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.
Perception is not the only reason women are less likely to get caught, however.
Females are quieter killers. They tend to murder people they know in domestic settings—75 percent of their victims are members of their family—and they often use poisons that can’t be detected in toxicologist tests. Take Nancy “Nanny” Doss. By the time she was arrested in 1955, the plump, agreeable-looking fifty-year-old had killed four husbands, her mom, two sisters, two daughters, at least one grandson, and a nephew. Her favorite weapon over the three-decade long killing spree? Prunes soaked in arsenic. Authorities have also charged Huckaby with attempting to poison a man and his child earlier this year.
Maternal Nature
Part of what makes Nanny Doss’ depravity so inconceivable is that she was a mother and grandmother. And the trappings of motherhood are largely what explain why women are less likely to murder and commit acts of violence than men. It’s the age-old paradigm: men hunted and women cared for the children. Women are hard-wired to nurture. The modern shift in contemporary roles doesn’t undo thousands of years of evolutionary encoding.
When women kill, particularly when their victims are children, it “goes against the maternal instinct that is genetically programmed into every woman,” said Saul Rosenberg, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.
From the time girls are very young, they display more interest in other people than boys do. Baby girls, as young as one year old, respond to the distress of other people, showing greater concern through more sad looks and sympathetic noises. Girls make eye contact and develop language skills more quickly. All of this primes women for greater empathy and attachment.
The Victims
Yet, when women do murder, one-quarter of their victims are children. Women, generally mothers or family members, are responsible for 42 percent of the homicides of children twelve and younger by people known to them; the victims are most often infants, according to a 2001 federal Department of Justice study. Some studies suggest that there may be many more infanticides that are disguised as accidents or as SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). SIDS describes the unexplained death of infants less than one year old and claims 2,500 children a year.
Women are also their own victims. While men direct their anger outward, women, especially those who have been sexually abused, tend to direct it inward, manifesting in damage to themselves by burning, cutting, and inserting sharp objects in their bodies. Although these acts are not crimes, they are ruthlessly violent. Anna Motz, a British psychologist and author who treats violent women, says that some of her patients who have slashed themselves to the point of near death explain it as a way of “not harming anyone else.”
Like women who self-mutilate, those who commit violent crimes are likely to have been victims of abuse. Abusive mothers, for example, tend to become violent toward their children at the age the mothers themselves were abused.
For that reason, mental health experts have hypothesized that Melissa Huckaby was sexually abused when she was about the same age as Sandra Cantu. A trial may reveal some of her history, which could help explain why a woman—one who is said to have been a loving mother to her own daughter—could kill a little girl.
But it still might not dull the shock.