"You need to look into your victim's trusting eyes day after day as you slowly snuff out their life," she states. But it's not as easy as it looks, writes Telfer.
The resulting agony could be attributed to other dire illnesses. 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. Poison is a girl's best friend in these accounts. 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." The Two-Way Ex-Nurse Accused Of Murdering 8 Nursing Home Patients In CanadaĪmong others, we trace the story of the "the self-made widow" Nanny Doss, fond of baking cakes and doing away with husbands.
With selections that are exceptionally well sourced, Lady Killers profiles more than 14 subjects with widely differing motivations for ending multiple lives. Like female rocket scientists and cage fighters, lady killers had to wait for the new millennium to be properly recognized. 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. Could she convince me that documenting women who kill and kill again is a kind of feminist exercise?įor a long time, the received wisdom had it that female serial killers did not actually exist. 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. Men are far more likely than women to be killers. 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. 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.īut instead, I approached Tori Telfer's account of serial slaughterers with a bit of trepidation. 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. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Lady Killers Subtitle Deadly Women Throughout History Author Tori Telfer
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