Women are not as obsessed with control and power
and domination as men are.
[theme music playing]
MAN: The thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite -- it's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
SAHNI: When women kill, it's shocking, because as a society,
we are all socialized to expect certain stereotypic
behaviors in women.
They're congenial. They play nicely.
They know how to be cooperative,
and they certainly aren't violent.
MORGAN: People are used to thinking of men as the part of
the species that is aggressive and kills people
or does something violent.
When people think of women who have killed someone,
it's alarming to them.
It sort of violates the norm of
sugar and spice and all things nice.
That's what girls are made of, right?
We would prefer to believe that women are not violent...
[music playing]
...but it's not true.
From a scientific perspective,
most studies on psychopathy have
been conducted in male prisoners.
So the data are skewed -- right now,
we tend to think of women being a small percentage of
psychopathic killers.
But I do think there's a greater number
than we imagine.
I think that as a group, female psychopaths,
they're both overlooked, and they're underestimated.
Over the years, popular culture has assigned
labels to particularly heinous crimes
that have been committed by females that have been thought
to be psychopaths.
We're going to examine some of the unique characteristics of
female psychopathy and explore the horrific crimes
that they've committed.
So normally, if you use the term vigilante,
people will think of a man,
maybe even a cowboy film from the West.
People will generally think of it as
a man who's a vigilante trying to seek justice --
Zorro -- they don't think right away a woman.
And that's why the female psychopath who
is a vigilante flies under our radar.
SAHNI: A vigilante is both judge and jury,
and they decide who lives and who dies.
And while we see male psychopaths that have
that vigilante justice streak in their crimes,
we do see that more often with female psychopathic offenders.
One of the more notorious or well known
vigilante psychopaths is Aileen Wuornos.
REPORTER: By her own admission,
Wuornos was a hitchhiking highway prostitute
who killed seven motorists in one year.
RAGHAVAN: It's shocking, because women who use
extreme violence are rare.
And so, as human beings, we are always
attracted to or respond to things which are rarer.
We idealize womanhood in very stereotypical
and unrealistic ways,
which then leads to the flip, where we then sensationalize
their violence, so men's violence is normalized,
and women's violence is sensationalized.
SAHNI: When Wuornos is initially caught,
she claims that she killed these men
because she was sexually assaulted by them.
She was physically beaten by them.
But the evidence just doesn't support that.
What we know is some of the victims were
actually shot in the back -- to make matters worse,
Wuornos stole their cars, she stole their wallets,
and robbery was a secondary game.
Aileen is a woman who has
an upbringing that is not trauma-free.
She has a history of abuse and decides that it would be
fine to rid the world of men who then solicit sex workers.
So she's able to seduce men with the promise
of having sex with them and then killing them.
It's her way of cleaning up
the world -- from a psychoanalytic perspective,
she's just paying the world
back for whatever abuse she suffered.
And there's also a sense of gratification.
They're fulfilling a fantasy of something that they want.
We see a similar justification in another female psychopath,
Angela Simpson.
The use of sex or promises of sexual favors
and sexual interactions or flirting
is a strategy that female offenders do use more so than
male psychopathic offenders.
In the case of both Wuornos and Simpson,
we see that they were able to use this tool of promises of
sex and sexual favors to lure their victims in.
Ultimately, in the process,
these women found a way to access them when their guards
were down, and they were in,
essentially, their most vulnerable state.
SAHNI: There's no evidence that the victim
was ever an informant.
Simpson's outlook is that she is superior to most
people in that she gets to decide who's a snitch.
She gets to decide if they live or die.
MORGAN: Simpson is describing her act of killing men.
It's so matter of fact, while she's eating,
just mentioning that she has stabbed and tortured him,
as if it's the same thing as asking
for potato chips or a Diet Coke.
There's nothing shocking about it.
And this is one of the traits that we do talk about in
psychopathy, that people have
low empathy and that they seem callous
and in different to other human life.
And this is a feature that
we don't automatically associate with women.
MORGAN: Men are usually thought of as being stronger,
bigger, and more dominating of women.
And in this situation, she's flipped the power dynamic.
