A Comfortable Evil: Female Serial Murderers in American Culture
Open Access
- Author:
- Wilkins, Melinda Page
- Graduate Program:
- Special
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 14, 2004
- Committee Members:
- John Philip Jenkins, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Alan M Sica, Committee Member
Anne Carver Rose, Committee Member
Michael Walter Anesko, Committee Member
Barbara White Pennypacker, Committee Member - Keywords:
- serial murder
women and homicide
female offenders
women and crime - Abstract:
- ABSTRACT A COMFORTABLE EVIL: FEMALE SERIAL MURDERERS IN AMERICAN CULTURE Melinda PageWilkins This is a dissertation about the ways in which American culture understands the behavior of women who commit serial murder. Despite what most people think, female serial homicide is a distinct criminal phenomenon accounting for perhaps as many as 30% of all serial murders. These killers are women who murder secretly over the course of months or years and claim on average more victims than their male counterparts do. They are successful for three reasons: First, cultural mythology holds that serial murder is a crime committed only by men. Second, female killers use traditional gender stereotypes to conceal their crimes. Third, American culture seems to have a great deal invested in believing that, by virtue of their gender, women are simply not capable of committing the crime. For the most part, the materials used for this project are available in the public record. They derive from interdisciplinary research into theoretical and empirical criminology and sociology, print and broadcast journalism, and true-crime, literary and cinematic treatments of the topic in American culture. This dissertation suggests that female serial killers in American culture are good wives, good mothers, faithful, submissive girlfriends and lovers, competent nurses and healthcare professionals, good babysitters, responsible landladies, vulnerable hitchhikers--ordinary women who pervert the gender stereotypes they seem to exemplify. Like their male counterparts, they violate cultural standards not only for appropriate social behavior, but also for appropriate gendered behavior. Stories which account for their criminality reflect a divisively gendered cultural ethics which is defined by the ideals of agency. These women are criminals, but the agency they might exercise—erotic, powerful, enraged—is subsumed by the more compelling issue of how they have violated the cultural understanding of womanness. Stories about female serial killers are based on an ethics which holds the murderers juridically responsible for their crimes and, perversely, finds them damningly irresponsible as women.