While national crime rates have recently fallen, crimes committed by women have risen 200 percent, yet we continue to transform female violence into victimhood by citing PMS, battered wife syndrome, and postpartum depression as sources of women?s actions. When She Was Bad convincingly overturns these perceptions by telling the stories of such women as Karla Faye Tucker, who was recently executed for having killed two people with a pickax; Dorothea Puente, who murdered several elderly tenants in her boarding house; and Aileen Wuornos, a Florida woman who shot seven men. Patricia Pearson marshals a vast amount of research and statistical support from criminologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists, and includes many revealing interviews with dozens of men and women in the criminal justice system who have firsthand experience with violent women. When She Was Bad is a fearless and superbly written call to reframe our ideas about female violence and, by extension, female power.

Women who kill rupture our assumptions about what a woman is. This book explores different socio-cultural understandings of women who commit, or are accused, of murder. A wide range of cases are discussed in order to highlight the ways in which such women have been perceived, and how such cases reflect important social and cultural shifts.

In the United States and Great Britain, 20-30% of all homicides involve the killing of a woman by a man. In When Men Murder Women, Dobash and Dobash - two seasoned researchers and longtime collaborators in the study of violence against women - reveal what they learned from a three-year study that included 866 homicide case files and 200 in-depth interviews with murderers in prison. They focus on intimate partner murder, sexual murder, and the murder of older women, and compare each of these three types with those in which men murder other men. Each type is examined in depth and detail in a separate section that begins with an overview of relevant research, and is followed by a comprehensive examination of the murder event and the lifecourse of the perpetrators. There has never before been a comprehensive book that has covered the entire scope of homicide cases in which men murder women. The result is this essential text for students, professionals, policy makers, and researchers studying violence, gender, and crime.

Although they account for only ten percent of all murders, those attributed to women seem especially likely to captivate the public. This absorbing book examines why that is true and how some women, literally, get away with murder. Combining compelling storytelling with insightful observations, the book invites readers to take a close look at ten high-profile killings committed by American women. The work exposes the forces that underlie the public's fascination with female killers and determine why these women so often become instant celebrities. Cases are paired by motive—love, money, revenge, self-defense, and psychopathology. Through them, the authors examine the appeal of women who commit murders and show how perceptions of their crimes are shaped. The book details both the crimes and the criminals as it explores how pop culture treats stereotypes of female murderers in film and print. True crime aficionados will be fascinated by the minute descriptions of what happened and why, while pop culture enthusiasts will appreciate the lens of societal norms through which these cases are examined.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

A genre-bending feminist account of four Chilean women who committed the double transgression of murder, violating not only criminal law but also the invisible laws of gender. Women Who Kill: Four Crimes Retold analyzes four homicides carried out by Chilean women over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Alia Trabucco Zerán offers a nuanced close reading of their lives and crimes, foregoing sensationalism in order to dissect how all four were both perpetrators of violent acts and victims of another, more insidious kind of violence. This radical retelling challenges the archetype of the woman murderer and reveals another narrative, one as disturbing and provocative as the transgressions themselves: What makes women lash out against the restraints of gendered domesticity, and how do we—readers, viewers, the media, the art world, the political establishment—treat them when they do? Expertly intertwining true crime, critical essay, and research diary, International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán (The Remainder), in a translation by Sophie Hughes, brings an overdue feminist perspective to the study of deviant women.

In this fascinating book, Peter Vronsky exposes and investigates the phenomenon of women who kill—and the political, economic, social and sexual implications buried with each victim. How many of us are even remotely prepared to imagine our mothers, daughters, sisters or grandmothers as fiendish killers? For centuries we have been conditioned to think of serial murderers and psychopathic predators as men—with women registering low on our paranoia radar. Perhaps that’s why so many trusting husbands, lovers, family friends, and children have fallen prey to “the female monster.” From history’s earliest recorded cases of homicidal females to Irma Grese, the Nazi Beast of Belsen, from Britain’s notorious child-slayer Myra Hindley to ‘Honeymoon Killer’ Martha Beck to the sensational cult of Aileen Wournos—the first female serial killer-as-celebrity—to cult killers, homicidal missionaries, and our pop-culture fascination with the sexy femme fatale, Vronsky not only challenges our ordinary standards of good and evil but also defies our basic accepted perceptions of gender role and identity. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS