Inside The Minds Of Australia’s Worst Female Killers

Katherine Knight, Sarah Makin, Caroline Grills, Catherine Birnie, Helen Moore, and Rachel Pfitzner are among the most notorious female killers in Australian history. But what compels a woman to take a life, whether it’s someone close to her or, more rarely, a stranger? Dr Xanthe Weston, a criminal psychologist, has long been driven by this very question. Drawing on years of research into cases like these, she joins us today to explore what she’s discovered - why women’s motives for killing often differ from men’s, and whether some perpetrators are inherently predisposed to violence, or shaped by circumstance. LINKS Listen to the Method & Motive podcast here https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/motive-method/id1676882162. If any of the contents in this episode have caused distress, know that there is help available via Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. CREDITS Guest: Dr Xanthe Weston https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533976/Host: Gemma Bath https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemmabath/?originalSubdomain=au Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahli-blackman-205a891b7/?originalSubdomain=au Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy Audio Engineer: Jacob Round Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  It's March 1979 in South West Sydney. And Helen Moore has been put in charge of babysitting her two brothers while her parents enjoy a night out. Only four days ago, her stepbrother, 14-month-old Andrew, was discharged from hospital after being found unresponsive in his cot. Doctors say he narrowly escaped from SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But 17-year-old Helen is confident she'll be able to handle the evening alone as she ushers her mum and dad out the door. Later that evening, the 13-year-old brother Craig hears Helen screaming. He rushes into her bedroom and sees Andrew. He's not breathing again. The young boy quickly starts to give the toddler mouth to mouth

• 0:46Speaker 00

  while Helen runs to the neighbour's house for help. But it's no use. Andrew is gone. At first, his death is ruled as SIDS. But a trail of death starts to follow Helen. By early 1980, four children have died while being babysat by Helen. Two more have been found unresponsive and only just survived. By the age of 18, Australia will know Helen as the babysitter killer.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  I'm Gemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. Moore ended up confessing to the murder of three children and the attempted murders of two others. Her crimes shocked the country, not just because female serial killers are rare, but because of her age when convicted, just 18. She's back in the news this year because she's been found at the age of 63, living by a different name on the central coast of New South Wales, babysitting children again. She served just under 14 years for her crimes nearly 50 years ago. There's no denying that female killers are a media goldmine.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Women who kill have long fascinated society and the press has played into that, often in ways that seem to criticise and chastise them more than their male counterparts. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that in the 10 years to 2014, women were responsible for just 13% of murder. As for mass killing events, worldwide figures show just 6% are perpetrated by women. It would be amiss of us not to mention the Victorian case of Erin Patterson while on this topic. In late 2025, she was convicted of the triple murder of three relatives with a lunch containing poisonous mushrooms. She was also charged with one count of attempted murder for poisoning Ian Wilkinson, who survived.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  However, given the case is still going through the appeals process, we will not be discussing it today. Our guest is criminologist Dr Xanthe Weston, who has written and studied female killers in detail. She joins us now. Dr Xanthe Mallett, thank you so much for joining us on True Crime Conversations. If you could design a study today around female killers, what unanswered questions would be at the top of your list?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Oh, hello. Thanks for the invitation to joining and what a question to open with, like a study on female serial killers. Well, I think what's really interesting about female serial killers is that they are often motivated by different things to men. And so much of the work we've got is on male killers that we kind of assume that women are going to be, you know, very similar in their psyches. And they're actually not. They kill for different reasons. I mean, they, they obviously can be driven by rage and jealousy, et cetera, which are a lot of male crimes, especially interpersonal crimes within the family, intimate crimes. But also, you know, they can be extremely greedy, they can be very callous and cunning, and especially psychopaths, female psychopaths, express very differently to the male version.