#861 - Dr Marissa Harrison - The Dark Psychology Of Female Serial Killers

28:07And I tried to write about the psychology and whatnot. And what I did was I wrote about five men and then the rest were women. And then I wrote about the men to show just how different females who are killers are. And I can tell you in almost every one of those cases, that person was severely sexually abused when they were younger. And I've heard people come out of the woodwork and say, no, it's a myth that serial killers were sexually molested. No, it's not. No, it's not. I have read this. Now, again, let me stress, for people who have had that terrible thing done to them when they were kids, almost everybody would never grow up and hurt somebody else, let alone kill them.

28:46But if you want to see a common denominator in both male and female serial killers, is you see this profound CSA childhood sexual abuse. I've seen it in the data. The interesting thing there is, as you identified previously, and as we're gonna get into it a bit, in terms of motives, men a lot of the time are killing, it's in and around sex, it's actually motivated in one form or another, but for women that isn't, but for both men and for women, childhood sexual abuse is predictive of becoming a serial killer later in life. So what that suggests to me is there is what seems to be most likely, childhood sexual abuse does not make men more likely to use killing as a sexual weapon because you have a split test which shows that women don't.

29:38They still do. So what is it doing? The way that you see the world, this reactivity toward aggression, this requirement to use physical force in order to be able to enact your will, It seems like that, but I mean that's fascinating, right? That you basically have the same scenario both predicting the same outcome, but the way that the outcome is deployed is motivated in a different way. Absolutely. You said that brilliantly, you're absolutely right. And when somebody experiences that violation when they're younger, I mean, it's shown in the research that I don't conduct. Right? Definitely behavioral neuro science research.

30:10Your nervous system literally rewires itself. So imagine somebody who is violent when they are a child. Certainly they are more reactive. Their nervous system is more sensitive to any kind of aggression, et cetera, et cetera. It's terrible. It absolutely changes who the person is. And you're right. And male serial killers, again, I don't study them as thoroughly as I do female serial killers, but it is my understanding most are sex crimes. and they might start out as experiencing a paraphernalia. So what that is is like an abnormal sexual interest. Maybe in, like I'm not saying it's abnormal, do what you need to do, but there are psychological classifications that would say, for example, a shoe fetish is abnormal, et cetera.

31:00So it might start out with that. And then it might eventually to watching somebody get undressed. And maybe that doesn't fulfill the gratification or the fantasy. So it, it, it, it eventually eats and and and gets right. Sorry, escalates right to attacking somebody. So we see that there was somebody by the name of Jerome Bruto. It's Jerome Bruto's was a serial killer and he started off with a shoe fetish. Then he started killing women and literally keeping their legs literally severing their body parts and keeping their legs sexually assaulting them and then keeping their legs to show off his shoe collection.

31:36And so that's really, really worst case scenario, right? But it happened. And again, serial murder is rare in female serial killers or even, you know, rare, but it does happen. Do female serial killers take trophies? That's really interesting. So my colleagues and I, Stephanie Winkle -John Black, Claire Alley and I are looking at that. It's a study that we're currently working on. We've not gotten it published yet. But yeah, we do see that males are, you know, very likely to keep trophies. More likely than females are. Here's the thing. I actually didn't think as many female serial killers would keep trophies.

32:19But again, these are new data. We don't have them released yet, but I did see that they did. Now, it depends on your definition of a trophy. If a male C -ray killer keeps it, is it to, you know, being Frank masturbate to it, to relive the sensation, the, you know, the sexual gratification of the crime? It could be some kind of glorification, you know, totem and whatnot. I've found women, they're going to keep, they might keep like a necklace or a lipstick or something. Now, I don't know if that's a trophy or that's because they like it, right? Let's, again, this is a nice lipstick. Why should I throw it away?

32:54So I'm not really sure about that, but I saw trophy keeping in both sexes just a lot more in male serial killers There's some other teams that say that they didn't witness that in the data But my team and I did find it in the data What about substance abuse? I have seen that as well again. I don't have those data in front of me But I have known cases of female serial killers who had drug abuse problems There's one female serial killer who used to get, gosh, I better not say a name because it's not coming to me right now, but she would, she had profound substance abuse. She used to hide drugs and she would wear her hair in curlers, like how women curled her hair and leave the curlers in.

