work. On August 11, 2015, Brittany Pilkington, 23-year-old mother of four children (three deceased) confessed to murdering – over a period of several years – her three sons by placing blankets over their heads to suffocate them.
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Her explanation of motive was unusual. She claimed her husband Joseph Pilkington (43), a worker in the Marysville Honda factory, paid more attention to the boys than he did to their daughter. According to Logan County prosecutor William Goslee, “in her mind, she was protecting her daughter from being not as loved as the boys were by their father,” as the Columbus Dispatch reported. Miss Bernebet was a 17-year old self-described Priestess of a cult variously called the “God Sacrifice Church” and the “Flame of God Church” in Lafayette, Louisiana. She led a team of serial killers who roamed about the region engaging in ritualistic human sacrifices targeting innocent families (always entire families!), dismembering the victims in accord with a Voodoo-like superstition. Clementine Bernebet’s case is among the many hundreds of female serial killer cases that have been (conveniently) “forgotten” by scholars of criminal behavior in the haze of the collective amnesia that for the past half-century has infected their profession and the whole of society as well.
The photo in the title graphic shows Russian serial killer Tamara Samsonova, arrested July 27, 2015, peeking out from the police holding cell in St. Petersburg, Russia on the day of her arrest. She is thought to have murdered eleven or more persons, dismembering their corpses and perhaps cannibalizing portions. Quote: “I came home and put the whole pack of Phenazepamum - 50 pills - into her Olivier salad. She liked it very much. I woke up after 2 am and she was lying on the floor.
So I started cutting her to pieces.”. 16) Murray A. Straus, “ Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence,” European Journal on Criminal Policy, published online 14 July 2007.
17) “ a feminist approach is also limited for explaining abuse perpetrated by women. Feminist theory typically explains women’s use of violence in the context of self-defence and retaliation for previous abuse. Yet, by doing so, a strictly feminist orientation denies that women can also feel angry and enraged without provocation in their relationships with men (Nolet-Bos, 1999). Additionally, while much of a woman’s use of violence does exist within the framework of retaliation and self-defence, feminist theory does not explain why women perpetrate violence outside their intimate relationships (e.g., at work, with children, or with peers).” Richard Amaral, PhD, “Explaining Domestic Violence using Feminist Theory.” Dr.
Richard Amaral Psychology For Growth, March 21, 2011. C) “While detailed serial killing data are difficult to find or generate, recent studies have conducted both national and cross-cultural inquiries regarding female serial killers. For example, Gurian (2011) analyzed cross-cultural data compiled from academic and media sources on 134 offenders (99 partnered teams including 55 males and 44 females and 35 solo female killers) primarily from the U. S., but also including serial killers from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, India, Mexico, Russia, Spain and the U. 170, Denise Paquette Boots and Jennifer Wareham, “A gendered view of violence,” pp.
163 ff., in Claire M. Renzetti, Susan L. Miller, Angela R. Gover, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Crime and Gender Studies, Routledge, 2013. These findings (Gurian’s) represent only a fraction of international cases turned up in my own research (Robert St. D) “Jon Amiel’s film Copycat (1995) opens with renowned criminal psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) giving her stock lecture on serial killers in which she explains that serial killers murder for recognition and power, usually over women, who constitute the majority of victims.
With each killing leaving them unfulfilled, they kill again driven by the hope that next time might be perfect. To highlight the group that poses most risk, Helen asks all male members of the audience to stand, and then invites those under 20 or over 35 and those of Asian and African American descent to sit down, an exercise designed to highlight that 90% of serial killers are young adult, white males.” Nicola Rehling, “Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies.” Jump Cut: A Review Of Contemporary Media, No. 49, spring 2007.