First ever female serial killer: Aileen Wournos 60 Minutes Australia. View interviews with Aileen Wournos, the woman who is credited with being America's first female serial killer, speaking about her motives and eagerness for the electric chair.
Wanted to know what it was like for those around Wournos? The District Attorney and her lawyer, who helped her get to her goal of execution, speak about the legal proceedings. Capital Punishment in Context: Aileen Wournos. To support the primary source above, this website reviews Aileen's life and crimes by victim.
Interested in more capital punishment? This is a great place to expand your research! The peculiar evolutionary differences between male and female serial killers. The Giggling Granny. Amelia Dyer: The Victorian nurse who strangled babies.
The Life and Deaths of Dorothea Puente. Miyuki Ishikawa the Demon Midwife. Myra Hindley: The depraved and sadistic serial killer who was cremated in Cambridge. Sharon Kinne, the not-so-ordinary housewife. When asked why, serial killers often give a wide range of answers regarding the reasons for their murders.
The most common belief is that the killer wants to feel complete control over another person. They thrive on the fear their victims display and see the murder as the ultimate form of dominance over a human being.
The person in question must have murdered a minimum of three individuals not simultaneously , there must be a period of time in between the murders to prove that multiple victims were not killed during a single fit of rage , and the circumstances of each murder should indicate that the killer felt a sense of dominance over the people they have killed. The victims must also be vulnerable to the killer in some way, a characteristic which indicates that the killer has sought to achieve a feeling of superiority.
It is rarely possible for the killers to find people who meet these exact qualifications, so they generally seek out people with similar traits. This is why serial killings often seem to be completely random at first — each victim may have something in common that only the killer easily recognizes. They are, however, thought to be extremely cautious people who will not choose a victim unless they feel the chances of success are very high.
For this reason, the first murder victim is very often a prostitute or homeless person, someone the killers can attack without drawing a lot of attention. These factors make it even more difficult to establish patterns in a series of slayings and to track down the responsible culprit. In addition to famous cases that have been covered by the media throughout the ages, the FBI has also made a note of their famous cases and criminals.
Not a scholarly resource, but can provide basic background information on Serial Killers. Nor was there any trace of the interview Bourgoin claimed to have had with the cult leader Charles Manson. The Berkowitz and Manson anecdotes, the group realised, both strongly resembled experiences recounted by John Douglas — the FBI profiler Bourgoin had interviewed 30 years earlier — in his memoir Mindhunter.
The book was all but unknown in France until being adapted as a Netflix series ; both anecdotes appeared in it. The investigation took months, and nearly all their free time. But they seemed unable to stop. They found borrowings and misrepresentations everywhere.
Who Killed the Black Dahlia? The FBI still lists the case as unsolved. In , Bourgoin had travelled to South Africa to film a documentary on Micki Pistorius, a profiler of some renown. During the shoot, Pistorius gave Bourgoin a copy of the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published autobiography, Catch Me a Killer.
At the time, Bourgoin insisted that the book was based solely on his experiences with her in South Africa, and Pistorius, whose French was too rudimentary to read the book herself, took him at his word.
The group alerted Pistorius to claims Bourgoin had been making. And the draft from the rotor blades sent bits of decomposing body and maggots flying everywhere. And I, her, and another cop were covered in it. And I could feel that he was beginning to crack. It was perhaps predictable that it should be his own fans who first noticed this tendency.
No one in the group had any video-making experience to speak of; they posted them to YouTube without fanfare.
Within the community of francophone crime aficionados, the videos took off. Bourgoin fans sent insults, and occasional threats of legal action. Some seemed to be under the impression that their hero had merely plagiarised a passage here and there, which seemed forgivable; some reproached the debunkers for going after a man whose own wife had been murdered.
And others still, more conspiracy-minded, concluded that Bourgoin was not merely a fabulist but a serial killer. He offered no details about this project. He did not address the claims in the videos specifically, but he did make an extensive show of his credentials, in the form of a series of rhetorical questions.
Had they sold out theatres in 26 cities on their speaking tour? The media began to take notice. Bourgoin said he and a detective had both questioned Wilken, but that it had been the detective, and not himself, who thought to cover the walls of the interrogation room with photographs of children. Le Pennec asked why Bourgoin had previously claimed otherwise. Around this time, the journalist Emilie Lanez, of Paris Match, contacted Bourgoin to ask for an interview about the controversy.
She had published several books, and noted to Bourgoin that they shared a publisher. They would talk for several hours, and then she would spend the afternoon making calls to confirm what Bourgoin had just told her. Over time, though, Lanez felt she was coming closer to the truth. When they came to Eileen, Bourgoin sobbed for a long time. Eileen was an embellishment of a somewhat less sympathetic story, he admitted.