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  So we kind of assume we understand the psyche of a psychopath that may end up killing someone. Um, but women can be very different.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Female killers as a cohort are very rare, female serial killers even more rare. How much study has been done into those two areas, both here and worldwide?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Well, certainly less people are killed by women. I mean, women obviously do kill, but a smaller proportion than men, we know that. Um, but female serial killers, yes, and mass murderers, very, very unusual. So it's really difficult to study something of which there are a few examples. I mean, we have quite a few examples of what I would call black widows, women who have encouraged other people to kill on their behalf. They can be extremely manipulating and cunning and cruel. And so we've got a few of those, but it is really, really unusual. So the ones we've got are extreme cases, but they are few and far between. So drawing lines of commonality can be really difficult.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  You've dedicated a lot of your time and research to women who kill.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Why is that? Why is this such an area that is of interest to you?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Oh, God, that's a good question too. So I have, I won't say who, I have a family member who has some very unusual behavioural traits. Now, they've never killed anyone, right? But as I grew up, I did wonder why they behaved the way they did, why they treated other people the way they did. They did so with impunity, they had no empathy or sympathy or remorse, and, and seemed to live off other people almost like a parasite. And as I grew up, I was thinking, what is it about this person? They enjoyed causing harm to other people. They enjoyed it when other people were distressed. And they were one of those people who likes causing trouble. And I was like, what is it about this personality? And then I, I started to learn about female psychopaths.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And the male psychopaths, we're all kind of aware of, we think of the ivan mulats, certainly if they're violent, but you can get what we call very successful psychopaths. So they might be businessmen or. Pilots or anywhere where there's a hierarchy of power and that's what we think of as like the male psychopath, that very dominant but charismatic often.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Manipulative. Um. But females can often prey on other people and they have those different traits. They can use emotions against you. And so when I started to learn about female psychopaths, I was like, that's what it is. That's what she is.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  And then I started to get into trying to understand when women do kill, how it expresses differently, because I think a lot of female psychopaths slide under the radar because we, we use the same determinants that we do for men.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  But they're not the same. And so I think they kind of slide through because we expect them to express the same way behaviourally and they don't.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Broadly speaking, let's get into the nitty gritties of the key differences between male killers and female killers. What motives are typically different between the genders?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So men, I mean, we've seen it so often. I actually work in obviously a centre now for domestic family violence research. So a lot of male killings, when we're talking within the family, et cetera, and a lot of instances every week, in fact, sadly, um, males often kill for rage and jealousy and control.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And that's what we see with domestic violence killings. And that may be perpetrated against a partner, not necessarily just female. We do see that in homosexual relationships as well, males killing males. Um. And on sometimes what we class as family annihilators. So they may kill the woman and the children. And we saw that with Hannah Clark. So men can kill for those very emotional reasons, but they can also kill other men for the, you know, the same reasons, you know, taking out a, um, a new partner, that, you know, an ex's new partner, again, that jealousy, that jealousy and rage and control. So we

