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    Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
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    Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
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    Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
    Ebook401 pages6 hours

    Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

    By Tori Telfer

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Inspired by author Tori Telfer's Jezebel column “Lady Killers,” this thrilling and entertaining compendium investigates female serial killers and their crimes through the ages.

    When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”

    Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.

    Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject, and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes and sexist clichés that inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations (she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it) and tired tropes (she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch), delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation. Featuring 14 illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.

     

     

    Editor's Note

    Capacity for cruelty…

    If you thought only men have the capacity and cruelty to become repeat murderers, Tori Telfer’s book about the little-known stories of female serial killers will make you think again. Inspired by the Jezebel column of the same name, this book takes feminism to a new level.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 10, 2017
    ISBN9780062433749
    Author

    Tori Telfer

    Tori Telfer is the author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History and the host of the podcasts Criminal Broads, Why Women Kill: Truth, Lies, and Labels (CBS All Access), and Red Flags (Investigation Discovery). She lives in New York City with her husband and son.

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    Reviews for Lady Killers

    3.5/5

    171 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book or my review itself. In Lady Killers, Telfer tells the true stories of fourteen female serial killers from history, ranging from groups of women who banded together to poison the men in their lives, to a woman who kept finding her way to elderly men and their money. Telfer has a wonderfully wry writing style, and manages to find moments of subtle humor amidst the darkness, making her book very accessible, while never losing sight of her subject matter.I have read a lot of true crime, and I hadn't heard of many of these women. And that is one of Telfer's main points. That whatever media existed at their time marveled at how a woman could commit such heinous crimes, and then history promptly forgot them, proclaiming every time that this was the first female serial killer.I would absolutely recommend this book for true crime readers, as well as people interested in history and women's studies.
    • 5/5
      Great book! Read it during dull times at work -- it thankfully made the hours fly by. Interesting to learn about female serial killer stories while also seeing how the media, of their era, painted them.
    • 3/5
      Nice book. Can read it to experience serial killers and their lives
    • 3/5
      Interesting cases but I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it.
    • 4/5
      This was interesting read about women that have committed horrendous crimes this is a good part that is talked about how they are represented in the media, and how there is a type of sexual context that has to be there for female killers. This some how diminishes the crime that are just as serious as the male counterparts.
    • 4/5
      This is a light read, but not a trashy one. I'd heard of a couple of the female serial killers (Elizabeth Bathory and Mary Anne Cotton) but the rest wre all new and - generally- quite an interesting lot. The "Angel Makers of Nagyrev" - a sisterhood of old Hungarian villagerswho operated almost like social workers, 'fixing' things for overburdened mothers, unhappily married wives; a sadistic Russian serf-owner; "the Beautiful Throat Cutter- a Kansas inn owner who despatched her guests; the murky word of a pair of Egyptian brothel owners; the 'Giggling Grandma'...The author considers, too, how female killers are represented entirely differently to men...our need to paint their crimes with comprehensible motives- money, love, witchcraft- and their very existence a bit of a joke, since to envisage the nurturing gender as truly psychopathic, relishing suffering, is too scary to contemplate.Very interesting!
    • 4/5
      The subject of female serial killers is not one that comes up often in literature, but this book handled the subject well and is aptly named. Many of these killers were ladies in the strictest sense. Some came from well-to-do families. They looked liked society people, or like hard-working innkeepers, or like loving relatives, or even like a kindly grandmother. But in reality, they were cool, conniving, cold-blooded killers. They beat their servants, poisoned their husbands, and buried the bodies without losing a wink of sleep. Author Tori Telfer does an excellent job of breathing life into killers who come from different countries and are spread over several centuries. You will be appalled by their cruelty and horrendous crimes even as you are compelled to read about them. This audio version is well performed by Sarah Mollo-Christensen.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This was a fun book! It was easy to read and fascinating, spooky and unsettling at the same time. The scariest parts in this book to me were the sections on Erzsébet Báthory with her crazy inventiveness to torture and Mary Ann Cotton with her merciless killing of her 11 kids, and all of it was done in a nice form. I think the only thing that bothered me with the book was the repetition of how a story was laid out: in media res, background, killing, public response, conviction, summary, next story. It lent itself to easy reading but was repetitive after awhile, unfortunately.
    • 5/5
      I Loved this book. wish it could have been longer

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What a delightfully creepy book. I'm not really a true crime fan because it makes me even more paranoid than I already tend to be, but I had to find one for Read Harder this year. I still couldn't listen to it right before bed but it was fascinating. Telfer brings together a set of women from our near to distant past to show how women have never been the pure maternal souls we so often get put on us.

      The most recent lady killer mentioned was in the 1950's, which I appreciated. Lady killers may not be a thing of the past only, but I feel I'm better off not knowing popular contemporary ways to get rid of people. It also helps that not one of these women didn't really get away with it. I don't consider that a spoiler because there's no other way to get the details without extensive documentation plus the detail that it was definitively a woman. I think one did elude the police, though.

      The tales collected are incredibly detailed, including methods of murder, motives, rumors, lore, sentences, and what alerted people to their deeds. The women themselves are from many countries and eras and of every class. They were in a variety of circumstances and their actions were the result of situations from excessive abuse to excessive privilege. The author admits in the end, though, that she was unable to find sufficient information to include women of color and mentions a few she had looked into along with a caveat that this does not mean they didn't exist among other races.

      The book itself was written to not just refute the idea that women can't kill even their own children but to combat the erasure that happens when women do kill. The point is not to glorify this sort of behavior, nor to excuse it, but acknowledge that it is there, despite popular belief. Many of these women got away with murder for as long as tbey did because no one around them could fathom that a woman was capable of such a thing.

      It was likewise interesting to read about the preferred methods of murder for women over the years, especially having seen several mentioned in some of my favorite fiction, like Etiquette and Espionage. We continue to forget what women can be capable of when push comes to shove and while I nor the author condone murder, we recognize that women should not be underestimated in this regard either.

      1 person found this helpful