Male and Female Serial Killers

Part 1

Male and Female Serial Killers

Serial killers have been around for as long as civilization, but female serial killers are not researched as often as their male counterparts. The crimes may not be as well known but that does not mean they are any less heartless and gruesome. One similarity all serial killers have, no matter the gender, is that they commit murder for money, pleasure, family, or whatever their method may be. In one case, a woman by the name of Aileen Wuornos, is about a Floridian woman who murdered seven people from the years 1989 to 1991(The Case of Aileen Wuornos). In another, a man by the name of Jeffrey Dahmer, is about a man from Wisconsin who murdered seventeen young boys and men from 1978 to 1991(Jeffrey Dahmer). The third case, a German woman by the name of Anna Marie Hahn, who lived in Cincinnati and murdered multiple elderly people from the early 1930s to the late 1930s(Nash). Lastly, in New York, a woman named Lydia Struck Sherman murdered twelve people from 1864 to 1866(Nash). Contrary to what many think, male and female serial killers are more similar than people give them credit.

The first case begins on February 29, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan(The Case of Aileen Wuornos). Aileen 'Lee' Wuornos was born, to a father who was a convicted child molester and mother who left her and her brother when they were young. She and her brother were left in the custody of their maternal grandparents. According to childhood friends of Wuornos, she was beaten by her grandfather and her grandmother was an alcoholic. At age eleven, Wuornos began trading sexual favors for money, beer, and cigarettes. At the age of fourteen, she gave birth to her only child, who was given up for adoption. Her neighbors had claimed that the child's father was a friend of her grandfather's, but no concrete proof has surfaced to prove these claims of being true. Soon after giving birth she began to spend more and more time away from her grandparents home. She did this by spending her time living in the woods or hitchhiking across the country, all the while she was using fake names. When she returned from these vacations at age fourteen, not even a year after giving birth to her only child, her grandparents forced her to leave their house. She moved to Florida to work as a prostitute in the early 1980s after her brother died from cancer. While working as a prostitute her primary clientele were middle-aged, middle-class white men. She was almost constantly in trouble with the law, for working as a prostitute along with other crimes she had committed. In the year 1989, she met a woman named Tyria Moore in a bar located in Daytona Beach, Florida. They started an "intense romantic relationship"(The Case of Aileen Wuornos) which came to an end before Wuornos' final arrest in 1991. The relationship with Moore was Wuornos' second romantic relationship with a woman. By 1990 Moore had begun to grow suspicious of Wuornos' activities. She ended up moving back in with her family who, at the time, lived in Pennsylvania.

Wuornos took her first victim in 1989; a shop owner named Richard Mallory. He was a fifty-one-year-old white man who met Wuornos on Interstate 75 in Florida. He thought she was a prostitute so when he saw her on Interstate 75 he paid her to engage in sexual relations with him. His body was discovered miles away from his unattended car by a Volusia County sheriff's deputy. He was killed by multiple gunshot wounds in the chest. On June 1, 1990, the nude body of a man was discovered in Citrus County, Florida. This body belonged to forty-three-year-old construction worker David Spears. He had been shot six times in the torso. Charles Carskaddons body was discovered in Pasco County, Florida, a few days after Spears' body was discovered. He was a forty-year-old part-time rodeo worker, he was shot nine times in the chest and stomach collectively. Troy Burness', a fifty-year-old salesman, was found dead by Marion County police on the fourth of August 1990(The Case of Aileen Wuornos), less than a week after he was reported missing. After being out in the Floridian environment for a few days the body had already started to decompose, but the medical coroner was able to determine the cause of death, which was two gunshot wounds to the torso.

On September 12, 1990, the fully clothed body of Charles 'Dick' Humphreys was found in Marion County. Humphreys was a retired Air Force major, police chief, and Florida child-abuse investigator. His car was later discovered in Suwannee County, which is roughly ninety miles away from where his body was discovered. His cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds to both the head and torso. Peter Siems, Wuornos' sixth victim, left central Florida in the hopes to reach New Jersey in the June of 1990. His empty car was discovered in Orange Springs, Florida on the fourth of July in the same year, nearly a month after he set off to New Jersey. His body has still not been discovered, however, witnesses claim to have seen two women around his car while it was located in Orange Springs. The half-nude body of sixty-two-year-old Walter Antonio was discovered on November 19, 1990. His body was discovered in a desolate part of Dixie County, Florida. Four bullet wounds to his back and head were determined to be his cause of death. Five days after the initial discovery his car was found in Brevard County, which is roughly two-hundred miles away from where his body was found, he is the last of Wuornos' victims.