It's the male who is helpless and who is bound, and she is
fully in control of everything that will happen to him,
including his death.
We've all heard the phrase that hell
hath no fury like a woman that's scorned.
Generally, female psychopaths tend to be less physically
violent and more interpersonally
aggressive and manipulative than male psychopaths.
However, when women psychopaths are betrayed
or rejected, sometimes they do become violent,
as we'll see in the case with Jodi Arias.
REPORTER: I have to ask you this.
-Did you kill Travis Alexander? -Absolutely not.
No, I had no part in it.
REPORTER: But a police report shows
forensic evidence tying Arias to the murder.
Alexander was stabbed 27 times, shot once,
and his throat was cut open.
TUSSEY: Jodi Arias, upon hearing that her ex-boyfriend
was going to be going away with another woman,
became triggered, because it was
the ultimate rejection for her.
Basically, it said, he's moved on,
and now she no longer has control over him.
While rejection is difficult for people to accept,
the majority of us are able to process it, move on from it.
But in the case of a female psychopath who is violent,
their ability to handle rejection and their ability to
regulate their emotions of anger and loss
and grief really are significantly lacking.
PROSECUTOR: Was he alive when he was stabbed in the heart?
-WITNESS: Yes. -PROSECUTOR: Was he alive,
in your opinion, when his throat was slit?
WITNESS: Yes.
Normally when we hear that term about scorn, uh,
we always think of a romantic relationship where people have
been attached, and then
the relationship's falling apart,
but it can be more broad than that.
A person doesn't have to be in a romantic relationship
to feel vengeance is necessary or needed.
And a nice example of that is actually in the Cdebaca case.
MORGAN: Cdebaca is in her early sixties,
and she's had a history of a stroke.
She's living with her daughter and her son-in-law.
And when he speaks in a disparaging way about
an outfit that she's wearing, her clothing,
and she interprets it as a put-down
of who she is as a person.
It's sort of an insult that cuts
right to the core that is disrespectful.
We might say in psychiatry that this is
a narcissistic injury, and with a psychopath,
that's particularly dangerous.
SAHNI: The complete lack of remorse that she's showing is
somewhat stunning, particularly given her age as a female.
When you look at Cynthia Cdebaca, you think of somebody's
grandmother, you think of a kind,
gentle person who wants to nurture her family, who has
a softness about her, and there's
nothing soft or gentle about Cynthia Cdebaca.
She is a female psychopathic offender
who just killed her son-in-law.
SAHNI: In our culture and society,
oftentimes, elderly women are invisible.
They're not seen as authority figures.
They're also not seen as sexual creatures
or as attractive individuals any longer.
Female psychopathic offenders oftentimes are
aware about how society perceives them, as well as
the stereotypical expectations of how a female will behave.
And that isn't any more true than Dorothea Puente.
REPORTER: Police have finally caught up with Dorothea Puente.
She is the woman who is suspected of killing
seven people and burying them
in the yard of her boarding house in Sacramento
for their social security checks.
I have not killed anyone.
I told you that.
I have not killed anyone.
The checks I cashed. Yes.
TUSSEY: Puente flew under the radar
and wasn't detected for quite some time
because, first of all, she disguised herself.
Puente was only in her fifties, but she let herself
look different and older than she really was.
And she was also somebody who ran this boarding home.
People looked at her as a caregiver.
So nobody was suspecting that what she was
doing, that she was, in fact, a serial killer.
Another individual who used her identity and her occupation
as a caregiver to avoid detection
was Elizabeth Wettlaufer.
MORGAN: We go to the hospital, we think the people who are
there, or to a nursing home, they're there to help us.
They don't abuse people. They certainly don't kill them.
And then her type of psychopathy is centered around
this notion, we can think of
the angel of mercy type of serial killer.
What she'll say to other people is they shouldn't live
that long, or I'm helping them along.
Although when we look at her statements more closely,
we end up finding that there's more than meets the eye.
TUSSEY: What's different about the way female psychopaths
engage in violent behavior versus male psychopaths
is that when they are violent,
sometimes it's a little more discrete.
Whereas we might expect a male to stab someone or shoot
someone, in this case,
it's much more subtle, and it also makes it
more difficult to detect.
