Friday, 15 October 1965.
Saddleworth Moor, near Oldham in Lancashire, England.
On Boxing Day the previous year, Lesley Ann Downey disappeared from a fairground in the Ancoats area of Manchester. In this photograph, her grieving mother, Ann West (formerly Downey) is pictured on the Moors, a team of police and volunteers spread out behind her, searching the land for her daughter’s corpse. In her memoir entitled For the Love of Lesley (1989), Ann West described how she waited, ‘trembling with an agony of loneliness…. I was a mother alone, supporting a weight of misery that only a mother can know’. The day after the photograph was taken, 16 October, the body of Lesley Ann was found buried in a shallow grave. The melancholic mother became a woman consumed by hatred, wanting only to be able to slowly torture to death that ‘subhuman’ creature, Myra Hindley. ‘How could any mother who has lost a child to a cold-blooded killer have any other view on this issue’, she asked? For her, justice is retributive and ruthless. The carceral confinement of Hindley which was to last her entire life (that is, 36 years) was not enough.
This is the final blog in my 2022 series on ‘Evil Women’ (there will be more because I am writing a book on 'Evil Women'!). I began it with Ann West’s grief because it exudes a moral authority over the way we respond to people who commit acts of extraordinary cruelty. If, in my other blogs in this series, I could be accused of disregarding the suffering the victims of ‘evil’ women (including the simpering domesticity of Snow White and the misogynistic cockiness of Randle McMurphy), this cynicism has no place in this blog. 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, 12-year-old John Kilbride, 12-year-old Keith Bennett, 16-year-old Pauline Reade, and 17-year-old Edward Evans suffered irreparable harms, as did their families, loved ones, and communities.
What is evil
This is why, since 1966, Hindley’s name almost always appears in close proximity to words such as evil, monstrous, She-devil, Satan, and ‘devil’s daughter’. She is a ‘SS girl’ living ‘among decent humans’, the ‘most hated woman in Britain’, and the ‘personification of evil’. Lord Steyn maintained that ‘in terms of comparative wickedness’, Hindley was in an ‘exceptional category’: he claimed that ‘even in the sordid history of crimes against children’, her actions were ‘uniquely evil’. Hindley’s name is so blackened by her wickedness that parents think twice about calling their daughters ‘Myra’.
However, as I have attempted to argue in all the blogs in this series, there are good reasons why we should stare long and unflinchingly at people who commit acts of atrocity. Imputations of ‘evil’ not only tell us about the diverse and shifting meanings of evil and of people who harm others; they also suggest ways to imagine better worlds.
Before I illustrate what I mean by this through an exploration of Myra Hindley, I want to return to a question I asked in all the blogs in this series. Why should we be interested in ‘evil’? It has been my contention that contemporary historians need to engage with questions of evil. Of course, there is a vast literature on the nature of evil in earlier periods of history, when it had a central place within local cosmologies, mythologies, and theologies. But ‘evil’ never disappeared. Today, moral evils (that is, major harms that humans inflict on others) are post-metaphysical. They are worldly not otherworldly; material, not transcendental. This is why narratives about evil must intrigue modern historians and other social scientists. As sociologist Jeffrey Alexander put it,
The social sciences have not given evil its due. Social evil has not been sufficiently respected; it has been deprived of the intellectual attention it deserves. Evil is a powerful and sui generis social force.
It is worth exploring the function of ‘evil’ in the modern world even if it turns out that the concept is used primarily to conceal the absence of any explanation for atrocious deeds. Tabloid journalists, right-wing politicians, ‘true-crime’ authors might latch onto narratives of ‘evil’ to obfuscate politics; philosophers like Slavoj Žižek might argue that ‘evil’ can be used as ‘a moralizing term that diminishes the possibilities for carrying out effective political critique’. But, I argue, productive as well as politically astute uses can be made of ‘evil’.
