History and entertainment are both full of psychopathic men who manipulate their victims. But it makes you wonder... why aren't there more female psychopaths? Or are they out there and we just don't know it?
Dr. Mark Freestone, author of Making a Psychopath: My Journey into Seven Dangerous Minds, takes us into the mind of an infamous female psychopath—and the finicky, outdated, and often untrustworthy system that attempts to diagnose women like her.
A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:
Did You Know?
James Bond is a psychopath. He scores around a 27 on the PCL-R, which in the UK is past the threshold for a psychopath.
Get a copy of Dr. Freestone's book on Amazon, Audible, or Bookshop.org.
Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.
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Doug
Quick warning. This episode contains some language as well as graphic descriptions of violent acts will serve discretion is advised. Come with me for just a moment and imagine a murderous psychopath. Let the picture form in your head. What do you see? It's a dude, isn't it? History and entertainment are both full of psychopathic men who manipulate their victims with relative ease. But it makes you wonder, why aren’t there more female psychopaths? Or are they out there and we just don't know it?
Mark
Something that psychopaths are very good at doing is putting on this mask of being outwardly cooperative and friendly when underneath that mask, there's always a plan. So it's very possible, very frustrating to be strung along by someone you don't realize as a psychopath into playing a game.
Doug
That's Dr. Mark Freestone. He's going to take us into the mind of a female psychopath and the finicky outdated and often untrustworthy system that attempts to diagnose them. I'm Doug Fraser and this is Curious State. If you want to dig into the psyche of a psychopath, Dr. Mark Freestone is your guy.
Mark
I'm Mark Freestone. I'm a, I guess, an associate professor in mental health at Queen Mary University of London. And my background is in forensic psychology and psychiatry. So I've worked in the prison service in the UK. And I've also done a lot of work for what we call the forensic mental health system in the UK, which is a system that operates parallel to the prison service that admits people who have committed a crime. And either the court has sent them to treatment for their mental disorder that they think might be related to that crime, or they become so unwell or so disruptive in prison that they've been sent to a specialist hospital.
Doug
In Mark's book, Making a Psychopath: My Journey into Seven Dangerous Minds, he gets into the nitty gritty details of some of his most mind bending cases. Of the seven individuals, only one is a woman.
Mark
I've worked almost exclusively with men throughout my career in the prison service and the hospital system. So there really are very, very few documented cases of women.
Doug
Have you found that there's a difference between male and female psychopaths and how they think and how they operate?
Mark
I think that there are certainly women who have virtually identical features to make male psychopaths. The personality disorder, if you like, can affect men and women in the same way, in that they can have the classic traits of being very glib and superficial, lacking empathy, they can lie pathologically, they can feel very impulsive and aggressive. And they can have this very grandiose manner that, you know, “I'm better than everyone else, I have the right to do and take whatever I want from anyone else”. But I think that's quite rare. And I think that if you, there's so few documented, well documented cases of female psychopaths. It's viewed as quite a rare phenomenon. Most of the archetypes of female psychopaths come from literature, they're fiction creations, or they're sort of stitched together from what we know about historical characters.
Doug
Characters like Villanelle, from the hit TV series Killing Eve. How do you define a psychopath? As it turns out, the lines are blurrier than you might think.
Mark
There's a friend of mine who is a forensic psychologist who says, you know, I know somebody who's killed 15 people, he's killed women and children. And the last time he killed someone was a year ago, and he's not in prison. And he's a member of the British Special Air Service as a Navy Seal, basically. So he does that for a living, but he's not in a prison. He might be a psychopath. But it's sort of irrelevant. Because if you're doing something for a higher cause, so people who are spies, people who are fighting for a political cause, for example, it's very difficult to describe them as psychopaths because part of them, I guess part of what defines a psychopath is that they have their their own motivation is intrinsically what's pushing them. The problem is that a lot of the women who have been identified historically as having psychopathic features did that because of an external motivation, whether it was political or because it was their job.
Doug
When it comes to diagnosing someone as psychopathic, there's a pillar holding the brunt of the weight of psychopathy diagnoses.
Mark
The PCLR or is a measure of psychopathy, Psychopathy Checklist Revised. It's developed by a Canadian forensic psychologist called Rob Hare, who worked a lot with men with psychopathic traits in prison and was developed, I think, because of his own frustration. So his frustration prompted him to put together this checklist and he wasn't the first person to sort of think about what makes a psychopath up but he was the first person to sort of select a group of what he thought were the most important traits and kind of put a badge on it and train people in it. And this is part of the problem, which is once you start training justice professionals with a particular way of doing things, and that could be measuring being a psychopath, it could be assessing how risky somebody is, it could be assessing whether somebody is ready for release. Once the justice system buys into that, and this is exactly the same in the UK, Canada, the USA, it's very difficult to get them to change their minds or buy out of it. So the PCLR, for better or for worse, is now very, very heavily used to diagnose psychopathy, almost to the exclusion of anything else.