33:37She would hide pills in her curlers and in a toilet paper and a bathroom. She had a really profound substance abuse problem. But I don't see that as like if you asked me to pull up my data from the 64th female serial killers we initially studied. I didn't really see that as a salient factor. Have you got any idea how common that is among male serial killers that they're drinking and killing or taking drugs and killing or that they're self -medicating from maybe some psychological disturbance? I would guess again what we need to try and separate out here is what's the base rate difference? Right.

34:12On average between the sexes again more women are caregivers, but probably not it shouldn't come out at 40 % of them as being caregivers. So that's not the you know what I mean? I'm trying to look at you know you're exactly right so I don't I don't know and you're right not only male versus female serial killers but male serial killers versus men in general and female serial killers versus female general so I don't I don't know that I have seen because I've studied some people in depth like oh Oh, yeah, she did that, or yeah, he did that. But I don't know the data overall. It seems to me though, that would be not a cause, but one of the effects of whatever went wrong initially pathologically, trying to numb myself and then committing those crimes as well.

34:58But I don't really see the drugs and alcohol as fueling the crime. So that's a, we have this psychological disposition, maybe disturbance downstream from that. Lots of things happen. Yeah, exactly right. Self -medication, maybe drinking. I know the one of them maybe being killing lots of people. Yeah. Okay, so let's get onto victims. Who do female serial killers kill? What's interesting about that? What's different about that? Okay, so most commonly a female serial killer will have both male and female victims. Most commonly a male serial killer will have female victims. But like we said before women tend to kill elderly people, people of age, infants, or people with some kind of disability or illness that all of these people can't fight back.

35:53That's the common denominator. Very predatory. Absolutely. That's a good way to put it. Absolutely. Sure. Why? Why is that safety? There's no retribution. There's no there's no retribution and wouldn't one be less likely to be caught if somebody who was in the hospital for an illness dies, right, couldn't it be attributed or explained away as a product of their illness or injury or a baby who dies? I mean, again, I studied some female serial killer cases from back in the day. It wasn't unusual for infants to die back then, right? There was a higher infant mortality rate. So I would think that the victims could be explained away.

36:44Also, for women who killed their husbands back in the day, it wasn't unusual for somebody to die of stomach disease or whatnot. So these women tended to use arsenic and other poisons. that would mimic stomach disease, heart attack, etc. So I think it's the victims that people might not suspect. Are they ever sexually motivated from women? That's a very good question. I have not really seen that frequently. I've heard anecdotally that maybe one or two might have had some sexuality going on there. for example. Again, I didn't see this in any official reports or newspapers or anything, but there's some rumors out there that Jolly Jane Toppins.

37:31She was a nurse from Boston, the Boston area of the United States from the turn of the last century, like the 1900s. And she used to give her patients central nervous system stimulants and depressants to put them to the brink of death, bring them back to life, and she wanted to lay in bed and hug them as they died, so she could feel the breath going on of them. And there were rumors that she may have kissed some of them or mounted them. That was just some rumors. But I've not really seen that officially corroborated. I've read reports where she actually said I got into bed and held them to experience their last breath.

38:12And she thought that was a glorious event. So the power involved there is interesting. What's the split of male to female victims for female killers?

38:26That I'm not sure. Give me one second. I'll look at my paper and see if I have that written down. I'm just interested. I'm wondering whether the split gets skewed when you get rid of children. When you get rid of infanticides. Oh, that one I know for sure. Men are far less likely than women to kill children only, far less likely. I've seen it done, but far, far less likely. Oh, that's a good question. Actually, a woman more likely to kill young people, like children than men are. Let's see. So in terms of killing only adult victims, it's equal about 49 % of male serial killers and about 49 % of female serial killers.

39:16Both adults and children, 47 % male serial killers, 23 % female serial killers. Only children, about 4 % of male serial killers, and about 27 % of female serial killers. So you've got the infanticide killer stuff going on there. How much of that have you got any idea? Again, if you were to separate, how often is it for a mother to kill her own child as part of a serial killing career. And what in fantasies is a thing that happens from mothers to children, but doing it as a serial offense. Sure. Absolutely. So going back to the definition of serial killers that we use, three or more deceased victims with a cooling off period and use the term cooling off however you want, just the time gap of at least one week between victims.