• 8:13Speaker 01

  see a lot of that. Women, less so, they're less controlling and less dominant, certainly less violent in that space. But certainly greed is something that I've seen with women, which you wouldn't necessarily expect, but they can be extremely cold. So obviously, I'm not talking women generally, but women who choose to kill. And there can be a level of premeditation with that as well. So financial gain is something I've seen. Reasonably commonly. Obviously, some men kill as a result of greed as well. Um, but that's something I've seen kind of commonly or more commonly with women.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  I've seen you say that in essence, men's violence is offensive and women's violence is defensive. Can, can you expand on that?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Men will more often instigate the violence and perpetrate it against those that they perceive are weaker. So again, a lot in that intimate space. So partners, ex-partners, you know, ex-partners are highly at risk if there is already some level of domestic violence present. And women can often strike, strike out when they're protecting themselves or family, etc. So, you know, they, a woman may be pushed to violence as a result of that intimate violence and they then respond. And again, this is very general. So I'm not saying that women can never be the protagonist and the, the lead cause of the violence. But generally

• 9:44Speaker 01

  speaking, that's not the pattern that we see.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  When something does fall outside of that norm, where the woman is the protagonist, someone that comes to mind is Catherine Knight, who killed and skinned her husband and fed him to her children.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Well, she tried. They didn't eat it. God, they didn't eat it. She had prepared the meals, that's true. But fortunately, um, yes, they didn't actually eat that meal.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  But by all accounts, she was the aggressor in that relationship. How do we even analyse someone like that?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  You know, Catherine Knight is an outlier. So yes, she did murder her husband. She stabbed him multiple times. She, we believe attacked him in the bedroom, stabbed him. He tried to escape.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Um was either fell back into the house or or was pulled back into the house and was stabbed a number of times, around thirty something times, I think, in the front and back of his torso. Um. And then, yes, extreme violence, you know, decapitated him, his head was found. Anyone sorry who's listening, but you know, we are talking in extreme level of violence. And yeah, how do you how do you interpret why somebody would go to that extreme? We have to go all the way back to Catherine's upbringing. It was incredibly dysfunctional. Um. Her father was violent to her mother, sexually violent. Um. And her mother used to kind of describe these acts to Catherine. Um. Catherine herself was victimized as a young child.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  So there were never excuses for these things. But you you can't look at somebody who's had such a damaged, dysfunctional childhood and expect them to grow up and be normal. Now Catherine expressed violence through many relationships, extreme violence through many relationships. And I like to think that if somebody were behaving the way Catherine were now, that it would be dealt with very differently because, you know, she had attacked people. She'd crushed people's skulls, you know, these are people she was in relationships with. So every red flag was there that she was a danger. Um. She was sane at the time, though. She she claimed she didn't remember what happened, but her psych evaluation said she was sane.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  She has been diagnosed, I believe, with borderline personality disorder, um, which obviously can impact how somebody has relationships. You know, it's very dysfunctional, um, or can lead to very dysfunctional relationships. But yeah, she is an outlier. And I think we have to go right back to ground zero and her childhood to try and understand why she developed the violent tendencies that she did.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Well, like you say, that extreme violence is something we usually see from male perpetrators, not so much female perpetrators.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And she.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Used weapons, she had carving knives at home. So she was, she worked in the abattoir and that was apparently her ideal job. She, she moved up to, you know, the boning process and she was given a set of knives which she used to keep in the bedroom now.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Alarm, alarm.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, red flag.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. In case she ever needed them. So yeah, I mean, serious red flag. She enjoyed cutting up animals. She was extremely, extremely violent to her partners. And so, yeah, it's, um, she, she is a case that is one of those extremes that you kind of, it's very difficult to understand, which is probably why she was the first woman in Australia whose case was marked never to be released. So when she was sentenced for that crime, the judge felt she was so dangerous that she should never be eligible for parole.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And that still stands. And it's happened very seldomly in Australia.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  So if those kinds of methods that she used are very unusual for women, what methods of murder do women typically steer towards?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, see Catherine used knives. That was her go to, or frying pan in a couple of instances, actually. Yeah. And it wasn't even just her partner. She, she physically harmed, she, she harmed a significant number of people. But yeah, she was very um proactive, how I would describe it, in her violence. Whereas women tend to choose methods such as poisoning that are more hands off. And I don't know whether that's psychological or whether actually because generally speaking, if a woman wants to or, you know, harm especially a male, there's going to be a size disparity there often, and there's strength disparity. So, you know, your, your go to weapon may not be a knife because they're more likely to be able to disarm you.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Whereas something like poison, there's that distance. So men tend to use methods, strangulation, guns if they can get hold of them, but knives. Um, whereas women tend to be more hands off. Poison is not an uncommon method, or if you're a black widow, manipulating someone else into committing the violence for you.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  The other outlier I want to talk about is female serial killers. We do actually have a few in Australia.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And when I was going back through the archives, there are quite a few there that I didn't. Recognise the names of, we were just talking off air, one of the names that popped up is Sarah Makin. Can you tell us a bit about that case? Because people might not know her name.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Sarah and John Makin were actually baby farmers back in the 1890s. So I can, you can see why people wouldn't necessarily know about this now. It's not going to be on the news. They're not going to be probably listening to documentaries about it. Although my colleague and I, Tim Watson O, did do an episode on our podcast on baby farmers recently because they are such an interesting group. So in essence, you know, back in the 1890s, it wasn't acceptable to have babies out of marriage. So a lot of young girls were getting, you know, getting pregnant. And what do you do when you have a baby? And it's so socially, you know, there's a stigma around that. So there used to be these baby farmers, they would take in these illegitimate children. They would feed them, sometimes just look after them like babysitting,

• 16:04Speaker 01

  but sometimes actually take permanent care of them. And obviously the mothers would be paying for this care and they would expect the baby to be looked after. But the Makins weren't looking after these babies. They were in fact killing them and burying them in the back garden. So the properties that they were renting. And I think in that case, the motive was purely financial.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Like you said, greed.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Greed, you know, they took in these babies, the mothers thought they were being cared for. And, but they didn't actually want to feed them, right? They didn't want to resource these children. So sadly, they killed them.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Gemma Bass. I'm speaking with criminal psychologist, Dr. Xanthe Weston. Up next, we dive into the babysitter killer case and the psychology and motives behind Helen Moore's murders.

