cover image Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer

Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer

Michael D. Kelleher, C. L. Kelleher. Praeger Publishers, $36.95 (226pp) ISBN 978-0-275-96003-2

Michael Kelleher has explored violence and murder in several works including Profiling the Lethal Employee (1997) and New Arenas for Violence (1996), which alerted corporate America to the growing threat of potentially disturbed workers. With his wife and coauthor C.L. Kelleher, he now offers a rare, mostly clinical overview of the female mass murderer. The book profiles nearly 100 deadly women. Dividing them into eight categories, including Black Widows, Angels of Death and Team Killers, the Kellehers bring to light information they claim is often ""overlooked by researchers."" They report, for example, that female serial killers are rarely involved in sexual homicides and tend not to attack strangers, yet they often exhibit a greater ability to succeed in murder than do their male counterparts and they have greater success in eluding suspicion. Caretakers turned lethal, such as Madame Popova in Russia and Lila Gladys Young in Nova Scotia, are estimated to have killed in the hundreds over many years before being investigated and arrested. The grim succession of murder accounts here, from lone sexual predator Aileen Wuornos dispatching victims with her .22 rifle to the cold, detached elimination of family members by the arsenic-wielding Black Widows, cuts an often shocking swath of feminine terror. With morbidity on almost every page, this work, scholarly despite its lurid subject, should appeal mainly to serial-killer buffs and the law enforcement community. (Mar.)