Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (34 page)

Lonnie Athens notes that violentization can also involve coaching, where the aggressive party
encourages
the more submissive one to display aggression or cruelty towards others. This coaching can probably occur up to the age of around twenty-five as
psychiatrists
estimate that until then the ego is still developing. Many of the young women profiled here have had such coaching experiences prior to age twenty-five.

For example, the teenage Myra Hindley was taken to war atrocity films and given books about torture and existential philosophy by her older lover, Ian Brady. He also persuaded her to join a gun club and to indulge in painful sodomy sessions. He told her that most people were worthless, that they should crush them like ants. When she was totally convinced by his philosophy, a process that took several years, he asked her to procure the first teenager for him to kill.

Seventeen-year-old Karla Homolka was happy to initiate sadomasochistic games with her lover, Paul. She bought and wore a dog collar, offered him her anal virginity and handcuffed herself for his sexual
pleasure.
But Paul, unlike most harmless erotic-power-exchange
players, wasn’t content with the consensual aspect. He started to humiliate her in their day to day existence and by the end of the relationship he gave her two of the blackest eyes that the local hospital had ever seen.

Paul also coached Karla in violent ways, bringing home books about killers and their victims. He would later coach Leslie and Kristen, who he abducted, on what to sexually do and say. Later Karla borrowed such books from the library and insisted on reading the most brutal passages out to her offended co-workers. It was part of her increasing sadism, a desire to shock.

Charlene was similarly coached by her older husband Gerald Gallego and was persuaded to act like his young daughter who he was having an incestuous relationship with. He encouraged Charlene to call him Daddy and to dress in outfits like those his daughter wore. She bought a gun and ammunition for him - and, according to author Eric van Hoffmann, she enjoyed biting and having lesbian sex with the bondaged girls. This would certainly explain why the Gallegos often abducted a pair of victims at a time - one each - rather that the more usual one.

Gwen Graham was coached by her father on how to kill animals on their farm - including farm animals that she loved and pets that she had grown up with. She was taught how to use a gun at an early age.

This ‘violent training’ explains why so few women
become seriously violent, for a violent father is more likely to coach his son to emulate him than he is his daughter. The women in this book were exceptional in that a man did coach them in vicious ways.

Sometimes we don’t know how many different forms the violence took. Carol Bundy was battered and emotionally abused by both parents and sexually molested by her father. Genene Jones had a troubled and increasingly hypochondriacal childhood (an ongoing cry for help or a desperate means of seeking affection) and has said it included abuse. Presumably Martha Ann Johnson did too, given that her low IQ would have made her a target for anyone irritated by mental sluggishness. We know that Martha feared being alone and married for the first time at age fourteen.

It’s hard to know after so many years exactly what happened to Bavarian poisoner Anna Zwanziger during her childhood but she was passed from relative to relative after her father died and such a history increases the likelihood of physical cruelty. Step-parents are statistically more likely to abuse stepchildren than they are their natural born. Anna’s first suicide attempts were made as a very young woman so she’d clearly suffered during her early life.

Violence can be lost in the midst of time - one crime book suggested Anna had a good stable childhood in her father’s inn, whereas more detailed research shows
that her father died when she was five leaving her doubly orphaned and spending the next five years being shunted from one foster home to the next.

Similarly, a recent television programme on Peter Sutcliffe suggested that his childhood was unremarkable - yet a close reading of his life shows that as a child he was terrified of his father and used to pop his head around the door to make sure that the man wasn’t home before he entered the house.

Other sources have suggested that Ted Bundy had a good upbringing, whereas in truth his religious unmarried mother was ashamed of him and his violent and bigoted grandfather became his role model for his formative years.

Alice Miller wrote in
Banished
Knowledge
that ‘It is absolutely unthinkable that a human being who, from the start, is given love, tenderness, closeness, orientation, respect, honesty, and protection by adults should later become a murderer.’ As we’ve seen, the women in this book weren’t given most of the necessities she describes.

Further proof that violence comes from within the family is found in Oliver James impressively detailed
Juvenile
Violence
In
A
Winner-Loser
Culture.
The book
shows that the children who ended up being labelled as aggressive had been hit hard and long by their parents. This was true of studies carried out in places as culturally diverse as England, Sweden and New York. Moreover, the violent parents rarely praised their children and were unenthusiastic about the good things their offspring did. Carol Bundy’s hyper-critical and vicious parents fit the bill.

Oliver James also looked at the impact a depressed mother had on her children. Small children (under the age of five) in her care were particularly at risk. He notes that ‘Murder of children is the only violent offence that women are more likely to commit than men.’ Quadruple child killer Martha Ann Johnson, depressed but determined to get her ex-husband back, and the alcoholic Jeanne Weber slot into this category.

He describes depressed mothers who rejected their babies. By age one the child became equally rejecting, refusing to acknowledge the mother when she came into the room. These neglected children also avoided eye contact and seemed to retreat into their own little world.

This account squares with Gwen Graham’s comments that as a baby she didn’t like to be held. She’d been ignored by her youthful and isolated mother so didn’t bond with her. The mother then became violent towards Gwen as she grew up. Gwen was doubly unfortunate in that her father beat her too.

Sociologists, psychologists and women’s studies specialists have all identified the self harm that women from such high conflict families experience. As these abused girls grow up they harm themselves by starvation, overeating or heavy drinking. Others cut their arms or burn themselves with cigarettes and there may be several attempts at suicide.

