Tori Telfer

Inspired by author Tori Telfer's Jezebel column “Lady Killers,” this thrilling and entertaining compendium investigates female serial killers and their crimes through the ages. When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.” Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction. Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject, and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes and sexist clichés that inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations (she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it) and tired tropes (she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch), delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation. Featuring 14 illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.

Deadly Women Throughout History

Lady Killers

Moth

This book was oddly really great. The author at times was funny and sarcastic when she needed to be, but she also knew how to balance dark elements that left you chilled to the bone knowing these women existed. I honestly couldn’t get enough. I picked up this book because I’m a fan of writers like Gillian Flynn and Tana French. So part of me was curious. I’m a sucker for mysteries and of history, so the balance of the two were perfect. 

The writing to me was well done. I found it kept me interested, even when it talked about women I’d heard of before (the author was great at bringing new information to those stories as well). I found it was just well done, all and all.

victoria

Like the others, I'll probably edit the review later but for now my rating is 4.5! When I bought it saw some bad reviews saying that all deaths were similar and that made the book boring, but I totally disagree, some deaths can be similar but the stories themselves are completely different and make you totally curious. The edition itself is beautiful, the author doesn't romanticize anything and the cases are extremely interesting, I liked everything, I just didn't give it 5 stars because the subject was heavy, I ended up taking longer to read.

Celeste Richardson

There is something so morbidly fascinating about serial killers. The killers who have wormed their way into the public psyche tend to have one thing in common outside of their macabre hobby; generally, these killers are men, or at least assumed to be men if they were never caught. The Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, and Jeffrey Dahmer are just a few such killers. In this book, Telfer makes the case that female serial killers are just as deadly, and far more prevalent throughout history than we seem to remember. In the author’s mind, there are a few reasons for this. 

First, the idea of the sex that is most often cast in the role of nurturer being able and willing to kill in cold blood makes society as a whole uncomfortable, leading to female killers being far more quickly forgotten than their male counterparts. Because of this, female serial killers are often either hyper-sexualized by the media or considered to be “not a real woman,” instead having more in common with their male counterparts than with the rest of the softer sex. Also, while there are visceral exceptions to this rule, women have a tendency toward choosing poison as their murder weapon, which is in a sense a much tidier way to kill, and thus is not viewed as being quite as heinous as other bloodier methods.

I’m not generally a big fan of non-fiction, but I do enjoy learning about the darker side of man for reasons I can’t really verbalize. This book was a fun way to learn about a side of crime to which I had never given much thought. My only problem with the book was that many of the crimes and their perpetrators tended to blend together in my mind, chiefly because so many of the murders were achieved through the use of poison. While this isn’t something the author could help, as this is not a work of fiction, it seemed to do more toward proving the stereotype Telfer pointed out rather than actually showing that female killers were just as varied and nuanced as their male counterparts. Even so, this was an interesting look into the darker side of the feminine, and a compelling argument against the subconscious cultural decision to underestimate the potential deadliness of the fairer sex.

Elizabeth Neill

I read this in one day and I really found it very entertaining. It kept me hooked and wanting more. I have heard of one or two of the killers in the book but most were new to me. I had to look them up after I was done reading because I wanted to know more about them. I understood why she picked older women to write about and that is what I liked about the book the most. I will be picking up her new books once it comes out.

Amy Grieve

3.5 stars. I really enjoyed reading Tori Telfer’s newest work, Confident Women, earlier this year so I was happy to get my hands on her first work.

Lady Killers was an interesting read with each chapter containing a case study following one female serial killer from the past. Pretty much all of the female serial killers Telfer talks about in this book are pre-1950s which I think was a negative point of the book because for most of these cases she was required to fall back on anecdotal evidence and incomplete records. This meant that a lot of the information about these women was unconfirmed including a lot of their kill counts (which is kind of expected for a lot of the earliest cases).

One thing I really enjoy about Telfer’s work in general is how well she contextualizes these women within their time period. Due to a lot of the examples in this book being historical Telfer focuses on the cultural climate each of each time period to explain why exactly the existence of a female serial killer was so decisive. For example, when talking about Kate Bender who reigned during the frontier years Telfer talks about how Kate used the concept of home to lure weary travelers to their death. She also goes into how ageism, sexuality and insanity affected the perception of these women.

