R.J. Parker: The Serial Killer Compendium

The remains of other mutilated bodies were found throughout the farm. Ray Lamphere, who had worked on the Gunness’ farm, was arrested and charged with arson and murder. Even though the exact number of victims was never identified, it is believed to have numbered anywhere between sixteen and twenty-eight. Lamphere argued that Gunness was the one who had set the fire and that she was the person responsible for forty-nine murders.

According to his testimony, Gunness was alive; he had helped her escape. He further argued that the decapitated body belonged to an unfortunate woman who had been lured to the farm with money. To this day, we do not know whether Gunness died in the fire or whether she had managed to commit the perfect crime and elude being apprehended.

Even though the Black Widow, murdering for profit, might appear to be unparalleled by any other serial killer, the type of Black Widow that murders out of jealousy and rejection is equally merciless. This type of Black Widow is epitomized in the person of Vera Renczi.

Vera Renczi was born in 1903 in Hungary. She suffered from a pathological fear of rejection that eventually led to a series of murders that lasted throughout her adult life. She murdered thirty-five individuals, including her husbands, lovers, and son. By the age of sixteen, she had run away with several local men considerably her senior.

Like all her relationships, Renczi’s marriage to a local executive did not last more than a brief period. Her pathological jealousy found expression in frequent and violent fits of anger against her mate, and soon her husband disappeared mysteriously. Renczi remarried shortly afterwards, but her new husband disappeared as well after Renczi convinced herself of his infidelity.

Throughout the following years, Renczi acquired a number of lovers – thirty-two to be exact – all of whom mysteriously disappeared from her life. The vicious Black Widow became so obsessed that she did not hesitate to take the life of her own son once he had discovered the truth about her vanishing lovers and husbands.

The fact that her own son had dared to blackmail her marked the ultimate form of treachery in Renczi’s eyes. After murdering thirty-five victims, Renczi was finally discovered when the wife of one of her lovers became suspicious and called the police when her husband failed to return home. Renczi admitted to lifelong deadly practices and led the police to the basement of her home where the remains of thirty-five men were preserved in lavish zinc coffins. Each one of the victims was poisoned by lethal doses of arsenic.

The Angels of Death

The Angels of Death are the lethal caretakers who match, by all standards, the Black Widows in their viciousness. These are the women from whom the elderly seek support, and to whom parents trust their children. Because these women usually act in places where death is a common occurrence, such as hospitals, they not only pass unobserved, but it is often very hard to determine the exact number of victims.

One thing, however, is certain, the Angel of Death targets victims who are unable to shield or defend themselves, and who are, in her own eyes, already condemned to die. The Angel of Death, like the Black Widow, uses a weapon that is delicate and hard to detect. When the victim is an adult, she uses deadly injections of chemicals such as potassium, which will cause a heart attack. When the victims are young children, she resorts to suffocation, usually with a pillow.

She usually starts killing in her twenties, making bold decisions over who is to live and who is to die, and just might maintain this habit over a long period in her life. A classic Angel of Death exhibits two characteristics that usually make her apprehension a little easier. The first is that she is obsessive in her need to kill, and she kills repetitively within her own area of responsibility – such as a nurse or caretaker.

The second is that the Angel of Death often enjoys talking about her crimes in an attempt to gloss them over as acts of mercy, and often tries to depict herself as a heroine and caring benefactor. Angels of Death are usually highly regarded by their co-workers, supervisors, and even their own victims’ relatives.

Even though numerous Angels of Death are responsible for taking the lives of hundreds of innocent children and helpless elderly people throughout the last quarter of the century, very few of them have actually been apprehended.

One of the most villainous Angels of Death was Genene Jones, an American nurse born in 1951. She was actively criminal between the ages of twenty-seven to thirty-one, and was responsible for the death of at least eleven children, all of them injected with lethal chemicals. It was suspected that she might have been involved in the deaths of as many as forty-six children.

Having changed jobs from the Bexar County Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, to the Kerr County clinic, and then to the Sip Peterson Hospital, she allowed suspicions to rise as the numbers of infant deaths in each hospital frighteningly increased while she worked there. Unfortunately, changing location also provided her with ample time to carry out the killings that satisfied her perverted need for power, control, and recognition. She was finally caught and brought before justice in 1984. She received a sentence of ninety-nine years in prison. The exact number of her victims is still unknown to this day.

Sexual Predators

The sexual predator is the rarest crime committed by a woman. It is so rare that American criminal history has only one reported female sexual predator who was acting alone, and that is Aileen Wuornos. She was an American serial killer who, between 1989 and 1990, killed seven men in Florida. She claimed they raped her while she was working as a prostitute. Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death for six of the murders and executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

The term sexual predator is used critically to describe a person seen as obtaining or trying to obtain sexual contact with another person in a figuratively predatory manner. A female sexual predator is thought to hunt for her sex prey. Rapists and child sexual abusers are usually referred to as sexual predators, particularly in the media.

Revenge Serial Killers

In contrast to the Black Widows, the Angels of Death, and the Sexual Predators, the fourth category of female serial killers is the Revenge Serial Killer. Whereas it is not hard to understand why a resentful, vengeful female, might take on a single act of murder, it is exceptionally complex to understand why she would engage in a series of murders.

Traditionally, crimes that are motivated by extreme hatred are crimes that are targeted against a particular individual or individuals, and are thus rarely serial in nature. They also take place within a limited framework of time, when the feelings involved are strong enough to motivate a murder.

There are also crimes of passion which are both deliberate and carefully calculated in their execution. In the case of serial murders, however, feelings of anger remain highly personalized even when the victims vary. That is especially so because the perpetrator holds her victims responsible for whatever may cause her hostility, and she attacks them as a symbolic act of retribution.

As a result, there is an overpowering steadiness among the revenge serial killer’s victims, which are often tragically her own children, murdered in a perverted attempt to hurt her spouse. Like the Black Widow, she prefers suffocation or poison, but her crimes are not carried out with the persistency and precision of the Black Widow. That can be attributed to the fact that the revenge serial killer is a victim of her own feelings, acting impulsively, which could explain why she shows immense remorse after she is caught.