Female Serial Killers

In this episode, we chat with Dr. Marissa A. Harrison from Penn State University (PSU) Harrisburg, PA who has studied female serial killers and written a book about them.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) This episode contains discussions about infant death, child abuse, intimate
partner violence, murder, and other explicit comments that may not
be suitable for all audiences.
Listener discretion is advised.
Hello, listeners, and welcome to this episode of Criminology Chats.

(00:23):
I'm your host, JR. With me today are two Chicago
school students, Alana McCarran and Miranda LaCour.
We have as our guest today, Dr. Marissa A.
Harrison from Penn State University, Harrisburg, PA.
Just a little bit about Dr. Harrison, she's a research
psychologist who investigates serial murder and is interested in serial

(00:45):
murder from the evolutionary and other psychological perspectives.
Her research has been covered in popular written and televised
media, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, CBS All Access, Good
Morning America, A&E.
She's been featured on radio and television programming such as
Investigation Discovery, A Crime to Remember, BBC Radio Britain, The

(01:08):
Jill Bennett Show, and on popular Irish radio programs.
Her recent book, published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press,
called Just as Deadly, The Psychology of Female Serial Killers,
has received expert and reader praise.
Dr. Harrison's book can be found on Amazon Books.
We don't have a structure here.

(01:29):
It's more of a chat, you know, where Miranda and
Alana have some questions for you.
I'll have a few to throw in and then you
just talk about it.
Do you want to give us a little background about
yourself there, Marissa?
Sure.
My name is Marissa Harrison.
I am professor of psychology at Penn State, Harrisburg.
I have been conducting homicide-related research for about 12

(01:50):
or 13 years, focusing exclusively on serial murder for about
10 or 11.
My background, actually, I'm a biopsychologist and my specialty is
evolutionary psychology.
I don't know if you've taken a class on evolutionary
psych, maybe you have, or if you've discussed it in
your other courses.
Evolutionary psych is a lens through which you could view
all of psychology.

(02:11):
So what happened was my friend, who is a clinical
psychologist, was studying mass murder, and I invited myself.
I said, Oh, that's so interesting.
Can I come be on your team for a little
bit?
He said, Sure.
So Tom Bowers and I wrote a paper about mass
murder from an evolutionary perspective.
And then one day, a wonderful student, just like you
guys are, her name was Erin, said to me, Hey,

(02:32):
Dr. Harrison, do you want to do independent study in
serial murder?
Okay, well, researching serial murder.
I said, Sure.
And then we realized female serial killers were very understudied,
right?
There's not a lot of empirical evidence out there on
them.
So we decided to go for it.
And that's how my going down this avenue started.

(02:52):
And I could say this, again, I'm a biopsychologist, I'm
not a clinician.
So what I do is I usually, when I conduct
research, bring a clinical psychologist or some kind of very
experienced forensic analyst on board to get a second opinion
and whatnot.
So that's where I am.
And I got my PhD in 2006 University at Albany
State University of New York.

(03:13):
And I've been a college professor for 25 years.
For 25 years, when you're only 30, and I say,
Oh, it's just magic.
Yeah.
Myself, you know, I'm only 42.
It's me too.
As they say in the South, I just been rode
hard and put away wet.
Oh, no.
Okay.
Some of my best friends lived in New Orleans and
I've heard worse.
Miranda, Alana, whenever you want to interject some questions for

(03:35):
Dr. Harrison, just fire away.
So throughout your time in the field, what has been
your favorite like aspect of like your studies or anything
you've stumbled upon while studying?
Sure, absolutely.
And that's a really great question.
So I think the most interesting to me is the
fact that female serial killers are so underexamined, to the

(03:57):
point where the FBI once said there are no female
serial killers.
So here is yet another area of the world where
women are underestimated.
I mean, and this is a bad thing.
It's like, okay, so men do some really violent stuff.
Women do it too.
And that's why I wrote my book and called it
just as deadly.
So there are far more male serial killers in the

(04:18):
world.
The FBI estimates maybe five out of six are men,
but there are female serial killers out there and they
do horrendous things and they leave a trail of destruction.
And I always say their victims are no less dead,
right?
So I just say just as deadly because you might
have somebody like, and you've probably heard of these individuals
like Jolly Jane Toppin or Belle Gunness.