What can the ‘evil’ Myra Hindley contribute to these debates? Between 1963 and 1965, Hindley (a typist in a local chemical factory) and Ian Brady (a clerk in the same factory) tortured, sexually assaulted, and killed at least five young people aged between 10 and 17 years in the Manchester area: John Kilbride, Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey, Pauline Reade, and Keith Bennett. They were tried at the Chester Assizes in April 1966. Initially, Hindley was convicted of the murder of Evans and Downey and of harbouring Brady after he murdered Kilbride. There was a tape recording (an uncommon technology within ‘ordinary’ households at that time, so especially shocking) proving that Hindley had been present and participatory when Leslie Ann Downey was tortured, sexually assaulted, and strangled. In 1987, Hindley confessed to a further two murders, those of Reade and Bennett. At the time of these murders, Hindley had been between the ages of 21 and 23 years.
Hindley was given a life sentence which, in the words of the presiding judge, meant ‘a very long time’. Only a few months previously, the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act had been passed. Before 1965, murder warranted a mandatory death penalty; henceforth, this would be replaced with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment which could only be changed at the discretion of the Home Secretary.
Over the decades that Hindley spent in prison, she appealed repeatedly against the length of time she was serving. Her indelible branding with the ‘evil’ label rendered parole unthinkable for Home Secretaries with a keen eye on public opinion. Crucially, in 1990, Home Secretary David Waddington ruled that ‘life’ meant ‘whole life’, a fact that Hindley was not informed about for another four years. This political decision was echoed by Home Secretaries Michael Howard (Conservative and vocal adherent of the idea that ‘prison works’) and Jack Straw (Labour, who staked his political fortunes under the banner of ‘law and order’). In 1997, after Hindley had spent more than 30 years in prison, a MORI poll revealed that 83 per cent of the population were opposed to her release and three quarters would not respect the Home Secretary if he decided to grant parole. Unable to make any progress through the UK justice system, Hindley turned to the European Court of Human Rights, which had rejected ‘whole life’ sentences, as had most European jurisdictions at the time. Not surprisingly, this further infuriated tabloid journalists and rightwing commentators, who accused the European Court of ‘intrusion, interference, and meddling’ in ‘British justice’.
Hindley’s sentence was to become the harshest one imposed on a female criminal in British history, contrary to the tendency for women to be treated more leniently in criminal justice systems. In jurisdictions allowing for the death penalty, female serial killers are over 60 per cent less likely to be sentenced to execution than their male counterparts. Even some of the most notorious murderers such as Caril Ann Fugate (the serial killer who was the inspiration for the film ‘Natural Born Killers’), Jeannie Donald (a child killer), and Karla Homolka (where, as in some of Hindley’s murders, sexual sadism preceded the murder of young girls and women) were released from prison early. The relatively light sentences or early parole of female murderers is due to the belief that women are more likely to be rehabilitated, they are less likely to reoffend, are too sensitive to cope with prison life, they are more likely to have been emotionally coerced into their deviant behaviours by domineering male partners, and that they need benevolent ‘protection’. But in the case of criminals like Hindley, her violation of gender stereotypes was perceived to be so great that the perverse effect of ‘chivalry’ was invoked: she was to be punished for transgressing feminine norms.
Hindley’s lengthy punishment reflected the view that her actions were uniquely evil because she was a woman. Explanations for why male criminals sexually assault victims before they kill them are regarded in a less problematic light than for their female counterparts. Male sexuality is assumed to have an aggressive streak – whether because of evolutionary adaptation or socialization. It is the excess of male sexual aggressiveness that render such actions ‘sadistic’, not its underlying existence. Crucially, in Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (the famous forensic psychiatrist who was frequently cited in reports on her crimes) argued that sadism was an extension of ‘normal’ male sexuality. As he put it, sadism is nothing more than ‘an excessive and monstrous pathological intensification of phenomena… which accompany the psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males’. Krafft-Ebing drew attention to the fact that, in ‘normal’ sexual intercourse, ‘very excitable individuals’ at ‘the moment of most intense lust’ often bite and scratch their partners. Love is similar to anger, Krafft-Ebing explained. Both were ‘active (sthenic) emotions’, that
seek their object, try to possess themselves of it, and naturally exhaust themselves in a physical effect on it; both throw the psycho-motor sphere into the most intense excitement, and thus, by means of this excitation, reach their normal expression.
In sadistic sexual acts, this normal, heteromasculine cauldron of passion overheated, exploded, causing ‘real injury, wound, or death’. In contrast, female sexuality is said to be passive and masochistic. As Krafft-Ebing explained, ‘In the intercourse of the sexes, the active or aggressive role belongs to man; woman remains passive, defensive’. Female sadists, he contended, were truly monstrous.
