When women become killers
Some 46 years ago a mother-of-four was beaten to death by female UDA members in Belfast’s Sandy Row. Eilis O’hanlon explores how women can be just as deadly and brutal as men
Reading the accounts of those killed during the Troubles can be a distressing experience, not only because of the nature of the crimes which were committed on all sides during the conflict, but because of the number of victims who’ve been forgotten.
For their families, each death meant a lifetime of trauma. For everyone else, it was all too often a passing headline on the news, soon replaced in the mind as some abhorrent fresh atrocity took its place. It’s important to keep remembering the names and faces of the people who died, and the unforgivable circumstances in which they lost their lives, if only to combat the efforts of those who tirelessly seek to whitewash the past.
A few days ago it was the 46th anniversary of the murder of Ann Ogilby, a 32-year-old single mother-of-four, who was beaten to death with bricks and sticks in a disused building in Sandy Row in July 1974, before her body was dumped near the M1.
A motive was never established conclusively, but most theories suggest her main “crime” was having an affair with a married UDA commander.
That dreadful date may have passed without remembrance too, if it hadn’t been for victims’ advocates on Facebook making
sure to mark its passing.
It’s not hard to appreciate why they felt this young mother’s death needed to be memorialised.
Even by the depraved standards of the Troubles, the socalled “romper room” murders committed by loyalists were especially brutal; but what makes this one more notorious still is that it was ordered and carried out by members of the local women’s unit of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), an organisation which, incredibly, remained legal until 1992.
The involvement of women in such a callous murder seems to run counter to all our inherent ideas that they should be more caring, nurturing, and compassionate than men.
How could women act this way towards a fellow human being, not least one of their own sex?
The awful truth is that it was more common than we like to imagine. Even among those who weren’t “involved” directly, the nature of society at that time turned too many female hearts to stone.
There is footage of mothers in the 1970s saying they’d gladly hand their own daughters over to be tarred and feathered if they cavorted with British soldiers, and, whilst the vast majority of active terrorists in Northern Ireland may have been men, there were many notable exceptions.
On the republican side, the Price sisters and Donna Maguire (once described as Europe’s most dangerous woman for her role in a continental bombing campaign) were every bit as ruthless as their male counterparts.
Jean Mcconville was taken from her home at gunpoint by four women, and never seen alive again. Dolours Price admitted driving the Protestant mother-of-ten across the border to her death.
Mary Mcardle, later a Sinn Fein special adviser at Stormont, was likewise convicted over her role in the 1984 murder of teacher Mary Travers, a young woman like herself.
Outside of politically-motivated violence, there have been plenty of female murderers, including some serial killers. Peterborough woman Joanna Dennehy was convicted in 2013 of stabbing three men to death and dumping their bodies in ditches.
She was given a whole life sentence, one of only three women in the UK ever to be locked up without hope of release. The other two are Myra Hindley (now dead) and Rose West.
Some like to delude themselves that women who commit murder only do so because they are under the influence of evil men — what you might call the Myra Hindley defence — but the killing of Ann Ogilby exposes that as a fiction.
Her death was conceived and carried out entirely by other women, and the leader of the female loyalist unit made no bones about the fact it was “not a UDA operation”, saying it was “just a move between a lot of women, a personal thing”.
Even Joanne Dennehy, who was deemed at her trial to have no normal human emotions, told acquaintances during her own killing spree that she did not want to kill other women, especially not women with children. Those considerations clearly did not cross the mind
of those who abducted Ann Ogilby and her young daughter back in 1974.
It’s worth stressing that violent crime has, throughout history, overwhelmingly been a male occupation, and there may well be convincing evolutionary reasons for that, in terms of the different roles men and women played going back to the time of the hunter-gatherers.
Whatever the reason, most crime, including violent offences, is still carried out by men, and they make up by far the largest proportion of prisoners.
There are currently 78,000 men behind bars in the UK right now; that’s 94.9 per cent of prisoners.
Just over 3,000 are women, and more than 80 per cent of them are in for non-violent offences.
When women do kill, their crimes tend to fall into specific patterns.
One way in which Ann Ogilby’s murder fits the pattern is that women are much less likely to target strangers. They kill closer to home, for personal reasons. How it differs is in the level of violence used. Women generally use less brutal means to end life, such as poison and suffocation.
That’s what makes this case so disturbing.
What’s equally unsettling is that the two teenagers convicted of her murder — who were just 18 and 17 at the time of their conviction six months later, when they too were said to be “without feeling or remorse” — probably went on to live quite ordinary lives on their release after nine years in prison.
What darkness possessed them we may never understand, because the psychology of female killers remains far less studied than that of their male counterparts.
We explain them away as aberrations from the norm, because that’s easier than admitting the uncomfortable possibility that they may be just as capable of sadistic barbarity as men, and it’s merely a thin veil of socialisation which stops them giving in to their most evil urges more regularly.
How could women act this way towards a fellow human being, not least one of their own sex?
There are over 3,000 women behind bars and more than 80% are there for non-violent offences