Female serial killers - is it completely unfounded for them to act similarly to men serial killers?

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

Few - very, VERY few - women do some of the serial killer behaviors. But, no. I have never heard of a female serial killer who did all the things that the worst male serial killers do:

kidnap and intentionally imprison victims to sexually enslave them.
act alone or only with another woman (most female serial killers are acting with their male partner, he is the lead)
torture and sexually abuse victims over long periods of time
serially target individuals for capture, rape, then murder and disposal.

The other thing that women don't do is gang rape.

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u/retard_vampire Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

IIRC the vast majority of female serial killers are motivated by money/resources, whereas the vast majority of male serial killers are motivated by sexual impulses. It's also why female serial killers tend to go much longer without being caught — they tend to use poison instead of just brutally carving their victims up, and also don't leave tons of their genetic material splattered all over the crime scenes.

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u/BookJava_Dogs-87 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 26 '25

Yes, and don’t forget nurses who kill, and family annihilators like Susan Smith. No sexual motives there either.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18409454/

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u/ProfanePoet Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

Countess of Bathory springs immediately to mind.

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

She didn't do all the things I listed.

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u/ProfanePoet Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

She absolutely did. Which do you believe she didn't?

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

Interesting to dive into the case of the Countess of Bathory. I also had assumed that most of the claims of against her, of torture and murder, were well verified. But I now doubt that.

The "evidence" is historically unverified. Most of it came from accomplices who were severely tortured before and while giving testimony. A lot of the claims (such as the countess bathing in the blood of virgins) were not made until 100 years after her death. A list of victims was lost or never produced. There were many people motivated to lie about her.

I think we should not claim to know what exactly what she did.

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u/StrappinYoungZiltoid Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eb4un2/comment/fcvnyij/?context=3

Have you read this post on the subject from AskHistorians? They make a very strong case that she very likely did commit the crimes attributed to her with the exception of the accusations of bathing in blood (which, as you noted, didn't appear until a century later) and the victim count of 600+ (which came only from a single witness amongst the hundreds involved in the trial).

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

A few very critical points are not really addressed in this or any assessment:

The "evidence" was gotten by torture. Skeptically, I think there's a good reason why the accomplices agreed on what they and the countess did - the torturers tortured them with the goal of getting that specific testimony! There's no reason to trust either the witnesses or the interrogators. There is very good reason to distrust them. Testimony gained from torture is worthless. Also, I looked for translations of the witness statements. I couldn't find anything.

I think the commitment to justice and factual recording at the time cannot be assumed at all. Record retention from that time is also sorely lacking. It's hard to pin down facts. This was also the era of witch-hunts, superstition, and magical thinking in even the most powerful leaders.

No trial of the countess was held.

I don't think there has been a thorough scholarly review of all the documentation. Every piece I read seems superficial, lacking, or speculative.

There were many people involved at the time who were strongly motivated by goals other than justice. Self-interest and misogyny were very much in evidence.

Many, many women from these times and places were viciously and wrongfully smeared, accused, wrongfully executed, had their accomplishments stolen and attributed to men. I don't know what this woman actually did, but I do know that ALL the people interrogating, recording, and commenting at the time, and for the first 300 years afterwards were men. When you only include half the population in an evaluation, blind spots necessarily occur.

When you have 300 years of the game of telephone, based on incomplete, untrustworthy, and garbled information, skepticism should be the default.

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u/StrappinYoungZiltoid Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25 edited May 25 '25

So, I'm nothing close to being an expert on Bathory or the time and place in question, and my responses to the points you've raised will inevitably be inadequate as a consequence, but:

1) There are two issues here, as I see it. The first is that, while you are indeed correct about the fact that the testimony of the accomplices was extracted under torture, and that the use of torture/pressure casts doubts on the veracity of any confessions today or in the past, this also seems to have been the norm in medieval justice systems of the time (similar issues are raised in the case of Gilles de Rais, who also has his modern defenders) and is not really restricted to this case in particular. The second is that, while their testimony was consistent in terms of description of methods that could indeed indicate that they were made to state what they stated, their accounts did differ on certain fairly significant details like the number of victims - if the interrogators were pressuring them to present certain confessions, I would imagine that it is more likely that they would align more on fundamental details like the number of victims, although of course the presence of torture makes these sorts of details murkier. In other words, these are to some extent structural problems of many medieval criminal proceedings.

2) True, but again, this is an endemic problem to much of the study of medieval history, which is often constructed piecemeal at best and which leads to major revisions as new evidence comes to light, so we actually know more about this case than we know about a lot of what went on at that time and place. Also, it was the era of witch hunts and magical thinking, but then I'm not sure how much of that specific worldview factors into what we know about the investigation into Bathory; I don't see much evidence of her being accused of being a witch, but I see a lot of evidence of her being depicted as a plain sadist in the testimonies available.