While living in the US in the s as a young bachelor, Bourgoin had been a regular visitor to Daytona Beach, a resort town on the Florida coast. On one visit, he met a bartender and aspiring cosmetologist named Susan Bickrest, who, Bourgoin seemed to imply, made a bit of extra money as a prostitute.
A serial killer was suspected. A few years later, in , he was authorised to interview his first killer, Richard Chase, a paranoid schizophrenic who drank the blood of some of his victims.
B ourgoin seemed to have hoped that the Paris Match story would somehow exonerate him. When the story appeared, he responded angrily. They spoke by phone. Among other things, it seemed extremely unlikely that Bourgoin had ever met Richard Chase.
Both Carol Kehringer and Olivier Raffet, who worked on the documentary, said they were under the strong impression at the time that, prior to the three interviews they filmed, Bourgoin had never met a serial killer in his life.
Ahead of the shoot, Raffet had gone to see The Silence of the Lambs, and came away imagining that, as in the film, the killers they were interviewing would be held behind security glass.
But there was no glass, or wall, or bars, and the men came to the interviews without restraints of any kind. Bickrest was indeed a real person, and the victim of a serial killer. They and I have contacted her — she now appears to work as a real estate agent — but she has never responded.
Early on, he found genre cinema, and devoted himself to the category the French call fantastique, encompassing science fiction, horror and all things uncanny. Bourgoin, who was not yet 20 years old, wrote frequently for the magazine. At the time, Bourgoin was living with his parents, in a grand apartment in view of the Arc de Triomphe.
Every year, Schlockoff organized a major festival of the fantastique , and Bourgoin often worked as one of his assistants. In , ahead of the festival, Schlockoff was in London, meeting with a director. The man said he would send over a copy of the film Schlockoff had asked for; Schlockoff was confused, as he had not requested a film. He cut ties with Bourgoin immediately. Soon after, Bourgoin made a long trip to the US, where he hoped to make connections in the film industry, and to see as many movies as he could.
These included the Americans Robert Bloch, whose novel Psycho adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock was inspired by the case of the serial killer Ed Gein, and James Ellroy, whose work had similarly drawn upon the theme of serial murder. It was around this time that Bourgoin seems to have developed his own fascination with serial killing.
Initially, his friends found it amusing, or at least inoffensive. But it soon grew tiresome, especially after the release of his documentary.
He spoke of nothing else. At a certain point, however, Bourgoin seemed to have lost his bearings, to have lost hold of what was true and what was not. That he could tell me the story of his murdered fiancee! But his star continued to rise. He tricked us! Q uietly, Bourgoin was dropped by his publishers and producers. Serial killers are not immune to the appeals of celebrity. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of serial murder is that such killings appear random.
This, however, is a misleading characterisation, for while serial killers do target strangers, their victims are not haphazard Wilson, Rather, the victims of serial killers tend to mimic the wider cultural categories of denigration characteristic of contemporary society. Such individuals, often singled out by modern institutions for reprobation, censure and marginalisation, are also disproportionately the targets of serial killers, who tend to prey upon vagrants, the homeless, prostitutes, migrant workers, homosexuals, children, the elderly and hospital patients ibid.
Such a statement keenly demonstrates the extent to which serial killers embrace and reproduce the wider cultural codings that have devalued, stigmatised and marginalised specific groups.
Through a distorted mirror, serial killers reflect back, and act upon, modernity's distinctive valuations. Recognising the dynamics of victim marginalisation is particularly germane to the study of serial killers, for the denigration of particular social groups is connected to specific opportunity structures for murder. That the victims of serial killers tend to be drawn from modernity's disposable classes can also mean that these victims are outside of effective systems of guardianship, and are targeted not only because they are more accessible, but also because their deaths are less likely to generate timely investigation or legal consequences.
While serial killing is routinely presented as the unfathomable behaviour of the lone, decontextualised and sociopathic individual, here we have emphasised the unnervingly familiar modern face of serial killing. Several distinctively modern phenomena, including anonymity, a culture of celebrity enabled through the rise of mass media, and specific cultural frameworks of denigration, each provide key institutional frameworks, motivations and opportunity structures for analysing such acts.
To exclusively focus on aetiology and offender biography systematically ignores this larger social context, and elides a more nuanced understanding of the hows and whys of serial killing. Braudy, L. Egger, S. Holmes, R. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Nock, S. Wilson, D. Skip to main content.
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