• 17:02Speaker 02

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• 17:37Speaker 00

  Another name that has actually been in the news recently is Helen Moore. So I, the listeners will have heard me talking about Helen at the start of this podcast, but they might not have heard of her either. Her name back in the day in the newspapers was the babysitter killer. And she's back in the news this year because kind of some reporters have found her living on the central coast of New South Wales. And she's once again babysitting children. What do you make of this case and of the resurgence of her in the headlines?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Well, this one kind of blew my mind slightly because I hadn't heard of her. So we're talking a woman who-

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Which is wild for a criminologist that's based in Australia.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Wild for a criminologist based in Australia who's written a whole book on women who killed children that they care for. And obviously she was a quote babysitter, but a number of the people that she killed, you know, one of whom was her brother. Another was a cousin, you know, these are people close to her. And I still have questions over her younger brother, Andrew, who died aged two, who was the first death associated kind of with Helen Moore. In that sense, she was, she was his older sister. She was caring for him at the time of his death. Now, that death was listed as natural causes and according to Helen was the reason she went on to start murdering other children.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I have my serious doubts about that because the trauma that she allegedly went through as a result of her little brother's death. But you know, she was, she was quite prolific. She killed a number of children. She then admitted it. She showed no remorse from what I can tell. And she's even confessed to a school friend that she killed Andrew. So this blew my mind that a woman who is a-

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Mass murderer of children, including those within her family. I didn't know about her. And more worrying, yeah, she's out, she's living on, you know, the the north coast of New South Wales and has access to children.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  I think she's changed her name, so she's now anonymous. And that causes me significant concern that somebody out there now with that history and that lack of remorse has access to children.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  The thing that shocks me is that she was eighteen when she was convicted. For such a young person to have such.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Like, to have that level of violence.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and she started murdering at seventeen.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  So she, you know, she murdered three children and there were further attempts. This is all within a very short period of time, kind of between seventeen and eighteen years. Some people began to suspect something was very wrong because these children around her that she was looking after kept dying or almost dying. And yeah, that level of violence in such a young person. And I just wonder, oh, you know, what treatment did she receive when she was incarcerated? Her rehabilitation, do we know now that she isn't a danger? And if so, how can we be sure? How can the community be sure that the children that she has access to are safe?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  The one kind of area of murder that I don't hear women being involved in as much is those random killings. So what I mean by that is, you know, the death of Ayam Masawi in Melbourne, who was murdered while walking home after getting off the bus, or Sarah Everard in the UK, who was picked up by that dodgy cop who just happened to see her on the side of the road, or.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Um. Gilmar is a big name that people will remember. She was stalked on her way home from the pub.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Toy accordingly, yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Exactly, the amount of names we have. I mean, obviously stranger killings are rare, but they do happen quite a bit with male perpetrators. Do we ever see females doing that?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Not really. So we're talking the situational, somebody may be out and they may be hunting, as you might want, you know, to put it. So we're talking about, generally speaking, a male perpetrator who is out looking Clermont killings as well. So these are stranger killings where somebody may be looking for a type or a certain situation. They may be backpacking or waiting at a bus stop or in other ways of vulnerable. So they're very situational, but not individual to the person. Yeah, we don't see that generally with women. If somebody is abducted and murdered, I'm trying to think of a case where a woman has done that.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  And I actually can't think of anything. I'd be interested to know if the listeners can think of any examples where a woman has just chosen to kill for the sheer thrill of it.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  That doesn't really happen.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  We did do a case just recently, Gemma Lilly from Perth. But that was still a planned case where she just loved murder, loved serial killers, and kind of decided she wanted to kill someone before the age of 25 and used, you know, found a victim. But that's still not hunting on the street, deciding you're going to take something. Like, it's slightly different. It's more that, like, premeditation that we talked about before. Whereas you don't hear about women just, oh, there's someone, I'm going to take them and I'm going to kill them.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  With the case of Toy accordingly, he was obviously a massive case in Queensland, up near Cairns a few years ago, 2018, she was murdered. She was just walking along the beach with her dog. And Rowinda Singh, who's now been found guilty of her murder, happened across her. I mean, there's some indication that, you know, he was kind of watching people on the beach. He did admit being there. And what he was doing there, you know, there are still some questions around that. I do get the sense that maybe he may have been spying on young girls at the beach or whatever, but that was purely situational. Right? She just happened to be on the beach. Maybe he didn't intend to kill her, I don't know.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  But yet, we don't see that generally with women. I think as soon as, you know, a situation like that occurs and Toya's body was found, they're looking for a man. You know, they're not, they're not looking for a woman who happens across, especially another woman, and just kills her in the heat of the moment. You know, that's, that's not something that women tend to do. If they're going to kill in the heat of the moment, there's a reason for it. Either it's within the home, it's an argument, it's some sort of emotionally driven. Or they may have some, there may be drugs involved or some mental health condition. They may be in the middle of a schizophrenic break, for example. And I'm not demonising schizophrenics at all, but we do know that some,