(04:40):
These individuals are estimated to have killed 100 people each
at least.
All right.
So you take Ted Bundy and Ed Gein and Ed
Kemper and add up their victims, maybe Ted Bundy probably
more, but these women probably killed more.
I take it back about Ted Bundy.
He probably killed hundreds of people that we don't know
about.
But somebody like Ed Gein or Ed Kemper or Demis

(05:02):
Rader or John Wayne Gacy, all of them together didn't
kill as many people as these two women did.
So you asked what's the most surprising to me.
I think it's the fact that female serial killers are
so underexamined.
And why do you think there's not much research regarding
the female serial killers?
Got an idea on that?
I mean, has that come up in your research or

(05:23):
anything?
I do.
I absolutely have some ideas, but I'm a teacher.
So I want to know what you guys think first.
Why do you think people just aren't ready to believe
that females, women can be serial killers?
Personally, I think it's because a lot of people view
women as mothers and don't think that they are able
to commit such heinous acts against other people.

(05:46):
I agree.
How about you, Miranda?
What do you think?
I think very similarly.
I think women are seen as more nurturing and more
they stay at home.
They take care of people.
They're the nurturing, loving kind.
And I think people just weren't looking into it and
thinking that they were capable of such things.
You are absolutely on target with what I believe.
So that's what I wrote about in Injustice Deadly.

(06:08):
And I'm not the first person to say this, but
we have cognitive frameworks called schema for basically everything we
encounter.
And your scheme is your mental framework.
You put it together based on everything you've encountered previously.
So what's your schema for dog?
You have one for cat.
You have one.
What's your schema for woman?
It doesn't include somebody who poisons babies, right?

(06:29):
It just doesn't.
Like you said, women are thought of as caregiving and
nurturing.
So the famous author, Patricia Pearson, we all believe, I
think women are underestimated because killer doesn't fit in female
schema.
And I know we're not the first people to say
that, but I do strongly believe that we're just not
ready to accept that women can do this kind of

(06:49):
thing.
And I've gotten to do some law enforcement training in
my travels.
And what I say to the police and the detectives
and the agents is you all are trained in criminal
justice.
You know really how to approach, how to catch the
bad guys and girls.
And I understand that you're going to be a lot
better than I am at that.
But as a psychologist, let me give you this ammunition,

(07:11):
right?
Lose your schema, lose your bias.
If you don't think a woman can do these things,
think again.
Because for example, think of serial killer nurse, Kristen Gilbert,
who was valedictorian of her class and killed, I think
at least seven disabled elderly veterans or disabled veterans in
a nursing home.
Or Retta Mays, who was a nursing assistant.

(07:32):
She herself was a veteran and she killed elderly disabled
men in a VA home.
You wouldn't think the nurse and the caregiver or the
woman could do these things.
And they're the ones who did it.
And I know that others have speculated that those two
women, for example, got away with it for so long
because people didn't think that women would, you know, they
didn't think to look at these nurses, these caregivers.

(07:54):
So I think we need to lose our biases and
realize that just about anybody is capable of these heinous
crimes.
So during your research, have you found, have you figured
out why female serial killers use like suffocation or poison
rather than like bludgeoning someone to death?
Sure.
Well, I figured it out.
I can't, I wouldn't take credit for that, but I

(08:16):
could tell you some reasons why I think that is.
And primary motives for female serial killers are usually profit
and power.
And if, if, if I want to collect somebody's money,
their insurance money, take money out of their, their bank
account, whatever, I'm not going to be all, you know,
shooting people and leaving bodies around.
I'm going to do it secretly and try to get

(08:37):
away with it.
I can't tell you too many cases of modern female
serial killers, but go back to, you know, maybe the
1950s and previously in the United States, we didn't really
have that great a toxicology detection program.
Right.
So the, the research methods and the analytical methods we
have now are, you know, they weren't as sophisticated back

(08:59):
then.
So it was easier to get away with killing somebody
with arsenic or, you know, pot poison in their coffee
and whatnot.
It was just easier to get away with covert.
So I always say that, well, I don't always say
it since I wrote Justice Deadly and I, when I
was putting together the synthesis, I'm like, you know, really
serial killer males kill overtly and they leave a string
of victims and you're like, okay, who did this?

