WHY WOMEN KILL
It’s usually about the money
In June 2009 Patrick Maqubela’s body was found in his bed in his Bantry Bay flat. The acting judge had been dead for two days when he was discovered shrouded in a sheet with the heater on and the curtains drawn. He is thought to have been suffocated with clingwrap.
His wife, Thandi Maqubela, is in jail for his murder.
A forged will, and phone calls to his life insurer shortly before his death, pointed to a motive of money. Judge John Murphy’s judgment at her trial resonates with the latest research on women killers across the globe: “The evidence shows beyond all doubt her proclivity towards deception, fraudulent conduct, and an almost delusional tendency to fabricate, aimed unrealistically at self-preservation and advancement.”
Maqubela had hired hitmen to help her carry out the deed.
A growing interest over the past five years in women who commit murder has produced some uncomfortable theories on how we have evolved across gender lines: men kill for sex, women kill for money.
Marissa Harrison, an evolutionary psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, argues that women, with their finite supply of eggs, have “limited reproductive potential” and have thus “evolved to place a premium on securing resources”. Men, with their “relatively unlimited sperm”, are likely “predisposed to seek a vast number of sexual opportunities”.
Harrison led one of the biggest studies on female killers to date: her research, which focused on women who had killed three people or more with a “cooling-off period” of at least a week between murders, looked at 64 such killers in the US who committed their crimes between 1821 and 2008.
This took her into the heart of some notorious cases which are as intriguing today as they were when they happened.
Jane Toppan, a nurse at Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts, administered deadly morphine cocktails and other poisons to more than 30 people. In 1901 she confessed to the murders.
While most of her victims were patients in her care, they also included her best childhood friend and her foster sister.
Dorothea Puente, dubbed the Death House Landlady, ran a boarding house for the elderly and infirm in California in the 1980s. She would cash in her tenants’ security cheques, and kill them off in cold blood if they moaned about it.
Police discovered seven bodies buried in her backyard.
While there were variations, the killers explored by Harrison and her team typically had a caregiving role (nurses, stay-at-home moms, Sunday school teachers, babysitters), were well-educated, and were white.
Her findings relate directly to evolutionary psychology — how the human brain and psyche, influenced by natural selection, have developed over millennia.
According to Harrison’s research, published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, the female serial killers “knew all or most of their victims, and most were related to them”.
In all cases, “they targeted at least one victim who was a child, elderly, or infirm — those who had little chance of