40:09So we might have somebody, a mom with Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, we call it these days fictitious disorder imposed on another who would kill child after child year after year and they would be considered a female serial killer. How often that happens? It does happen. It's not very often. There was a female serial killer named Mary Beth Tinnig in Schenectady, New York, United States. And it is suspected that she killed at least eight of her children. I don't think she was convicted of all eight. But the story goes, they think that her first bit, right? The story goes that they think her first baby died natural causes, and that maybe she saw all the attention she was getting.

40:54And so the next baby and the next baby, and the rumor was that she had some kind of nursing knowledge. So she knew how to mock and present symptoms, and that she would back then, even in the 70s and 80s, medical records were not as centralized as they were now, as they are now. So she would go to different hospitals with these different infants. There was a book written about her and the author of the book, and I'm sorry the name escapes me, but it's a very good book. She said that reports say that at each funeral, Mary Beth would get all this attention and she seemed to quote, be having a good time at the funeral of the babies.

41:30Everyone's saying, oh my goodness, what poor mom, what a good mom you are. And finally, somebody called the hotline and anonymously and said, And aren't you going to do anything about this? And they looked into it. And finally, with the death of Tammy Lynn, her last child, they caught on. In fact, Mary Beth allegedly tried to kill her own husband, and they didn't even really do anything about it. But child after child year after year, so yes, this person would be considered a female serial killer. Let me have one thing about the Mary Beth tending case. It's the first modern case that I've been reading about these for 10 years now.

42:08It's the first modern case where I saw the prosecution and the defense say, well, there's something really mentally wrong with this individual. They need help versus in the past in the 40s and the 50s. I've seen, you know, retribution like let's put this person to death. In this case, I've seen, wow, you've got to be something really wrong for somebody to do this. Let's try to get her some help. This is the first kind of compassion at case I saw. Again, I'm not trying to say I feel bad for serial killers, but if, you know, some things have happened to these people. And if I may just add this, Chris, it's tough because I'll give talks and I'll say there are some serial killers I feel bad for.

42:55and I don't want that taken out of context and then get canceled over it because I have really a lot of empathy for the fact that there's much worse things on this podcast. There's much. Okay, it's good. But let me say this. Let me tell you a story. What if I told you a story of a young boy who his father named him a very masculine name, but it turned out he was a little bit feminine. So the father used to beat the crap out of him. Beat him in the head until he was unconscious. because this boy was molested when he was at age five by a female babysitter. Little bit later, when he was about eight years old, he was molested by a male local contractor and a sister corroborated these things.

43:35His mother was so physically abused that the father would beat the hell out of both the son and the mother. I wonder if somebody would feel sorry for that person. I do, right? But that person is John Wayne Gacy. So if I said to you, Do you feel bad for John Wayne Gacy, by the way, he killed at least 33 young men and bury their remains under his house and threw them in the river? You don't feel bad for that. But if I told you the story of that boy that they called Johnny back then, you'd say, oh my gosh, right? Now again, most people were abused, never ever would harm somebody like he did. But we look at that and we say, wow, if somebody had come in there and helped Johnny and his mom, maybe those 33 young men would still be alive.

44:16So I think that's, you know, something. Yeah, we want to solve crimes, but as a psychologist, let's solve the psychology, let's solve the riddle, and we can get in there and maybe help people before they go down this path. Can we talk about the motives but using an evolutionary lens? Oh, sure. So you said money, power, and then give an evolutionary perspective to that, and then can you compare that as well with the male motives? Absolutely. So I'm an evolutionary psychologist by training, actually, my degree says, biopsychology, but I'm an evolutionary psychologist. It all comes down to sperm and eggs.

44:58All right, it always does. So men produce millions of sperm on a daily basis. Women have, they're born with all the eggs they'll ever use, the probably only, obviously, maybe a couple hundred times in their lifetime. So if you look at reproductive potential, men could father as many people as they could find reproductive partners. Women, you're only going to get pregnant once, right? So men have a lot more chances for reproduction compared to women. Men have a higher sex drive compared to women worldwide. I'm not saying you're going to meet a woman who's not the horniest person you've ever met in your lifetime.