Doug
As you can imagine, in the midst of the murky waters of self motivation, the test for psychopathy finds itself under duress, throw in the fact that it was last revised around 1998. And it nearly buckles under the pressure. The training for the test alone says everything you need to know about the issues that plagued the test itself.
Mark
And when you do the training for the psychopathy checklist, interestingly, one of the cases that you're supposed to pick up as not being psychopathic, is a woman that's the only woman you see throughout the training. So you see, when you're automatically programmed as a writer that this is not a psychopath, it looks like the way that we assess psychopathy currently doesn't lead us to see it in women in the same way. And some of the features of historical psychopaths, like so women are often very much more emotionally manipulative, rather than physically aggressive. So they achieve the same thing but by different ends. And it's difficult for me to say whether that stereotype is completely accurate, but it's very rare for a male psychopath to do it in quite that way. He’d probably be much more confrontational.
Doug
Would it make sense then to just to have tests for men and then separate tests for women rather than a universal test?
Mark
That's a really interesting question. So yes, it would I mean, for example, Bob Hare has already got a youth version of the psychopathy checklist, the PCLYV. So there's already a separate version for young offenders, which completely makes sense when you think that some of the traits won't apply to younger people, because they won't have had the time to get what we call criminal versatility, they won't necessarily have time to get into enough trouble to get some of the antisocial items. But I think the reluctance to do that comes from the fact that if you say, let's bring out a women's checklist, you're automatically undermining the assumption that psychopathy is a universal construct, in the way you've defined it. And this is where it gets frustratingly political, I think.
Doug
So if the test is geared toward diagnosing what's seen as, quote, masculine behavior, then who knows how many female psychopaths have gone undiagnosed. They're such a rare phenomenon that when a female psychopath lands a television interview, her story grabs the world's attention, and holds it tight. One of the rare well documented cases of female psychopath who Mark details in this book is Angela Simpson, or as the media referred to her, Angela the Remorseless.
Doug
Angela, the Remorseless. That's quite the nickname. The media sure knows how to turn a human into a villainous character. In fact, she was the inspiration for the Villanelle character in Killing Eve. When you find out what she did. You'll understand why. Here's what happened. A few days before Angela walked away from a church parking lot with the cut up body of Terry Neely burning behind her. She was friendly with him. And old Terry was quite fond of Angela. One day, Angela was like, “hey, Terry, why don't you come to my place and we can have sex and do drugs”. So he got out of his wheelchair, which he used for convenience and wasn't bound to, and they went upstairs.
Mark
She sort of manipulated him into a position where he thought that you know, something good was going to happen, and then suddenly, the situation turned on him completely.
Doug
There were no drugs or sex waiting for Terry, just a chair which he was tied to. The mirror in front of him was no coincidence. Angela wanted him to watch everything she was about to do to him. For three days, she tortured him, beat him unconscious, stabbed him, extracted his teeth with pliers. Then she picked up a hammer and drove a nail into his skull. But that didn't kill him. The next morning, he woke up bloodied and on the verge of death. That's when Angela finished the job by strangling him with a TV cable.
Mark
He's gone from sort of being accepted and welcomed to being tortured in a very short space of time. Just really classic, horrible psychopathy stuff. So she identifies what's going on,
Doug
which in this case was Terry's crush on her
Mark
and then uses it against People to her own advantage and she comes across as you know, absolutely pitiless. Particularly because I think she had a very vulnerable victim, a guy in a wheelchair. So if you're going to pick a victim, this isn't a fair matchup. She's beating someone weaker than her and then she tortures him horribly and emerges him horribly at the end of that, which is really, you know, it's quite stomach churning.
Doug
Three days after Terry walked into Angela's apartment, a pastor at the local church was jarred from sleep. According to police records, he was awakened to the smell of burning flesh. When detectives found Terry's body, he’d been dismembered, tossed into a trash can behind the church and set on fire. Phoenix police called Terry's murder, one of the most heinous homicide cases the department has ever seen. Angela's reasoning for all of this: he was a snitch, a police informant, and according to her, he deserved to die a violent death. Unbeknownst to Terry, he'd said something a few days prior that didn't sit well with Angela, perhaps his way of trying to impress her, he told her that while in prison he'd snitched on his cellmate and he implied that he'd been a police informant. This took Terry from an acquaintance to a target. But what if everything he said was a lie?
