Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.toritelfer.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2017136277 |
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017136277 |
| HEADING: | Telfer, Tori |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Telfer, Tori |
| 670 | __ |a Lady killers, 2017: |b title page (Tori Telfer) about the author (Tori Telfer is a full-time freelance writer and editor. She majored in creative writing at Northwestern University. This is her first book) |
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, B.A. (magna cum laude).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Previously, worked in children’s publishing and catering.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:Edwin L. Shuman Fiction Award, J.G. Nolan Scholarship, Undergraduate Research Symposium Award, Hulda & Maurice Rothschild Endowment award, Edwin L. Shuman Best Senior Honors Thesis Award, all from Northwestern University.
WRITINGS
Also, author of the screenplay, Detective in the City of Beautiful Women. Contributor to publications and websites, including Chicago, GOOD, Establishment, Hairpin, Awl, Jezebal, Vice, and Salon.
SIDELIGHTS
Tori Telfer is a writer and editor based in Chicago, Ilinois. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, from which she received various awards and scholarships. Telfer has written articles that have appeared in publications and websites, including Chicago, GOOD, Establishment, Hairpin, Awl, Jezebal, Vice, and Salon. She is also the author of a screenplay called Detective in the City of Beautiful Women.
In 2017, Telfer released her first book, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History. This nonfiction volume profiles a diverse set of female murderers. Among them is Nannie Doss, whose nickname was the Giggling Grandma. In the 1900s, Doss murdered seven people, all family members of herself and her husband. Alice Kyteler lived during the thirteenth century in Europe and was put on trial for having killed her husbands. She was also accused of witchcraft. Telfer calls particular attention to Erzsebet Bathory, a Hungarian woman, who lived during the 1500s. Bathory is said to have tortured and murdered young girls. An Irish woman named Lizzie Halliday blamed mental illness when it was discovered that she killed her husband and the people who lived next door. Mary Ann Cotton killed multiple men she married, as well as several of her children. Some accounts say she killed up to eleven of them.
In interviews, Telfer has explained her interest in female killers and why it is important to discuss them. In an interview with Lyz Lenz, writer on the Rumpus website, Telfer stated: “Violent women are violent because they’re human. And humans are violent. There are a million reasons for someone to become a serial killer. But they’re violent because they’re human. They’re not violent because she’s some special breed of bad woman or the wrong kind of seed was planted in a weird type of soil and that woman spun off. That’s a really crazy metaphor.” Telfer also remarked: “My current theory on why I like true crimes: There’s just something elemental to it, like humans at their most extreme. It’s sort of like the most eeriest thing you can do to another person is murder them. It’s just so intense and visceral and such an expression of power. It’s like a destruction of a creation. I think too, we like to identify monsters because it makes us feel better.” Telfer told Suzannah Weiss, contributor to the Broadly website: “Female serial killers have bursts of publicity when they’re apprehended, but people tend to forget about them after they’re locked away. I suspect this is because it’s too much work to rearrange our conceptions of ‘female’ to include ‘can be a serial killer.’ Their crimes reveal that women aren’t always the ‘gentler sex’—and that’s unpleasant or downright scary for people to admit.” Telfer also stated: “A lot of the stereotypes about female serial killers hold up under scrutiny: Women tend to use poison, they tend to kill people they know, … and they don’t use excessive violence.”
Reviewers offered favorable assessments of Lady Killers. A Kirkus Reviews writer asserted: “The book is well-researched and informative, but squeamish readers beware: Telfer doesn’t hide the grisly and gruesome details.” The same writer described the book as “an illuminating read on a subject that has not received much publicity.” “Telfer draws out the tired stereotypes with just enough wit and humor to make the topic of female murderers enjoyable,” commented a contributor to Publishers Weekly. Of the book, David Pitt, critic in Booklist, noted: “Given its dark subject matter, it’s surprisingly lively.” Pitt also called it “a welcome addition to serial-killer literature.” A reviewer on the Rebellious Magazine website remarked: “It’s important to at least know that these women exist because it’s part of the world we live in, even though we all wish it wasn’t. … And this idea that violence = inherently male is simply false. That being said, this book isn’t just for studying human nature. It’s also for entertainment.” Ximena N. Larkin, contributor to the Bitch Media website, suggested: “It might sound perverse, but seeing women as killers helps us collectively see them as human, capable of being both the executed and the executioner. As progressive as Lady Killers is, the ‘gender straitjackets’ study shows that we are still raising young girls with the harmful belief that they are weaker than boys. Lady Killers serves as a warning against underestimating women, and a reminder of what can happen in a society that does. The topic might not be pleasant, but it’s a crucial component in the fight for equality.” “Telfer not only tells a convincingly creepy story, she gives each case a cultural context, explaining what would drive a woman to this particular kind of madness,” asserted Jean Zimmerman on the National Public Radio website. Zimmerman added: “As a frequent magazine and web contributor, Telfer knows her way around a pop phrase. Her work is bracingly non-stuffy, with a tone similar to that of Mary Roach’s Stiff. Lady Killers most definitely entertains.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, David Pitt, review of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, p. 12.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Lady Killers.
Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2017, review of Lady Killers, p. 61.
ONLINE
Bitch Media, https://www.bitchmedia.org/ (December 11, 2017), Ximena N. Larkin, author interview and review of Lady Killers.
Broadly, https://broadly.vice.com/ (November 20, 2017), Suzannah Weiss, author interview.
Daily Iowan Online, http://daily-iowan.com/ (November 2, 2017), Salma Rios, review of Lady Killers.
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (October 14, 2017), Jean Zimmerman, review of Lady Killers.
Rebellious Magazine, https://rebelliousmagazine.com/ (February 27, 2018), review of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (October 16, 2017), Lyz Lenz, author interview.
Tori Telfer Website, https://www.toritelfer.com (March 23, 2018).
Tori Telfer graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University with a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing. She was the recipient of both the Edwin L. Shuman Best Senior Honors Thesis in the English Major in Writing Award and the Edwin L. Shuman Fiction Award; an NU Undergraduate Research Symposium award; the J.G Nolan Scholarship and the Hulda & Maurice Rothschild Endowment for academic excellence; and a membership in Phi Beta Kappa.