• 24:32Speaker 01

  some serious unmedicated mental health conditions can lead to violence. Now, normally speaking, schizophrenics are much more likely to harm themselves and other people. But there are those occasions when that does happen.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Well, let's go further into mental health because it is a factor in both male and female killings. But how, how much of a factor is it when it comes to women who kill?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  It depends on the kinds of cases we're talking about. So, you know, with the Makins, I think they probably had personality disorders. They may have been psychopathic, for example, in that even if they didn't enjoy the violence, they're not necessarily sadistic. So sadistic people enjoy causing physical harm to others.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  The psychopaths just don't have any remorse or guilt or shame. They don't feel love. So harming somebody else, if it, if it meets their need, is easier to them because they're not restricted by those emotions that, that we would feel. So I think instead of mental health conditions, I think they're probably more behavioural conditions like the psychopathy that would basically allow people to behave in that way. But ultimately, we, we have seen cases where somebody has had a serious mental health condition. They haven't been medicated and that has led them to become violent, but they are outliers.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Well, you've written a book called Mothers Who Murder, which is a topic that people love. They are particularly villainised. But I would say that mental health plays a role in that area, mothers who murder.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Um. What's the case that comes to mind the most when I say that?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Well, there were a couple in that book, but um I know that one you're interested in is Rachel Fitzner. Now, she would certainly fall into that mental health category. This was a young woman who killed her son, Dean Schillingsworth, who was a toddler. Um. And when you look at Rachel's background, again, not making excuses. She had an incredibly troubled dysfunctional background. She's claimed her father sexually offended against her, but that is unproven. She's cognitively impaired, so she has a very low IQ. She also has a personality disorder. And the relationship with her ex-partner, Dean's father, um was also violent.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  There was allegations of substance abuse on both sides. And she said that basically every time she looked at Dean, she saw his father. And so she, she in essence tortured that little boy throughout his very short life. He was abused, he was neglected, and eventually she snapped and shook him because she was so frustrated with him. He sadly had a seizure and I won't go into what happened after that. It's really quite unpleasant. But when you look at Rachel's background, I just remember thinking, how did social services and social services, no doubt, let that family down? The, the child was at risk. There was a risk report in the hospital when she was giving birth to him

• 27:41Speaker 01

  because of the interaction between um the father and uh Rachel Fitzner. So I just looked at that and thought, how on earth could that woman who's damaged, who's cognitively impaired? She cannot have a healthy relationship with these children. And she was even calling social services, asking them to take him away. And they didn't respond.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Which is really telling, isn't it, that she was reaching out for help as well?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  She knew, she, she has um. I believe it's borderline personality disorder she was diagnosed with, so a really strong fear of kind of abandonment and loss, and yet you can't let go. So she was asking social services to take Dean away because she knew she didn't want him there, that he was triggering her, and yet she couldn't give him up at the same time. And so this is an expression of what she was going through psychologically. And emotionally, she just couldn't cope and she snapped. So even though she was neglecting him, I don't believe she understood the extent to which she was neglecting him. And I don't think there was premeditation in the murder.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I think in the moment, she just couldn't cope and she didn't know what to do afterwards. So she is an example of someone who needed support. The children should not have been with her. They were at risk. And so I think the community let them down.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  And social services let that family down. And the most heartbreaking thing is Dean was actually in the form of custody of his grandmother at the time. And Dean should have been with her, but Rachel had kept him after a visit. And they were trying to get, the grandmother was trying to get him back through the courts. And, you know, that boy was loved. If he'd been with his grandmother, he would have been safe. If social services had acted sooner, there was no reason for that boy to be harmed. And, you know, that is just such a heartbreaking story. I hope lessons were learned.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  But certainly, mental health, cognitive impairment, huge, huge impacts in that case. And Dean would be alive if she had had more support.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  You know, that stat of thirteen percent of women are female murderers.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  How many of them would be?

