By Sue Hincenbergs
Author of The Retirement Plan
It’s fair to say that, if we were asked to speculate about how our moms spend their days, most likely we wouldn’t conjure up images of them sitting around a kitchen table with their girlfriends, sipping coffee and plotting to kill our dads. And yet, sometimes, that’s exactly what they’re doing–at least in the realm of fiction.
In my novel, The Retirement Plan, one of the wives pushes herself away from that table and proclaims, “I shouldn’t be hiring hitmen and dodging threats. I should be scrapbooking and playing pickleball.”
She’s probably right. But who wants to read about pickleball when women getting away with murder is so much more fun?
If you’re like one of my early readers, Michelle, who posted on Goodreads: “Love me some freaky murderous women,” then all you have to do is go to the bookstore or turn on the TV. Because these days, fictional killer-type gals are everywhere. And it’s a relatively new concept.
Even the highly regarded FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood said at a conference in 1998 “There are no female serial killers.” Unfortunately, we now know feminism has reached even that shadowy corner of life. Wikipedia lists seventy-two. But in fiction, as Misha Popp summarized in a CrimeReads article called “The Sisterhood of Serial Death”, historically women have most often been portrayed as the victims, then increasingly as sleuths, but rarely as the perpetrator. Keeping in mind that a serial killer is defined as someone who has killed three or more people, over a significant period of time.
And while the wives in The Retirement Plan don’t necessarily qualify as serial killers—the criteria are kind of a gray area: They are plotting the deaths of their three husbands, but there are three wives, so does that average out as one each, making them more one-off killers than serial killers? Regardless, serial or not, there does seem to be a recent trend toward fictional female killers. And with good reason.
Women killers are more interesting.
Scott A. Bonn Ph.D. wrote in a Psychology Today article “The Unique Motives of Female Serial Killers” that male serial killers are most often driven by lust whereas women are more likely to kill for profit or revenge; generally, with the aim to improve their life.
I wasn’t aware of that research when I was writing my novel, but profit is exactly my wives characters’ motive. As Nancy says, “…Larry is the one thing I can cash in. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not killing him out of spite. I’m killing him for the money. I’m not being vindictive. I’m making a business transaction.”
Additionally, Bonn notes that women killers are typically more covert and tidier than male killers. They rarely troll for victims and gravitate toward killing people close to them.
Close relationships provide rich fodder writers look for to create tension and intrigue in storylines that we are seeing more frequently. Not like twenty years ago when sitcom mom Lois got into her share of dicey situations in Malcom in the Middle, and Marge occasionally blushed from yellow to pink on The Simpsons. Their writers introduced plenty of shenanigans,but those female characters didn’t dabble in murder. Sure, one or two episodes might have skirted the idea of vengeance, but it was never served up as a regular part of the storyline buffet. On any of the shows of the time, for that matter. There’s no Friends episode entitled “The One Where Rachel and Pheobe Killed Chandler”. Could you imagine the twists if Samantha had been a serial killer in Sex and the City? Think of the havoc Lorelai and Rory could have wreaked on Stars Hollow on The Gilmore Girls. Fast forward a decade and while Michonne and Carol regularly lopped heads off zombies on The Walking Dead, even that was reactive, not so much premeditated.
But then in 2017 Luke Jennings wrote Codename Villanelle, and a year later we watched the world’s most lethal assassin, a woman, kill a man with a tuning fork on TV. Even though Jody Comer’s Villanelle was a hired gun, her killing became personal when Sandra Oh walked into her crosshairs in Killing Eve. Viewers tuned in, and other murderesses followed.
When we first meet the title character in the pages of Finlay Donovan is Killing it, she’s struggling with sticky kids, looming bills, and pressure from her ex-husband to relinquish custody of their children. By the time Finlay has a lifeline thrown to her, as a reader, I was happy for her to grab on to it, even if it meant she was taking on a side-gig as a killer for hire.
Some moms bake birthday cakes to pay the mortgage. Others don’t own a piping bag.
Finally, women characters were killing it. Literally. Now, it might just be me, but I think it’s more fun watching women do anything with friends, as opposed to travelling solo. That’s why I Love Lucy had Viv, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had Rhoda and Phyllis. There’d be no Thelma without Louise.
In the first episode of Dead to Me, we watch Christina Applegate’s Jen struggle with life as a new widow who opens her guest house to Judy, played by Linda Cardellini. We follow along and discover the role Judy played in Jen’s husband’s sudden death. As the women’s friendship develops, discussions of disposing of dead bodies are served up across their kitchen island almost as often as the kids’ pancakes.
And fictional women murderers don’t just act in their own interests—they’re generous and thoughtful. They also kill for the benefit of others. Case in point, the five Garvey sisters in Apple TV’s Bad Sisters. The opening act finds the women readying for The Prick husband’s funeral after their sister, Grace, has become his widow. In some circumstances that scenario could be a tearjerker, but not in the hands of Sharon Horgan. In her depiction of women killing for family, each episode stacks up The Prick’s malevolent misdeeds. From fat-shaming his adolescent daughter, to demeaning Grace, to framing the nicest man in the neighbourhood as a pedophile. Soon, the viewer is rooting for the sisters to rid the world of the man and improve Grace’s life.
In my novel, Nancy, a librarian turned murder-plot-researcher presented Bad Sisters to the other wives on a list of “Recommended Viewing” as they set about planning their husbands’ deaths. The one character, Pam, was astonished when she read in Nancy’s notes that the Garvey sisters tried five times to kill The Prick.
“Five times!” Pam said. “They had to try five times!”
“Well, it’s a TV series. They had to keep it going for ten episodes. They couldn’t very well have him die on the first try, could they? That wouldn’t be a series – that’d be a movie.”
While each episode of Bad Sisters ramped the motivation up a notch, sometimes, the reason to kill is there from the beginning. As mentioned, aside from improving one’s life, Scott A. Bonn found another prime motivation for women killers was revenge.
Now, there’s no question that Grace Bernard qualifies as a serial killer in Bella Mackie’s How To Kill Your Family. From the start her murder list is longer than the required three deaths. Bearing a grudge against the father who deserted her mother when she was pregnant with Grace, she seeks vengeance by systematically lopping off the branches of his family tree.
Just like the Garvey sisters sought to kill The Prick to help Grace in Bad Sisters, there’s also a trend toward women killers avenging sisters, as we see in How to Kill a Guy in Ten Waysby Eve Kellman. Millie Masters tries to track down the man who raped her younger sister and bodies pile up in her wake. In My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Ayoola has a penchant for regularly killing her boyfriends, and her sister Korede hustles to keep her from being caught. Although there’s no sisters in How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent, her character, Kitty Collins accidentally kills in self defense and then develops a taste for revenge. But always targeting those who deserve it. As Goodreads reader Nilufer Ozmekik said in their review: “Ladies and gentlemen: make some noise for Kitty freaking Collins!”.
Perhaps we enjoy these stories because we’re living vicariously through these characters, where far from being victimized, we delight in the way these women turn the tables and take control.
As my three wives debate committing to killing their husbands, Shalisa says, “I’m tired of my life being not that bad. I’m ready for my life to be what I deserve it to be. F***ing fantastic.”
Goodreads reviewer, Jessi H. Vojsk, nicely summed up this pseudo-genre of women killers with these words: “I support women’s rights, but more importantly, I support women’s wrongs.”
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