Forensic Insights: Female Sex Offenders Program Transcript

Forensic Insights: Female Sex Offenders

MALE SPEAKER: There are many different types of sex offenders and sexual predators. And we usually think of men as being sex offenders and sexual predators. But we also have female sex offenders. We do, on occasion, see female sex offenders who are involved with men who will become, for example, serial killers. But we've sometimes seen a woman who is helping a man do it. But she's not the person who initiates it. It's the man who does. Whenever you see a lot of mutilation, and sadism, and so forth and a woman's involved, so is a man. Women generally, on their own, do not do those types of things.

And we are more likely to see female sex offenders as schoolteachers. It's very, very rare-- maybe one out of every 200 to 300-- a woman who would actually target somebody under the age of 12. Women are not true pedophiles. What they do, is they tend to focus on the 13, 14, 15-year-old, 16-year-olds. Those four age groups tend to be the ones that they focus on the most. They often just have one victim.

Someone like Mary Kay Letourneau, she's what we call an outlier. She's not your typical type of female schoolteacher offender because she married her victim. That's extremely unusual-- very, very rare to see that happening. But what we're seeing are women who have boundary issues. They have emotional issues. Sometimes they're a little histrionic perhaps. But there's usually something going on with them.

They're in their family life and sometimes they're married, but they will either get involved with one or two victims. And sometimes there's alcohol involved. If a man, who is a schoolteacher, is 25 years of age-- we'll just say for example. And has his victim is a 15-year-old girl. And he gets caught. He's going to go to prison for 10 years.

If a woman is a schoolteacher, she's 25. And her victim is 15-- her male victim is 15. He got lucky. And that's how the system looks at it. Rarely do women get convicted of these types of things. When women are convicted of these types of crimes, they get less than half the sentence of a man for exactly the same crime.

So the problem here is that women are not being treated fairly. And women, they want to be treated fairly. I've always heard about equality. So I'm making efforts to do some research. And then we're writing a book on this. We want to give women equality so they also can be punished like men for the same crimes.

But the real problem here is, we make assumptions that the boys are not affected by this like girls are. And that's just not true. The ledger is very clear that boys are affected by this type of abuse. As we look at the top tier, like the 17-year-olds and the 18-year-old girls, you're more likely to see lesbians involved with it who

are school teacher or coaches are involved with them because they're looking for relationships rather than just having sexual encounters. They're also looking for relationships, which is different than these other women who are kind of unstable that are trying to get involved with these younger boys.

So it's a different kind of group that we're looking at because when we look at men who prey upon school kids, you're looking at men who are hebophiles. And then you're also looking at the ones under 12, the true pedophiles are also there as well. So it's a broader spectrum of men, whereas the women are just above 12, for the most part. I mean, there are exceptions. But really, really rare exceptions.

We only have, I think, two or three sex offender programs in the United States that focus on female sex offenders. We had not really validated the typologies of female sex offenders yet. I think there's a lot more work that we can do. I think the treatment programs for them would be quite different than what we would be offering for men because of their interests and so on.

We don't think of females as sexual predators, but we see them as sex offenders because they usually are schoolteachers. They're not the ones that get on the internet trying to troll and prey upon kids. They're much more focused on access to the school systems.

Paraphillia, as we talked about, can be very complicated. Sadism is a form of paraphillia. It's also a paraphillia that's woven throughout some other types of sex crimes. There are some offenders who can become serial rapists who are also very sadistic in what they do. And we've seen serial killers, for example, who are not sadistic at all. But they kill their victims. And then others are very highly sadistic when they kill their victims.

For example, take Cary Stayner. Cary Stayner was a serial killer in California. His brother Steven Stayner was the one who was abducted by a pedophile and kept in the mountains for several years. I think seven years. Cary was a nice guy, an artist of sorts. And I looked at some of his artwork. But Cary was known-- well, his last murders he had targeted this woman, and her daughter, and her best friend from Argentina. He had seen them at this hotel where he was working near Yosemite National Park.

They were at the end of the building. And he approached them one evening, he had been watching them for a while. I believe he had a gun at that time or something, a weapon of some sort. And when he went to the door, the mother thought that he was going to rob them. And so she said, well, just don't hurt us, you know. Take what you want. He tied them up. And then he killed the mother, he strangled her. And he killed this other girl from Argentina in front of the daughter, who was, I think, 15 or 16 and that time.