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Parents or mothers killing children.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  It does happen. Around, around 27 children are killed per year in Australia by a caregiver. And around half are the mothers and, or half the females and half males, often mothers.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  That's really interesting that it's half, half.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's actually more equal than you might think. We tend to think of the males. Yeah. As I said, the one case that obviously jumps to mind is the Hannah Clark case, where Rowan Baxter killed Hannah and her three, or their three children before suiciding. So we tend to think if it's something males do to punish women, but certainly women do do it. I've seen a number of cases of that. Generally speaking, there is a mental health condition in there. And there's often social isolation and all these other factors going on as well. Dysfunctional childhoods, often abuse in relationships. Sometimes women kill their children because they actually can't cope anymore and don't want to leave them behind.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Um. So there's a really misguided altruistic element to it. Sometimes they, I mean, I've seen one case where a woman killed the children to punish the husband. Um. That's the case of Donna Fitchett. She killed her two boys. She was recognised as, you know, a good mother. Up until that point, she was a nurse and she murdered her two boys to punish her husband.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Which is usually what you would see from a male killer of children. That jealousy and that like, I can't have them, so you can't have them.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  She just wanted to punish them. She knew she was going to go to prison and she, yeah. She, she wanted to cause him as much harm as she could. So she killed the boys, she drugged them, then she suffocated them, she bathed them, she dressed them, she put them in their bed. So when he got home from work, they looked like they were sleeping.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Oh my goodness.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  When I think about the stories of. Female killers that have killed children and I compare them to the headlines I see about men who kill. I would argue that the women are demonised more by society. Would you agree with me on that?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I would. I think that a mother who's accused of harming a child, especially their own child, is seen as the worst, the worst. We don't want to believe it, right? Because mothers are meant to be nurturers, you know, they they raise children, they protect children, they don't harm children. You know, when you think of stranger danger and you think of people who do intentionally harm and abduct children, we think of men. So when a woman is accused and ultimately found guilty, or even during that kind of whole legal process, I think if people do believe they've harmed a child, the reaction, emotional reaction is so much stronger. So if you think of, you know, historical cases, you know, Kathleen Fogle, for example.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Who has now been exonerated.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  You know, she didn't react the way that people wanted her to act. She wasn't crying in the stand. And so she was considered, you know, Australia's worst female serial killer for 20 years. And a number of us were asking questions, saying, you know, this doesn't, this doesn't seem right. Yet, when I was saying that back in 2014, when my book came out, because I did a chapter on Kathleen in that book, and I raised doubts about the case then. And the emails I got, mostly from women, threatening emails, you're defending a baby killer. And all I was doing was saying, I don't think there's evidence beyond reasonable doubt that this woman is guilty of these crimes. And yeah, I mean, serious threats of violence.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  After the break, Zathy tells us about the women she believes shouldn't still be behind bars and the psychology behind Kelly Lane's case.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  She's not the first and she won't be the last woman that we've seen that has been exonerated or has been found to be not guilty of these crimes of killing their child. The biggest one is Lindy Chamberlain. Baby is Aria, Dingo has my baby, if people are unfamiliar, but you know, most people know that story. She was also exonerated of murder.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  So I guess what I'm trying to say is we demonize women in the headlines, but why are these women being put behind bars and then they haven't done it? Are we, what's wrong with our, our society and our justice system? And is there something at play there? Or is there just as many men that are exonerated as well? It's just that I'm so focused on these cases.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think that when a woman is accused of harming her own child, like Lindy Chamberlain, like Kathleen Fobig, there is a certain sexual bias there, a gender bias. So, you know, I, I don't remember the media pack images of Lindy from the original ones from her walking to court, but I've seen them, right? I've studied the case and I started my book, Mothersy Murder, with Lindy's case because I wanted people to read the rest of the cases with an open mind because I, you know, if you talked about Kathleen Fobig at the time, everyone believed she was guilty. Um, another one I raised questions about in that book was Kelly Lane. All three women, if you look at them, none of them behaved as they, the public wanted them to.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  They didn't cry, they weren't, you know, a mess on the stand. And so I think we, we judge them and think they're not behaving as we would expect and therefore they're guilty. And then there's nothing, you know, that isn't awful enough, you know? People would see them hung, drawn and quartered if they got the chance, but of the three examples I just gave you, two have been exonerated.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  So, you know, but people were so sure that Lindy was guilty, even though the evidence and the timeline never worked in any reality that we exist in. It should never have gone to court, nor should Kathleen Fobig's case, it should never have gone to court. And I believe the same for Kelly Lane too. So are we looking at, you know, is Kelly going to be the next potential recognised miscarriage of justice? Well, I hope so, but I just wish we'd stop getting it wrong in the first place.