Title: The return of the female serial killer – Trouble and Strife
Headings: The return of the female serial killer
The return of the female serial killer 2
Mythologizing murder
The female serial killer: monster, victim or psychopath?
Joanna Dennehy’s story
The question of sex
Becoming a hero
Cognitive dissonance
The sexual politics of serial killing

Content: In it we explored the relationship of what was then more commonly called ‘sexual murder’ to certain forms of masculinity, and asked why that connection was so rarely made in either ‘folk’ or ‘expert’ accounts. We were interested not only in the phenomenon of sexual murder itself, but also in the stories told to explain it. Those stories are revealing about a culture’s sexual politics, its habitual ways of thinking about gender, power, sex and violence. Joanna Dennehy’s case is interesting because it challenges our assumptions about the way those things fit together. The female serial killer: monster, victim or psychopath? In 1995, the FBI profiler Robert Ressler, then regarded as the world’s leading expert on serial killers, declared that to his knowledge there had only ever been one ‘true’ female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos. It is open to question whether Wuornos really fits the prototype, since her motive for killing may have been self-defence rather than self-gratification. She was a prostitute, and at her trial she claimed that the seven men she shot were punters who had attempted to rape her. ( Except in one case, this defence was rejected: