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Joanna Bourke, "Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker" (Reaktion, 2026)
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Professor Joanna Burke
I wanted to give something to the
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Welcome to the New Books Network
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Joanna Burke about her book titled Five Evil Women, Hindley West, Warnus Homolka Tucker, published by reaction in 2026. Asking what sounds like a really simple question, but as we're going to be discussing, leads to a lot of interesting thinking in individual cases and comparatively and kind of about society overall. And this question is, why do certain women become un icons of evil? Evil. Pretty strong word there, right? And as the title suggests, with Five Evil Women, this is a case study book and a comparative case study book that's looking at these particular cases, but also kind of what it means that they have been portrayed and conceptualized in these very strong ways and kind of what that means about these women, but also about the rest of us, the society that we live in, where these stories sort of take root. So clearly there's a lot for us to discuss. Joanna, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
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Professor Joanna Burke
It's really wonderful being here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Why, for instance, do you think we need to think differently about evil women?
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Professor Joanna Burke
Well, you know, I've been working on the history of violence for a very long time. What more years than I care to to think about. I've written quite a few books on violence Generally most of it though, has been on firstly, people who inflict violence. So it' about perpetrators, really. And most of it has also been about men because men are the people who inflict the most violence on other people. So I became super aware of this narrowness, if you like, in my focus and became aware that there was a lot to be said about women who actually committed these acts of violence and that I needed personally to think more systematically about them. I mean, I think. I think, Miranda, one of the things that has kind of followed me in my entire historical career is this kind of belief that history actually can provide insights about difficult questions in the present. In other words, that kind of by looking at the past, we can not only see that things have not always been like this, but also that we can work to change our world to make things better and, you know, develop different ways of responding to exceptionally violent people. And it seemed when I started this book a few years ago now, goodness, a really good time to do it because there are really high levels of violence committed by women and men. And perhaps I really ought to qualify that slightly. There's high levels of anxieties about female violence and they have been increasing, I think, in the last few decades. And although, you know, it did strike me that these anxieties are largely baseless, but it does. The, you know, these anxieties do reflect very real fears in our society about the role of women in modernity, about aggression, the successes and failures of feminism, gender and sexual fluidity, and, you know, criminal justice systems, what we should do about it. And I was also, when I started to read around the topic, kind of dismayed by the flatness, the kind of cardboard cutout representations of so called evil women, particularly in the true crime genre, which of course most of my friends and myself quite love and frustrated by the mantra of mad, bad, sad. So I really wanted to think about what do we today mean when we say someone is evil? And is that different if that someone is a woman? So I think those are the reasons I kind of came into the book. I think there is a third one that is maybe not as strong in the book, but it certainly was there when I started the project. And that is thinking about what do we mean by evil? And this is not a theological book, it's not a book of philosophy. For me, evil is a very human ascription, a doing, not a being. And I was really struck by the way that, you know, the concept of evil itself, even in the half century that I look at, is really unstable. And I Kind of wanted to unpick that in a modern context.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a whole bunch of very interesting questions to investigate. And as you mentioned, you look at them kind of primarily in a particular set of decades and obviously, as the subtitle of the book suggests, through particular women. Five women. So how and why did you choose those five to focus on?
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Professor Joanna Burke
Well, I have to come clean here. Originally I had nearly two dozen women I was going to look at. These are women who've committed acts of extreme violence, primarily sexual assault and murder. But also crucially here there are women who people at the time and for decades afterwards labeled evil. So in other words, they're not necessarily the women who've committed the most horrendous or atrocious crimes. They're women who have committed horrendous crimes. But people have. Society has affixed this label of evil upon them and it was a really, really difficult decision. I think they were chosen. These five women, in the end were chosen because of the longevity, if you like, of their appearance in the public mind. So in other words, all of these have had their stories told and retold and retold for decades. They're all white, they're all working or lower middle class. Only one was diagnosed with a mental illness. But they all knew what they were doing and they all knew that what they were doing was very wrong. So they're not insane in that sense. And I also choose these women because it's sort of notoriety. They have vastly surpassed other serious female criminals in terms of public profile as well as their male co offenders. Nearly all of them offended alongside a man. But the man who offended these crimes with them really kind of disappears in many ways from the scene because the center of attention gets kind of fixated on the women themselves. You know, of course, I think we can all think of exceptionally evil male murderers and rapists, Kit Bundy, Jeffrey Obama, etc. But I think violent women, and particularly these five violent women, continue to be seen as more transgressive than violent men because precisely because they're breaking some kind of fundamental rule of femininity. So these were the reasons I chose these in the end. Now, admittedly in the book, I do bring in other women who have had this label attached to them, but they're really more there as contrast or similarities to help build the argument.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that makes sense. Obviously case studies doesn't mean you can't ever talk about no one else. Right, but that's helpful to get a sense of sort of how you went about selecting kind of the focus for answering the questions you raised at the beginning of our conversation. But now that we have those sort of foundational pieces laid out of the questions you're asking and the women you're focusing on to answer them, I'd love to get to the question that kind of. I admit I immediately had when I saw just the title of the book before I even began reading it, which is how exactly can one write a book investigating and in many ways critiquing our society's obsession with kind of quote, unquote, evil women without just sort of accidentally even contributing to sort of the embedding further even of these narratives while you're critiquing them at the same time? Like, how do you go about that tricky investigative question?
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Professor Joanna Burke
Oh, Miranda, that's a difficult one. You know, I was so worried about precisely that before I started writing the book. And there are so many risks that I was really conscious of. And I'll be honest here, quite frightened by when I decided that this was the book I wanted to do research on and write. There is, you know, as you're suggesting, that simply by telling their stories, I inadvertently glamorize them in some way. These women themselves craved immortality. Immortality. And was I going to sort of contribute to that? I also worried that I might over aestheticize evil. Now, this is why I made a deliberate decision in the book not to include any lurid descriptions of violence. But of course, that, you know, as, you know, that that brings itself some problems about, you know, does this mean I ignore the ugly bloodiness of what they did, the actual real cruelty of. Of what they did? You know, but I also didn't want to make these women into monsters, demonic figures, or, you know, there's even the opposite problem, that I would somehow domesticate them, making them sort of familiar to readers. And, you know, as in a previous couple of books I wrote on the history of sexual violence, you know, I was really conscious that it would be a very distressing outcome if actually my book contributed to making women scared. You know, making increasing levels of distrust and making women sort of driving women in particular into their homes at night with new and improved locks, locking themselves in, too frightened to venture into the world because there's not only evil men out there, there's also evil women. So these were all problems that I grappled with for actually about a year before I even put pen to paper. You know, the issue of silencing victims or speaking for victims, which is probably just as bad, you know, because my focus has always been on violence inflicted, you know, was I at a risk of minimizing the violence that it actually suffered? And you know, I was. Many of the women I talk about in the book have been already really damaged by society, but the women's victims have also been really damaged by society, by poverty, lack of education, homelessness, rejection by caregivers, or no caregiving, in fact. So, you know, what should I do about. About that issue? But I think the toughest challenge for me was the one of moral empathy. And that kind of is a bombshell when I put that into the conversations on evil women, moral empathy for women who have caused what is frankly, unimaginable suffering. And in the end, I decided that kind of this empathy for violent women is not incompatible with an absolute revulsion for the crimes they committed. In other words, I tried to politicize empathy, to empathize with and seek to understand evil women doesn't justify their actions, nor does it diminish in any way whatsoever their responsibility for what they did, which were horrible. And in fact, I see this as a step, a little step towards seeking to eradicate or limit evil in the future. And, you know, it does make for a more, if you like, messy story, you know, when you're trying to understand these women in really complex ways. But actually, I think it's a really important thing for us to do. These women, you know, were not wholly evil. And I think this is kind of what I was alluding to a couple of minutes ago when I said that evil is a doing, it's not a being being. You know, when they weren't harming others, they were convivial, playful, good company. When they were removed from brutalized environments, they turn out actually to be very much like us. And they did these evil deeds for the most pitiful reasons. You know, recapitulation of their childhood, plain thoughtlessness, romantic desperation, petty revenge, carnal indulgence. These are rather pathetic reasons for the horrors that they carried out. And they were incapable, absolutely incapable, of responding to the suffering of other people. And this is kind of the nub, I think, of the entire book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that's really key to have early on in our discussion, as we get into some of the case studies in more detail. And I think we're probably going to move through them roughly chronologically, but keeping in mind these themes you've already raised for us that very much have links throughout them. So when we talk about these ideas of, as you mentioned, fear, right, the idea of, like, oh, my goodness, you have to stay home, like there's all sorts of dangerous things going on. I want to start, I think, with Myra Hundley in the sort of swinging 60s in the UK, where certainly in the popular imagination there was a lot going on outside one's door, right. For good and for ill. They were all manner of things sort of changing and happening really fast. And it was really intriguing to read about this particular case because from the perspective of obviously decades later, when one thinks about the 60s, there's lots of changes that could kind of stick in the public memory. So can you help us understand why her crimes were part of what stuck? I mean, it's not like there wasn't anything else going on. So why was she and her crimes seen as so threatening, both at the time, but also so much that they've stayed in the public memory since?
