Women Who Kill (TASK 2)

 THE BLACK WIDOW KILLERS

According to U.S. Department of Justice, between 1976 and 2005, nearly 90 percent of homicides were committed by men.

Betty Lou Beets

In 1972, she pled guilty to a misdemeanour charge for shooting and wounding her second husband Bill Lane. Thirteen years later, the bodies of husband number five, Jimmy Don Beets, and husband number four, Doyle Barker, were found buried in the yard of Betty Lou Beets' mobile home in aptly-named Gun Barrel City, Texas. Both men had been shot in the head several times.

Belle Gunness

Belle Gunness was one of America’s most degenerate and productive female serial killers. Standing 6 ft (1.83 m) tall and weighing in at over 200 lbs (91 kg), she was an imposing and powerful woman of Norwegian descent. It is likely that she killed both her husbands and all of her children at different times, but it is certain that she murdered most of her suitors, boyfriends, and her two daughters, Myrtle and Lucy. The motive was greed-pure and simple; life insurance policies and assets stolen or swindled from her suitors became her source of income. Most reports put her death toll at more than twenty victims over several decades, with some claiming in excess of one hundred.

Katherine Knight

The first Australian woman to be sentenced to a natural life term without parole, Katherine Knight had a history of violence in relationships. She mashed the dentures of one of her ex-husbands and slashed the throat of another husband’s eight-week-old puppy before his eyes. A heated relationship with John Charles Thomas Price became public knowledge with an Apprehended Violence Order that Price had filed against Knight and ended with Knight stabbing Price to death with a butcher’s knife. He had been stabbed at least 37 times, both front and back, with many of the wounds penetrating vital organs. She then skinned him and hung his “suit” from the door frame in the living room, cut off his head and put it in the soup pot, baked his buttocks, and prepared gravy and vegetables to accompany the ‘roast’. The meal and a vindictive note were set out for the children, luckily discovered by police before they arrived home.

In our thriller Dayana is playing our Black Widow Killer, Killing The PI Stephen because of a lovers tiff. This subverts to societies expectations because we feel that women should be the "angels in the kitchen" and not the" mad women in the attic" but as you can see from above Dayana is the stereotypical Black Widow killer.