45:33I'm not saying that. But on average, men have far greater sex drive than women do. And we in evolutionary psychology attribute that to underlying biological differences. Okay, so how does that play into serial murder? Like, okay, so women with these very limited eggs, very limited reproductive opportunity, in the ancestral environment, it would have benefited a female to pair with somebody who had a lot of resources. right? Because not now, right, we are women here as a war, but back in the ancestral environment, you females were far more slender and helpless and whatnot. It would have been really reproductively advantageous to pair with the alpha male who had a lot of access to resources and territory.

46:19So men seek sex, women seek money, worldwide women prefer people with resources. What are the number one motive for serial killer is, sorry about that, one more time. What are the number one motives for serial murder? For men, it's sex, for women, it's money. That didn't surprise me at all. Absolutely not. Then there was another perspective that I had. It takes a little bit more, you got to bear with me on this one. My team and I came up with a hunter gatherer hypothesis of serial murder. It's not the only explanation. trust me, but it could be a part of the explanation for serial murders in that it is thought that anthropologically speaking we evolved from societies where men did the hunting and men did the hunting and women did the gathering, right?

47:09And so what do we see? Male serial killers as hunters, they stalk victims, unfamiliar victims, they write down their times of day and where they work and their friends and they follow them just like a hunter would hunt prey and they keep trophies, right? Like a hunter does. Women, it's, you know, use this one a little bit more figuratively. They gather victims. They gather the people around them. They look around who was around me. Let me tell them. And then they gather prophets as well. So we did come up with a hunter gather hypothesis and we took everything we tested in our study. We, you know, showed to be, to be so.

47:44So then target strangers, they kill people outside their birthplace, etc., etc. So there is some evolutionary perspective, but let me add, I know it is not the only factor. You have to consider developmental components, developmental trajectory, parent school, childhood illness, society, generals, you know, time and history, you have to consider all of these things to think about what makes a serial murderer, but I do think there's an evolutionary component. Yeah, it's interesting because you always hear that a wife was killed was the first place you look, the husband. Right. Well, by your evidence, it seems that men are more likely to kill strangers than they are to kill their intimate partner.

48:31That is interesting. However, the number one mode of last time I checked in North America for murder was male perpetrated jealousy.

48:41So did jealousy. What's that? Yeah. So I'm sorry. So a man kills a woman because he's jealous of something. Last time I checked the statistics, I might want to go back and check the statistics, but in North America, the guilt is rejected. I'm falling in state as I angered my woman is cheating on me that kind of thing or I think she's cheated on me. And David Buss and colleagues have done a lot of research on that. How do women kill? What are their methods of choice? Poison. So a lot of people call those passive methods. I'm not sure. If you've ever read about what arsenic does to somebody's body, chronic anacute, what does it do?

49:23Let's say I take some arsenic. Oh my gosh, let's say you take some arsenic, well you're going to get in cephalitis, your brain is going to swell. All of your internal organs are going to swell and then fail, your gastrointestinal system is going to bleed, you are going to vomit blood, you are going to have bloody diarrhea, you are going to be doubled over in cramps until you die. So we don't want, don't, we don't want anybody to do that. No, it's horrible. It's painful. And it might not even be that day. It might be days of this person's suffering. It's horrible. What? It's a poisoning, a variety of different ways that they use it.

50:02I'm gonna guess. Right. Yes. And so I take poisoning, but I use actual poisoning like That kind of thing arsenic that used to be able to buy just, you know, buy the ounce at the apothecary back in the day and prescription drugs. So they might inject somebody with insulin and induce a heart attack and then they die by heart attack. And if they're in the hospital anyway and they say, oh, wow, hey, he had a heart attack, then people might not suspect it. So yeah, so it could be poison in terms of illegally used poison or pharmaceuticals used to a poisonous efficacy. I wonder if much of the reason that you have this higher prevalence of care gives a nurse is simply that they're around the weapons that they're going to be able to use.

