Lady-killer

“ This passion seems to possess some men regularly, and it is indulged at the expense of those who offer least resistance to it, viz. the female members of their household. With them a habit is formed of assaulting their women-folk, and the habit grows in force and intensity. In most cases of brutal wife-murder that have come under my observation, the fatal assault has simply been the last of a series committed regularly when the culprit was under the influence of drink, and the woman’s death was the final incident in a long-drawn-out martyrdom. ”

“ There was real cruelty for you, she thought—to ruin a woman's life and then to come and enjoy the spectacle. What a story for him to go home with, to remember and smile over, to tell, perhaps, to his mother or Eleanor!
"The poor girl!" he might say with tones of false pity in his voice. "At the mere sight of me she fainted dead away and lay at my feet in her prison dress, her hands coarsened by hard work——"
This last proof of her utter defenselessness infuriated her. She was justified in her revenge, whatever it might be. The thought of it ran through all her dreams like a secret romance. ”

“ A world in arms, every mother's son turned upon every other mother's son, shooting, stabbing, bombing, suffocating. Cities laid waste, countrysides desolated, brave men changed to vultures, honest men to thieves—your work, Bertha Krupp! But the War Lady remains scathless! ”

“ A young and lovely lady, wedded little better than a year, holding the very highest position in society, in the sacred privacy of her own household, surrounded by faithful servants, is struck down by the dagger of the assassin. Her youth, her beauty, the sanctity of slumber, all were powerless to shield her. Full of life, and hope, and happiness, she is foully and hideously murdered—her babe left motherless, her young husband bereaved and desolate. ”

“ Next, taking into consideration two crimes, which may, inferentially, be attributed largely to the motive of revenge in both sexes, we find for that of incendiarism a ratio of 34, and for that of assassination a ratio of but 12 in 100. From this it is evident that the propensity to crime and the degree to which women recoil from publicity in its execution are widely different matters, and are traits which distinguish women from men in the perpetration of crime. ”

“ What we have set forth is mere conjecture, for the assassin may be a woman, but we think this improbable. No woman would have the nerve to commit such a crime in the open street--true the assassin, was favoured by the fog which hid his or her crime behind an impenetrable veil, but still the risk was enormous.
But be the assassin man or woman there is no doubt we have in our midst a human fiend who, possessed of a deadly weapon, namely, a poisoned dagger, can commit crimes with impunity? A slight scratch given in a certain portion of the body and the victim is doomed. ”

“ Rogers!"
She emerged from a door near the head of the stairs and came down. "Yes?" she said.
Smith grinned at her. "It's okay, lady—the job is over."
"Good! Let me fix you a drink, and you can tell me all about it."
Smith sat down on a couch. She prepared the drinks and brought his over. They sat together and sipped the liquor.
"Science is wonderful," she said.
"Yeah, it sure is," said Smith. "They spend millions figuring out fancy ways to catch crooks, and then some dumb professor invents a way so I can kill people and never be caught." ”

“ I've gone past the fact that women did it; I thoroughly believe that,—in fact, I think it means that women used the knife, but it may not, it may be merely that they were the primary causes. However, he knew, he was sure of the criminals who were to be punished. Now, if that bo means 'get both' there were only two. If it means something else there may be more than two women implicated."
"Oh, Lord, Ziz, don't gather in more than two suspects. Women don't form a club for murder."
"Women don't murder, as a rule, anyway. You know yourself, the small proportion of feminine murderers." ”

“ No woman of the upper class ever does this.
If a man is a traitor or if he desecrates a grave, the common custom, until very recently, has been to decapitate him and all his male relatives of near degree, and to execute by poison all women of his immediate family, namely, mother, wife and daughters. In certain cases the women may merely be made slaves. If a woman herself meditates treason, she will be poisoned. For murder a man is decapitated and his wife poisoned. If a woman is the offender, she will be strangled or poisoned. ”

“ The men carried on this murderous profession alone, had to carry it on alone according to their nature, and whatever the women did in the meantime, according to their nature, was not credited to them as worthy of the same distinction as murder was to the men. The women were therefore neglected and disqualified because they did not — murder. Let us imagine history without war, or the weaker sex capable of engaging in war, and the entire position of woman is changed in an instant. ”

“ A warfare in which women stand an equal chance for death and wounds is a terrible thing, and yet this is usually an inseparable feature of mob-fighting. However, setting aside the natural and instinctive horror at injuring a woman, the depraved creatures in the streets were deserving of no more sympathy than their male abettors in every species of outrage. ”

“ It never struck him that the charge of thirsting for feminine blood cannot be brought with good grace against men who were the only legislators, or interpreters of the law, who have ever treated the taking of a woman's life as crime more heinous than ordinary homicide. ”

“ The fact that young Z wore woman's clothing is to the police the strongest evidence of suicide and supplies to them evidence of a psychopathic individuality. [That fact is to myself the strongest evidence of murder since I have repeatedly witnessed the intense revulsion of prudish bigots at any cross-sex phenomenon, and have been myself half-murdered solely on this incentive.] ”

“ A witness gives a story, very circumstantial in its details, of how women were publicly attacked in the market place of the city, five young German officers assisting. The report goes on: “In the evidence before us there are cases tending to show that aggravated crimes against women were sometimes severely punished. These instances are sufficient to show that the maltreatment of women was not part of the military scheme of the invaders, however much it may appear to have been the inevitable result of the system of terror deliberately adopted in certain regions. ”

“ Fancy a girl of nineteen being convicted, whatever the evidence, of having poisoned her paramour or even if, per impossibile, she were convicted, fancy her being given more than a short term of imprisonment! A man murdered by a woman is always the horrid brute, while the woman murdered by the man is just as surely the angelic victim. Anyone who reads reports of cases with an unbiassed mind must admit the absolute accuracy of this statement. ”