It is important to dispel this myth. After all, women are a minority – but not a minor one – amongst sexual offenders and murderers. A U.S. survey conducted between 2008 and 2013 found that a majority of men reporting sexual abuse named female perpetrators. Nearly 80 per cent of men who had been ‘made to penetrate’ named a female perpetrator and up to just under 60 per cent reported that violence had been used. Women are also not rare in serial or multiple murders, either. One-fifth of all serial killers identified between 1800 and 1995 were female. Of these, around one-third acted alongside a partner.
This is why we must question Lord Steyn’s view that Hindley’s crimes were ‘uniquely evil’. Steyn maintained that without the ‘active participation’ of Hindley
the five children would probably still be alive today. The pitiless and depraved ordeal of the victims, and the torment of their families, place these crimes in terms of comparative wickedness in an exceptional category. If it be right, as I have held it to be, that life-long incarceration for the purposes of punishment is competent where the crime of crimes are sufficiently heinous, it is difficult to argue that this case is not in that category.
But were Hindley’s crimes really ‘unique’? David Gurnham points out that the phrase ‘uniquely evil’ implies ‘an exceptionally high degree of malice and wickedness on the part of the criminal herself’. However, ‘in what sense can Hindley or her crime be described in these terms?’ He notes that
Even a summary examination of other whole lifers reveals that the evilness of Hindley’s crime is not, in fact, unique. There are many examples of gross and shocking cruelty amongst those serving life sentences for murder, against whom Hindley looks decidedly ordinary.
Hindley understood this. As she pleaded with the Home Secretary,
To have been kept in prison for more than fifteen years is unreasonable. To keep me in prison indefinitely… is inhuman. To deprive me of hope as I have been is inhuman…. The whole area of neglect and inhumanity pervading my case stems, from what I interpret to be fear of public opinion, but someday, someone has to have the courage to stand up to this so called public opinion…. Is society going to be compensated for being thwarted of the rope by my perpetual imprisonment?
The question of being paroled rested not on future risk but retribution and political calculation.
This was what frustrated Lord Longford, prison reformer and long-time supporter of Hindley. He reported that fellow Lords and politicians would admit that ‘I agree with you, my dear chap. Of course, after all these years she ought to come out’. They would then add, ‘But you can’t imagine any Home Secretary having the guts to let her out, can you? Think what would happen to him. Think what the tabloids would do to him’. The injustice was exacerbated by the fact that ‘life sentences’ were never intended to literally mean ‘life’, unless there was clear evidence of risk. And no-one seriously believed that Hindley would reoffend.
Ironically, Hindley could have been presented as evidence that ‘prison works’, Home Secretary Howard’s favourite mantra. She was a model prisoner, a practicing Catholic, and a ‘calming influence’ on other prisoners. As writer Peter Stanford observed, Hindley was
one of the few success stories of our prison system. She was a woman whom jail had provided an opportunity to make herself a better person. So, during her time in Holloway, Durham, Cookham Wood, and latterly Highpoint, in Suffolk, she obtained an Open University degree in humanties, became a voracious and intelligent reader, and a keen student of politics.
A prison report in 1995 noted that ‘For many years now, Myra has been ready to accept responsibility for the offence and appears to be genuine in her remorse’. Contrary to tabloid assertions that she never expressed shame or guilt, she did so frequently. She even admitted that she was ‘more culpable than Brady… even though he committed the crimes’. This was because ‘Not only did I procure the victims for him, I knew it was wrong, to put it mildly, that what we were doing was evil and depraved, whereas he subscribed to de Sade’s philosophy, that murder was for pleasure’. No one who knew her well, including prison chaplain Fr. Bert White, doubted that her repentance was sincere.
