Female Serial Killers Essay

The fascinating thing about women is that they often tend to not possess the common characteristics of a serial killer that a male tends to show earlier on in life. Although not always fully acknowledged, there are many early signs of a potential serial killer. These later become the characteristics of a serial killer. The most common characteristic of a serial killer is animal abuse. This particular characteristic is commonly seen during a serial killers childhood. Many serial killers see this as â€Å"practice†. Psychiatrists describe this early sign of killing as a mental disorder that should not be ignored. Another highly common characteristic of serial killer is a person who enjoys starting fires, otherwise known as Pyromaniacs. The people that possess this characteristic tend to get sexually aroused just from starting a fire. A well-known Pyromaniac was Joseph Kallinger who described starting a fire as a heavenly pleasure. Also a common characteristic would be bed wetting. Many serial killers tend to wet the bed past adolescence. Kenneth Bianchi, an American serial killer, spent most of his adulthood wetting the bed. A broken home has been noted to be a characteristic of a serial killer. Growing up father-less or mother-less highly affects a young soon-to-be serial killer’s life. Female serial killers share only some of these characteristics such as animal abuse. Women tend not to show characteristics until later on in life. At times they do not show characteristics. Most female serial killers kill for long periods of times and quietly unlike her fellow male killer. Female serial killers almost always have a strong motive driving them to commit these horrible crimes and coincidentally they are often similar. If a female serial killer is acknowledged by a community the people in that community tend to believe that because she is a woman, therefore the weaker sex, she was somehow pressured or victimized by her lover to kill. (Davis, 2001). Many refuse to believe that a woman is capable of killing on her own terms. Women have many different reasons for killing yet throughout the years and the multiple murder cases that occur where a woman is the murderer, the motive is almost always. Most of the women who tend to kill are in great debt and in need of a quick and easy way out. Belle Gunness, who was considered one of the worst serial killers in American History, did just this. Belle killed all of her children and husbands just to collect life insurance, money, and other valuables. (Edwards, 2012). She also adopted more children in order to repeat the process of collecting the insurance and got away with doing so for eight years. Another murder case in which the primary motive happened to be money was the Olga Rutter Schmidt and Helen Golay case. These two women in their 70’s conducted a $2. 3 Million insurance fraud murder scheme. Helen and Olga provided shelter and food for Paul Vados and Paul McDavid just long enough to have good amount of money to benefit from if these two men were to pass. There were multiple insurance plans that gave these two women benefits when the two homeless men were killed.