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 reality, as opposed to fiction, serial killing is a rare crime, committed by few individuals of either sex. And among those few individuals, the number of women is negligible. Before Joanna Dennehy, Britain had produced only two examples of the ‘female serial killer’—Myra Hindley and Rosemary West—in the space of fifty years. The other way in which ‘the female serial killer’ is mythologized is through the stories which are told about her—stories about who she is, why she kills, and above all what her killing has to do with her femaleness. Male serial killers are also mythologized, but without the same obsessive focus on their gender. Whereas Joanna Dennehy inspired a slew of articles with titles like ‘Inside the mind of the female serial killer’, and ‘What makes a female serial killer tick?’, no one would call an article ‘Inside the mind of the male serial killer’. The serial killer is male by default: his maleness is both taken for granted and glossed over in the stories told to explain his behaviour. That observation was the starting point for a book I wrote with Elizabeth Frazer in the 1980s, The Lust to Kill.