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  You've been very public about the fact that you think Kelly Lane should be exonerated, that you don't think that the evidence is there. What has been the feedback to you from that? I'm imagining you would have fielded quite a bit of criticism.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. But at the end of the day, my background, I'm a forensic scientist. I look at facts and I look at the balance of probabilities and whether the evidence exists or not. And in that case, I don't think it does. I think it was an emotional reaction to the fact that Tegan can't be found. So Anthony Weely, who was the residing judge in that case, has also spoken publicly to say that he doesn't think that Kelly Lane should be in prison. Now, that is extraordinary.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  That is.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  They do not speak out and the fact that he has done that. You know, that case, I think is one, it was his last case, and I think it's one that will stay with him because I don't think he believes Kelly should be in prison for that crime. And so, you know, I don't care whether people are critical of my opinion. It's what it is and I'm not going to be silenced because other people don't agree with it.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Are there any other women that have murdered, that are currently behind bars, that you don't think should be there?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  I think the main one at the moment is Kelly and obviously Kath. I mean, I got to know Kath when after the book came out, both representatives of Kath and Kelly contacted me. And I've seen them both, spent time with them both.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  You know, Kath's campaign over 20 years, I never thought that we'd actually get to the end and she would be released. I remember exactly where I was when I got the call, that she was going to be released and it all happened so fast when it did happen. With very little warning, and I think that was intentional by the justice system because they didn't want the whole media pack arriving outside the jail. So it was all very fast. But I think those are the main two that I, my whole career since I've been in Australia, I've looked at and I thought, this is wrong.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  I want to touch again on media coverage because it is such a big part of this. It's how the public sees these cases unfolding. Do you think we're getting better at removing the misogyny and removing the crude nicknames and the way that women are treated in the headlines in comparison to male murderers? Or are we just in the same spot?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  I think it would depend on the case. So I think hopefully next time a woman is accused of murdering a child, I like to think that we may be a little more open minded, a little more circumspect, a little less judgmental. You know, if they walk to court and they are holding their head high and they're being stoic, that doesn't mean they don't have emotions. It doesn't mean that they're guilty. And so I like to think we may have learnt lessons from the past, but we all love to judge, you know? We all love to jump to those conclusions. I remember as a man, but when Terence Kelly abducted Cleo Smith a few years ago, the little girl in WA, very unusual case.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  And she was found physically safe after 18 days. And that was an incredible outlier because if a child is taken by a stranger, which it quickly became evident she had been, it was just, again, situational. He came across her, he opened that tent, they were camping, it was the mother, stepfather and a baby in a tent, he opened the tent, I think he was going to rob them and then he saw the child and he just took her in the moment, not premeditated. And when sadly, if a child is taken by a stranger, then they need to be found within three hours, otherwise they're likely to be deceased. That's generally speaking, how long a young child will be kept alive.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  So the police know they've got two to three hours to find that child, otherwise the odds are really not in their favour. 18 days, it blew my mind, right, that she'd been found physically unharmed. But the interesting thing about Terence Kelly, and I remember I talked to Nat Barr on Channel Seven when he was sentenced, and he didn't get the maximum sentence. And she was horrified that he hadn't got a longer sentence. I think he got ten years, but you could fact check me on that, for the abduction of Cleo Smith. And what I tried to explain to Nat was that the judge has to take into account so many factors, aggravating factors which increase the length of sentence within the boundaries for that offence, and mitigating, so things that bring it down.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Now, whilst we all understand that what he did to Cleo was awful and not making excuses, I'd actually seen the full outcome, the full sentencing remarks, I'd seen what he'd been diagnosed with. And he was a walking DSM, which is the psychological manual of disorders, right? So he has so many personality disorders, he has cognitive impairment, he probably has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder because his mother was an alcoholic. She was giving him alcohol in his baby bottle.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Oh my goodness.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  He was sexually abused when he was a kid, physically abused. Oh, if I went into his history, you'd be horrified at what that boy had been through, young man had been through. And I genuinely think he took Cleo Smith because he wanted a child to look after. There wasn't that sexual element there, it wasn't what we all expected. And I tried to explain this to Nat, who was, I understood that, horrified that he wasn't given the full sentence. But what I'm saying is the picture was much more complicated than the majority of people knew and understood. And if you'd seen his background, again, like Rachel Fitzner, there was nowhere on earth he could understand the implications of what

