All the deadly women

12 July 2024

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks;

And when she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.

I have to stop swearing at the telly, it upsets the dogs. Or so my beloved tells me. It ill becomes, it seems, a lady of my venerable vintage to indulge in some loud Ango-Saxon vituperation just because the murderer unmasked on the latest detective series is yet again – surprise, surprise, what an unexpected plot twist – a woman. Shock horror. You don’t say. The ladies, God bless them, the fellows say. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, and sometimes (if you really really make them cross) can’t live full stop.

It's not a new thing. My sister recently remarked that crime programs have been doing this for absolute yonks. If you go to any streaming site you’ll find that A Touch of Frost, Morse, and Foyle’s War, all the classic workhorses of detective telefiction, have the female perp as the main villain far more often than you’d see in real life (or ‘irl’ as the young folk who never watch telly put it when messaging in their games). The newer offerings on 7Two have intriguing names like Deadly Moms Retreat, Deadly Women (and these are nothing whatever to do with First Nations women), Evil Stepmom, A Sister’s Grudge, Murder in Law (two women in the ad, both looking suitably nasty), A Stepmother’s Secret and so on and so on until any visiting alien regarding the offerings would conclude that humans are lucky to survive their mothers. You see, if you watch SVU or CSI or any of the recent noir thingies on SBS, you will very often find that their detectives will painstakingly track the fiendish serial killer only to find it was someone’s auntie. Or grandma. Or bitter-and-twisted ex-wife/girlfriend/Tinder date. Femmes fatales indeed.

I’m not saying for one moment that women aren’t just as evil as men, given circumstances, but the nature of their crimes tends to be different in the vast majority of those very circumstances. At the pointy end of badness, your average evil woman of the Countess Bathory/Lucy Letby/Aileen Wuornos stamp, is notable for being – albeit just as murderous– still a bit more unusual than your Jeffrey Dahmers and Jack the Rippers. Women who are associated with really horrific crimes tend to be sidekicks rather than main operators – Myra Hindley and Rosemary West

AUSTRALIA

All the deadly women

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