Deadlier Than the Male: True Stories of Women Who Kill

On a cold January morning, Karla Homolka ran screaming from her suburban house, covered with blood. Beaten by her husband, she finally cracked, spilling the deadly secrets that would end in her imprisonment for brutal sex slaying. Thus, she joined the terrible list of female serial killers whose actions have shocked the world. In “Deadlier than the Male”, journalist Terry Manners tells the stories of women who have killed not once but again and again. Not just a modern phenomenon, Manners looks back in time, recreating the crimes of Victorian Mary Ann Cotton, who poisoned twenty people with arsenic; of Christine Falling, the babysitter who killed the children in her care; of Nanny Doss, who mixed rat poison with stewed prunes. These infamous women and others such as Beverly Allit, Aileen Wuornos and Karla Homolka had a common bond. Their sex made them unlikely suspects as the death tolls grew. Why did they do it? Through interviews with renowned criminal psychologists, the author attepts to find a pattern and an answer to the frightening phenomenon that is women who kill.