Women Who Murder: An International Collection of Deadly True Crime Tales
Ed. by Mitzi Szereto

The crimes:

“Down in the Ditch: Joanna Dennehy, Serial Stabber” by Charlotte Platt: a woman in southern England goes on a murder rampage with some help of from a pair of friends.

“Ruth Snyder: The Original Femme Fatale” by Ciaran Conliffe: in 1920s New York an unhappily married woman kills her husband in order to be free to marry her lover. After a sensational trial she ends up in the electric chair.

“Innocence Taken: The Murder of Karissa Boudreau” by Mike Browne: a Nova Scotian woman kills her daughter when the girl becomes an obstacle in her mom’s new relationship.

“Mahin: Monster or Victim?” by Mitzi Szereto: an Iranian woman drugs and strangles other women in order to steal their jewelry. She was in need of money as her husband was a worthless layabout and she had a disabled daughter.

“Twisted Firestarter” by C L Raven: a difficult woman in Wales deliberately burns down the house she rents an apartment in, killing the people (two adults, three children) in the apartment upstairs.

“On the Courthouse Steps: The Trial of Susan Smith” by Cathy Pickens: reflections on the famous 1995 trial of Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her two children in a car she rolled down a boat ramp into a lake.

“Angela Napolitano: ‘I Am Not a Bad Woman’” by Edward Butts: an Italian immigrant woman living in northern Ontario kills her abusive husband with an axe.

“The Strange Case of Keli Lane” by Anthony Ferguson: a young woman with a thing for concealing her pregnancies apparently kills her fourth baby, though she maintains her innocence and the baby’s body is never found.

“Jolly Joseph: The Kerala Cyanide Serial Killer” by Shashi Kadapa: an Indian woman finds her path to social advancement made easier by poisoning everyone who gets in her way.

“Women Fight Back” by Tom Larsen: a pair of stories about (feminist?) women killing macho men in Mexico.

“Beauty and Beast” by Ily Goyanes: the life and trials of the sadistic Nazi death camp warden Irma Grese.

“Anno Bisesto, Anno Funesto” by Alisha Holland: Katherine Knight slaughters her on-again, off-again partner and cuts his corpse into pieces.

“Dead Woman Walking” by Joan Renner: in 1950s California the mama of a mama’s boy pays to have her son’s pregnant wife murdered so she can keep him all to herself.

“Mona Fandey: The Malaysian Murderer” by Chang Shih Yen: a money-hungry Malaysian witch doctor cuts an aspiring politician’s head off with an axe as part of a ritual meant to make him invincible.

The book:

For some reason women who kill have always been of special interest. As Mitzi Szereto puts it: “There’s something infinitely fascinating about women who commit murder. It pushes our buttons.” I remember when I was just starting out as a book reviewer in 1997 one of the first assignments I had was a joint review of Caleb Carr’s Angel of Darkness and Patricia Pearson’s When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. And just recently, for the True Crime Files, I reviewed Harold Schechter’s Fatal, which spent a lot of time in the early going talking about the differences between male and female serial killers.

Well, there’s nearly thirty years between those two bookends and I’m pretty sure the subject came up several times in-between. It does push our buttons.

I don’t think there’s any particular argument being put forward here about women who murder. Szereto canvases some of the usual talking points in her Introduction, like the differences (real or imagined) in opportunity and motivation, but mainly does so to show that they’re no more than general rules at best. So when Ily Goyanes kicks off her account of the sadistic Nazi Irma Grese by saying “When a woman kills, it is almost always for one of three reasons: financial gain, revenge, or pleasure,” we almost automatically think of exceptions. Exceptions that we wouldn’t have to go far to find, as there are several provided in this anthology. Sometimes, for example, and not to worry about being too precise about it, women who kill are just nuts.

Instead of advancing any kind of general argument, and as with the previous Szereto anthology I reviewed, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns, the main emphasis here is on the “international” angle. There are stories from the U.S., Iran, India, Mexico, the U.K., Malaysia, Canada, and more. Yes, there are women who kill featured in all of them. But some are young and some are old, some poor and some well off, and their motives for murder have a similar variety, ranging from self-defence to psychopathy. In some cases it’s not even clear how responsible they were or what exactly they did. On that latter point, in her Introduction Szereto name-drops “Britain’s baby-killing nurse, Lucy Letby,” and in the first story Charlotte Platt also refers to Letby as “the serial killer nurse who killed seven babies and permanently injured six others.” Since this book was published in 2024 this is something they could say, as Letby had been convicted, but there are a lot of questions being asked about that case now. Canadian readers of a certain age may remember the investigation into the series of baby deaths at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in the early 1980s and what a mess that turned into. I imagine there will be a fair few books coming out on the Letby case before long and it’s possible what we know about it will have to be revised.

