This article was originally published on December 3, 2020.
In 1985, criminologist Eric Hickey published the first — to his knowledge — academic paper on female serial killers. The dearth of research on this demographic belied a dangerous assumption: Women are incapable of the depravity needed for such horrific crimes. Early in his career, in conversation with FBI agents at a conference, Hickey described a case on which he was consulting. The unidentified offender had murdered eight people over two years, all poisoned. He told the agents which sex he suspected. Their response? “There are no female serial killers.”
In his subsequent work, Hickey has looked at cases as far back as the 1800s. "We’ve always had them," he says. "We just didn’t acknowledge them.” Other reports suggest they’ve been around even longer. Around the turn of the 16th century, Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess, supposedly tortured and killed hundreds of young girls. Hickey tends to “discount those huge numbers,” but the fact remains that women, too, are responsible for untold bloodshed — they just follow a subtler modus operandi.