After college, she worked in children's publishing and teaching before going freelance. Over her 4+ years of freelance experience, she has written marketing copy for everything from specialty manicure tools to indie theater companies, worked with CEOs and startup founders as the editor-in-chief of Hippo Thinks to help them publish in places like Forbes and Fast Company, edited numerous PhD dissertations, written viral reported pieces, and been featured several times on longform.org. She has also done plenty of catering, which she not-so-secretly adores.
Her writing has appeared in Salon, VICE, Jezebel, The Hairpin, The Awl, GOOD magazine, Chicago Magazine, The Establishment, and elsewhere. (See Clips.) Her screenplay, DETECTIVE IN THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, was awarded honorable mention in the Table Read My Screenplay contest. She has written, produced, and directed two plays.
Her first book, LADY KILLERS (Harper Perennial), was published on October 10, 2017. It's a "thrilling character study of the most diabolically complex, fascinating female psychopaths in history." —New York Times bestselling author M. William Phelps, DANGEROUS GROUND: My Friendship with a Serial Killer
QUOTED: "The book is well-researched and informative, but squeamish readers beware: Telfer doesn't hide the grisly and gruesome details."
"an illuminating read on a subject that has not received much publicity."
Telfer , Tori: LADY KILLERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Telfer , Tori LADY KILLERS Perennial/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $15.99 10, 10 ISBN: 978-0-06-243373-2
A compendium of women serial killers through the ages."When we think about serial killers," writes freelancer Telfer, "we think about men. Well, 'man,' actually--some vicious, twisted sociopath, working alone. He probably has a dreadful nickname...[which] is his brand, a nightmare name for a nightmare man whose victims are, more often than not, innocent women." In her first book, however, the author compiles comprehensive biographies of more than a dozen women who were as vicious, coldblooded, and brutal as their male counterparts. These women took great pleasure, physically, emotionally, and sexually, in killing--their husbands and other men, their own children, and other women. Most often, they used poison to kill their victims, but some enjoyed, among other methods, brutal and bloody torture and throat cutting as a means to a deadly end. Telfer delves deeply into the role of the media in making these women notorious, and she analyzes how quickly they lost their stardom, fading into relative oblivion. She examines how physical attractiveness and sexuality played into each woman's personal scenario and how each was branded or given a nickname depending on the violent nature of her crimes. As the author writes, "there's something so seductive about the word 'murderess.'" Telfer also explains how humor has been used to describe and counterbalance the atrocious acts these women performed. The book is well-researched and informative, but squeamish readers beware: Telfer doesn't hide the grisly and gruesome details about what these women did to the people they murdered. For those interested in historical facts about a special group of sociopaths, the author offers an illuminating read on a subject that has not received much publicity, except during the time when each woman was finally apprehended. Heavily researched and filled with gory details, a rare look at women who killed for pleasure.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Telfer , Tori: LADY KILLERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364646/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
xid=2b9c2fe4. Accessed 26 Feb. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364646
QUOTED: "Telfer draws out the tired stereotypes with just enough wit and humor to make the topic of female murderers enjoyable."
2 of 5 2/26/18, 9:32 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Publishers Weekly.
264.32 (Aug. 7, 2017): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Tori Telfer. HarperPerennial, $15.99 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-243373-2
In her debut work of nonfiction, Telfer, who writes for the Awl and Vice, exhumes the horrific criminal histories of 14 female serial killer;. Each woman receives an individual portrait that outlines her crimes in gruesome detail. Among the women portrayed are Kate Bender, the from Kansas who lured unsuspecting travelers to their deaths in the second half of the 19th century, and Nannie Doss, the "giggling grandma" from Alabama in the mid-20th century who was so dissatisfied with her string of husbands that she killed them off one by one. Telfer calls out the misogynistic tropes at play--the witches, femme fatales, and black widows, to name a few--in fictional depictions of female murderers. She also calls attention to how sexuality and beauty are often written into the popular narratives of these crimes. During the trial of Tillie Klimek for the murder of her husband in the 1920s, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune bluntly wrote that "Tillie Klimek went to the penitentiary because she had never gone to a beauty parlor." The oldest story in the book is that of Hungarian noblewoman Erzsebet Bathory, "the OG female sadomasochist," who tortured and killed hundreds of young women in the 16th century. With a breezy tone and sharp commentary, Telfer draws out the tired stereotypes with just enough wit and humor to make the topic of female murderers enjoyable. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History." Publishers Weekly, 7 Aug. 2017, p. 61. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500340373/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=1005e36f. Accessed 26 Feb. 2018.
3 of 5 2/26/18, 9:32 PM
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A500340373
QUOTED: "Given its dark subject matter, it's surprisingly lively."
"a welcome addition to serial-killer literature."
4 of 5 2/26/18, 9:32 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Lady Killers: Deadly Women
throughout History
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p12. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Lady Killers: Deadly Women throughout History. By Tori Telfer. Oct. 2017.336p. HarperPerennial, paper, $15.99 (9780062433732). 364.15.
Here's an interesting survey of female serial killers. The author introduces us to such ruthless people as Erzsebet Bathory, the "grand dame of serial killers," a sixteenth-century Hungarian who enjoyed torturing and killing young girls; Nannie Doss, otherwise known as the Giggling Grandma, who murdered her mother, her sister, her grandson, and four members of her husband's family in the 1900s; Lizzie Halliday, the nineteenth-century Irish lass who killed her neighbors and her own husband (and who might have been crazy, or maybe she was faking it); Mary Ann Cotton, who predated Jack the Ripper by about 40 years and who may have killed three husbands and as many as 11 of her own children; and Alice Kyteler, who in the thirteenth century was the star attraction in one of the earliest witch trials in Europe, and who may have been Europe's first female serial killer (she liked to murder her husbands). This is the first book by Telfer, who's contributed articles to such publications as Salon and Vice, and, given its dark subject matter, it's surprisingly lively. A welcome addition to serial-killer literature.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "Lady Killers: Deadly Women throughout History." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 12.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161438 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5bb97d9f. Accessed 26 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161438
5 of 5 2/26/18, 9:32 PM
QUOTED: "it’s important to at least know that these women exist because it’s part of the world we live in, even though we all wish it wasn’t. ... And this idea that violence = inherently male is simply false. That being said, this book isn’t just for studying human nature. It’s also for entertainment."