I do think that this book is worth the read. Although compared to Telfer’s newer work the variety of women discussed in this book is limited and it’s clear that Telfer was still developing her narrative voice.

Jennifer Dieter

I enjoyed this book about female serial killers of the past including the author’s commentary on why people tend to forget or ignore female murderers. Toward the end, some of the stories started to feel repetitive and it was hard to remember the individual women’s stories. The author did a solid job of pointing out that the crimes were heinous but also making the women human and worthy of empathy. Overall, I would recommend this one if you’re into true crime and forgotten history.

Viry

“I believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death. Recoiling from crime is natural, but recoil too far and it becomes a delusion.”
  

What an interesting read. Female serial killers are rarely talked about and this entire book brings to light the women who have done horrible things and how society tends to change the stories to fetishize and sexualize these monsters. Would recommend if you’re looking for some spooky real life stories of women who kill. Audiobook feels like a long podcast and I was a big fan of the atmosphere the author creates and how she includes her own opinion on the cases.

Christina M Masters

2.75 stars - This book was a book club selection and one that I was so excited to get to. Sadly, in my mind, it did not live up to the hype. It was fine as far as the book goes. There were parts I enjoyed, but a good portion of the book was a bit of a slough for me. I have always been fascinated by true crime and serial killers (thank you grandma), so I was definitely interested in this book since as the book states, you don't hear an awful lot about female serial killers, mainly because they are definitely outnumbered by their male counterparts and, honestly, maybe there just weren't that many to begin with. 

The book started out promising. She bought out the big gun, Erzsebet Bathory (more commonly known in these modern times as Elizabeth Bathory The Blood Countess) and she is someone I have always been fascinated by, not by her crimes per se, but by the fact and the fiction surrounding her story. But then the book continues with a spate of women who basically killed their husbands and children by poisoning them, most commonly with arsenic, usually due to money or they needed their husbands or children out of the way so they could run off with their next victims, which was interesting the first couple of times I read that, but I would argue 90% of the book ended up being about these women who poisoned and it just got a bit repetitive. In some of the stories you probably could have changed the names of the people and I wouldn't have known the difference. I do understand that the author was probably working with very limited information and was trying to write the most factual book she thought possible, she probably could have made this into an entirely different book called Poisoner Women - Deadly Women Who Poisoned Throughout History for Love and Profit. 

The writing was good and of course, the premise is amazing, but sadly, this book was just okay for me. This is not to say there weren't a couple of interesting stories in the book besides the Bathory one. A couple of names stood out that I feel would be interesting to find out more about, but overall I was not as excited to get through this book as I was when I first heard about it.

Sabrina D. 

One of the things that has always stumped me as a true crime reader is that female serial killers kind of get the shaft when it comes to attention and coverage years after the fact. We focus so much on how men are mainly serial killers, recounting the tales of those like Bundy and Jack the Ripper time and time again, yet after their trials and demise, the women seem to get swept under the rug.

This book really tries to provide the reader with examples of female serial killers from different places around the globe, different motives, backgrounds, and time periods. It has a kind of dark humor that reminds me of a Stay Sexy, Don't Get Murdered podcast episode. It has an appreciation for the crimes, but let's be real, these ladies had some flaws. I enjoyed it, but it did really fall flat after the halfway point. I think the stories closer to the end may have lacked information, so we got more "out there" with getting caught up in rumors and the humor to pad it.

I also think that many of the poisoning stories were the same. I know that it is a "go to" for women to the point that arsenic was deemed something that needed to be tracked when sold, and that it wasnt in common for children to be poisoned for insurance money in England in the right time period. It just got a little repetitive after a while. I also would have liked it to be a little bit more timeline based or grouped in some way. It seemed more like an anthology of short stories rather than a sit down book. And that's not to say it wasn't good, but I think it would have been very special if it had grouped stories based on themes or time period or interlinked them one after the other.

It's a good read with killers I had never heard of mixed with more information on ones that I had. And thankfully, it wasn't written by a man who just boiled everything down to the drag that female serial killers tend to get in mainstream media.

Lady Killers Deadly Women Throughout History

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