In 1998, an FBI profiler stood at a homicide conference and declared: "There are no female serial killers."
He was wrong. History proves it — fourteen times over, in just one book alone.
In this episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo sit down with Tori Telfer, journalist, author, and host of the true crime podcasts Criminal Broads and Red Flags, for a conversation about her book Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History (HarperCollins): the first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens, praised by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews, and described as "a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness."
The stories in Lady Killers are largely forgotten by history; not by accident, but by design. Women like Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Tillie Klimek, Kate Bender, and Mary Ann Cotton rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction. And yet the narrative we are most comfortable with, the one our culture keeps returning to, the one that shapes our true crime podcasts and Netflix documentaries and FBI profiles, is the one where women are the victims, not the perpetrators.
Tori Telfer spent years asking why. The answer, she found, is both fascinating and infuriating.
What we explore in this episode:
- Why humans are drawn to stories about serial killers — and why the serial killer functions as "the ultimate villain" in human storytelling
- Why the FBI didn't officially recognize female serial killers until the 1990s — and what that institutional blindness allowed to happen
- The tired tropes and sexist clichés that surround female killers whenever they are caught — she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it, she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch — and why those explanations are not just wrong but dangerous
- Why female serial killers are so much more likely to get away with their crimes than male killers — and how the same cultural myths that diminish women also protect them from suspicion
- The women in Lady Killers themselves — their crimes, their historical contexts, their motivations, and the way history has mythologized, sexualized, and ultimately forgotten them
- What it means to examine these women's lives seriously — not to excuse what they did, but to understand how the world they lived in shaped who they became
- Why we don't have the cultural language for female aggression and predation — and what philosophy says about that gap
- What the obsession with true crime reveals about us — our fear, our fascination, and our need for stories with a clear villain
This is true crime done the Good Is In The Details way: with wit, rigor, genuine philosophical curiosity, and a refusal to accept easy answers.
Guest: Tori Telfer — journalist, author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History (HarperCollins) and Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion, host of the true crime podcasts Criminal Broads and Red Flags (Investigation Discovery). Her work has appeared in Jezebel, The Hairpin, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.
Good Is In The Details is hosted by Gwendolyn Dolske, Ph.D. and Rudy Salo; a philosophy, books, and ideas podcast exploring the examined life in the spirit of Socrates.
Check out Tori Telfer's book featured on the pod: Lady Killers
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