(09:20):
But really with female serial killers, it's not until somebody
detects a pattern like, oh, wow, all the babies on
this specific shift died or wow, all the elderly veterans
in this wing of the hospital died.
And statistically it's unlikely.
And somebody starts, you know, having to dig into that.
So I say overt versus covert.
It's more of a means to an end versus for

(09:41):
male serial killers, the kill in and of itself might
be part of the ritual, right?
So women just want somebody out of the way.
I'm sure they're doing it to be mean, because you
don't really poison or suffocate somebody unless you don't really
care about their welfare.
But I think it's more, you know, it's almost collateral.
Like I'm going to get you out of the way
and I'm going to take your stuff and I'm going
to feel good about myself.
So I get some power from it.

(10:03):
Based on what you're saying there is Eileen Wernos, is
she kind of outside that kind of statistical norm of
what you found in your research was with female serial
killers, because she was, you know, not poisoned or anything.
She actually, you know, stabbed her victims and everything.
So she was more like a, I don't want to
say male serial killer, but she had, she done things

(10:24):
that male serial killers typically do.
You're absolutely right.
So where I automatically go with that is, and isn't
it interesting that she's probably the most well known that
to my, in my perspective, I think Eileen is probably
the most well-known female serial killer is probably because
they made a movie about her about 20, 25 years
ago.
One of those things, but you're right.

(10:45):
She didn't, she shoot, stab, whatever.
She very close proximity.
She was a sex worker and she picked up people
and decided that day, whether or not she was going
to kill somebody.
And she dumped their bodies in the woods.
The one thing she had in common though, was profit.
She took their money and she stole from the victims.
You're absolutely, she falls, falls outside.
Eileen Wernos is an interesting case.
And then Miranda, you asked if there was something that

(11:07):
surprised me or you ask, you know, is there something
I think really interesting?
So I had to conduct a lot of research as
you know, in my, in my career, and then I
had to put it all together for my book, Just
as Deadly.
And then I learned from that process too.
Right.
And I found myself feeling sorry for some of the
serial killers.
Now I feel worse for the victims of course, but

(11:28):
when you really get into each one and you look
at the path state they took, if I told you
their story outside of all of the crimes they committed,
you might say, wow, I wish that person got help.
So Eileen Wernos case in point, she was clearly mentally
ill.
She had schizophrenia.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say,
I think that if not diagnosed with schizophrenia, if she

(11:51):
were alive and clinically assessed today, I'm going to guess
she would be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
She was a psychopath, et cetera, but she had a
lot wrong in her, in her childhood.
She was raped.
She was abused.
The allegations were incestuously by her grandfather.
She was pregnant.
A lot of people think that that's what it says
in reports that the baby was her grandfather's baby.

(12:13):
Her father was in prison for child molestation.
And then he, he died by suicide.
Her mother threw her out of the house.
Eileen accidentally set herself on fire.
She had an sexual relationship with her brother and she
was a good student.
And the school called her grandparents who were her guardians
and said, we need to get her counseling.
Can we do that?
And they wouldn't give permission.
So what if the grandmother just said, yes, maybe Eileen

(12:35):
would have gotten some help.
We don't know that for sure.
But like, if I tell you somebody was raped and
raped and pregnant by their grandfather and set themselves on
fire and their mother abandoned them and their father died
by suicide, you'd feel bad for that person, right?
But Eileen did all these heinous things.
You know, we don't have to forgive.
We don't have to excuse, but we could see the
paths she went down.

