Lady Killers Quotes

“Even the most psychopathic woman can realize, when staring death in the eyes, that what she valued, in the end, was life all along.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“But serial killers aren’t scary because they’re male; they’re scary because they destroy order.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“A coward’s weapon? Not so much. Poison is the weapon of the emotionless, the sociopathic, the truly cruel.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“But that’s unfair, because poisoning requires advance planning and the stomach for a drawn-out death scene. You need to look into your victim’s trusting eyes day after day as you slowly snuff out their life.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“If crimes reflect the anxieties of our time, then today is the era of the mass murderer, the terrorist. Our violent delights still lead to violent ends, but the ends change as the decades ebb and flow.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“These lady killers were clever, bad tempered, conniving, seductive, reckless, self-serving, delusional, and willing to do whatever it took to claw their way into what they saw as a better life. They were ruthless and inflexible. They were lost and confused. They were psychopaths and child slayers. But they were not wolves. They were not vampires. They were not men. Time and again, the record shows: they were horrifyingly, quintessentially, inescapably human.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“In general, people take pains to link female serial killers to lust at every possible turn, even if their crimes have nothing to do with it.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“I wonder if female serial killers haven’t been studied extensively because at the end of the day, in our heart of hearts, we don’t consider them worthy antagonists.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Why did that one friend scoot her chair away from me when I told her I “empathized but didn’t sympathize” with every woman in this book?

I don’t think our obsession stems from the fact that we are all secretly violent, using the serial killer to enact our darkest fantasies. I think it comes from our enduring love of stories.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“But I believe in the healing and illuminating power of narrative, and I think there’s something to be gleaned from looking at evil, trying to understand it, wondering if perhaps we are all a little bit responsible. Should anything human be alien to us? That question is terrifying, and beautiful.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I also love the way Joyce Carol Oates puts it: “To examine the mind of the serial killer is to examine the human mind in extremis, and should anything ‘human’ be alien to us? Where the ‘human’ crosses over into the ‘monstrous’ is after all a matter of law, theology, or aesthetic taste.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“People have endless tricks up their sleeves for softening the violence of the female: dehumanizing female serial killers by comparing them to monsters, vampires, witches, and animals; eroticizing them until they feel safe (Bad”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“The women from Nagyrév never thought it would come to this. Yes, they had killed people, but many of them didn’t even see what they’d done as murder. Murder, to them, meant blood and struggle and force. They had simply sent people off to sleep. “We are not murderesses,” they told the court. “We neither stabbed nor drowned our husbands. They have simply died from poison. It was an easy death for them and no murder.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers - Deadly Women Throughout History

“She was also charged with boiling a ghastly stew in the skull of a beheaded robber that was comprised of ingredients like rooster intestines, “certain horrible worms,” the brains of unbaptized children, and the nails of dead men.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers - Deadly Women Throughout History

“One otherwise-great book on the subject includes a line implying that the “cute girl behind the deli counter slicing our bread” could actually be a heartless murderess. Dude, just order the sandwich, you’re going to be fine.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Distanciar-se do crime é natural, mas distancie-se demais e o crime se tornará ilusão”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Distanciar-se do crime é natural, mas distancie-se demais e o crime se tornará ilusão.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Veneno: para sempre, a arma das mulheres. Infiltra-se facilmente no lar. É sútil silencioso e limpo. Veneno não deixa sangue no assoalho nem buracos nas paredes. Despejar um pouco de líquido incolor na sopa ou no vinho é a coisa mais simples do mundo. E quem, historicamente, fica em casa, cozinha a sopa e serve o vinho? Mulheres é claro.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“They caused the greatest disappointment,” wrote the Szolnok Gazette while the trials were taking place. “Instead of witches, demons and crafty murderers we see only kind, poor, old and broken women on the benches . . . Life has brought them little joy. However, they did not deserve anything better.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“«¿Cómo pueden (…) ellas, que son tan sensibles a los infortunios de los otros (…), cometer tan graves crímenes? —escribió un desconcertado reportero, impresionado por la cantidad de damas envenenadoras que llenaban las cárceles de la ciudad—. Son monstruos. No hemos de suponer que son como las demás; de hecho, parece más natural compararlas con los más perversos de los hombres.»
Claro, resultaba tranquilizador —de aquella manera— imaginar que estas envenenadoras tenían más de hombres que de chicas, pero es que eso, sencillamente, no era verdad. Estos «monstruos» eran mujeres”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“I believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“This was the ugly truth behind the verdict: Tillie may never have been locked up for life if she had been more attractive. Yes, she was clearly guilty, but Chicago had dealt with guilty husband killers before, and the pretty ones consistently walked free.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Today, some evolutionary psychologists have theorized that male serial killers are “hunters” while females are merely “gatherers,” sensibly collecting resources from their victims instead of doing it out of a deep and unslakable thirst for violence. Anna may have technically collected money from her crimes, but she was a hunter to the core.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“While her affinity for stripping her maids naked may hint at some sort of fetish, and her dealings with Darvolya and the occult may have occasionally focused on preserving her youth, it seemed that what the countess truly liked was pretty straightforward: to absolutely destroy the body.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Vanity is a much more palatable explanation for her crimes, because then all that bloodshed simply comes down to a misguided desire to look good for the boys.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Like nicknames, archetypes can be useful organizational tools, but they, too, often end up suppressing more nuanced ideas of evil and darkness in femininity”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“These are not names calculated to keep us up at night; they’re punch lines to the great overarching joke that is female aggression. (There goes Arsenic Annie. She’s never fully dressed without a restraining order!)”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“What happens when people are confronted with a female serial killer? When ideas of the “weaker sex” break down and we’re staring into the unnerving eyes of a woman with dried blood under her fingernails? First, we’ll probably check to see if she’s hot or not. (A 2015 study took pains to determine which of the sixty-four female serial killers they profiled were of “above-average attractiveness.”) This helps their crimes go down easier”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History

“Think of everything cliché you know about the 1950s: housewives spent their days vacuuming with martinis in hand and a look of existential horror in their eyes, and every home was outfitted with a TV set.”
― Tori Telfer, Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History