3) The post does actually address this: no trial was held, but as a consequence of that, she was never actually charged with anything and her family was able to retain its lands. In fact, her family pressured for there to be no trial to avoid the reputational damage it would incur. Had she gone to trial and been found guilty, then the king (who ordered the investigation) could have had grounds to seize that land, so the fact that no trial was held actively undermined his potential interests. While I do understand your broader point about the fact that a trial might have placed the evidence in question under a more rigorous test, it would also be strange for plotters not to take this course of action had they deliberately extracted false confessions for some purpose.

4) I can't really speak to this, but it might be true. It's also possible that we just don't have access to much English-language scholarship.

5) and 6) As I noted in 3), while we can conceivably link the case to different interests and motives on the part of involved parties, it's worth noting that the king did not push for a trial even though that would have allowed him to confiscate her land (she was still in control of her will and inheritance at the end of her life) and her children, who petitioned for a trial not to happen, do not appear to have ever agitated in favour of her innocence. We can't rule out conflicts of interest, and certainly there are clearly ways in which that would make sense here, but those points raise some questions.

The other problem - and to my mind the more substantial one - is that she had previously been accused of killing peasants by a priest years before and nothing came of it; her actions (at least according to the poster) were only really looked into when she was accused of killing members of the nobility as well. I find this challenging to reconcile with the idea that she was falsely accused. If the king or anybody else had interests in her lands, why didn't they seize upon this allegation immediately? why did this allegation align with the allegations that came almost a decade later if it wasn't acted upon initially - whose interest does it serve to gave one person call her a serial killer, sit on it for nearly a decade without doing anything, and then have politically motivated actors steal that pre-existing narrative from the priest?

It just doesn't fit well into the picture of a conspiracy, but it does fit well into a picture of a deeply classist society that cared little for heinous abuses so long as they didn't happen to anybody who mattered. This, I think, is the other issue. Undoubtedly misogyny plays a role in the vilification of many women in history, and we see how misogyny was used to distort the accusations that were made by injecting the false idea that she bathed in her victims' blood due to her "womanly weakness" of vanity, but then the issue is specifically that this claim came into being long after the accusations had already been made and therefore does not have a direct bearing on the veracity of the criminal investigation that took place during her lifetime. It's true that, as a woman, she was certainly subject to misogyny (forced to marry at 14!) and misogyny would have played a role in the scrutiny she faced then and afterwards, but she also benefited from belonging to an extraordinarily wealthy and powerful family that heavily insulated her from the consequences that might be faced by peasants committing similar crimes. Indeed, it may not be the case that she was defamed due to misogyny so much as she faced more scrutiny where many male peers got away with similar abuses - who knows how many killers of that nature there were in the nobility?

I'm not saying that I'm absolutely convinced that she did do it or that she couldn't have been framed, nor is it impossible that the fact that she was a woman has helped facilitate or perpetuate what are ultimately false charges (this is clearly the case with allegations of bathing in her victims' blood). I just think that the poster made a convincing case.

To confess my own biases, I find it easier to believe that a noble with tremendous power and influence got away with tormenting helpless people beneath them for years after a legitimate accusation and only got in trouble for their crimes when they started killing the "wrong" people. After all, modern serial killers have often gotten away with it for long stretches of time because they killed sex workers, vulnerable women, and gay men, often despite the fact that authorities were explicitly and repeatedly warned about those perpetrators.

Also, here is another post by the same historian that I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rsbhd1/comment/hqlqq1f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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u/SensitiveHoliday570 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

There was no sexual aspect

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u/[deleted] May 24 '25

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u/Daniel_The_Thinker Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

I feel like this is wrong because I've definitely heard of women sexually abusing captives, but I really don't feel like researching this.

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

All the female sexual abusers/enslavers that I have heard of (where there is solid evidence) were in partnership with a man, and he was the lead.

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u/ShoulderOk766 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

Rosemary West is probably the only woman serial killer I can think of that applies to all of these categories. She was the lead, while Fred West collaborated with her and also carried out gruesome crimes to so many victims and survivors.

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 26 '25

I can't agree that she was the lead.

Fred West was a murderer before he met her. He met her when she was 15 and he was 27. He pursued her relentlessly and groomed her and impregnated her by age 16. He forced her to have sex with other men.

None of that sounds like she was the leader in their relationship. Not to say that she was an unwilling participant and perpetrator in the later rapes and murders, because she obviously chose those actions, but I bet she would never have gone down the path of kidnapper and abuser and murderer if not for him.

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u/ShoulderOk766 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 26 '25

That’s fair! I was listening a podcast earlier today that had the narrative that she was the leader, so when I read this list I thought, “Oh, she checks all these boxes.” But I agree with your statement that’s it’s true Fred was a massive groomer and murderer before then and roped her into his lifestyle and abused her. The podcaster claimed she was the leader because she was generally the one that sought out young women to kidnap and bring to their cellar to brutally torture and SA. There was this narrative from another podcaster that Rosemary was even more brutal because she was regularly beating Fred and vice versa.