(12:56):
When I wrote my book, after doing really a great
big summary of what, what I've done myself and what
I feel, you know, was outstanding in the field.
I think we need more clinical and counseling psychologists, social
workers.
Absolutely.
And I think we need more police resources.
I worked on a case.
I don't think I could talk about it, but I
could tell that they told me they didn't have enough
resources to process the forensic samples.

(13:17):
I'm like, what do you mean?
You know, CSI, they're analyzing samples to rock music and
it gets back to you on Monday.
It doesn't work like that.
You have to pay thousands and thousands and thousands of
dollars.
It's not free.
And we don't have that.
So it doesn't work like you see on TV.
I mean, Jerry, you would, you would know that more
than I, but that's what my friends in the police
had told me.

(13:38):
It's like, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work like that.
I'm not really on the inside of that world, but
that's, that's what they tell me.
It's like, okay, the forensic samples are not readily analyzed.
It takes a while and it takes vast resources.
That is true.
That is very true.
Upwards of like $5,000 per, I guess, samples that
you send in, depending on what you want.
It can range from 2,500 up to $10,000,

(14:00):
but most common is around 2,500 to 5,000
for a sample to get, to get it done.
And you think why, why this we're trying to solve
crime.
This woman that the case worked on, she clearly, she
murdered people and they had the forensic samples and they
were sure they were going to find a specific poison
in the systems of the victims, but no, they couldn't
afford the analysis.

(14:21):
What happened to the, what happened to her?
The suspect.
She had a true bill against her.
She had, she was indicted and she died by suicide
before they could arrest her.
And I said to the, my friends that were there,
I said, how do you feel about that?
And they said, we just wanted justice for the victims.
They said, well, you, you got it.
You know, you, you knew who it was and you
stopped her, you know, ask for somebody done by suicide.

(14:44):
That's terrible, right?
The police were doing the detectives were doing the jobs,
getting her off the street.
I think they wanted her to face courtroom and face
the families of her victims.
And that, that didn't happen, but they caught her, put
it that way.
For one of our shows, Alana was communicating with a
individual killer that killed his family in Germany, West Germany,

(15:05):
back in 1987.
And some of the things that you brought up about
Eileen, he alleges in his correspondence with us that he
has faced some of those similar things in his childhood,
a lot of abuse, a lot of sexual abuse, seeing
a lot of violent behavior against women growing up in
Clinton, North Carolina.
So some of that is kind of similar with what

(15:28):
Eileen experienced.
And I wonder if that, if what you experienced as
a child can affect when you do your killings, I
wonder if that can affect the way you kill, what
do you think about that?
Absolutely.
And I just wanted, if I may ask Alana, did
you just write to him and he wrote back?
I sent him an email and then we exchanged addresses

(15:51):
and he would handwrite me letters until I could, until
I got his email.
And then we would email back and forth.
He probably wanted to be heard.
I'm not excusing what he did, but he probably appreciated
the outlet.
So Jerry, you asked what I think happens.
Again, I could tell you my perspective, right?
I can't guarantee this is the solution, but I think
this is where my being a biopsychologist might come in

(16:14):
handy.
So I do know that the literature does say that
if you experience childhood abuse, emotional, physical, sexual, they call
it adverse childhood experiences, ACEs.
And if you experience four or more, and I don't
mean four times, I mean four, four just incidents or
more, and that's the child abuse, sexual abuse, et cetera,
et cetera.
You're more likely to develop disordered cognitions and behavior when

(16:37):
you're, when you're older.
Usually I collected data from a bunch of people and
wrote means and summaries and conducted some statistics.
So I looked at really group behavior, but for Justice
Deadly, I wanted to write extensive case studies.
So I went in and I read, I think I've
like 25, 27 different case studies in the book.
I read deeply the history of each person.

