Serial Killers--Philosophy for Everyone by Fritz Allhoff

Author:Fritz Allhoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-11-04T04:00:00+00:00

PART IV

A EULOGY FOR EMOTION

The Lack of Empathy and the Urge to Kill

ELIZABETH SCHECHTER AND HAROLD SCHECHTER

CHAPTER 9

KILLING WITH KINDNESS

Nature, Nurture, and the Female Serial Killer

Introduction

Until 1978, when police in suburban Chicago discovered the moldering remains of several dozen teenaged boys in the fetid crawl space of a pudgy building contractor named John Wayne Gacy – who eventually confessed to 33 murders – the largest number of victims dispatched by a single American serial killer was 31. This earlier killer, like Gacy, was a classic criminal psychopath who led an outwardly respectable life while secretly indulging in wholesale torture and murder, a sadist who achieved the heights of sexual ecstasy by inflicting slow suffering and death on helpless victims. Before Gacy laid temporary claim to the dubious distinction, the Guinness Book of World Records listed this long-forgotten psycho-killer – who operated in the closing decades of the nineteenth century – as our country’s most prolific multiple murderer. Her name was Jane Toppan.

That a woman was America’s long-reigning champion of serial homicide comes as a surprise to many people, particularly those who continue to believe the hype about Aileen Wuornos, the hard-bitten Florida prostitute who, having shot seven male motorists in the course of a year, was widely touted as “the first female serial killer in history” and subsequently immortalized in the Oscar winning movie Monster. To some extent, the insistence that only men are capable of such enormities is a sexist assumption that cuts across political lines, being shared by social reactionaries (who persist in seeing women as the “weaker sex”), middle-class liberals (who idealize women as less prone to violence), and radical feminists (who tend to see their sex as morally superior to the male). There is a famous (if happily outmoded) riddle about a boy who – having been badly injured in a car accident that has killed his father – is rushed into the emergency room, only to have the surgeon exclaim, “I can’t operate on him – he’s my son!” The inability of the average person in the not-very-distant past to realize that the doctor is the boy’s mother is precisely equivalent to the continuing failure among the general public to recognize that the sadistic sex-killer of 31 victims might be a woman.

It is also true, of course, that Wuornos represented something of an anomaly: a female predator who killed in the random, assaultive style of male serial stalkers like the Zodiac and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. Relatively few female psycho-killers have conducted their homicidal sprees with guns or knives. Nor are there any known examples – at least in modern times – of female mutilation-murderers who have engaged in the kind of horrors perpetrated by the legendary Whitechapel monster, whose victims were subjected to hideous post-mortem butcheries. As Camille Paglia puts it, “There is no female Jack the Ripper.”1

This fact, however, does not mean that only men are capable of serial murder. Rather, it suggests that men and women tend to perpetrate serial homicide in different ways.

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