'Lady Killers': Chicago Author Explores Lives of Female Serial Murderers
Lady Killers
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History takes a look at 14 women who didn’t stop at one murder, or two, or three … Fourteen serial killers throughout history.
Chicago’s own Tori Telfer looks at their origins and motivation, their rationale. Perhaps even more important, she looks at how they were seen. How does society view women who are cold-blooded killers? Differently than men. Let’s start there. We caught up with Telfer with just a few questions in anticipation for her book launch at Women and Children First, Tuesday, Oct. 10 at 7 p.m.
JB: “I believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death. Recoiling from crime is natural, but recoil too far and it becomes a delusion.”
The way you wrote about these women definitely triggered both reactions in me. I was amused, but also horrified. How did you attempt to keep a balance as you wrote this book? Did you find yourself leaning strongly in one or the other direction?
TT: It’s much easier for me to research and write about things that are terrifying than to just consume things that are terrifying. I can’t watch horror movies, I don’t like “Investigation Discovery” shows, I once had trouble falling asleep in the same room as a TV where I’d seen a channel playing some awful story about a young boy who accidentally killed his neighbor. But when I’m in the library stacks or reading old newspapers or whatever—well, then it’s a job. A job I adore! But a job nonetheless. So the process of writing this book was more formal and professional than the process of reading about true crime. That was nice because it gave me a lot of distance. I wasn’t thinking about these women in terms of, “How much does this scare me??” but rather, “What actually happened, what’s interesting about them, how can I tell this story in a way that’s true and also compelling?” I do hope my readers are terrified at points and laugh at other points (like when Nannie Doss makes puns about murder). Not to sound like an ad for green juice, but it’s all about balance.
You write about some of the historic accounts of the women you researched became how exaggerated and absurd: like Erzsebet Bathory bathing in the blood of her victims. Do you think we still have a tendency of inflating the truth of serial killers today? Is this part of how death becomes a delusion?
Yes, absolutely! You definitely see that inflation in the treatment of our most famous modern female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos. We’ve moved beyond the days of straight-up folklore, of course, but she still got folklorized in subtle ways: She was a man-hating lesbian enacting a feminist agenda! She was the world’s ugliest woman! She was a hero to abused women everywhere! People don’t like to treat serial killers as individuals, each with their own secret formula that led them to destruction. They want to see them as archetypes, almost. (The One Who Bathed in Blood!) Especially with female serial killers, it’s always got to be more, more, more, excess, excess, excess. I think it’s too scary for people to just think: oh man, a woman did this, and she wasn’t a myth or a legend or a symbol of any agenda. A woman did this.
You attempted to break apart the stereotypes that we place on both women and women killers. At the core, you write, “They were horrifyingly, quintessentially, inescapably human.” Why do you feel it’s important to study these women? What do you think it helps us understand about the impact of gendered perspectives on society?
I think it’s important to at least know that these women exist because it’s part of the world we live in, even though we all wish it wasn’t. (I mean, it’s also important to understand how beautiful humans can be, how smart, how creative, how selfless…I would never advocate for a life spent only learning about serial killers.) And this idea that violence = inherently male is simply false. That being said, this book isn’t just for studying human nature. It’s also for entertainment. True crime is pretty addictive, as many of us know, and I think it’s okay to just enjoy the tales on a certain level.
Do you think you’ve learned anything about mass killing in writing this book that has helped you (and might help us) process recent events, like the Las Vegas shooting?
Ugh. That human nature has always had a terrifying dark side? That there is something of the beast about us; that violence is hard to control; that it can bubble up anywhere? I do want to note that being a serial killer is so, so different than being a mass shooter. It’s a completely different crime, in my opinion; a different psychology. But I was just talking with a friend about the Las Vegas shooting, and what I think all these horrible crimes slowly prove is that you can’t simply pinpoint them on violent video games, or death metal, or bump stocks. Slowly, horrifyingly, you realize—oh God—it’s humans. Humans do this sort of thing to each other. Not all humans. But humans.
QUOTED: "It might sound perverse, but seeing women as killers helps us collectively see them as human, capable of being both the executed and the executioner. As progressive as Lady Killers is, the “gender straitjackets” study shows that we are still raising young girls with the harmful belief that they are weaker than boys. Lady Killers serves as a warning against underestimating women, and a reminder of what can happen in a society that does. The topic might not be pleasant, but it’s a crucial component in the fight for equality."
Macabre DesiresWhat Lady Killers In Pop Culture Teach Us About Ourselves
by Ximena N. Larkin
Published on December 11, 2017 at 1:50pm
Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling and Freddy Rodriguez as Wray in Grindhouse
Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling and Freddy Rodriguez as Wray in Grindhouse (Photo credit: © 2007 Dimension/WC)
Twelve years ago, Rose McGowan told director Robert Rodriguez that she’d been assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. It inspired him to cast her in Planet Terror as a “badass female action heroine who loses her leg and transforms into a superhero that rights wrongs, battles adversity, mows down rapists, and survives an apocalypse to lead the lost to a land of hope.” Recently, Rodriguez revealed that he and McGowan were using art to send a clear message to Weinstein and make a broader statement: Women are not victims, and men who violate them will pay.
In Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, journalist Tori Telfer affirms this message by chronicling the motives of 14 murderous women. She begins with Erzsébet Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed hundreds of people. For perspective, John Wayne Gacy supposedly killed at least 33 victims. Yet it’s his name and crimes that haunt our dreams. While Aileen Wuornos is credited for ushering in the very idea that women can be serial killers, Telfer’s book covers crimes committed before 1950. Her historical account of female killers negates the belief that female aggression is a recent phenomenon.
“When we only talk about male serial killers, we’re missing out on an important piece of information about our own world,” Telfer said in an email. “We get the idea that violence is an exclusively male thing. We get a warped perspective of our own nature and culture. There have always been violent women. People have always ignored them, not taken them seriously, or forgotten about them after they’re locked up. In the 1998 book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, Patricia Pearson calls this our ‘collective amnesia’ about female violence. Though women are so often treated as powerless, that’s never been the whole story.”
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History book cover and Tori TelferLady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History book cover and Tori Telfer (Photo credits: HarperCollins/Marcy Capron Vermillion)
From childhood, girls are outfitted with “gender straitjackets” that portray them as weak and in need of protection, according to September study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Girls begin internalizing these stereotypes between the ages of 10 and 14, and it leads to lifelong consequences, including greater risks of dropping out of school, suffering physical and sexual violence, getting pregnant before they’re ready, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases. The researchers also found that these gendered restrictions emphasize subservience among girls, and justifies violence against them as punishment for not following “the rules.”
Lady Killers works to reverse some of this harmful stereotyping by showing women who not only buck the label of victim, but also invoke fear. Mary Ann Cotton, a young wife and mother, killed her husbands and children in the late 1800s. She allegedly murdered three of her four husbands, and at least 11 of her approximately 13 children. When she died, she couldn’t remember the exact number of children she birthed. History tells us that women are as capable of taking lives, as they are of creating them. Yet, Hollywood continues to feed us the damaging stereotype that women are only exclusively victims, but never killers.
Consider Kim (Maggie Grace), the teen victim in Taken. She’s used as rope in a game of tug-of-war between her father and a sex-trafficking ring. In The Accountant, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick) screams and cowers behind Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), but never takes her destiny into her own hands.Then there are the women of the Jason Bourne series, who almost always end up dead. It’s even demoralizing when women are able to defend themselves only after they’ve been (usually sexually) violated. In order for Slim (Jennifer Lopez) in Enough, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) in The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, and The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill Vol. 1 to be capable of lethal force, they were first baptized as victims. When movies place such qualifiers on women’s violence, they reinforce sexist ideals of violence.
Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in MonsterCharlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in Monster (Photo credit: Newmarket Films)
“There’s something to be said for acknowledging female aggression,” Telfer said. “Even when it’s sick and twisted. Any woman who’s ever felt perpetually underestimated by the world understands how morbidly cathartic it can be when the villain or killer is a woman. In the academic text Gendered Lives, Julia T. Wood argues that this constant exposure [to women as victims] trains us to believe that violence against females is inevitable. That getting hacked to pieces is simply the inescapable fate of women.”
Perhaps that’s why Hela (Cate Blanchett) and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) were so enjoyable to watch in Thor: Ragnarok. Hela kills with a smile on her face, which made me curious to see how much she could destroy in a movie about Thor (Chris Hemsworth). With a 92 percent fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating and a $294 million box office, Thor: Ragnarok shows that there is a desire to see women step out of typecasted roles as whimpering cowards. Hollywood has explored the idea that women can be violent: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien and Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) in Tomb Raider paved the way for female killers who aren’t fueled by the trauma of sexual assault. They throw punches, wield firearms with confidence, and don’t outsource their salvation to men. They are their own heroes, and don’t worry about being rude or “unladylike.” And it happens without them first being victimized.
Now, we have killers, including Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) in Game of Thrones, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) in Haywire, Laura (Dafne Keen) in Logan, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, and the women of the Fast and Furious franchise. These lady killers are a reminder that power is possible without trauma; their strength comes from a willingness to embrace qualities—strength, violence, musculature—generally associated only with men. While fictional, their onscreen presence deconstructs the belief that women are inferior to men and helps to normalize female aggression.
Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill Volume 1Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Photo credit: Miramax)
“We tend to see women killers very differently than male killers, particularly through a sexist lens,” writes Paul Booth, media and cinema studies professor at DePaul University, in an email. “Women killers are typically associated with family and children.” The “mother monster” trope turns mothers—or women who want children, but can’t have them—into evil killers. Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in The Avengers franchise and Clementine (Laura Dern) in The Good Time Girls are perfect examples of how the trope manifests onscreen. The “mother monster” illustrates our fear of women who don’t nurture, according to Booth: “It’s hard to escape the sexist stereotypes of motherhood and womanhood in our media, even when looking at villains. “The danger lies in thinking all women are or want to be mothers.”
Lady Killers highlights this lack of nurture in women like Nannie Doss, who killed four husbands, two children, two sisters, her mother, a grandson, and a mother-in-law for no clear reason. It wasn’t revenge; she simply submitted to her macabre desires. Not all women are invested in being doting, caring, and nurturing mothers and wives. Believing otherwise allowed Doss’s nefarious actions to go undetected for years. We don’t have to imagine a world where women are stripped of their self-esteem before fighting back; many of us already live that reality. Instead, it’s crucial to build worlds where women, like Charlize Theron and Petty Jenkins, are free to depict female rage onscreen.
After winning an Oscar for 2004’s Monster, the biopic of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Theron has taken on other roles that allow her to embody a remorseless a villain. Since Monster, she’s starred in The Huntsman: Winter’s War; The Fate of the Furious; Mad Max: Fury Road; and, most recently Atomic Blonde—all roles that don’t center her characters’ experience of trauma as a prerequisite of fighting and killing. Jenkins, who directed Monster, has since taken the helm of Wonder Woman, the ultimate female warrior movie. It isn’t farfetched to assume that bringing Wuornos’ story to life inspired both women. Immersing themselves in her life gave them a close-up look at an uncommon narrative: Women wielding the same terrible power as men so often do.
It might sound perverse, but seeing women as killers helps us collectively see them as human, capable of being both the executed and the executioner. As progressive as Lady Killers is, the “gender straitjackets” study shows that we are still raising young girls with the harmful belief that they are weaker than boys. Lady Killers serves as a warning against underestimating women, and a reminder of what can happen in a society that does. The topic might not be pleasant, but it’s a crucial component in the fight for equality. “We might think that an impoverished, serial-killing mother from a small town in 1800s England could not be more different than us and has nothing to teach us—but we’d be wrong,” Telfer concludes. “Studying human nature is an invaluable pursuit, and we can’t just study people who do good things. We gotta look at the bad ones, too. In my experience, reading about serial killers always ends up teaching you something about yourself.”
QUOTED: "Female serial killers have bursts of publicity when they’re apprehended, but people tend to forget about them after they’re locked away. I suspect this is because it’s too much work to rearrange our conceptions of 'female' to include 'can be a serial killer.' Their crimes reveal that women aren’t always the 'gentler sex'—and that’s unpleasant or downright scary for people to admit."
"A lot of the stereotypes about female serial killers hold up under scrutiny: Women tend to use poison, they tend to kill people they know, ... and they don’t use excessive violence."
How and Why Women Become Serial Killers
In her new book "Lady Killers," author Tori Telfer examines how gender norms shaped the treatment of female serial killers and explores the circumstances that drove some of history's most notorious women to murder.
Suzannah Weiss
Suzannah Weiss
Nov 20 2017, 1:04pm
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
In 2014, writer Tori Telfer stumbled across the name of 16th-century Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory, who—legend had it—killed virgins and bathed in their blood to stay young. After falling down a dark, twisted Wikipedia rabbit hole, Telfer got the idea for her column, "Lady Killers," which debuted at The Hairpin and moved to Jezebel. It's also the name of her first book, which examines the history and folklore behind famous female serial killers.
Humanizing one of the world’s most dehumanized populations, Lady Killers reveals that Báthory was a product of inbreeding, witnessed traumatizing violence during childhood, got engaged at 10, learned to torture and kill from her husband Nádasdy and companion Darvolya, and probably never bathed in blood. This myth has persisted, Telfer argues, because it’s easier to imagine a vain woman than a purely sadistic one.
Lady Killers examines how gender norms shaped the rumors around female serial killers like Lizzie Halliday, who was mocked for her looks growing up and became separated from her 12-year-old son after fleeing a violent husband, and Mary Ann Cotton, who lived in poverty and lost four or five infants. Throughout each chapter, readers begin to feel bad for these criminals—until Telfer reminds you how they dealt with their hardships.
Broadly spoke with the author about the many ways female serial killers are misunderstood. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Kate Bender and Alice Kyteler, illustrated by Dame Darcy
BROADLY: Your book talks about how female serial killers are often overlooked. Why do you think that is? What do they reveal that we don’t we want to admit?
TORI TELFER: Female serial killers have bursts of publicity when they’re apprehended, but people tend to forget about them after they’re locked away. I suspect this is because it’s too much work to rearrange our conceptions of "female" to include "can be a serial killer." Their crimes reveal that women aren’t always the "gentler sex"—and that’s unpleasant or downright scary for people to admit.
How do people’s reactions to male and female serial killers differ?
If you look at serial killer lore, male killers are actually the ones that terrify people much more. In fact, female serial killers tend to kill for longer than male ones because no one suspects them of being killers. In my book, I argue that certain, especially nonthreatening-seeming female killers—like Nannie Doss, the "giggling grandma" who blamed her 1950s husband-killings on a search for love gone wrong—don’t scare people because they operate under this guise of, well, normality.
You know how Ted Bundy didn’t initially strike people as a suspect because he looked so "normal" with those suave, ruggedly handsome young lawyer vibes? We have an idea of what a killer has to look like (say, a wild-eyed Charles Manson type with messy hair and some sort of awful tattoo). Women literally don’t "look" scary to people because they don’t look like killers; socially, we are not trained to see women as threats (and, of course, statistics largely back that up). So they get away with it.
Did you notice any theme or pattern in the ways or reasons women kill?
A lot of the stereotypes about female serial killers hold up under scrutiny: Women tend to use poison, they tend to kill people they know (as opposed to male serial killers, who often go after strangers), and they don’t use excessive violence or "overkill" (mutilating the body, etc.). However, there are a few terrifying women in my book that go against the grain, so to speak.
Are there any in particular who you think are misunderstood?
All of them, I think! Not misunderstood as in, "Hey, she was actually a pretty good egg!" but misunderstood as in, "She was a complicated human being, led to kill by a nuanced combination of nature and nurture—and yet she was reduced to a salacious headline, or a jokey archetype."
Who was your personal favorite murderer to research?
I had a lot of fun researching Lizzie Halliday, because a) she was quite unpredictable, a real wild card of a serial killer, and b) turn-of-the-century America was so out of control. The headlines were splashy, the science was sketchy, and the rumor-mongering was deranged. For example, a few brave souls theorized that Lizzie was Jack the Ripper.
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What was the biggest surprise you came across in your research for this book?
This is gruesome, but I found very detailed descriptions of the execution of Anna Marie Hahn, the first woman in Ohio to ever get the death sentence. A number of journalists were allowed to witness it, so we know the sound the electric chair made (one compared it to a "fourth of July sparkler") and the fact that her thumbs turned upward as she died. Reading such vivid details about the death of a killer put me in a position of intense ambivalence, because I was furious at her, but I also felt sorry for her. I was scared for her because she was so scared, but I also couldn’t help thinking of the terror her victims felt. But then, of course, there was the cold-hearted writer part of my brain that was like, "These details are great."
Did you find any of them sympathetic or relatable?
A lot of my readers have told me that they feel quite a bit of sympathy and emotion for the Angel Makers of Nagyrév, a group of Hungarian women who poisoned their abusive husbands, belligerent parents and in-laws, and other people who were making their lives miserable. These women were extremely desperate and had very few options in life. They were, in a word, trapped. Unlike some of the other women in the book, they didn’t operate out of any sort of crazed bloodlust. They were just trying to hack out some sort of freedom for themselves. All in all a totally tragic scenario, from every angle.
Murder at the heart of ‘Lady Killers’, a book about female serial killers
Tori Telfer reads from her book about female serial killers on Halloween night at Prairie Lights.
By Salma Rios
salma-rios@uiowa.edu
Halloween: the spookiest day of the year. Most people go trick-or-treating with their children, while others go to parties with their friends. A few people in the Iowa City area, however, decided to spend their Halloween at Prairie Lights and listen to author Tori Telfer read about one of the most little-know facets of murder history: female serial killers.
Prairie Lights held a special reading Tuesday night in honor of the Halloween season. Tori Telfer read from her book, Lady Killers, which tells the stories of 14 deadly women and their motivations for murder.
Telfer is a full-time freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in Salon, Vice, Jezebel, The Awl, The Hairpin, Good magazine, and many more publications. She graduated from Northwestern University and has worked in publishing, teaching, and academic editing.
Accompanying Telfer at the reading was Lyz Lenz, the managing editor at The Rumpus.net.
Telfer started off her reading complimenting Iowa’s beauty and rolling fields, then began reading the last chapter of her book, called “Queen of Poisoners: Marie-Madeleine, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.”
The chapter told the story of Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, a high-society woman who went on to poison her father and brothers when they had her lover thrown into the Bastille. She was a woman who wanted to break out of the cage her male relatives had put her in, so she murdered them in revenge.
Telfer’s reading of the chapter was very enjoyable. She was full of lively energy and was quite sassy in some places during the reading.
A Q&A session followed the reading, with Lenz leading the conversation. The women talked about humans’ obsession with serial killers and murder, as well as female serial killers in general.
When asked about why humans are obsessed with murder, Telfer said she believed that humans are obsessed with dramatic types of crime, such as murder.
“Serial killers are narration in the most extreme form,” she said. “This narration related to humankind’s love of stories and their own darkness.”
That women serial killers are not taken seriously because they are not seen as a threat was also brought up.
“Female serial killers don’t do the stuff that gets into the headlines — the bloody and gruesome crimes, that is,” she said.” So we have visual trouble seeing them as scary, and as a result, we aren’t afraid of them.”
The book also brings up issues on the ways people view female serial killers. It’s complicated, because people can’t help but side with the women, but they also have to remember that these women killed innocent people.
QUOTED: "Telfer not only tells a convincingly creepy story, she gives each case a cultural context, explaining what would drive a woman to this particular kind of madness."
"As a frequent magazine and web contributor, Telfer knows her way around a pop phrase. Her work is bracingly non-stuffy, with a tone similar to that of Mary Roach's Stiff. Lady Killers most definitely entertains."
'Lady Killers:' Cherchez La Femme Fatale
October 14, 201710:00 AM ET
Jean Zimmerman
Lady Killers
Lady Killers
Deadly Women Throughout History
by Tori Telfer
Paperback, 352 pages
purchase
If I were a cheerier feminist — an upbeat, jolly, devil-may-care sort of feminist — I believe I would fall in love with this book. Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History would take its place alongside works about other exceptional females on my bookshelf, gynocentric efforts about Calamity Jane, Queen Boadicea, or Lady Jane Grey, who lost her head after only nine days on the English throne.
But instead, I approached Tori Telfer's account of serial slaughterers with a bit of trepidation. Could this debut author deliver the "bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey" her book jacket promises? When the Saw franchise thrills millions, such a thing could be, well, a thing.
Men are far more likely than women to be killers. The title of the book is itself a grim pun: The phrase "ladykillers," of course, most often applies to men, though Telfer does her gruesome best to even up the body count. Could she convince me that documenting women who kill and kill again is a kind of feminist exercise?
For a long time, the received wisdom had it that female serial killers did not actually exist. The skimpy literature on the subject touted Aileen Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron in the 2003 movie Monster) as America's very first and only example of the species. Like female rocket scientists and cage fighters, lady killers had to wait for the new millennium to be properly recognized. With selections that are exceptionally well sourced, Lady Killers profiles more than 14 subjects with widely differing motivations for ending multiple lives. Cherchez la femme fatale.
The FBI Investigator Who Coined The Term 'Serial Killer'
Remembrances
The FBI Investigator Who Coined The Term 'Serial Killer'
Ex-Nurse Accused Of Murdering 8 Nursing Home Patients In Canada
The Two-Way
Ex-Nurse Accused Of Murdering 8 Nursing Home Patients In Canada
Among others, we trace the story of the "the self-made widow" Nanny Doss, fond of baking cakes and doing away with husbands. A 1950s newspaper headline crowed, "Tulsa Grandma Charmed 'Em, Poisoned 'Em." Darker still is the career of Erzebet Bathory, a Hungarian royal who in the 16th century tortured and killed "nubile peasant children with strong, expendable bodies — and when she was finished with them, she flung them back over the castle walls to be eaten by wolves," although, she adds, "With so many vanished centuries between her life and ours, we may never get definitive, forensic proof of her guilt."
Poison is a girl's best friend in these accounts. It was easy for a home cook to stir the stuff into food, and for a long time things like arsenic and strychnine were readily available, even at drug stores. The resulting agony could be attributed to other dire illnesses. But it's not as easy as it looks, writes Telfer.
"You need to look into your victim's trusting eyes day after day as you slowly snuff out their life," she states. "You have to play the role of nurse or parent or lover while you sustain your murderous intent at a pitch that would be unbearable for many of those who've shot a gun or swung a sword. You've got to mop up your victim's vomit and act sympathetic when they beg for water." She almost makes you feel sorry for the poor put-upon poisoner.
Telfer not only tells a convincingly creepy story, she gives each case a cultural context, explaining what would drive a woman to this particular kind of madness.
Telfer not only tells a convincingly creepy story, she gives each case a cultural context, explaining what would drive a woman to this particular kind of madness. The murderess rarely had close friends, she explains. Constrained circumstances make men and women both go blood simple, with homicide as a deadly form of gold digging. More philosophically, Telfer invokes the French term mise en abyme, translated as "placed in an abyss," which evokes the hall-of-mirrors disorientation that marks the typical lady killer's psyche.
The author also explores the reasons why many of us find it hard to confront the reality of women who murder multiple times. We clothe them in the colors of the vixen or the witch. Perhaps not surprisingly, lookers tend to get a pass from juries, a la the pair of marcel-haired husband-killers who inspired Chicago, "Stylish Belva" Gaertner and "Beautiful Beulah" Annan. The illustrations in the book, by the well-known goth cartoonist Dame Darcy, lend a soulful piquancy to the enterprise.
As a frequent magazine and web contributor, Telfer knows her way around a pop phrase. Her work is bracingly non-stuffy, with a tone similar to that of Mary Roach's Stiff. Lady Killers most definitely entertains. Still, I felt my "oogie" buttons being pushed, as Annie Wilkes, the nurse-killer of Stephen King's Misery would say. Upon realizing the real consequences of the macabre actions so breezily depicted, performed by members of my own sex, I couldn't shake the thought that taking a life is really never amusing.