The mounting evidence of Hindley’s rehabilitation proved counter-productive: it was interpreted as further proof that she was manipulative and cunning. Evidence of female agency – including agency for the good – was portrayed as diabolical and devious. When confronted with a photograph of Hindley in her graduation gown, Ann West (mother of Lesley Ann Downey) commented that ‘Hindley is wearing the cloak of Satan’ while Paul Reade (brother of Pauline Reade) contended that ‘Satan in satin is still Satan’. Even when Hindley offered a heartfelt apology to West, the confidential letter was published in the Daily Mirror, which accused Hindley of ‘crying crocodile tears’. They quoted a ‘top psychiatrist’ who claimed that Hindley ‘might be trying to change the public view of her as evil’. When she died on 15 November 2002, even her corpse was regarded as polluted. Twenty undertakers refused to conduct the funeral. In the words of one, it would have made his business impossible if it was revealed to other customers that their loved one was ‘in the same chapel of rest or in the same hearse as Myra Hindley’. On the fence of the crematorium, someone had posted a sign saying ‘Burn in Hell’.
Hindley spent 36 years in prison. She died before her case could be heard before the European Court of Human Rights. Ten days after her death, the Law Lords ruled that tariffs for prisoners would no longer be decided by Home Secretaries.
Hindley’s demonisation was relentless from the time of her trial to her death. There is no need to turn to tabloid newspapers for evidence of this – suffice to say that her name almost never appears without the adjective ‘evil’. But even reputedly ‘highbrow’ accounts cannot resist monstering Hindley. Pamela Hansford Johnson, a distinguished novelist and social commentator, attended the 1966 trial of Brady and Hindley. The following year, she published her reflections under the philosophical title On Iniquity. Three themes emerge: criminal physiognomy, Nazism, and the ‘affectless society’. First, Johnson seems obsessed with Hindley’s appearance. She noted that Hindley was ‘sturdy in build and broad-buttocked’ and could have ‘served a nineteenth century Academy painter as a model for Clytemnestra’ or, worse, ‘one of Fuseli’s nightmare women drawn giant-sized’. Her hair was
far too massive for the wedge-shaped face; in itself it bears an uneasy suggestion of fetishism. But it is the lines of this porcelained face which are extraordinary. Brows, eyes, mouth are all quite straight, precisely parallel. The fine nose is straight, too, except for a very faint downward turn at the tip just as the chin turns very faintly upward. She will have a nutcracker face one day.
She possessed ‘a great strangeness, and the kind of authority one might expect to find in a woman guard of a concentration camp’. It was a classic statement drawing on Cesare Lombroso’s nineteenth century descriptions of criminal women as unmistakably marked with the stigmata of deviance.
Second, Johnson returns time and again to the theme of Nazism and its links to pornography. The trial had revealed Brady and Hindley’s attraction to pornography. One of Brady’s favourite books was Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue by the Marquis de Sade. Other books in their possession included Women in Bondage, Kiss of the Whip, Orgies of Torture and Brutality, and The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber. For Johnson (as well as numerous other commentators), this was proof that the ‘permissive society’ had occupied British culture, providing the soil in which the most perfidious forms of evil could blossom. Crucially, she linked this permissiveness to Nazism. She claimed that the Nazis deliberately flooded Poland with pornography, using it as a means of ‘social castration’. Their aim was to make ‘the individual conscious only of the need for personal sensation’ and ‘encourage withdrawal from any sort of corporate responsibility’. The ‘blunting of sensibility’ was ‘not the way to an Earthly paradise, but the way to Auschwitz’, Johnson proclaimed.
It was class-based analysis. She argued that texts such as those by the forensic psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing (who invented the term ‘sadist’) should not be available in paperback where the lower classes might have access to them. As she put it, ‘there are some books that are not ft for all people and some people who are not fit for all books’.
