One of my favorite classes in college was Criminology, and like oh so many college courses, we had a large term paper to do as a final project. We had to present an original concept, with research to back it up. I wrote my paper on female serial killers, with a theory that the only reason the statistics were so low on women and murder was because people didn’t look for them.

Where did that come from? Well, statistics for female serial killers dropped dramatically in the late 70′s – right at the exact same time the FBI began heavy profiling. The generic serial killer profile is a white male, 30-50, middle class, etc. Nearly every investigation into a serial killer at the FBI begins with that standard profile. Meaning…they don’t look for women.

I don’t have the paper anymore, so unfortunately, I can’t give sources for any data. I used a lot of FBI/CIA documents (publicly available stuff, obviously), books on profiling, and lots of articles/interviews of serial killers.

My paper caused quite an outrage in my class (me? causing trouble? never!). My professor thought my theory was “plausible, but could never be proved,” but over half the class insisted it was impossible. They didn’t have data, there is none, but “women don’t do things like that.”

But of course they do. We have multiple instances in our history of women being just as nasty and evil as men, and yet, we expect women to be “better.” I keep hearing the quote “why would one woman kill another woman’s child.” People don’t say “why would one man kill another man’s child.” Women kill their own children, they murder, they’ve even raped before…raped both boys and girls. And because we all think the way we do, it genuinely HURTS to find out a woman did something like this.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Intellectually – I know full well that women can be as evil as men, obviously, I was pushing the theory over ten years ago. Emotionally – I was as horrified as everyone else to find out that Sandra Cantu’s killer, and possible rapist, was a woman. There is an expectation that women should be better, which makes absolutely no logical sense.

I still feel the same as I did back when I wrote the paper. Profiling is really great, and very helpful in solving criminal investigations, but it is dangerous when an entire segment of society is excluded for no good reason. I believe the statistics are flawed, and that there really is a correlation between the rise in white male serial killers and FBI profiliers looking for them.

To get back to Sandra Cantu (which is what inspired this blabbering), police stumbled into Melissa Huckaby as a suspect. They knew of her and had interviewed her; she told police that the suitcase Sandra Cantu was found in had been “stolen from her driveway.” But she did not become the focus of an investigation until she had done two more interviews with conflicting information (if I remember right, it was a CNN interview that was the nail in her coffin). I can’t believe that had a man said he owned the suitcase the girl was found in that he wouldn’t have been – at the very least – dragged down to police headquarters.

With all that said, kudos to the Tracy police for figuring this out. Women slip under the radar in things like this, and even though it took CNN to help “break” this for them, at least they were open minded enough to consider the possibility. Women are fully capable of evil things, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s going to be watching the criminologists and psychologists that are bound to start coming out to talk about this topic.

Why is it that while we push for gender equality everywhere, we still dodge the possibility that women could be just as evil as men? Equality is equality, after all. Women killing people on the front lines of a war? Absolutely! Women killing people…for no reason? Absolutely not. How on earth does that make sense, and why do I feel that way? I dislike logic that comes from emotion. I want facts, figures, proof. The data says we’re just as bad. But I simply can’t believe it.

Can you?