

“Elderly people would check in and never check out. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California. She is believed to have murdered between nine and 15 people, all for financial gain. She also had anger towards these men, but it was mostly about material gain.”īonn cited another comfort/gain female serial killer, Dorothea Helen Puente. Bonn said that Wuornos was also a comfort/gain killer. Female serial killers tend to be more practical in their reason for killing than males," said Bonn.ĭoss murdered for financial gain. “The most common female serial killer is what is known as a comfort or gain killer. She collected the insurance policies of several of her victims.īonn and Oxygen discussed how men and women become serial killers, and why. Her victims included her five husbands, two of her sisters and two of their children, a mother-in-law and her own mother. One such example is an Nannie Doss, who killed 11 people in Oklahoma between the 1920s and 1954.

You can go back through recorded history and see instances of female serial killers,” said Bonn. Oxygen conducted an interview with Scott Bonn, a professor of criminology and author of Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers on the subject. In 1998, according to Psychology Today, a member of the FBI stated outright at a conference that there are no female serial killers, period. But before Wuornos, most people believed that female serial killers didn’t exist.
