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Myra Hindley is typically described as an ‘icon of evil’. In the 1960s, Hindley and her boyfriend Ian Brady sexually tortured and murdered at least two girls and three boys, aged between 10 and 17 years, in the Manchester area of the UK. All except one were sexually assaulted. She has provoked a huge amount of public commentary for more than three and a half decades after her conviction. This chapter asks how Hindley's actions were understood and interpreted at the time. Central themes are the concept ‘evil’, sexual violence, pornography, permissive society and patriarchy, as refracted through gender and class.

Murder is overwhelmingly a male affair (UNODC Global Study on Homicide, 2019). So, when women kill, their crimes gain a lot of attention and even more hysteria in both courts and media. This chapter will analyse the cases of Sally Challen, Belinda van Krevel and Maxine Carr to show that portrayals of women who are involved in killing exist on a continuum, from abused victims to those simply ‘born evil’ to the incomprehension of those whose crimes render them outside society altogether; or in simple terms, from sad, to bad, to mad. In all cases, the agency of the women is presented as incomplete or impossible, indicating our inability in heteropatriarchy to acknowledge that women are as capable as men of exhibiting the full spectrum of human behaviour. Denying agency, particularly to violent women, allows Western societies to avoid having to face and thus, attempt to understand, the female capacity for aggression.

Many depictions of women in the west, through images and old stories, focus on women as either mothers or as young girls in an idealized state. Whenever behaviour deemed correct to their sex has been disrupted, images and tales about women shift the focus onto blame, using women as scapegoats for their persecuted lives, or showing women's essentialist biological ‘weaknesses’ as the cause of wrongdoing. Surrounded by a blame culture with its negative effects, have women demonstrated a female agency as they project blame back onto a force beyond themselves? Struggling with disappointment and fears, a common belief in ‘bad-luck’ would allow women to voice a varied imaginary of superstitions, omens and presences in the past. While such imagery derives from less legitimate forms of knowledge (i.e. vernacular), remaining chiefly in folklore and fairy, such projections which move between the interior and exterior world as liminal presences expand the domestic sphere, long considered the norm for women. The function of such blaming by women, rather than be read as complaints without a resulting action, instead can be viewed as a positive action which allowed women relief and release, a chance to express and reveal the frustrations of a group with limited power over their own lives. This chapter examines how images and tales reveal and maintain blame culture towards women and suggests a view of blame and blaming transformed into survival tools for women in the past.

Literature and legend features many dangerous female characters. However, in fiction (and in film), it is the male psychopath who dominates. In the scientific literature, research into psychopathy in men also dominates. Studies of the nature and treatment of this severe personality disorder in women are sparse and little is known or agreed about its presentation in this group. Consequently, psychopathy is not routinely assessed in women and the harmful potential of some can be overlooked leading to failures in the management of risk, especially towards partners and children. The purpose of this paper is to explore how psychopathic women manifest the traits of their disorder compared to men.

This paper focuses on the representation of women in fiction who appear to demonstrate psychopathic traits. Several relevant works of fiction will be identified but three texts are described in detail and their female characters and storylines explored.

Gender differences and practice implications are highlighted. Specifically, the paper explores the nuanced ways in which women execute their harmful conduct on others and their most likely relationships with the victims of their aggression; comparisons with men are drawn throughout. Further, comparisons are drawn between the psychopathic female characters created by men and women writers.

The study of psychopathic women in fiction is an invaluable adjunct to empirical research as a way of understanding the phenomenology of psychopathy in this group.

This paper is the first to examine the representation of psychopathic women in fiction and to propose the value of fiction in the study of this particular group of clients.