Jean Zimmerman's latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.
QUOTED: "Violent women are violent because they’re human. And humans are violent. There are a million reasons for someone to become a serial killer. But they’re violent because they’re human. They’re not violent because she’s some special breed of bad woman or the wrong kind of seed was planted in a weird type of soil and that woman spun off. That’s a really crazy metaphor."
"My current theory on why I like true crimes: There’s just something elemental to it, like humans at their most extreme. It’s sort of like the most eeriest thing you can do to another person is murder them. It’s just so intense and visceral and such an expression of power. It’s like a destruction of a creation. I think too, we like to identify monsters because it makes us feel better."
Lady Killers and Our Obsession with Murder: Talking with Tori Telfer
By Lyz Lenz
October 16th, 2017
In her first book, Lady Killers, Tori Telfer tells the true stories of unknown female serial killers. The book, investigates not whodunnit, but rather who is she? Each chapter attempts to strip the sexism, racism, fetishism, and all the isms off of these deeply troubled and problematic women and their crimes and tries to see them for who they are.
It’s a daunting task, but the book belies none of these labors. The writing is fast-paced, often funny, and never flippant. I spoke with Telfer over the phone about the origin story for her book, the art of the murder hustle, and the reason more women don’t murder.
***
The Rumpus: I understand your book had an interesting genesis. I’d love to hear the story.
Tori Telfer: My book began as a column for The Hairpin in 2014. Basically what happened was, I was just starting out as a freelance writer. I had left my MFA program and I was discovering this world where people would pay you to write. They wouldn’t pay you very much, but they would pay you. That was really thrilling after the world of literary fiction.
In my mind, what I wanted was a column that was when you know you’ve made it. Carrie Bradshaw taught us that valuable lesson: We can live off one column, once a month. So, when I saw that The Awl had a call out for historical essays. I said, “Great. That sounds fun.” I just thought about what sounded fun to write about and serial killers popped into my head. I like creepy things.
So, they said, “We like this, but it would be better for The Hairpin.” Which is sort of hilarious that they were like, “This is about women.”
Rumpus: They pink ghettoized your pitch! But The Hairpin was and is such a great site. And in 2014 they had Jia Tolentino, Emma Carmichael, Mallory Ortberg, and Nicole Cliffe, and their comments section was so amazing.
Telfer: It was just so fun to have my column on The Hairpin. The Hairpin readers are so nice. I read the comments for the first and only time in my life because I realized just even if the readers had little corrections, they were constructive and it was wonderful. So I did two columns for The Hairpin. Interesting tidbit: I was starting out, so I didn’t even get a contract. I just didn’t know that world. I thought I wasn’t getting paid from them at all.
So the first column was 5,000 words long and I was like, “I guess I’m just doing this for free.” Then a couple months later I got a check. It’s such a learning curve.
Rumpus: Then you moved over to Jezebel?
Telfer: Yes, Emma Carmichael was hired by Jezebel and she took the column with her. I did two more columns for Jezebel. It was a very short lived column because I started getting interests from editors right away which was just so crazy. It made me feel so spoiled. Pretty quickly it was like, “Oh I think I should probably try to focus on this book thing and not do the column anymore even though the column is really fun and good publicity.” It’s so much work because each one is so much research.
Rumpus: So you were contacted by editors and got an agent and the rest is history?
Telfer: I just feel really lucky. It just happened pretty smoothly.
Rumpus: Some of the stories in this book are very obscure; did you have to travel for the research?
Telfer: I did a lot of the research online. God bless people who scan old newspapers to the Internet. I did some library research. I didn’t travel for the book, although I did end up going to Budapest with my siblings on a spontaneous trip.
The first woman, Erzsébet Báthory, is from Hungary. So I tried to go into the Hungarian National Archives because there’s this rumor that she had a diary and it was in the archives. Thankfully that’s not why I went to Budapest because once I got there, I found out that it was just a rumor. There’s no diary in the archives.
Rumpus: There is also a story in the end about the town of Nagyrev, where women, led by a midwife, kill their husbands. Did you travel there?
Telfer: No, I didn’t go there. In that chapter, I mention an academic book by a Hungarian scholar named Béla Bodó. He had translated all these newspaper articles. He really laid out the social climate. The town was just the perfect atmosphere for murder.
Rumpus: Perfect atmosphere for lady killers.
Telfer: Exactly. This terrible melting pot of all these things that men murder for all the time, in this tiny town with no railroad.
Rumpus: This whole book made me wonder, why don’t more women murder? I’m not being flippant. We’re abused, we’re beaten way more than men are, so why don’t we murder more?
Telfer: Women all over the world do have those reasons to murder. I think something that’s very special, very particular about the town of Nagyrev is that there was a large group of women all in it together.
But it’s not just women I wonder about; I sometimes think when I’m walking on the street with a bunch of other humans, why aren’t we all just killing each other all the time? The world is so dangerous, like cars. How scary are cars?
So, we’re just walking down the street and there’s this social contract that we’re not going to kill each other. Most people are abiding by it. Sometimes that strikes me as absurd. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy that we all agree not to kill each other. But there’s something like… it feels like only this very tenuous film of social accountability is keeping us from chaos. I’m envisioning this balloon, like saran wrap, this transparent saran wrap.
I think in Nagyrev that film was punctured so the murder just rushed in. I guess that’s my answer to why women don’t.
Rumpus: And all it took in Nagyrev was for that one midwife to puncture the saran wrap of society and then all the frustrations, and everything just came out. Part of the reading experience of this book, was having to deal with the parts of me that were rooting for these women. Like with the midwife in Nagyrev. It’s not great, I understand. But also there is something so perfunctory about it. Okay, he’s beating and raping you. Here, murder him.
Telfer: He beats you with a chain.
Rumpus: Here’s some poison.
Telfer: Give him this cup of tea.
Rumpus: Is that why you picked older stories, because the distance of the past gave a little bit more narrative space?
Telfer: First of all, I don’t know if this is of interest to other writers, but people were telling me getting an agent is like dating. You feel out for that spark, whatever. I totally found that with my agent, and the thing that I can sort of pinpoint what made me fall in love with her, is when she said, “I think you should keep the book just vintage killers because it’s spooky and Victorian in a way that modern killers aren’t.”