(16:59):
And I'm going to tell you almost always the person
was victimized when they were a child.
And I mean, sexually victimized.
And I know people say it's a myth and I'm
telling you, it's not.
When you are victimized, and here's what I put together
in my own head from research.
When you are victimized as a child, and this is
a sensitive topic, but let's say somebody overpowers a child

(17:20):
and they violate them.
So if somebody overpowers a child, a child can't fight
back.
So what do you do?
You dissociate, you turn off your emotions.
And so what if there comes a point where as
a child, that's imprinted upon you and you just can't
turn your emotions back on again.
And then psychopathy forms, you're a psychopath.
You don't even feel emotions anymore because that was adaptive.

(17:44):
And I can tell you that if you're an abused
child, your nervous system forms differently.
It really does.
Your nervous system develops to expect an alarm.
Everything is an alarm.
So I get called for TV and podcasts and stuff
pretty frequently.
I'm not saying I'm a superstar, people just are interested
in the material.

(18:04):
And I have producers from a television show that did
air.
They wanted to talk to me about a woman who
wasn't a serial killer, but she had been a part
of two murders.
And I could tell the producers of this program had
an angle, right?
They weren't going to be open to what happened to
this woman.
They were just, she's a bad, she's bad, she's bad,
she's bad.
Okay.

(18:24):
I know what she did was bad, but they said,
you know, her parents used to victimize each other.
So intimate partner violence, and they used to abuse her
and they abused her brother and her brother raped her.
And this happened her whole childhood.
And they said, she's a terrible person.
One time she was in a bar and somebody grabbed
her by the shoulder and she smashed her beer bottle
and stabbed the lady.

(18:44):
And I said, and that's, that's horrific.
But let me ask you something.
I said, let's say if your whole life you were
abused and you were punched and you were raped, and
that was your childhood and that's how you grew up.
How would you react if I grabbed your arm unexpectedly?
Wouldn't you be like this?
I would.
And they said to me, oh, she'd like you.
And I said, give her my email.

(19:05):
Maybe she needs somebody to listen to her.
I'm not saying I'm on her side.
I don't like what she did.
I feel worse for the victims, believe me.
But maybe if somebody listened to her, she wouldn't have
gone down that path.
So I absolutely, going back to what you said, I
absolutely believe that when somebody has a history of emotional
or physical or sexual violence, it changes their trajectory.

(19:26):
It changes who they are.
And that's why I wish we had more psychological resources
available.
Because if this trauma does happen to somebody, we can
help them address it.
Or maybe we could prevent people who would actually perpetrate,
people perpetrating these crimes.
So yeah, I think childhood has a lot to do
with it.
I'm wondering what you think.
You've all studied this.

(19:46):
What do you guys think about that issue?
Do you think childhood contributes?
I think it contributes a lot.
It's your brains forming during that period of time.
It's a very influential period of time.
You're learning about the world.
You're seeing how it forms.
So if you grow up learning that the world is
violent and not a nice place, why would you change
your mind in the future?
You're exactly right.

(20:07):
Alana, what do you think?
I definitely agree.
I work with behaviored kids right now at a school
and seeing how they have completely different perspectives on life
than I do and hearing how they've grown up and
how we're their only outlet.
It's hard to hear, but I can definitely see where
a lot of things stem from childhood.

(20:29):
Something happens.
It's not just once and then a serial killer is
born.
It's repetitive.
I agree.
We add the disclaimer that really some people have behavioral
issues without any external stimulation, right?
So you might have a hormonal or a neural or
whatever.
So it's not everybody's parents' fault.
We're not saying that and we're certainly not saying that

(20:50):
mental illness is a direct pathway to criminal behavior.
That's not true whatsoever.
In fact, somebody who is mentally ill is far more
likely to be victimized themselves.
But we would be remiss if we didn't say that
some people with mental illness under certain circumstances are more
prone to violent behavior.
And we have to say that.
You can't be wishy-washy about it.
That is factual, right?
So when we address that, then we can look for

(21:11):
it.
Then maybe we can prevent it.
Maybe we can help people.
And then let's also say that somebody could be horribly
victimized in every arena, emotional, sexual, physical, and never hurt
anybody when they're older.
And I'm sure that's far more common.
And there really aren't that many serial killers out there,
right?
So you're very, very, very, very unlikely to become a

