Original subtitles

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.