TUSSEY: When you work in a nursing facility,
you're expecting patients to have some behavioral
and/or emotional difficulty.
She's accepted a role as a nurse
as a caregiver to people who need help,
and she's ultimately using that to kill people.
She's a great example of a female psychopath.
She's using her knowledge and her role as a caregiver
to kill someone in a way that's very discreet
and could have flown under the radar for
who knows how many more victims had she not come forward.
While Wettlaufer was the caregiver to all of
her victims,
it's important to note that she didn't kill them on day one.
She facilitated a relationship with them,
she bonded with them, and ultimately poisoned them.
TUSSEY: Another distinction between male
and female psychopaths is their motive.
Male psychopaths may have a motive
such as sexual gratification or pleasure,
for example, like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy,
but female psychopaths
tend to have a motive toward greed
and financial security and stability.
The label "black widow" has been assigned to females
who kill significant others
or spouses to gain some sort of financial means
or security, and a great example of that is Jill Coit.
REPORTER: This Southern Belle, once a former model
and beauty queen, has been married 10 times,
and no less than two of her husbands have died in
mysterious circumstances.
There was always a different person, a different man.
REPORTER: Her youngest son, William, doesn't
remember much about his father, Clark.
He was just three years old in 1972 when his dad was
found murdered -- Jill Coit was the cops'
number-one suspect.
I have never murdered anyone, and I definitely did not
murder Mr. Coit. -REPORTER: To this day,
the case remains unsolved.
Jill received almost $200,000 in stocks
and bonds from her husband's estate.
Jill Coit is an individual who married multiple times.
She married men and lured them out of money,
out of their life savings, out of their homes.
She got them to take care of her children
while she moved on to her next victim.
She made up fantastic stories to gain their sympathy.
I don't smoke or drink.
I guess my greatest sin is that I get married.
SAHNI: Ultimately, Jill Coit ends up
marrying a gentleman named Gerry Boggs.
When Gerry figured out that Jill was a liar,
his mission is to make sure that everybody knew
that Jill Coit was a fraud.
Ultimately, he sued her for fraud.
Six days before that trial was set to begin,
Jill convinced her new boyfriend to dress in
a disguise, women's clothing,
a wig, and to enter the home and shoot and kill Gerry Boggs.
TUSSEY: So we know that male psychopaths tend to target
random victims, people they don't necessarily know.
But in contrast, female psychopaths tend to
target individuals they know.
They develop close relationships sometimes with
the very people that they're going to take advantage of.
And some female psychopaths will use behavior
like flirtation and sex
in order to manipulate and entrap their victims,
and a great example of that is Dalia Dippolito.
[Dippolito sighs]
What's interesting about Dippolito's case is that
she actually was working as an escort
when she met her husband, and it's a transactional
relationship that's mutually agreed upon.
Dippolito worked in commercial sex,
which means she's repeatedly been in some ways dehumanized,
probably exposed to violence, and probably does not think
highly of men nor see them as
anything else but objects that purchase her and ill treat her.
Dalia Dippolito learned about her husband's property
and life insurance before she married him.
And so this is sort of a long-term plan
where she marries -- she seduces him,
she marries him, and then she puts a hit on him
to inherit property and life insurance.
So it wasn't impulsive.
She planned it coldly.
Dippolito tells the undercover officer, who she thinks is
a hitman, that she's tougher
than she looks and she knows that he sees her
as a cute little girl.
What she's actually giving us is a little bit of insight
and awareness into what she knows about how to
manipulate others.
While Dippolito believes she's gonna walk
out of this as a single rich lady,
she's about to find out that
her reality is absolutely not coming true.
TUSSEY: So despite being obviously caught,
you don't see the remorse that you would expect to see.
She's actually trying to regain control of the situation
and manipulate her husband again,
and she's almost playing the victim.
Oftentimes, society doesn't find it hard to see women as
fragile and frail,
the damsel in distress, that victim that needs rescuing.
But when you have a female psychopath who knows that
about society and uses that to their advantage,
what you might actually have is not a damsel in distress,
but a stone-cold killer,
like the case of Pamela Smart.
We had sex.