Finally, Johnson blamed the rise of an ‘affectless society’ for ‘evil’ deeds. The ‘swinging sixties’ had cultivated a milieu of ‘total permissiveness’, which was never a healthy thing for ‘ill-educated’, but not ‘stupid’ young people such as Brady and Hindley. For Johnson, who had been initially exhilarated by the abolition of capital punishment, the sentencing of these two young people lacked ‘catharsis’ and was ‘unaesthetic’. She believed that it would have been better if ‘something violent’ had ‘happened to put an end to violence’: society missed ‘the shadow of the rope’. Her account was a powerful attack on the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
Johnson’s account of the trial is simply one example of how seemingly fact-based commentators contributed to the extreme monstering of Hindley. The legacy of such responses, however, continued for decades after the crimes – indeed, they continue today, more than half a century later. In 1997, for example, Hindley had been incarcerated for 31 years – longer than any other female prisoner, let alone one who was considered to be of no-risk of future offending. Her monstering was exacerbated by an exhibition at the ‘Sensation’ show at the Royal Academy in London. Artist Marcus Harvey’s ‘Myra’ had been painted two years earlier and, in size, was a monumental 396 by 320 cm. It reproduced the infamous mug-shot photograph of Myra Hindley – but using a plaster cast of a child’s hand. The scandal lay in the way it juxtaposed evil and innocence. Its black and white shadows heightened the darkness of deviant femininity; it was a disturbing allegory of modern attitudes to childhood. The backlash was immediate: academicians resigned; two men attacked the painting; and MAMA (that is, Mothers Against Murder and Aggression) protested outside the gallery, along with Winnie Johnson, mother of Keith Bennett. The Sun newspaper asked, ‘Why not simply hang a bucket of sewer water in the gallery?…. It would smell a whole lot sweeter than this monstrosity’. Their editorial declared that ‘Myra Hindley is to be Hung in the Royal Academy. Sadly it is only a painting of her’. By coincidence, only a week prior to the exhibition. Diane Princess of Wales had died in a car accident. The press barraged their readers with photographs of the Princess, including images of her infamous Panorama interview. The stills from the interview and Harvey’s painting uncannily similar: the Good Mother juxtaposed to her most Evil counterpart.
Responses to Mayra Hindley echo many of the themes that have appeared throughout these blogs on ‘evil women’. Much of the literature on ‘evil women’ uses two tropes: evil women are passive followers of violent male agency or they are misguided dupes to the self-same patriarchal ideology that victimized them. In other words: they either lack agency altogether (and are therefore victims themselves) or their agency is radically constrained by their acceptance of harmful gender norms (‘love at all costs’, for example).
The first of these tropes appeared during Hindley’s trial when the judge maintained that Ian Brady was the truly ‘wicked’ one, with Hindley as a hanger-on. He believed that Brady was ‘wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption (short of a miracle)’ but added that he did not think this was ‘necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence’. There is abundant evidence that Hindley’s behaviour and demeanour changed dramatically after meeting Brady. As Johnson noted, she
lived a normal teenage life – dances, cinemas. Chasing the boys. She was a good and patient baby-sitter…. You could always trust your toddlers to her, and go out to Bingo with a quiet mind.
It was a comment echoed by William Mars-Jones, who assisted the Attorney-General Frederick Elwyn Jones in developing the case for the prosecution. He also observed that, in her early life, Hindley
had been a normally happy girl, a bit of a tomboy, who got on well with friends and relatives. It was not until Brady came into her life that she suddenly began to become withdrawn and secretive and changed her whole attitude towards life. Hitherto she had wanted to marry and have a family, but at this point she adopted Brady’s ideas, including trial marriage, and the view that procreation was unworthy and unnecessary.
After meeting the Nazi-obsessed Brady, Hindley began wearing clothes she considered to be ‘Germanic’. She abandoned her Roman Catholic faith, admitting that Brady ‘was God. It was as if there was a part of me that didn’t belong to me, that hadn’t been there before and wasn’t there afterwards’. She was also afraid of him, even giving a letter to a female friend stating that, if she disappeared, Brady was responsible.
Similar to many of the other ‘evil women’ in this series, there was a focus on her sexuality. Her relationship with a Brady, who was obsessed with sadism, was widely assumed to have perverted Hindley. Even after incarcerated in prison for 36 years, the fact that Hindley formed intimate lesbian bonds with other prisoners, including fellow-murderer Rosemary West and a female prison warden, was a powerful argument against any suggestion of rehabilitation. After all, wasn’t part of her punishment to be denied human touch, and especially ‘deviant’ sexual intimacy?
However, there are aspects of Hindley’s demonization that have not been prominent in many other discussions about ‘evil women’. In particular, there is an absence of talk about psychiatric deviance. As the mother of one victim put it, she did not have ‘the decency to go mad’. A high proportion of women accused of violent crimes (much higher than male defendants) enter psychiatric pleas, which is why they are more likely to receive psychiatric or non-custodial sentences. This was not the case with Hindley who always insisted that she was not psychiatrically disturbed. This meant that she was denied access to the paternalistic compassion that is often given to women who act violently but are deemed in need of therapy rather than punishment.
