The Female Homicide Offender: Serial Murder and the Case of Aileen Wuornos

This monograph-length book on women, serial murder, and psychopathy explores the case of Aileen Wuornos provides practical, useful strategies to predict, prevent, and treat female offenders who murder serially. Topics covered in this interesting and comprehensive book are: women and crime, women as homicide offenders, mental disorders, antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, attachment theory, analyzing and interpreting data, ethics, crime, and justice. For forensic psychologists, correctional psychologists, clinical psychologists, and others in the field of criminal justice.

Why do some female homicide offenders commit serial murder? The answer to this question has eluded criminal profilers and police officers for decades. Although researchers have offered some tentative explanations based on the limited cases documented, no systematic treatment of this phenomenon has occurred in the popular and academic literature—at least not until now.

In this engaging, accessible, and detailed book, authors Stacey L. Shipley, Psy.D. and Bruce A. Amigo, Ph.D. put many of the missing pieces together, shedding new and provocative light on this fascinating though deadly crime. Relying on insights from psychology and criminology, they argue that unresolved trauma following poor or severed childhood attachments to parents can result in disorderly conduct in adolescents who act delinquently and psychopathic adults who behave criminally.

In order to test this theory, Shipley and Arrigo turn to the high profile case of Aileen Wuornos, a woman executed in 2002 for the cold blooded and calculated murders of seven men. Challenging conventional wisdom that female killers are victims of abuse, the authors provide a cogent and penetrating analysis, raising many disturbing questions about the nature of predatory and serial murders committed by women. Going well beyond the confines of the Aileen Wuornos case, Shipley and Arrigo also examine the ethical dilemmas inherent in a culture of violence where the systems of criminal justice and mental health seemingly fail to assist persons in profound distress. At issue here is the manner in which society helps to create the female homicide offender, including those women who kill repeatedly.