50:51It could very well be. So I have a good friend who is a nurse. Somebody went to high school, and she's been a clinical nurse 25, 30 years. And I called her. I said, why? Why? And she said, Marissa, don't take this the wrong way. But right now I can tell you a hundred ways I can kill you and no one would ever know She's that's one thing that comes to my mind. She's no one would know we know how to do these things The way they so they have the means and the access and again if somebody dies in a hospital It's not the most peculiar thing that's ever happened so they The means to get away inside yet again

51:29What oh you've spent all of this time studying a lot of female serial killers of all of them who has been the most outlier psychologically that you found. I would say the outlier is... I would say the outlier is Eileen Warros because she shot men, left their bodies in the woods to decompose and rob them. I mean, so you have the financial motive there. But I mean, she was really abused. She had some mental illness. She was a psychopath, etc., etc. So I don't know. She was really the outlier there. Again, I think even in the absence of any diagnosis that I have read, you've got to be mentally ill to do something like this.

52:18So I don't know if there's any psychological outliers. But if you name a mental disorder, I have seen it in serial killers, female serial killers, schizophrenia bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, Munchausen syndrome, by proxy, now called fictitious disorder and post on another. So if you name it, it's a borderline personality disorder. It's represented in serial killers. What about female serial killer wives of male serial killers, like killer couples? Interesting. So I never studied killer couples, and I'll tell you why. I wanted to study psychology, and I wanted to know the what we call the auto -genic mode of like coming from you.

52:59So if this is my husband and we're killing, how do I know who it came from? How do I know who thought of these things or who persuaded whom to do what? I don't know. So I never studied paired serial killers. There is a pair I'm thinking about. I've not studied them, but the pair from the United Kingdom was it Anne and sorry, Mira Hadley is it? Yes. Okay, right. So what's really interesting about them, and I just maybe go on with a little tangent here, but please follow me. I don't even really remember his last name, but I remember her. And from what I recall, and I have some friends from Britain, I have some family from Britain, they tell me she is one of the most hated people in Britain.

53:43I'm like, yeah, but what was it, it was an Ian's idea? And they're like, yeah, but people hate her. Why? I think because she violated the female role. She was a good -looking woman who enticed kids to go on a journey or whatever those awful people did to those kids. And people hate her more for being the accomplice than they hate him for coming up with the crimes. He chops somebody up with an axe, right? But they hate their highly. It was the number one. It feels like she's contravened some sacred sort of protector code. It's almost like I guess again it's sort of the public perception thing that Man we expect that men are more likely to be serial killers So when you see a woman assisting a man in doing something you already know as heinous you feel like it's almost double heinous in a way Oh, absolutely they really do.

54:34I just don't want to get her her name wrong mirror handling That's it because people say there's no lady that wrote the book but doesn't know who mirror handling is Talk to me about the sociocultural environment that we've got at the moment and a sort of living setup. Again, if you're taking an evolutionary lens with this, we are in a novel environment and cesseurally right now. What do you make of that for the persuasion or dissasion of killers, male and female? The thing is, I don't think it is. So again, I've studied female serial killers at length compared to my study of male serial killers, which I've studied somewhat.

55:22And they got away with it largely because their methods were undetected for a long period of time. I think we have increasingly sophisticated medical examination techniques, medical recording systems. I mean somebody who kills somebody if they died of arsenic poisoning, we're going to know on the first try. So I really think that's going to dissuade female serial killers. That being said, that's the kind we're used to. I don't know. There might be some kind of woman that does these things and gets away with it that we haven't caught or written about. Now in terms of male serial killers, in terms of the typical profile of stalking and killing strangers, I'm not sure.

56:04think about the victims being so interconnected in the stay -in -age with social media and and I'm tagging myself here and I have cameras all over my house. I'm not so sure it would be easy to get away with that. And again, to meet the criteria for serial killer it would be three or more victims with a cooling off period of one week in between or a timeout of at least one week in between. So even if somebody was horrible enough and stupid enough to kill the first person, are they going to be able to get away with it the second and the third time? Yeah, I really think about this a lot, especially given my nighttime ponch hunt for watching Netflix true crime documentaries and stuff like that.

56:48So much of this is, you know, it's 60s, it's 70s, it's 80s, it's out west somewhere in Alabama or wherever the fuck it is that it's going on. And as I go, I hear much about modern day serial killers, is that just that forensic techniques are so good that one, potential serial killers are much more disweighted from starting or two, they're so good that after the first stop, perhaps the second, they don't get chance to get to the third because they've been popped by some great investigator like your friend the detective. Right. It could very well be. I think you're on to something. You're absolutely right.