Finally, the extreme, decades-long, vindictive hatred against Hindley can be explained in part as a result of an absence of easily available explanatory frames. This did not apply to Brady. In the context of circulating frames of meaning in the 1960s, his actions were relatively easy to place: not only did he have a history of crime, violence, and pathological behaviour, he was also diagnosed with schizophrenia and acute paranoia.
In contrast, Hindley was a mystery. She was the archetypical ‘stranger danger’, except the ‘stranger’ was a young, female typist well known in the local community. When Hindley was tried, the media-inspired panic over women’s involvement in paedophilia had not exploded into popular consciousness – and, even if it had, the fact that at least one victim was a seventeen-year-old young man would have confused matters. In Claire Wardle’s analysis of child murder between 1930 and 2000, she observes that the language of ‘evil’ individuals was a common one in pre-1990s reportage of horrific crimes. From the 1990s, however, ‘evil’ was jettisoned for an emphasis on societal decline ‘with the offenders defined as serial predatory ‘paedophiles’. It is important not to exaggerate her point – as we have seen, in On Iniquity, Johnson pointed an accusatory finger at the rise of an ‘affectless society’. However, the language of paedophilic or even sadistic pathology – as an identity that could explain these violent acts – was lacking in the 1960s. Instead, people turned to a secularized language of ‘evil’, exacerbated by ‘sadistic’ pornography but not necessarily a sadistic persona.
It was this void in commonly circulating explanations – Hindley was neither mad nor obviously bad – that made Hindley more frightening. It encouraged commentators to that catch-all for what is outside normal human understanding: ‘evil’. ‘Evil’ provided a language that was seemingly at odds with secular conceptions of wrongdoing but neatly enabled commentators to give meaning to atrocious behaviours without providing any clear explanation. As such, it was a useful concept since it allowed people to insist on retribution but setting the person who had offended so egregiously against societal norms to be set outside the human. In the words of sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, evil ‘defines and reifies the good’.
This is why I believe it is good to stare long, hard, and unflinchingly at ‘evil’. The ascription of ‘evil’ risks both dehumanizing the actions of real people in the world and, paradoxically, bestowing on them an atrocious, god-like power. As I have attempted to suggest in all these blogs in this series, ‘evil’ is constructed through discourses but it cannot be reduced to it. It is about political and moral confrontations between all-too-fleshy protagonists. Those fictional ‘evil women’ (such as the Wicked Witch of Snow White and Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) allow us to contemplate from a safe distance the nature and meaning of stories about Good and Evil. Some of the women I have looked at in the blogs in this series have harmed others in grievous ways. In the case of Eve, all of humanity was exiled from the Garden of Eden. Others have committed acts of extreme cruelty – the slaughter of babies (Amelia Dyer), steering young men into harm’s way (Mata Hara), and torturing children and young people (Hindley). I have suggested that in some cases these women have been responding to unbearable oppressions imposed by their own societies: religious dicta, lack of rights over their own bodies and property, and a universe of discriminatory practices. But they all expressed agency, albeit within those constraints. Throughout, though, I have argued that the actions of people who commit deeds horrible to contemplate cannot be understood through discourses drawn from metaphysics (possession by devils) or rationality (the autonomous, self-sufficient subject) but only in terms of embodied selves with complex emotional lives including feelings of rage, humiliation, fear, and pride. And those of ‘us’ who loudly proclaim that ‘we’ are not ‘like them’ are inevitably drawn into their worlds through acts of imagination. They may inspire revulsion, fear, awe, and rage. These responses are an indication of the moral value that we place on the lives of those people who have been harmed. The homicidal hatred of Ann West – mother of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey – towards Myra Hindley bears witness to her love and pain. But should we accord grief a moral authority that overrides all else? It is possible that even people responsible for such wrongs can come to accept the moral value of their victims. Those of us who look into the faces of ‘evil women’ narrow the gulf between ‘them’ (evil) and ‘us’ (good). In that moment – fleeting, perhaps; inadequate, always – we can imagine a way to avoid reifying evil as something outside the human. This would be a way of gesturing towards a form of justice.
This is the final in my series of blogs on ‘evil women’. However, I am writing an entire book on the topic – so wait for more!
I have another blog on murder and police surgeons. It might interest you. This blog is part of a series in 'Evil Women'.
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