The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Special Individualized Interdisciplinary Doctoral Majors A COMFORTABLE EVIL: FEMALE SERIAL MURDERERS IN AMERICAN CULTURE A Thesis in American Studies by Melinda Page Wilkins © 2004 Melinda Page Wilkins Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2004 The thesis of Melinda Page Wilkins was reviewed and approved* by the following: J. Philip Jenkins Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Michael W. Anesko Associate Professor of English and American Studies Anne C. Rose Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Jewish Studies Alan M. Sica Professor of Sociology Barbara Pennypacker Professor of Agronomy Head of Special Individualized Interdisciplinary Doctoral Majors * Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. Abstract: A COMFORTABLE EVIL: FEMALE SERIAL MURDERERS IN AMERICAN CULTURE Melinda Page Wilkins This is a dissertation about the ways in which American culture understands the behavior of women who commit serial murder. Despite what most people think, female serial homicide is a distinct criminal phenomenon accounting for perhaps as many as 30% of all serial murders. These killers are women who murder secretly over the course of months or years and claim on average more victims than their male counterparts do. They are successful for three reasons: First, cultural mythology holds that serial murder is a crime committed only by men. Second, female killers use traditional gender stereotypes to conceal their crimes. Third, American culture seems to have a great deal invested in believing that, by virtue of their gender, women are simply not capable of committing the crime. For the most part, the materials used for this dissertation are available in the public record. They derive from interdisciplinary research into theoretical and empirical criminology and sociology, print and broadcast journalism, and true-crime, literary, and cinematic treatments of the topic in American culture. This dissertation suggests that female serial killers in American culture are good wives, good mothers, faithful, submissive girlfriends and lovers, competent nurses and healthcare professionals, good babysitters, responsible landladies, vulnerable hitchhikers—ordinary women who pervert the gender stereotypes they seem to exemplify. Like their male counterparts, they violate iii cultural standards not only for appropriate social behavior but also for appropriate gendered behavior. Stories that account for their criminality reflect a divisively gendered cultural ethics that is defined by the ideals of agency. These women are criminals, but the agency they might exercise—erotic, powerful, enraged—is subsumed by the more compelling issue of how they have violated the cultural understanding of womanness. In one way or another, these women have been overwhelmed by their own physiology. Stories about female serial killers are based on an ethics that holds the murderers juridically responsible for their crimes and, perversely, finds them damningly irresponsible as women. iv Contents Chapter One: Gender and Ethics in American Culture 1 Notes 14 Chapter Two: Serial Murder in America 15 Notes 30 Chapter Three: Women and Serial Murder 31 Notes 42 Chapter Four: The “Textbook” Female Serial Killer, Aileen Carol Wuornos, 1989–1990 38 Notes 68 Chapter Five: Shared Serial Murder: Rosemary and Fred West, 1967–1987 70 Notes 91 Chapter Six: The Deaths of Children: Stella Elizabeth Williamson, 1923–1933 94 Notes 127 Chapter Seven: A Comfortable Evil 130 Notes 141 Vita v Acknowledgements I am grateful beyond measure to Philip Jenkins for his wisdom and patience. I thank Joseph J. Kockelmans, Robert C.S. Downs, Alan Sica, Anne Rose, Michael Anesko, Barbara Pennypacker, and Richard Yahner for their good faith. Antonia Mooney kept me organized. Cynthia Shaler’s clear mind and flawless ear for the language made the last days of this project exhilarating. I thank my sons, Thomas and William West, for their fortitude. Samar Farage, Sajay Samuel, Christopher Lee, Thomas Skibinski, Jim and Kathy Morrow, and John Cramer provided the fabulous conversation that kept me alight. My parents, Jane and Bill Wilkins, kept me in books. My sister, Jennifer Berghage, and my brother, David Wilkins, kept me in line. My deepest gratitude goes to Martin Pietrucha, for his unflagging energy, optimism, integrity, and fidelity. vi Consider: How I needed a comfortable evil to prevent my knowing what I could not bear to know. —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye vii Chapter One: Gender and Ethics in American Culture In American culture, serial murder generates among the most consistent and constant of social mythologies about evil. Tales of the crimes transcend historical contexts; they mark the nadir of human endeavor and they explain the behavior of individuals who are in every other way lost to humanity. These are moral stories. They allow members of a society to assign motives to their behavior, to recognize responsibility, and thus to create sensible patterns of action from the chaos of ordinary life. Because serial murder is so extreme in its violation of ordinary life, it dictates very clear texts that define specific social mores threatened by criminality. These texts also unite the community against a common and clearly understood enemy.1 As a crime, serial murder might be rare, but American society needs those particular parables to define what it is not as a culture and, by extension, what it is. Stories about serial murder reveal as much about American culture as they do about the murderers themselves. These are stories about an “epidemic of violence,” about gender, goodness and evil, biology, psychology, and a culture that seems simultaneously victimized and predatory. The storytellers range from professionals trained in the study of serial homicide—academics, scholars, criminologists, physicians, psychiatrists—to professionals trained in the commodification of cultural phenomena for popular consumption—journalists, members of the entertainment industries, mass-market entrepreneurs. Whether “true” stories or fables, their works combine to form a group of master narratives about serial murder that are undergirded by a subtext about gendered 1 ethics in American culture at its best and at its worst. They offer us a way to interpret good and evil, right and wrong, based on how we construct what makes men and women fundamentally different from one another. The classic moral stories assigned by the culture to serial killers describe lone stalkers roaming around the country, striking their victims at random, torturing them, killing them, and desecrating their corpses to fulfill inconceivably perverted sexual fantasies. These are killers who violate cultural beliefs in the sanctity of young women and children. They are monstrous and sane. Above all, of course, they are male and have achieved the dubious status of legends in America: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer; Oscar- winning Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter from the movie “The Silence of the Lambs” and Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho—all indistinguishable from a host of others in fact and fiction. These are classic serial murderers, stereotyped in coherent social narratives assigned to them by academics, criminologists, journalists, writers, and film-makers. The texts of their stories describe the depth of male deviance; their subtexts define an equally conventional norm of maleness. And as Philip Jenkins notes, they developed within the context of specific “historical moments” in American culture, during the early 1980s and again during the early 1990s, when stories about serial killers could be appropriated to advance the causes of various claims-makers and interest groups both conservative and liberal: In both the periods during which serial murder was constructed as a major social problem, the offense became particularly valuable for diverse ideological causes. Some were conservative, moralists who saw the crimes of a Bundy or Gacy as emblematic of the sexual hedonism and excess of the recent past. Other activists, however, were located on the left of the political divide, at a time when liberals or radicals saw themselves as particularly embattled because they were campaigning against what were seen as 2 profoundly unsympathetic conservative administrations at [the] national level. In terms of making and filtering claims about serial murder, these active groups included feminists, during times of uniquely tense gender politics; gay rights militants, and ethnic minority leaders. However ironically, claims made by conservative bureaucratic agencies appealed across a broad political spectrum, but including many left-liberal groups, all of whom had a vested interest in stressing the scope and harmfulness of serial homicide.2 Hence, the vested interests of these cultural agents spawned a useful and persistent mythology about serial murder as an “epidemic” carried by men and inflicted mainly upon women and children, representing America at its worst—violent, vulnerable, and savvy. It gave rise to swift and decisive countermeasures: initially, the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico, Virginia, followed by other profiling agencies both federal and private; legislation designed specifically to protect the victims of serial murder—women and children; and criminological, medical, and psychiatric research specifically focused on