-By that you mean intercourse? -Yeah, we made love.
REPORTER: In court today, Smart admitted
to having a steamy affair with
a teenage student but eventually tried
to break it off.
The defendant says the student,
William Flynn, was so distraught at the prospect of
not seeing her that he threatened
to kill himself but ended up killing her husband.
PROSECUTOR: Do you want this jury to understand
in that Bill Flynn decided to kill your husband
because you broke up with him?
I don't know why Bill Flynn killed Gregg.
I can just come in here and give my testimony.
PROSECUTOR: So even as you sit here today,
you still have no idea why he may have done this.
-Is that it? -I have not --
I didn't say I had no idea,
but I don't know specifically. -Well, I'm asking you.
What do you think? Why do you think he did this?
Probably because he thought we could be together.
There are several characteristics
of psychopathy that we can see
in this scenario with Pamela Smart.
First of all, she is failing
to accept any responsibility for this.
Second of all, there is no remorse.
There's no indication that she feels bad
that her husband was killed in the first place.
It's rather cold and callous in the way she talks about it.
There is no emotion behind it.
It's really if anything, she feels indignant and seemingly
upset with the student for sending her to prison.
[screaming]
The damsel in distress ruse that female
psychopaths can use can be very effective.
An example in the case of Jennifer Pan, who used the ruse
quite effectively initially, but it didn't work in the end.
MORGAN: She keeps holding her hand over her heart.
She speaks in a soft -- a soft voice,
is trying to cry at times.
She looks vulnerable.
We do have that instinct as humans
to try and help another human in distress.
And it's effective as a ruse, because it lets
the psychopath go undetected if
we think we're helping the victim, and we don't realize
we're actually helping the murderer.
But it doesn't take long for the detectives to figure out
that something doesn't quite add up.
RAGHAVAN: We find out that, for the last four or five years,
she has been leading a double life, one which she has
constructed intricately.
Her parents believe that she's going to pharmacy school.
She is gaining a degree, that things are going beautifully.
And then in the real life, she's really not doing anything.
And we discover that her parents strongly disapproved
of her boyfriend, who has a criminal record
and is a drug dealer.
I think the parents are probably going to
cut her off and not give her any money.
And then we see the reactive rage to that.
So an additional element of psychopathy is the parasitic
lifestyle, we call it,
meaning that they will live off of other people.
And in Pan's case, she wants her parents' money.
She's been enjoying living off their money.
She has been a parasite.
She's lying to them to get all the benefits of living with
them as long as she can get everything else that she wants.
REPORTER: Hann Pan says he saw his daughter, Jennifer, untied,
whispering back and forth with
one of the intruders, and he described that conversation as
soft and friendly.
He says he could hear his wife begging
for their daughter's safety -- "Don't hurt her,"
she cried, and then the trigger was pulled.
She worked with her boyfriend to set up a murder, and he
had hired men to come into the house and kill her parents.
She could no longer keep up the lies,
so that her entire world was going to collapse.
MORGAN: To want to hear your parents get killed
or to see it rather than asking someone
to come in and kill her parents while she's away,
it means she's much more callous and cold-hearted,
we say that lacking empathy in psychopathy.
SAHNI: When we think about parent and child relationships,
in the case of Jennifer Pan, parents
don't think that their children would ever harm them.
As they get older,
they put trust in their children to take care of them,
to care for them, and to remain watchful.
We also think of parent-child relationships in the reverse,
that parents are charged with keeping their children safe,
except in the cases of female psychopathic killers and what
we think of in popular culture as mommy dearest.
And that couldn't be more obvious
than in the case of Susan Smith.
I would like to -- to say to whoever has my children...
that they please, I mean, please, bring them home.
In 1994, Susan Smith got on national television
and pleaded with the person
who supposedly had carjacked her with her two young children
sleeping in the back.
But what we now know, tragically, is that
while she was on national television,
pleading for the return of her children,
Susan Smith the whole time knew that her children were
dead at the bottom of a lake.
She wanted to be in a new romantic relationship
and the man she was interested in
was not interested in dating a woman
with young children.
Susan Smith strapped her children into their car seats
and let the car essentially
roll into a body of water, where they slowly drowned.