Because the crimes recounted literally span the globe, one thing I found interesting was noting what seem to be cultural universals. To take just a few:

Investigating a serial killer case in Iran, the police ran into what, to Western eyes, will seem a very familiar problem:

As is the case in crimes such as these, people began to crawl out of the woodwork, all claiming to have important information that will help solve the crimes. Qazvin police receive several tips a day from supposed eyewitnesses, including melodramatic accounts from “victims” who say that they too, were taken by the killer, but had fought back, narrowly escaping death. Having no choice but to follow every lead, police investigate these claims, only to find that they’re bogus. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to invent stories or to provide false evidence to police.

Even in Iran. For some reason that surprised me.

Meanwhile, in India, another familiar script played out, that of state corruption. Need a forged will? Anything is possible “provided government officers, land registrars, and other authorities are willing to cooperate.” Need to stymie a police investigation after an autopsy report indicates poisoning? Perhaps the police sub-inspector can be bribed with money or “something more.” No matter where you live, you don’t have to be a particularly careful killer if you grease enough wheels.

Finally, the Mona Fandey trial was apparently a factor in speeding up the process of abolishing jury trials in Malaysia. I don’t think that’s likely to happen in the West (getting rid of juries, I mean), but the reasons for Malaysia taking this step may strike close to home. The Fandey trial was a circus, fueled not just by the bizarre nature of the crime but by the local celebrity of the people involved. As a result, it was a test case for the proposition that “the jury could be influenced by emotions and the media when reaching their verdict.” Better, Malaysia decided, to leave these matters in the hands of a judge.

This is the sort of information I enjoy learning about in an international anthology, and I found a lot of it here. Also, many of the individual crimes were ones I’d never heard of, probably again due to where many of them occurred. And finally the writing is mostly pretty good, with only a few duds in the line-up. Given that these are all new pieces of writing, I credit the job Szereto did in pulling them together.

Noted in passing:

“The Strange Case of Keli Lane” really was strange. Lane was a championship water polo player who got pregnant a lot as a young woman. One would have thought (that one being me) that pregnancy would have put a bit of a crimp in her training, especially as she didn’t want anyone knowing she was pregnant. This is something that’s hard to hide when wearing a swimsuit, but Lane was apparently built differently and perhaps people didn’t want to say anything. I’m not sure what the explanation was. But this part really surprised me:

It also transpired that Lane played in a grand final match while nine months pregnant. Anyone who knows water polo will be aware that it is a brutal sport. There is no way heavily pregnant woman should have taken part in such a match.

I second this. Water polo is a brutal sport, with a lot of grabbing and kicking going on below the water. It isn’t safe at all for a pregnant woman. But leaving aside how anyone nine months pregnant wouldn’t have shown wearing a swimsuit, or whether a woman in such condition should have taken part in such a match, the question I had was how she could have participated. This wasn’t some intramural match. Lane was playing at an elite national level. How could she even keep up?

Katherine Knight didn’t just kill her partner. She butchered him and cut his body up into steaks. In doing so she used tools and skills she’d become familiar with in her job at a slaughterhouse. This makes for an interesting digression. An academic study

found that counties in the United States that have a slaughterhouse, and are therefore home to slaughterhouse employees, have measurably higher crime rates, leading to more than twice as many arrests as a county without one. In fact, for every one thousand slaughterhouse employees in a factory, the surrounding area’s arrest rate can be expected to increase by 1 percent. Violent and sexual crimes also occurred at higher rates for slaughterhouse workers than those in similar industries, such as mechanics, truckers, and steel workers.

It’s believed this is due in part to the normalization of the extreme violence inflicted on animals – all in the name of the “greater good.” An employee may think: “I am killing this animal to feed the people,” with the violent methods being approved by their boss, their company, and their state. But the lines blur when these employees go home. Society has approved of, and even paid for them to kill, and, for some, the species becomes irrelevant.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it seems likely that some degree of desensitization occurs working in such places. Tobe Hooper was on to something.

Takeaways:

Why do women kill? Pretty much for all the same reasons men kill. They tend to use different methods, but things end up the same.

True Crime Files