• 41:53Speaker 01

  he was doing, or the seriousness. And so even though what he did was awful, I really did feel sorry for him. He received a sentence of thirteen years with a minimum of eleven without parole, which doesn't seem long for what he did, and it's certainly not the maximum sentence for what he did. But the judge had to balance so many factors in that reasoning that is very difficult for those who haven't seen all of that information to understand.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  I think it's a really important reminder, telling that story, that when you do see a headline, you know, babysitter killer seen on, or, you know, mother murders chat, like all of those headlines, there is so much detail. That the public isn't privy to, that is behind court doors or so it's very easy to make sweeping remarks or like you say with Kelly Lane or you know full big damn them to hell kind of thing, but when the public doesn't isn't privy to everything. They don't see all the detail and we really do need to keep an open mind when it comes to these really serious cases of murder.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally agree. And you know, as a criminologist, I always say to my students, what we're not trying to do is make excuses. We're trying to understand. Rarely have I seen a case where I think somebody is just born evil.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Really?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  You know, very rare. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you do see a situation where you think regardless of what environment they were brought up in, you know, no matter how positive and balanced and how caring the parents were, this person was always going to go on and cause harm.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting you say that, Xanthi, because your work husband, your colleague,

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Tim Watson Monroe, who is a psychologist.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  My better half, yes.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  He, we did an episode with him, Inside the Mind of Australia's Youngest Killer, who was the acronym S L D. And he thinks he was born evil. Would you agree with that?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Oh, so this is an interesting case. Obviously, um, not that many details available about this case. We're only talking a 13 year old boy.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Who abducted his friend's sister from her bedroom, stabbed her to death, right? Premeditated allegedly over a computer game or some sort of argument, you know, stupid school, a stupid childhood argument. You know, I would always bow to Tim's, not always actually, we do argue about stuff in a very respectful way. We do argue about stuff. But yes, I mean, certainly I think some people are born evil. I think, you know, people who are committing this level of violence very young. Um. There's certainly certainly some questions to be raised there when it's a premeditated, extremely violent crime. Ivan Malat, he was, you know, killing animals as a child.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Um. The two killers are James Bulger in the UK. They were only ten years old when they abducted James Bulger, premeditated. He was the second child they tried to abduct that day from a shopping centre. I remember those videos of watching those two boys whirling that toddler away. I will never forget.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, they, I won't go into what they did to James, but they planned that it was based on a horror movie they'd seen. They tortured that boy. And I believe that one of them was also born evil. I think there was a ringleader, and I think that person will always be a danger. And so I will defer to Tim on S L D, and I'm certainly not going to disagree with him that just because somebody is a child, that it means that they can't have those incredibly dangerous traits expressed at very young ages, ten, thirteen years.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  It's interesting, though, that all the examples we've used are male, not female.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can't think of names, but I can think of a case where a young girl did kill a couple of other children. She was very young, and as I said, the names escape me. It'd be interesting to know if your listeners know. So she killed um a couple of neighbourhood children, but it is unusual. It is unusual. And she was from a very damaged family. So some, yeah, I think some kids potentially, or some people who obviously start as children, you know, can be born evil. But rest assured, they are very few and far between.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  I want to ask you about rehabilitation. Do you think there is a difference between male rehabilitation and female rehabilitation? Are we more likely to see it from a certain gender or?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Um. That's a, that's an interesting question. It depends entirely on the individual. I think. So it depends on exactly what we're trying to achieve through that rehabilitation. Certainly, we know that younger people, it's easier to rehabilitate, but it depends on the environment. You know, some really young children who've been indoctrinated into um really radicalised, for example, can be very difficult to rehabilitate. You know, we're looking at the ISIS brides at the moment, and my biggest concern is the children.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  In that circumstance. But you know, what has their life been and how radicalised are they? Are they in fact radicalised? I imagine they are. And are they then a danger if they come back to Australia? How do you undo that? So I think it's less about sex-based differences at that point and more about that individual's psychological makeup and the environment in which they've been.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Next time our listeners see a murder case involving an alleged female perpetrator, is there anything that you want them to look out for? Keep in mind, any media tricks for them to see through?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Just keep in mind that there's probably more to the story than meets the eye. So whether the, whether we're talking a female victim or offender, there's always more going on. So one, I mean, as I said, I work in the Centre for Domestic Family Violence. So my head is in that space sadly a lot. And whenever I see a case where especially a woman has been murdered, and we're talking every few days in Australia by a partner or ex-partner, sometimes the police will say there's no history of domestic family violence in this case. And I think, yes, there is. It may not be a formal history. It may not have been reported to the police, but somebody knows. Somebody in that family or in her friend set or somebody knows. So there's always more to the story than the 60-minute

• 48:17Speaker 01

  or 60-second grab that's on the news. And what I would ask people to remember as well is, you know, they'll see the news tonight and something awful have happened and then it will pass out of their consciousness. But that awful thing is going to stay with that family forever. If somebody's been murdered, um, or whenever there's a level of violence, that stays with that family. And people love gossiping online, theorising. Just remember that there are people in that story. It's not just something on the news. It's not the most recent podcast you've been listening to. These are people's lives. And just to be cautious about what you say online, because sometimes these people read it and sometimes, and it can cause harm. So just a word of warning to be a little more circumspect.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Thank you to Dr Xanthi for joining us on this episode. You can find a link to her podcast with Tim Watson-Munro, Motive and Method, at the link in our show notes. If you want to see visuals from this episode, head over to our Instagram page, @truecrimeconversations, and for in-depth case explainers, follow us on TikTok under the same name.