Status Updates From Female Serial Killers: How ...

The names of murderous tyrants are infinitely familiar: Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein. Less familiar are their female equivalents, who we believed simply did not exist.

The murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk in British Columbia in 1997 by seven girls and one boy is indicative of the nature adolescent female violence can take today.

In 1952,
the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual replaced the term psychopath with "sociopathic personality" and the psychopath came to be informally called the sociopath.

The “signature” is the opposite of the MO—the modus operandi, or method used in committing the crime. Profilers carefully differentiate crime scene characteristics between signature and MO.⛏️🪛🔫🔪

Since the resumption of executions in the U.S. in 1977, a total of sixty-three women have been sentenced to death by 2005. Eleven of them have been executed. (The last woman executed prior to 1977 was Elizabeth Duncan, back in 1962 in California’s gas chamber for the contract murder of her pregnant daughter-in-law, who she had buried alive.)