This is true of the killers in this text - Anna Zwanziger, Jeanne Weber, Catherine Birnie, Charlene Gallego and Aileen Wuornos all had drink and/or drug problems. Martha Ann Johnson, Catherine Wood, Rose West, Myra Hindley and Carol Bundy were overeaters. Gwen Graham had cut and burnt herself, Genene Jones abused prescription medication whilst Judith Neelley lived off a diet of junk food and neglected herself physically to the point where she and her clothes were unclean.

Karla Homolka, though slim and beautiful, became obsessed with her diet and thought she was fat. She also turned up at school talking of suicide and showed faint marks on her wrists. She came from a family of heavy drinkers and in the days before her trial was sometimes drunk by the afternoon.

It’s true that many criminals don’t accept responsibility for their own actions, blaming the crimes on bad luck or pornography or hearing voices - and some
might say the same is true of those who cry abused childhood. But there are independent witnesses to many of the cases in this book who testify that the children were indeed abused.

Some of these girls were so isolated and brainwashed by their abusive families that they thought the beatings and excessive rules were normal. Rose West, who continued to have an unhealthy relationship with her incestuous father when she was a married woman, conforms to this pattern. Carol Bundy also talked about the good times like family outings - and it was through talking to relatives that they uncovered the physical beatings and emotional humiliation that had actually occurred in her childhood home.

Many of these punitive parents knew that the neighbours were talking about them, and in some cases their children were fostered because of the abuse, but the parents still didn’t seek help for their violence or change their behaviour. There is a rigidity amongst some parents that prevents them from acknowledging the pain they can create.

John Douglas, in
The
Anatomy
Of
Motive,
tells the story of mass murderer Charles Whitman, who was frequently hit by his father. His father also beat his mother.
Young Charles was often bruised and was almost drowned by his father for coming home drunk when he was eighteen.

Charles Whitman eventually took this hatred out on the world, killing his wife and his mother then taking refuge in a Texas tower. He shot thirteen strangers before being shot dead by police.

After the massacre, his father admitted that he had made his children call him ‘sir’ throughout their
brutalised
childhoods - but rather than regretting his harsh treatment of them, he felt he hadn’t punished them enough.

Charles Whitman isn’t alone as a beaten child who grew up to take revenge on the world. Again and again, prison authorities note that today’s prisoners were yesterday’s abused children. As we’ve seen, many of the killers profiled here were regularly hit by their parents or grandparents when they were growing up. As adult prisoners, such men and women often remain distressed or dangerous. Most institutions opt for a policy of just locking such prisoners up but Grendon Prison in Buckinghamshire, England, has opted for a more constructive approach.

This prison offers group therapy to some of the
country’s most violent male prisoners. Eric Cullen, former head of the prison’s psychology unit, spoke of Grendon’s work in the BBC2 documentary
Behind
Bars.
He said that prisoners had to come to terms with what they’d done to others, that they had to understand how they’d become the person that they now wanted to change.

Dr Joseph Marr, one of Grendon’s psychotherapists added ‘If we were showing abused children, people would want to rescue them. The inmates are these
children
grown up.’

The talking - and listening - cure seems to do some good, though we’re not talking miracles. Most prisons have a recidivism rate of sixty percent whereas Grendon has forty-five percent, the lowest reoffending rate of any British prison.

At group therapy sessions the men talk of their childhoods - being beaten by their parents and/or sexually abused in children’s homes is revealed in their stories again and again.

Ironically, the public often opts for even more punitive measures when abused children become criminally abusive adults. Readers of crime magazines sometimes suggest that we should put killers in the stocks and publicly humiliate them. The awful reality is that these men and women have already been humiliated and hit by their supposed carers throughout their childhoods and are now passing the violence on.

Robert Adams, who I interviewed in the summer of 2000, agrees that there’s often a link between being a victim and becoming a victimiser. ‘There is evidence that people who have been physically or sexually abused in their childhood, and
who
haven’t
coped
with
this,
go on to abuse others or be violent towards them,’ says the former prison officer. (My italics.) He adds that some people don’t pass the abuse on. ‘The major problem is how to predict who will and who won’t. By and large, criminologists can’t help with this one, though they do have lots of theories.’

As this book has shown, Lonnie Athens four-step theory of violentization (being brutalised, resolving to return the violence, being violent, realising that this violence pays off) is one of the theories that makes sense.

Extensive data has shown that children who are frequently smacked have more behavioural problems, show more aggression or depression and have more problems with their mental and emotional health than children from less punitive families. Carol Bundy, Judith Neelley, Catherine Birnie, Cathy Wood, Gwen Graham, Rose West and Aileen Wuornos all showed these aggressive or depressive traits during their violent and dysfunctional childhoods. The others would
show their aggression later - but the seeds were sown when they were young.

Three large American studies conducted in the 1990’s showed that children who were spanked regularly showed a marked rise in anti-social behaviour over a two year period. Conversely, those children who were rarely or never hit showed no increase in
anti-social
behaviour over the same period. (Research found in Barnardo’s National Children’s Bureau Highlight newsletter number 166)

Other countries - including Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Norway - have taken notice of the data and have made it illegal for adults to hit children. Sweden banned such punishment in 1979, which means that an entire generation has now grown up largely without being physically humiliated.

Granted, most of us who are regularly hit by angry adults don’t go on to become serial killers - but many such children grow up to develop drink problems and eating disorders. Others go on to hit their partners or their children or just live very unhappy and damaged lives.

Many parents think that if they stop hitting their children that they will spoil them - but Elie Godsi, author of the compassionate and knowledgeable
Violence
In
Society,
writes that it is love rather than hate which saves people from criminality and from ongoing personal distress. To quote from Walter Parsons, a
former Chairman of Leeds Juvenile Court ‘You can whip vice into a boy but you can’t whip it out.’