Lady Killers and Why We Are Fascinated by Them

On Saturday, in Perugia, Italy, 22-year-old American Amanda Knox was sentenced to 26 years in jail for killing her study-abroad roommate, Meredith Kercher. Knox’s family—and journalists like the New York Times’ Timothy Egan [2] and CBS correspondent Peter Van Sant [3]—believe that Knox is not guilty. Egan calls her “an innocent abroad,” a scholar/athlete from Seattle who worked three jobs to pay for her time in Perugia. Even the Italian tabloids, who basically convicted Knox in the court of public opinion, called her “angel face”… though they were sure to add that behind that scrubbed, middle-class visage hid a diabolical soul [4].

Because most people are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a woman—especially a fresh-faced young woman like Amanda—could be a violent criminal, they must create a more palatable narrative. Generally this involves a predictable twist: first normalize, then demonize. When a man commits a violent act—a far more common occurrence in this country, as only about 10 percent of murders between 1976 and 2005 were committed by women [5]—there is almost never a move by the media to make him sympathetic. But women killers are still as exotic as they were in Lizzie Borden’s time. In Knox’s case, she has been turned into a girl next door (with an inner sadist). On the one hand, according to her friends, Knox is “the most kind, warmhearted optimistic person” who saves spiders from being smooshed [6]. On the other hand, she is capable of outlandish behavior, like cartwheeling in the police station and conducting a minor flirtation with Satan [7].

This discomfort and concomitant fascination we have with these rare, violent women shows up in the Oxygen show Snapped. Each episode of the series, which premiered in 2004, tells the story of one woman accused of murder, through interviews with family members, local press, law enforcement officials, and, when possible, the accused herself. When they choose their subjects, they specifically go after women who have no criminal records, says Donna Dudek, the show’s series producer. “You wouldn’t expect this behavior from ordinary women with seemingly normal lives. We want the viewer to wonder, ‘How does this happen?’ ” Dudek says. Even the title implies that its subjects are average women who were pushed to the edge, rather than intrinsically violent beings.

One of Dudek’s favorite episodes of Snapped involves Amy Bosley, a Kentucky woman who ran a successful roofing business with her husband. “From the outside, she was as nice and all-American as could be,” says Dudek. “They were building this beautiful new house and had two beautiful kids. … I mean, I went to high school with this woman! We all did.” But, of course, underneath that shiny Southern exterior, Amy had driven the family business into a mess of tax debt, and Bob was busy boffing the ladies of Campbell County on his luxury boat [8]. Amy was convicted of shooting Bob seven times with a Glock while he was asleep in their bedroom and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years [9].

For prosecutors operating in the real world, this bias against believing that women can be inherently violent creates a tricky problem. Often they have to create an exotic past to make it credible, and sometimes this means making the defendant look promiscuous. “A lot of prosecutors in these cases are men, and as soon as there is a hint of sexual activity, they’re off to the races. Even when the relevance is pretty much impossible to see,” explains Rory Little, a professor at the University of California-Hastings College of Law.

In Amanda Knox’s case, prosecutors worked hard on this track. Giuliano Mignini described her as someone who often brought strange men home [10]. The story they created was that she killed Meredith Kercher in a bizarre Satanic sex ritual, essentially, for being a priss [11]. Dudek mentions another woman they profiled named Cindy Sommer, whom she believes was convicted of murdering her husband just because she bought breast implants with some of the insurance money she received from his death and participated in a wet T-shirt contest in Tijuana shortly after her husband’s demise [12]. Sommer was eventually exonerated, as it was discovered that her husband died of natural causes.

All of which brings us to another woman in the press lately accused of violent behavior: Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’ wife. She was the ultimate good girl, a pristine-looking former au pair turned gracious wife to a superstar. Elin seemed so lovely that when the information first broke about Tiger’s car crash, some people wanted to believe his preposterous story about how she smashed his Escalade in with a golf club to save him. But now America has accepted that Elin, well, snapped. Once everyone found out about the myriad mistresses, they could buy that a Swedish goddess could take a nine iron to a windshield.

Whether Knox is guilty remains unclear. I was convinced of her innocence [13] after reading American accounts, but upon further reading of international sources about how many times Knox changed her story, I am less sure. Perhaps I too was swayed by Knox’s girl-next-door affect and identified with her. That could have been me in college not too long ago, I thought, caught in some dystopian hell by an evil prosecutor. But in a less paranoid state, I know better. Of course even pretty young girls can kill.