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When women kill together.

Article Excerpt
Traditional ideas about female serial killers include that such offenders are motivated primarily by gain, are less violent than males, tend to commit murders out of reaction rather than their own initiations, and are not sexually compulsive in their bid to kill. But there are exceptions to every rule, particularly when it comes to stereotypes about serial killers. Some women who repeatedly kill have certainly been predatory and brutal. A few have even been sexually compulsive. There's no reason to believe that females are immune to an erotic rush from the act of murder, and this article examines several cases to illustrate this. Not surprisingly, many turn up in the health care industry.

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Jane Toppan, a nurse at the end of the nineteenth century, experimented on patients with a mixture of drugs that killed slowly. As they gradually lost consciousness, she would climb into bed to cradle them while they slipped into oblivion (Schechter 2003). After she went to work for a family, its members began to die, one by one, with gentle Jane by their side. Finally, someone grew suspicious and examined these deaths more closely, leading to Toppan's arrest. During her examination and trial, Toppan admitted to being aroused by death, which places her squarely in the category of a lust killer. In fact, she said that her sole regret was that she had been stopped so soon, and had she married and had a family, she was certain she would have killed them all as well.

There has been little to no research on female lust killers, in part because it's an unexpected phenomenon and in part because the cases are rare. However, similar to male lust murder, the female counterpart is often driven by a paraphilia, such as arousal upon viewing a corpse or when rubbing inappropriately against someone. Often, there's something deviant in their sexual development that consistently triggers arousal and thus feeds a compulsion.

Erotic motivation is even more prevalent among women who kill in partnerships with other women, although this behavior does not show up in all cases. There aren't many documented examples, but those this article identifies involved at least one person with a scheming mind, a degree of psychopathy, and the capacity for getting a thrill from deciding that others should die, in the first case involving two women, it's not altogether clear who was actually the...

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