Female Serial Murder Case Study

There have been limited studies in those pertaining to female serial killers. This article Lethal Ladies: What We Know About Female Serial Killers explores the lives of 10 women who are serial murderers. This study was constructed to have the opportunity to compare and contrast against a past study done by Kelleher and Kelleher. Because female serial murderers are very rare, this leaves little resources to be utilized for the researchers. This study explores the nature and statistics of 10 serial murderers who acted alone. This resulted in discrepancies in outcomes when excluding those women who work in teams. Ultimately, not only did working alone increase a women’s killing span and victim count, but it also decreased the age of the offender at the beginning of their killing series. This study also found some distinctive elements pertaining to the offenders characteristics involving the murder, the victim-offender relationship, and even one’s perceived mental state. In this particular study, researchers Amanda L. Farrell, Robert D Keppel, and Victoria B Titterington used newspaper articles as a main resource for their findings. News articles were used due to the offenders being deceased and unable to perform interviews, lack of files from police that were lost or sealed, and files that were available but for a very high price. News …show more content…
This correlates with previous research done on male serial killers, who are also predominately white men. 32% of the offenders chose their victims to be adults that they had personally known. Personal and well established relationships were often the offenders choice of victims. The next favored group of people were acquaintances. Strangers were the least likely category for the victims to stem from. This is contradictory to the evidence found of male serial killers who frequently use strangers as their target