For a woman to turn around and kill her kids is --
is not right.
There's no way to explain it.
You can't even understand it.
RAGHAVAN: It's shocking, because, in fact,
women who use extreme violence are quite rare.
We are primed as a culture to be more in
shock when women are violent, where we normalize
men's violence.
If someone has psychopathic traits and they become
a mother, it might change things for a little while.
And the part that's narcissistic,
she might be excited at the idea of creation or birth.
But once the reality comes in, the deep, personal sacrifices,
the loss of time, where you put your money,
the perhaps absence of attention from
potential partners,
um, it immediately and quickly becomes less exciting.
SAHNI: To be a successful, effective parent,
your children's needs oftentimes come before
your own, and in the case of Elaine Campione,
that was something that smacked her in the face
when she and her husband separated,
and he filed for full custody of both of their daughters.
Elaine Campione's sense of self-worth, her identity,
and her entire sense of self
was based on the idea that she was this perfect mother.
She was doting over the children.
She was a loving mother, and ultimately, her ex-husband's
decision to leave the family
was not just a rejection of her,
but it was him rejecting her daughters.
This is Campione's narrative.
So her ex-husband now files for full custody in court.
So in her mind, Elaine Campione only has one choice.
DETECTIVE: Mm-hmm.
What she's essentially describing are the post mortem
effects of her having drowned them to death.
And after Elaine Campione drowns each of her daughters
and then dresses them up in cute little princess dresses,
curls their hair, and puts them to bed, dead,
and while it may seem like Elaine Campione is having
a psychotic episode and she's out of touch with reality,
what we know from the rest of the case file is
this was just another example of Campione's attempts to
manipulate investigators.
So her performance appears theatrical.
It appears as if she's saying what she thinks will help her
manipulate the situation.
She's acting the way she thinks might be helpful for
her, pretending as if she has no idea what's going on.
She actually very clearly does just a few
minutes later whenever she asks for a lawyer.
TUSSEY: She created this video of her girls
just before she murdered them.
She's presenting herself as this very loving mother.
It's almost like she wanted to create this
to further hurt her ex-husband, to show him,
"Look at your beautiful girls.
Look how much we loved each other,"
and then she murdered them.
So it's another way for her to exact callous
vengeance against him for seeking custody.
She ended up taking a handful of pills, and by
all accounts, it appears she did not expect to wake up.
And this was really her last memorialization of what kind of
mom she was and what she wanted
to be the narrative, and consistent with what we see
with many psychopathic individuals,
her need to remain in control of
the narrative prevailed right up until the end.
TUSSEY: Becoming a parent doesn't stop you
from being a psychopath.
You can still have psychopathic behaviors
and tendencies
no matter what role you have in a family.
She manipulated her ex-husband
and used their children as pawns.
They were her tools, unfortunately,
to exact harm against her ex-husband.
RAGHAVAN: There are female killers, and yes,
they're very violent, but they are rare.
I think that's important to say.
Eighty to 90 percent of homicides are committed by men,
and the remaining homicides that are committed by women.
most of it is in self-defense.
That is not true of men.
MORGAN: It's important to focus on cases of women
who are psychopaths, because it's a cultural blind spot.
It helps us remember that there are female psychopaths,
and there's male psychopaths, and that to be equally
protected against both,
I think we need to be able to look for those signs
and understand how sometimes cultural stereotypes will
blind us right away to seeing those signs.
SAHNI: The female psychopath, while it is
a seemingly rare population,
what we also do know, which is somewhat humbling, is that
the female psychopath may go more undetected.
What makes them more dangerous is that they blend in.
They are upstanding members of society on the surface.
They hold leadership positions.
They are sometimes the backbone and fiber
of social organizations, and they
also go undetected, because of how they're able to navigate
their crimes.
They tend to use their interpersonal relationships
and willingness to manipulate others in
a manner that allows them to identify and prey on their
victims more easily than men.
And as a result, it may also
be part of why they avoid detection.
MAN: Are you remorseful?
-Not at all? -MAN: Why?
Why would I be? What's the difference?
Everybody has a reason to kill.