Angela’s Interview
“You believe him? Do you think he really was a snitch?” “Oops, if he wasn't.”
Mark
She's doing something we call malignant pseudo identification, where she seems to be playing along with the interviewers narrative but very quickly changes the game up again to unsettle people and make it clear that she's the boss.
Angela’s Interview
“Women generally don't commit crimes this heinous, right? You know, this is usually the domain of men”. “That's unfortunate”. “You think more women should?” “Oh, yeah. Equal Opportunity. Definitely”.
Doug
Angela was sentenced to natural life in prison plus an additional 14 years, a sentence she's carrying out right now, as you listen to this.
Mark
We're all I think fascinated by things that we don't really understand. People whose brains are wired completely differently. And none of the research that we've got satisfactorily explains why you've got your traditional nature, nurture argument, you've got a sort of gene environment interaction argument. And that's true. And it's true for psychopathy, we know that kids can have callous unemotional traits, when they're 7,8,9,10 years old, those will sometimes translate into adult psychopathy. So we know that there's something probably genetic in here. But then there's the stories of the vast majority of these psychopaths, including Angela Simpson are just so depressing. It is the same story, which is kind of a point that I'm making in my book over and over again, in my experience, psychopaths are shitty to other people, because their lives were shitty before that point. I'm happy to be disproved that if you can find anyone who could find a group of psychopaths who had a perfectly normal middle class upbringing is big enough to meet, be persuaded that it wasn't just random chance. The thing that gets missed is what James Blair, who's the president of the United States Study of Psychopathy Association says is that through all of this stuff through our poor understanding of what psychopathy is the fact that there are academic debates about it, the fact that we don't agree on the method of assessment, throughout all of that we can kind of fail psychopaths because we don't send a consistent message that these are people. And they have, you know, their own pasts as well. They have their own failings, they have their own regrets. They have their own thoughts, they have their own strength and positive aspects as well, all of them even some of the least appealing characters in my book, you know, they really do have positive sides to them. One of which I should say is that a lot of them are extremely funny, like very, very good with comic timing that I think is part of not caring about what people really think about you. But particularly we fail them because we don't have a coherent way of rehabilitating them into society. We view that we write them off as people who are just bad to the bone. They're deviants, they're freaks. They're not people we can help. And that may be the case that we don't know what works best yet. But that's become an excuse for nihilism saying nothing works. So lock them up or execute them. And I think that does everyone a disservice because I think we're better than that.
Doug
So back to the question, Why aren't there more female psychopaths? Well, as it turns out, there's no real way of finding out how many there are. It's a complex puzzle that's rooted in our poor understanding of how most illnesses affect women. Medical research has focused mainly on men for such a long time. And as Mark says, public systems don't adapt well to change. In 2003, a government estimate suggested there were only 40 female criminal psychopaths in the US, compared to 2000 males. Psychopaths already fascinate and frighten us. And women represent the rarest kind, a type of person that keeps the experts guessing. For instance, at the end of the Angela’s interview, her mask slips off. Or maybe she simply switches to a different mask. This is how the interview ends.
Angela’s Interview
“Okay, let's, we're done.” “Are you done?” “Yeah”. “All right. Good shit. That's gonna be crazy, isn’t it. And make it look good, please.”
Doug
You can hear the smile in her voice. In the video. Her expression switches from emotionless for nearly 15 minutes to almost giddy. The interviewer seems pleasantly surprised. I mean, after all, they're making great television. And the abrupt switch was a spooky cherry on top. As viewers, these psychological games unsettle us from a distance but real world victims of violence from those like Angela often don't see the game until it's too late. Once we better understand female psychopaths, we can count them. And if we can count them, we can start solving a very important mystery. This episode featured Dr. Mark Freestone, whose book Making the Psychopath: My Journey into Seven Dangerous Minds is available everywhere books and audio books are sold. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for future episodes, email me at curious@quickanddirtytips.com. If you prefer talking over typing, leave me a voicemail at 757-541-8471. For more information about the show and where you can find us across the internet, check out our show notes or visit quickanddirtytips.com. Special thanks to the Quick and Dirty Tips team: Adam Cecil, our Audience Development and Podcast Manager; Morgan Christiansen, Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist; Emily Miller, Assistant Manager; Davina Tomlin, Marketing and Publicity Assistant; and our trusty intern Brendan Picha. Curious State is hosted and produced by me, Doug Fraser, for the Quick and Dirty Tips network, which is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty Incorporated. Until next time, stay curious.