57:26And also, I mean, what about internet detectives, right? Put a picture on Facebook or Twitter and say, catch this person, they did X, they're caught in 20 minutes, right? So I think you really can't get away with stuff these days. I wouldn't even try. I wouldn't recommend it. So I do think the detective work and the science is there to prevent or at least catch before someone eventuates to the level of serial murderer. that being said, let's hope not. And I also know that if people really want to do something awful, they will. I don't want to go down this slippery slope, but honestly, there are mass murderers who, if they don't have guns, they set a house on fire or they push a card from a train, they'll stab you, they'll find a way, right?

58:16So yeah. So this is, we're now a deep, so I can say all of the spicy things now. Now, you know how there is some good evidence that women commit or attempt, should I say, suicide more than men, but men are more, for one of the better words, successful. Yes. They complete at a higher rate. I wonder whether, and this could go either way, it could be men or women, men or women are less successful at not being caught as serial killers. You would imagine there's sex differences in everything pretty much. So let's say for instance, I would guess on average that females are more likely to be better at hiding their tracks, being conniving, planning, doing that sort of stuff.

59:05So maybe the one in six number is that they are overrepresented because their failure rate, the amount of times that they kick some invisible tripwire that a man being a little bit more clumsy, less planned out, less sort of calculated in the way that he goes about his serial killing ventures. I get the sense that maybe they're overrepresented because they're actually quite good that disposition helps them. Absolutely. So it's interesting. I collected those data twice. And once the data showed that women got away with it longer. And then the second time I did another study, it was just about equal.

59:44and I have those data in front of me, the killing span, we call it the mean years killing. For men, it was 8 .7 years for women. It was 7 .8 years. So just about, just about equal. So they get away with it, but you're right. I mean, if somebody is leaving this female serial killer is sexually assaulting victims and leaving this trail of, you know, unfortunate dead bodies around the town, you're going to say, well, there's somebody there, let's catch them. They're gonna work really hard at it. Versus female serial killers. If there's This is awful, but babies dying in a hospital. It takes somebody to go hold on.

1:00:21Wait, that's there's a statistically Statistical anomaly somewhere. Let's go back and check it out People just normally turn up with axes in their heads, but babies do sometimes dying off Exactly exactly right So it seems like we have to to catch a male serial killer, but we have to detect a female serial killer. Oh, that's so great. And I think there's a difference there. How cool. Is there anything else that we haven't said from the sort of evolutionary lens perspective thing around female serial killers, any unclosed loops? I think I just, I'd like to close up with this and it might not be evolutionary, but you know, I conducted research to be able to write my book with Cambridge University Press, But then I learned from writing the book, right?

1:01:09And I know for sure from the data that I've seen and from the case that I worked on that we need more police resources, right? So the world is not like CSI where you send data, you know, you send specimen down to the lab and my friend from the FBI says it's hot men and women analyzing DNA to a banging musical soundtrack, right? The world doesn't work like that. They need money for these tests. They don't, the police organizations sometimes don't have these. We need more money for police and detective work. We need more of it. Secondly, we need more psychologists, right? Because let's say somebody intervened back in the day, Eileen Moronos was so sexually abused and raped when she was younger.

1:01:54She accidentally got set on fire. Her grades went down in school and the school called and said, hey, can we give her counseling? Nope, right? Well, if she got a case worker, maybe things would have been different for those seven or eight men that she killed. Right? So we need more psychologists to get out there and intervene because of something bad happens to someone. The earlier you get there, the better according to psychological data. You can treat trauma. If at all, you can give a better shot at it when it happens. If somebody's a kid, when you get right there and do it right then and there.

1:02:25So we need more psychologists and we need more psychologists and we need more police resources And that might tackle the problem Well, you may have inspired some fledgling criminal psychologists or detectives to get into the world of female serial killers today I hope so I hope they take what my team and I have done and and do it on a grander scale and and Create change, you know stop crime, help people where they need it. I really hope so. And thank you for saying that. I appreciate you. Marissa Harrison, ladies and gentlemen, Marissa, why should everyone go? If they want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing.

1:03:03I can check out my faculty webpage, Penn State Harrisburg, or you can take a look at my book, Justice Deadly, The Psychology of Female Serial Killers, Cambridge University Press 2023, but the paperback edition is coming out soon. So it's available at any retailer. Thank you so much. Congratulations. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you Chris.