(21:32):
serial killer.
But that's what I see pretty common in the histories
of the people that have committed these murders.
And then male and female serial killers commit murders for
different reasons, so we also have to acknowledge sex differences.
It's not an equality issue.
There's really a qualitative difference there.
Men and women, the people are victimized, but they very,

(21:55):
very often do it for different reasons.
Do you think these adverse childhood experiences affect women at
the same rate they affect men?
I do.
Well, at the same rate.
So in other words, they're victims?
I don't know.
That's a really, really good question.
In the same way, not necessarily.
I know I saw the literature, and I don't know
if I could cite it to you, but I think

(22:15):
women that experience that are far more likely to commit
certain types of crimes, including sexual crimes, but please don't
quote me on that.
You want to do your lit search.
I just remember reading that.
I don't know if male or female children are victimized
differentially and qualitatively different.
I don't know that for sure.
And then if we knew that, then we could apply

(22:36):
that to helping people even more so.
What were you thinking along those lines, Miranda?
I'm just curious.
I want to follow it through there.
There's more men serial killers that have been studied and
looked at and recorded, so I wasn't sure if they're
affected more by these experiences, which is why there's more
of them, or it's just the nature of gender differences.
So it's interesting what you're saying, and I don't know

(22:58):
if I could speak to frequency, but we can kind
of reverse engineer it in that men are almost always
likely, male serial killers, to have a sexual motive, right?
And I don't have the absolute numbers, but in our
research, I just want to make sure I get this
number for you.
So when we studied male versus female serial killers, at
least 75% of male serial killers had a sexual

(23:18):
motive compared to only about 7% of female serial
killers.
And I didn't interview anybody.
I had to go by archival records.
My guess would be the sexual crimes would be a
lot higher for men compared to 75, but I had
to go with the data with what I saw.
So male serial killers, exponentially more likely to commit sex
crimes.
And if you're murdering somebody due to sexual urges, where

(23:41):
did those aberrant urges start, right?
So what I read clinically, and I'm not a clinical
psychologist again, is it might start off with violent fantasies,
maybe some aberrant fetishism.
Fetish in and of itself, that's somebody's prerogative, but when
violating somebody else, it's a different story.
So it escalates over time to violence against women, rape,
and then murder.

(24:02):
Why does somebody have those thoughts that violent sexuality is
the way to achieve gratification, right?
And so you'd want to go back and check that
out.
And again, I'm not blaming everybody's childhood, but I wonder
where that trajectory started.
Do you think more men are recorded and have been
known to kill because their urges are overt, but women

(24:24):
are more covert, they use poison more.
Do you think the CSI aspect, the forensic aspect, because
we don't have those resources can hide a lot of
these women who do murder?
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I believe what you did.
You're absolutely right.
The data, one out of six serial killers are female
serial killers are based on known serial killers.

(24:45):
What if there's the type of women who just doesn't
get caught, right?
Because like you said, if the methods are covert, right,
that's what happens.
Sometimes you're like, wow, this person, this woman, four of
her husbands died.
We better go back and do some autopsies to see
what happened.
But then again, that's resources and whatnot.
And then back in the day, people kind of didn't

(25:05):
talk about that.
There was a female serial killer by the name of
Nannie Doss.
Have you heard of her, the giggling granny?
She killed five, I'm sorry, four.
I've got to go back and look, but she killed
multiple husbands.
She was in the 1950s and she moved from state
to state.
So people probably didn't put two and two together.
But then her mother ended up dead and her grandchild
ended up dead.

(25:26):
And we were like, wait a minute.
And then she poisoned her husband's dog.
She burned down her house for the insurance money.
So people were like, okay, let's go back and look.
And then they conducted some autopsies and upon medical examination,
they found arsenic in her husband's systems.
And she said stuff like, oh, well, he got in
the way, or the one husband was, he wouldn't buy
me the TV I wanted.
So there's clearly mental illness there.

