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: She has routinely been portrayed as ‘more evil’ than her male partner, and is often imagined as the ‘power behind the throne’, the one who instigated the killings even if she did not carry them out. This demonizing narrative is particularly strong in cases where the victims are children (as were all of Brady and Hindley’s and some of Fred and Rose West’s). Women who participate in the abuse and killing of children are ‘monsters’, lacking the instinct to nurture and protect which is seen as a defining feature of normal femininity. This is what makes them ‘more evil’ than the men: they are not just a disgrace to humanity at large, but traitors to their sex. Media coverage of the Dennehy case has made the inevitable comparisons with Myra Hindley and Rose West, but Joanna Dennehy’s story is clearly different from theirs, and even from Aileen Wuornos’s. Dennehy’s statement ‘I murdered three men’ was a direct and unequivocal assertion of her sole responsibility for the killings, while the ‘joke’ that followed (‘it could have been worse—I could have been fat and ugly’) made clear that she felt no urge to apologise, nor to claim, as Wuornos did, that there were mitigating circumstances. That defiant flippancy might in theory have prompted commentators to demonize her as a ‘man-hater’, but interestingly the question of her attitudes to men did not feature prominently in the reporting of her case. ( I will return later on to this rather surprising omission). Instead, what was emphasized was her clinical status as a ‘psychopath’, who also suffered from ‘anti-social personality disorder’ and ‘paraphilia sadomasochism’.