Hearing her say that, it was like this weight was lifted off my chest that I didn’t realize was there because there was part of me that didn’t want to write this book because I didn’t want to write about Karla Homolka.
My agent was the one who articulated this. But it was what my heart was telling me all along. I was really happy that that was built into the structure of the book in the beginning. Yes, it gives you distance. It makes it feel okay to discuss it. I just think it’s interesting, too, because to look at these completely different time periods when you can get arsenic at the drugstore, or when you’re husband died and people thought you were a witch. It’s just interesting. That’s not what happens now if you kill your husband.
The third thing is, I just was reading this bio of this writer who wrote about a recent serial killer, a man, I can’t remember who it was. She was trying to tell the story and help put policies into place that would help with sex crimes. Her heart was in the right place. But also understandably the victim’s family was totally unsupportive and appalled.
Rumpus: But a danger of distance can be that they are too shrouded in the past to become real. In the chapter about the Egyptian murderers, Raya and Sakina, you mentioned that the stories can get so wrapped up in sexism and Orientalism or colonialism that the truth is hard to access. Did you ever feel like you actually knew the truth about these women? Did you ever have a moment where you were like, oh I actually see this woman through the mythology?
Telfer: Elizabeth Ridgway, who was from the mid to late 1600s I think. There were only two sources on her. But I did feel like I truly saw her in a way just because through little anecdotes in the sources, her personality really came through. We all know an Elizabeth Ridgeway. Someone who when she is in a really bad mood, she’s kind of a psychopath.
But there was a huge language barrier with Raya and Sakina. Most of the sources about them were in Arabic.
Rumpus: To be fair, this is a struggle with modern murderers as well. We mythologize and contextualize their violence in a way that it almost makes it feel like any female killer completely unknowable.
Telfer: I think Aileen Wurnos is one of the biggest examples of that. Everyone was trying to claim her for their cause or to use her to prove something, which is so frustrating. I wrote about her a little bit in an essay that I was working on and I was struggling to put my finger on what annoyed me about feminists trying to claim Aileen.
I was like, Okay, am I being anti-feminist? Then I read this quote, unrelated but I can remember. It was in an essay and it went like this: if Hamlet is about anything, it was about Hamlet. It’s not about the alienation of man or whatever. It’s about Hamlet.
If Aileen is about anything, she’s about Aileen. She’s not an icon, she’s not a figure, she’s not a myth. She’s a person who had an incredibly terrible life and did an incredibly terrible thing. That’s Aileen and her story is just about her.
I’m not saying it’s always a fallacy to generalize. But I think, particularly in Aileen case, and in female serial killers more broadly, there is this immediate tendency to just be like, okay, what is this about? Is this is about gender roles clashing or this is about the changing role of women in society? No, it’s about one person and how they go to the point that they are. Aileen had a horrible life, but so do tons of other people who aren’t serial killers. I know that’s an obvious point, but I think people kind of forget it when they try to make her into a figure of something or proof of something.
Violent women are violent because they’re human. And humans are violent. There are a million reasons for someone to become a serial killer. But they’re violent because they’re human. They’re not violent because she’s some special breed of bad woman or the wrong kind of seed was planted in a weird type of soil and that woman spun off. That’s a really crazy metaphor.
Rumpus: What is at the core of our societal obsession with murder?
Telfer: I think it’s a lot of things. I think we are all sort of sick curious as human beings. We are obviously drawn to things that are creepy or bad or outside. That’s more interesting than looking at a picture of a house all day long. We like things that are spooky and weird even if we think we don’t. My answer to this has changed so take this with a grain of salt. My current theory on why I like true crimes: There’s just something elemental to it, like humans at their most extreme. It’s sort of like the most eeriest thing you can do to another person is murder them. It’s just so intense and visceral and such an expression of power. It’s like a destruction of a creation. I think too, we like to identify monsters because it makes us feel better.
Rumpus: You sold your book before the election. So you probably did not intend this reading of it, but reading this book in 2017, it felt a little cathartic. I think the catharsis came from learning about women who punctured that social fabric, that social saran wrap as you called it. And also, it was cathartic because your book is a process of stripping away mythology, of stripping away sexism or feminism or all the isms and just trying to find women at their core, even if that core is rotten.
Telfer: I think that’s why women will like it. I’d honestly be curious to hear if any men read my book. I don’t know their takes on it. I could see men having a very different reaction. I think also there’s just the rareness that’s so fascinating of female criminals and especially serial killers. Which is why we mythologize them. They’re these total outsider freak monster hybrid. We just don’t know how to deal with that and we don’t have the language for them.
Rumpus: The women in your book have an amazing amount of hustle, they aren’t just these beat up women who murder out of desperation. They are go-getters, they have kids, they have jobs, they murder. It’s really impressive. It’s like those ads from the 1980s where it’s like, she’s a mother and she brings home the bacon, she volunteers for the PTA, commits insurance fraud, and mass murders men.
Telfer: And she does it all smelling really fresh.
But, yes, they’re hustling. They have agency; they’re not just reacting to circumstance.
Rumpus: What story did you want to put in the book but couldn’t?
Telfer: There’s this girl named Ella and I think she was 1930s Los Angeles. She was eleven. She said she was a serial killer and deeply wanted to be one. She created all this drama because she had siblings die of natural causes. But she was like, “I killed them Mommy and Daddy. I killed them.” Police got involved and everyone was like, “Do we have an eleven-year-old serial killer on our hands?”
Poor child. Lord knows why she was trying to convince everyone she was a serial killer but it was really intense and super creepy of course. I felt very sympathetic for her parents, the ones who had the biggest emotional swings ever, from “Oh my gosh, our daughter’s a serial killer,” to it’s almost creepy, our daughter wants to be a serial killer. She would have been fun to include. Maybe I shouldn’t say fun. I have to stop saying fun.
***
Image credit: Marcy Capron Vermillion
Lyz Lenz is Managing Editor at The Rumpus. Lyz's writing has been published in the New York Times Motherlode, Jezebel, Aeon, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book on midwestern churches is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. She has her MFA from Lesley and skulks about on Twitter @lyzl. More from this author →