(25:46):
I have a question about the two female serial killers
we talked about earlier in the Veterans Administration, Rita and
Christian.
Do you think that they seen themselves though as ending
the suffering of these elderly gentlemen?
Our, right?
So no, I don't see them as an angel of
death.
Kristen Gilbert killed one veteran.

(26:07):
He was in his forties.
He was a blind disabled veteran.
I think he had multiple sclerosis as well.
She asked her, the head nurse, if he dies, can
I leave early?
Well, yeah, but he's okay.
The guy died.
So she wanted to go on a date.
She killed him.
It was getting him out of the way and read
amazed.
She was a nurse's assistant.
She injected insulin, gave people heart attacks.

(26:27):
She didn't get any kind of financial gain from that,
but they asked her why she said at one point,
she felt like her life was under control and maybe
that was a way to gain control.
So power control.
I could tell you one thing I would change about
my research if I could.
When I first started, I documented primary motive or what
we gauged to be primary motive.
And if I can go back, I don't think there's

(26:48):
just one reason.
I would look at multiple motives.
And so when we look at, for example, female serial
killer nurses, they're not going to get paid anymore.
So what is the motive?
It's got to be power and control.
And no, Jerry, I don't think it's ending suffering.
If anything, she created, they created exponentially more suffering by
killing people that, you know, giving them heart attacks, killing
them and, and, and leaving their loved ones in, in

(27:11):
distress forever, knowing that their, their beloved was, was murdered.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Yeah.
I see it.
And power is one of those reasons why, according to
your research at the female serial killers kill.
So, yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, let me, let me, if I may expand on
a thought there up to about 40% of female
serial killers are nurses or nurses aides.

(27:32):
So somebody that goes into the field to help people,
right.
And again, profit aside, they're, they're going to get their
salary, no matter what, what must be the motive.
And no, I don't see it as ending suffering.
Although I'm sure that happens.
The women I've studied though, now it was to get
somebody out of the way or, you know, to, to
create an emergency and go in and play the hero,

(27:53):
that type of thing.
Have you ever heard of Jolly Jane Toppin, Jane Toppin
from Massachusetts from the turn of last century, the 1900s
you have.
Right.
So she said she, I think she pled guilty to
dozens, but she told authorities that she killed at least
a hundred people.
So she was a nurse.
She was an excellent nurse.
In fact, she left a hospital to go be a

(28:14):
private nurse and made a lot of money.
And she was fascinated with autopsies.
She would laugh about them.
Her colleagues thought she was peculiar.
She said that she would inject patients with sedatives and
stimulants so she can watch them go in and out
of consciousness.
And she wanted to hold them as they died.

(28:36):
And she said, well, you know, something to the effects
of, well, I wanted to feel what it was like
to feel somebody's life slip out of their body.
Right.
So tell me that's not a power motive.
Clearly there's some mental illness there.
She was diagnosed back in the day.
I don't think schizophrenia was a diagnosis yet, but psychiatrists
at the time, they were called alienists.
And they said she was, they, they used the term

(28:58):
quote unquote, mental degenerate.
And she was confined to a psychiatric home for the
rest of her life.
And she started trouble there too.
So she was a very, very sick person, but she
was brilliant.
Right.
Cause she was a top nurse.
So yeah, I know she was found guilty by reason
of insanity.
And that's, that's interesting.
And I I'm not forensically trained.

(29:20):
I'm not legally trained, but I know that there's, you
know, a strong belief in mens rea and did the
person know right and wrong versus are they insane?
Okay.
Well they knew right from wrong.
You shouldn't take a life, but it doesn't mean that
they don't have profound mental illness.
We wouldn't do those things.
Have you ever heard of Gary Heidnik from Philadelphia?

(29:40):
He's one of the killers.
He's not a serial killer, but he's one of murderers
that the serial killer in silence of the lambs is
based on.
And Gary Heidnik kidnapped sex workers and shackled them in
his basement.
Right?
So think about that.
He, he electrocuted one of them.
They, they engaged.