Women beget life, not take it, or so the common wisdom goes.
So when authorities named the suspect in the killing of eight-year-old Sandra Cantu, it shattered the image of Sandra’s murderer as a perverse middle-aged white man. The accused, instead, is a twenty-eight-year-old female Sunday school-teacher in Tracy, California whose daughter was Sandra’s playmate. Almost more shocking, officials believe that Sandra was also raped.
If she is found guilty, Melissa Huckaby is both an aberration—women kill far less often than men do and female rapists of young children are virtually undocumented—and a reminder that however infrequently, women do indeed commit unfathomable acts of violence.
Men are vastly more violent than women are; they’re ten times more likely to commit murder and six times more likely to be involved in violent crime, according to the Department of Justice.
But many crime experts believe that while female violent offenders are the minority, they are also underreported.
Denying Female Violence
Violent women don’t fit within societal notions of femininity. Men are allowed—even expected—to be aggressive, whereas females are supposed to be kinder, gentler, and maternal. The result is that crime investigators will often focus on finding male suspects and may even overlook clues that point to a woman perpetrator. Men in particular have a difficult time accepting the notion of extreme female cruelty, says Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist who has trained police officers to alter their perceptions and accept that women can also be killers.
“It’s very difficult for us to believe that females don’t have empathy—that they might be cold-blooded remorseless killers,” says Ramsland.
To prove her point, Ramsland, the author of Health Care Serial Killers and numerous other books about criminals, described the sadistic deeds of several women serial killers. Females represent 16 percent of serial killers and hold two dubious distinctions. The youngest serial killer was a ten-year-old girl (who is still alive and has a child) and the first documented serial killer is also believed to be a Countess who killed as many as 650 women for sport in the sixteenth century and is said to have bathed in their blood. Just one female serial killer, however, Aileen Wuornos, has come close to becoming a part of the American lexicon in the same vein of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