Now, he could have spent the evening with this girl in that motel room. But instead, he didn't. He took her in the car. He actually put the bodies in the trunk of the car and left. He drove for several miles out into the words and then parked the car. And then walked her out into the woods. And there was a purpose behind all of this. He didn't care about the other two victims. He strangled them. He wanted to get rid of them very quickly. But he wanted the girl for a very specific reason.

And so he took her out in the woods. He took off her clothes. And he raped her. And while he raping her from behind, he cut off her head. She was 16 years old. Now the purpose of walking her out into the words, was to instill fear. Not that she wasn't already afraid, but going into the woods was part of his fantasy.

I had a chance to look at his drawings after the fact. He had about 30 different paintings he had done. All of them were women-- heads of women on the ground in the words. And there were monsters in the words. And of course, he was a monster. And here he was out in the words with this poor little gal, who he just decapitated. And he couldn't be aroused unless she was afraid of him. And that's why it was really important that he see the fear on her face. And know that she was afraid of him. Otherwise, what's the point? What's the point of killing her?

In another case, very similar to this-- was very sadistic. Where the I-5 killer, Randy Woodfield, would put a gun on the head of the victim and pull the trigger back. And make the victim perform oral sex on him. In that particular case-- and he shot several people in the head during this time and killed them. But there were some victims he didn't shoot.

Now it's very curious, why didn't he shoot those victims but he shot the others? So I went to Oregon to interview them. And I tracked down the first victim. And we met in a restaurant. And I said, so you were there on the ground in your store at night. And you knew by then who he was. He was a serial killer. You're tied up. You're on your knees. You're performing oral sex on him. He's got a gun on your forehead with the trigger pulled back, you're about to die. You were afraid, correct?

She goes, yes, I was terrified. I said, do you have any idea why he didn't shoot you in the head? And she thought about it. And she said, well, I did exactly what he told me to do. I said, did you act afraid? She goes, no, I just did what he said to do. I said, that's exactly why you're alive. Had you acted afraid, you would be dead. He only killed the ones who acted afraid of him because he couldn't get aroused unless you saw your fear.

You showed no fear. You just did what you were told. He couldn't get aroused. He couldn't ejaculate. He couldn't do it. And so as a result of that, you're alive. And that was the same way with the other two other three women. They all did exactly what he said. And didn't act afraid.

And so this whole issue about sadism is important. That he was feeding off of the fear of his victims. And that's a different kind of predator than someone who sits and peeps through windows. A lot of sexual predators are not sadistic. But in this case, he was a type four serial rapist who became a serial killer. And then he went on, of course, later on to kill another woman by cutting of her head as well. And he's currently, of course, in prison.

So as we get into really the dark underbelly of these types of people. This is not fun. This is the real thing. There's nothing exciting about this. This is about understanding predator behavior. And how do we stop these kinds of people? How do we find them? And how do we prosecute them? How do we make sure they never get out of prison again?

I know it's really horrific information. But it's reality. It's what's out there. And so to do this kind of work, you really have to be very professional and objective. And you can't identify with the offenders or with the victims. You have to be able compartmentalize and do your work. And then take breaks, and go on vacation. But this is kind of work that requires you to take vacation. You just can't do this every day and think, this is good stuff.

No it's not good stuff. And it does have its impact on anybody who does this kind of work. People say, oh, how can you do this? Well, I do it when I want to. And then I take breaks and do other kinds of work. I'm not always interviewing offenders. I'm not always reading horrific magazines, or stories, or articles about monsters. I don't do that.

But I do enough of it. And when I know I'm at my limit, I move on to something else. So I think is really important as we think about these types of predators, that they wreak a lot of havoc in our society. And it's the underbelly that we tend to avoid. These are the kinds of things that we would make movies about. And some of these people are far worse than anything we could ever put on the film screen.

Forensic Insights: Female Sex Offenders Additional Content Attribution

FOOTAGE: GettyLicense_86485145 (INT. Inmate Conversation w/ Lawyer) Credit Line: [Thinkstock Images]/[Stockbyte]/Getty Images

GettyLicense_157198998 (INT. Depressed male double date) Credit Line: [Kris Hanke]/[E+]/Getty Images

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ABQN4A-021 (Wooded area; TC: 10:22:34 – 10:22:39)

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