“ In all crimes requiring a certain amount of brute strength, such as burglary, robbery with violence, and so on, the proportion of women to men is small. A woman very rarely possesses the animal force requisite for the perpetration of crimes accompanied with much personal violence. But where the element of personal violence does not come conspicuously to the front the proportion of female criminals to male immediately rises, and in such crimes as poisoning, child murder, abortion, domestic theft, women are more criminally disposed than men. ”

“ It is undoubtedly a terrible thing that the woman has been executed; but consider what would happen to a state, particularly in war, if it left crimes aimed at the safety of its armies to go unpunished because committed by women. ”

“ The women are violated, and the men put to death! We have been the accomplices of the executioners of so many victims; we have been so by our criminal indifference, and to-day we pay the penalty of our selfishness. ”

“ I know some such to have a heart as tender as a woman. Yet you will shut them up, it may be forever. Don't understand me to say that murder is not committed. Of course it is, and the law should deal with it accordingly. All true men regret the taking of human life, even on the field of battle. ”

“ The deep-seated line that marks a woman as different from a man appears even in the method of capital punishment meted out to women. While a man who is to be executed will have his jugular vein cut, be nailed to a wall, or be blown from a cannon's mouth, a woman will be sentenced to have her head shaved, her face blackened, to take a bareback ride upon a donkey along the public highway, and finally to be beaten to death in a bag. ”

“ Why don't she learn to shoot? This monstrous crime pursues her like a nightmare. It is an ever present peril to every woman in the land. Must she shun every alley and fly from every bush lest lascivious eyes be on her and unbridled, brutal passion block her way? Of all the hobgoblins abroad in the night, in fact or fancy or in song or story, there is none so hideous as the stealthy form of the lecherous brute that leaps forth out of darkness and drags defenseless woman to her ruin. ”

“ In connection with this division of our subject we are brought face to face with the fact that women are as capable of crime as men. "It is not the degree of crime which keeps a woman back," says Quetelet.... "Since parricides and wounding of parents are more numerous than assassinations, which again are more frequent than murder, and wounds and blows generally, it is not simply weakness, for then the ratio for parricide and wounding of parents should be the same as for murder and wounding of strangers." ”

“ The "injured husband" reserves the right to intrigue with as many women as he pleases, but his wife, being his absolute property, has no rights of her own, and if she follows his bad example he mutilates or kills her too.
HORRIBLE PUNISHMENTS Strangling, stoning, burning, impaling, flaying alive, tearing limb from limb, throwing from a tower, burying alive, disemboweling, enslaving, drowning, mutilating, are some of the punishments inflicted by savages and barbarians in all parts of the world on adulterous men or women. ”

“ I have specially instanced these foul murders as exhibiting circumstances of atrocity rarely equalled in the records of crime. Catherine Hayes and Sarah Malcolm were unsexed desperadoes, whose misdeeds throw into the shade those of the Mannings and Kate Websters of later times. But women had no monopoly of assassination, in those days when life was held so cheap. Male murderers were still more numerous, and also more pitiless and bloodthirsty. The calendars are replete with homicides, and to refer to them in anything like detail would both weary and disgust the reader. ”

“ Although not naturally more inhuman than woman, he is capable of beating his drums and his kettle-drums over a battlefield covered with ten thousand dead, if only they are the enemy's dead. But woman is the life-giver, not the life-destroyer, and in her heart of hearts ten thousand slain, whether friend or foe, are ten thousand mothers' sons, each of them a man born of a woman and suckled at her breast. What, then, brings women into the munition factories? ”

“ The best illustration of the extent of the women's privilege to murder men will be found in the consideration of the number of cases in which women have been hanged during the last quarter of a century for the offence when, by a mere chance, they were convicted. As has been stated, a woman who kills a man is usually acquitted. If she be convicted, it is almost invariably of manslaughter, not murder. If she be by some off-chance convicted of murder, an agitation for her release is usually started. ”

“ Should the murdered woman be pregnant, the slayer is amerced as if he had killed two. If the offspring would have been a boy, it is as though a woman and a man were slain, and "the price of blood" is so measured. If it would have been a daughter, the smaller price is charged, the father receiving the full price for the child and his eight hundred piastres for the murdered wife. ”

“ No criminal code in the world—least of all the laws of war—makes such a distinction; and the feminine sex has but one preference, according to legal usages, namely, that women in a delicate condition may not be executed. Otherwise man and woman are equal before the law, and only the degree of guilt makes a difference in the sentence for the crime and its consequences. ”

“ The female bandit in society, or frankly on the war-path outside, takes her weapons from an armory of foulness and cruelty unknown to men; just as the heroines and angels among women fortify themselves in sanctuaries to which few, if any, men have the key. ”

“ No matter what the provocation, legally or sentimentally, no man can be exonerated for killing a woman. No matter how little the provocation, legally or sentimentally, any woman may kill almost any man, and the jury will render a verdict of Not Guilty. ”

“ Whether that is a motive for murder depends entirely on the temper and temperament of the married ones themselves. But—it is very rarely that a wife kills her husband.”
“Why, there are lots of cases in the papers,” said Miss Ames. “And never are the women convicted, either!” ”

“ There were women everywhere around—not merely the Princesses, in their transparent muslins, and silks that a single violent movement would tear, but hard-faced old women, of the race of those whose mission it was to finish up the wounded in frontier warfare. She had often heard shudderingly of their horrible methods of torture and mutilation—picking out the wounded man’s eyes with the long needles used for applying kohl to the eyelids was one of the mildest,—and the thought of the little dagger occurred to her again. ”