The Australian Crime File 2 by Paul B. Kidd

Author:Paul B. Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction, true crime, Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, South Australia, Paul B. Kidd, Alan Bond, Azaria Chamberlain, ‘Jockey’ Smith, Rosaleen Norton, serial killers in the movies, Sir Terence Lewis, Strathfield Massacre, Laurie Connell, Australia’s first bank robbery, Mount Rennie rape case, Eddie ‘The Fireman’ Birchley, Frank Butler, Jimmy Governor, Arthur Caldwell, George Freeman, Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones, Ebony Simpson, Peter Huxley, serial killers, rapists, fraud, crime, true crime, Cec Waters, Port Arthur massacre, George Edser, Raymond Patrick Bennett, Christopher Skase, Katingal, Russel ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, Stephen Tandy, Earl Heatley, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Nicole Hanns, Rex ‘Buckets’ Jackson, Raymond John Denning, Roger Rogerson, Laurie Connell, Daryl Francis Suckling, Wade Frankum, Brendan Abbott, Lindy Chamberlain, Brian Quinn, Rosaleen Norton, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp
ISBN: 9781743004579
Publisher: Five Mile Press
Published: 2012-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

31

Women Serial Killers

On average there is a murder committed in Australia every day. And on average women commit one-third of them. With this in mind it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that of the thirty cases of serial murder in Australia’s history, almost a third (nine) of them involve a woman either killing on her own or murdering in tandem with a man.

The reason that this fact is so unusual is because while women who kill are commonplace, women serial killers throughout the world, especially those who murder alone, are rare in comparison to men and considerably less than Australia’s average of one in three. There seems to be no logical explanation why Australia’s average is so much higher.

‘Female serial killers are not as common in numbers as the men because the extreme violence that usually surrounds a homicide is much more common in males,’ explains Dr Rod Milton, leading Sydney forensic psychiatrist who worked on such cases as the Granny Killer murders, in which serial killer John Wayne Glover violently murdered six elderly woman on Sydney’s lower north shore in the late 1980s.

‘Women are much less violent than men and of the few that do commit serial murder, their crimes are usually more of a passive nature such as quietly poisoning their victims or suffocating babies or elderly women in hospitals where they are least likely to be caught,’ Dr Milton says.

‘Most women serial killers, for whatever reason they are killing, go about their business in a quieter, subdued, yet deadlier manner than their male counterparts. The classic example would be the 1944 movie Arsenic and Old Lace, where two old dears befriended tramps off the streets, fed them, gave them a drink and then poisoned them and buried their bodies under the house,’ Dr Milton says.

‘Mind you, they were caught, but I think there’s a lot more female serial killers out there than are given credit for,’ he added.

Statistics show that the USA has 76 per cent of the world’s serial killers, of which only approximately 15 per cent of the cases involved a female either acting alone or in partnership with a male who was almost always a lover, but very rarely a husband.

Take away the women who acted as an accomplice and you find that solo women serial killers are a very rare breed indeed, possibly as low as five per cent. And husband-and-wife serial killer teams are the rarest of them all at around two per cent.

True to form, it was the American media, where serial killer hype was first born following the coining of the term by FBI agent and serial-killer profiler Robert Ressler in the mid 1970s, that claimed Aileen Carol Wuornos, a hard-drinking, ex-convict prostitute, as the world’s first female serial killer. She murdered seven men on separate occasions by shooting them in the torso with a small-calibre handgun after they picked her up as she hitchhiked throughout Florida in 1990. But in the true sense of serial multicide, where

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.