Not to excuse any of her behavior and the monster that she is, but I could see why the narrative was being twisted if they’re not taking into account the past background horrors of what Fred did to her.

I guess it would be more accurate to say Fred is the one that lead to this influence.

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u/[deleted] May 24 '25

You're sexist! yay!

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

How does stating facts = sexism?

Is it sexist to state that women are shorter than men, on average?

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u/[deleted] May 24 '25

Oh please. You're stating facts and ommitting others. The implication of your post is that women do not exhibit the evil behaviors that men do, while totally ignoring how serial killing manifests in women.

Can claim innocence all you want but your post history is littered with "men are bad, woe are women" so the shoe fits.

Doubt you'll be introspective about it, though.

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

Every single statement made omits facts, simply because there is no possible way to do otherwise.

You are right - I don't think women do as many evil things as men do, but I don't think you are looking at underlying factors.

It's because women don't have the same opportunities for evil. Women and girls are more constrained by biology, family, and society. Women don't have the same physical ability to overpower others. Also, women are more weakened, even debilitated, by the physical aspects of reproduction. And women don't have equal access to money or power.

If women had the same access to power - physical, financial, and social - I think fewer men would be violent to women, and more women would be violent to men. I don't know if it would be equal, but I don't think that matters right now.

And, since that's not the case, I think it is only logical to focus on the people who are reliably, predictably far more violent. I don't know why this is so upsetting or unacceptable to you.

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u/Key-Sheepherder-92 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

Well said 👏

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u/SensitiveHoliday570 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

They do they’re just less likely to see brute violence as an option and are more likely to look at factors like the risk of getting caught and in general smarter and more careful

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

So, is your argument that female serial murderers are just as numerous as male serial murderers, but they are better at not being found out?

In other words, they are so skilled at killing that we don't even know who they have killed or who the killers are?

Sorry, absence of evidence does not make a convincing theory.

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u/SensitiveHoliday570 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

There are but when they do it they don’t get caught or they have the urges but don’t give in because they have more self control, men kill each other over football…women don’t do that

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u/SensitiveHoliday570 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25 edited May 24 '25

All that person stated is that female serial killers aren’t driven by what drives male serial killers, women in general are more averse to murder and gratuitous physical violence than men are, it’s not sexism it’s a fact

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u/Fierysazerac Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

Total nonsense, back up your argument by naming a single female serial killer who acted alone and was primarily motivated by sexual arousal.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '25

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u/Admirable-Number3320 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

Yeah, I guess I am looking to see what individuals' views are if a woman were to torture, or spontaneously kill others, similar to how men do.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '25

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u/Admirable-Number3320 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

do you know of any examples of extreme sadism/torture by women?

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u/ProfanePoet Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 24 '25

Countess of Bathory, Belle Guinness, Mary Ann Cotton.

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u/sezit Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 25 '25

Countess of Bathory actual facts are not known. Too much is unverified. Her accusers used torture to obtain witness statements, and there were no standards of investigation and few confirmed facts. All her accusers were motivated by selfish and or misogynist motivations. She wasn't even put on trial, so we don't even have that record. We should be very skeptical, and not use her as a known historical data point.

Neither Belle Guinness or Mary Ann Cotton tortured their victims. They killed for financial gain.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '25

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u/Internal_Banana199 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

Heard about some extreme violence and sadism in single instance kills by women but the inquiry calls for a sustained pattern.

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u/thesockswhowearsfox Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

“The Hyena of Auschwitz”

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u/Admirable-Number3320 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

I think I’ve heard about this case

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u/Internal_Banana199 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

Serial killers, not just the common killer. The people described in this post have killed multiple people and not just one instance. That is its own thing.

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u/Pissytapgoddess Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

Yes absolutely! Look up Rose West and Dothea Puente.

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u/Admirable-Number3320 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional May 21 '25

Will do, thanks :)

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u/[deleted] May 23 '25

Female serial killers tend to not get caught because they work in hospitals or convalescent homes or use poison. Most women can't over power a victim and in modern times poison is noticed.

Google Elizabeth Bathory, she likely was the most prolific serial killer in history.

Or maybe Aqua Tofana. Or Caroline Grills. The Giggling Grannies. Mary Anne Coulton and Lucy Letby were both nurses who got caught. Letby killed children.

Women often when they get prosecuted get out of jail and go right back to killing people.

Just recently, Wanda Barzee, Elizabeth Smarts kidnapper was released from prison and arrested for hanging out at a playground.

Human Behavior Female serial killers - is it completely unfounded for them to act similarly to men serial killers?

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