316 pages
English language
Published Aug. 7, 2017
"In 1998, an FBI profiler infamously declared in a homicide conference, 'There are no female serial killers'--but Lady Killers offers fourteen creepy examples to the contrary."--Page 4 of cover.
Serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, "There are no female serial killers." Telfer delves into the reality of female aggression and predation with this compendium of female serial killers and their crimes through the ages.
Women do seem to choose poison! I wish the author had gone into an analysis of what turned these women into killers (“why” is more interesting to me than what they did or how they did it), but they’re mostly quite historical so it would be conjecture anyway.
Interesting cases but I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it.
I loved the inclusion of non-western female killers, even though there were only a few cases with sufficient data to properly portrait the women and their motives.
It's a bit repetitive after a while, and despite condemning the media's reaction to female killers, I often did get the impression that those murderers were still 'only women', doing 'womanly crimes'. But that might also be due to the scarce information on other female killers.