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Professor Joanna Burke
Well, Miranda, I start the book with Myra Hindley. She's the first substantive chapter precisely for the reasons you give that she is the evil woman that seems to resonate the most, at least when speaking to people from the uk, you know, she is the, if you like, epitome of evil women for people in Britain. And in the 1960s, something that actually shocked me when I realized it, when she committed her horrendous crimes, for those who don't know, Maya Hindley and her partner ian Brady killed five young children, age 10 to 17. And shockingly, they even recorded the torture of one of these children. It was a new technology at the time, so that's actually quite important in terms of how shocking this was to the public. But anyway, it was really shocking to me to discover that when she did these crimes, committed these crimes, she was only 21 to 23 years of age. So she was really, really Young. And in 1966, both her and Brady were sentenced to life in prison and Hindley served more than three and a half decades in prison. And you know, for British people, Hindley was, as someone said, journalist said, somewhere as much part of the 60s as the Beatles and the Pill. She really represented these fears about the so called permissive 60s and feminism. So why such loathing? And I think part of the reason there was such loathing is due to the fact that she just seemed so normal. Now, this was not the case with her co offender, Brady. He was very easy to understand. He was a male. He tortured animals as a child. He spent most of his childhood in a ball. Still, he had a long history of criminal violence and he was mentally unstable. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and acute paranoia as the, the mother of one of the victims, Leslie and Downey once said Brady had the decency to go mad, whereas, you know, Myra Henley was normal. And one of the arguments I make in this chapter, but also throughout the book, is it's the absence of an easily available explanatory framework to make sense of someone's actions, in this case Hindley's actions, that made her seem particularly dangerous rather than less dangerous. As I already mentioned, there are these fears about pornography, morality or immorality of the 60s really prominent at the time. This idea that the 1960s were swinging and sexuality and homosexuality on the increase. There was great horror about the Wolfenden Report, which recommended decriminalizing homosexuality. There was real concerns about pornography and particularly pornography is consumed by ordinary people. It was okay for the upper classes and the educated classes to read the Marquis de Sade, but the fact that some working class young people might do so was considered rather, rather horrendous. There was also in this period renewed or heightened, I should say, awareness of the Holocaust. You know, Eichmann's trial, 1961, Kramer's film Judgment at Nuremberg. You know, the kind of fact that these two rather banal young people could glorify Nazism and, you know, in this little ordinary little home in Manchester, embrace the ideas of the Marquis de Sade. This seemed really shocking, extraordinary. There's also, I think it's interesting to ask whether Myra Hindley would have actually gained as much notoriety as she did if it hadn't been for that infamous, the iconic police mugshot. You know, even young people today know that mugshot of Maya Hindley, which came to represent everything that was morally ugly about the modern world. And commentators at the time really drew on what were long outdated ideas, but they were still drawn upon of Lombroso in the 19th century century who had written about criminal women claiming they possessed the stigmato degeneration, you know, twisted face, dark hair, asymmetrical skulls, et cetera, et cetera. So this idea that women in the modern, the swing 60s could actually be like atavistic throwbacks to an earlier stage in human evolution was also a really important aspect of it. She was kept in the public eye for nearly 40 years after her conviction because, you know, artists, theater playwriters, theater directors, visual artists were quite obsessed with her. There were numerous representations of her in the public sphere. The most famous or notorious would have been Marcus Harvey's big painting, massive painting, simply called Myra, which was shown at the Royal Academy of Art in 1997. And it's a massive painting, but it's made with the plastic casts of two young children's hands. And it caused massive stuff, massive sort of scandal, if you like. You know, ink and eggs were thrown at it. There were crowds protesting outside saying it shouldn't be shown. And it's really interesting to note that at the time that this painting was exhibited, you know, Myra Hindley was 55 years old. You know, she committed her crimes when she was in her early twenties. To being if people were actually still acting as if the woman in that mugshot was the woman who was on the walls of the academy. And, you know, this sort of incredible longevity of fears associated with Myra Hindley was responsible for the fact that she was never released from prison. She died in prison. Even though criminals who committed identical crimes to Myra Hindley were typically released within a dozen or so years, she remained incarcerated for nearly three times the length of other murderers. So I think it's really an indication of just how much of a lightning rod she was for people with anxieties and fears.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, that's really quite a stark statistic that brings that home in terms of the length of the. Of time she was in prison and also the kind of issues, the way it stuck over decades. Right. I think that's such a fascinating aspect of it because comparing then to some of the other women you discuss, like, has she created essentially a template of what evil women look like? For example, if we look at Rosemary west, was there an element that kind of the coverage about her crimes were so intense because they were tapping into the same sort of fears?
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Professor Joanna Burke
Yeah, I think you're right. They did happen to similar sorts of fears. You get the Lombronzo type arguments reappearing to people, inspecting Rose West's body to find signs of evil, so evil written on the exterior body for those people who don't know. So I should say this. Rose and Fred west committed their crimes in the 1960s through to the 1970s. They sexually assaulted, tortured, killed an unknown number of girls and women who were arrested, found guilty. Rose west was found guilty of 10, killing and torturing 10 girls and young women. Fred committed suicide in prison. So Rose McWest basically sentenced to life in prison. And she's. By the way, she's still alive. She's only, I think, in the early 70s. But anyway, Rose west, there are a lot of things. The template that was developed in the context of Myra Hindley was applied to a large degree to Rose West. As I mentioned, the Lombroso type arguments that Rose west was kind of a savage throwback to an earlier age. But on the other hand, she was very normal, like Myra Hornley. She was just a normal, plump housewife with six glasses. So, you know, those are kind of similar things. They're also similar anxieties about the effects of pornography, the impact of violence in the mass media, lesbianism. You know, at the time, you know, it's shocking to remember at the time, three quarters of people in Britain believed that homosexuality was wrong. It was evil in itself. And of course, Rosewise submitted to enjoying sex with. With women. And also these fears that appeared in Linus Henley's time also appeared in Rose West's time about permissive society more generally and the disruption of gender norms. I do think, though, and I should add, and like Myra Hindley, Rose west was very young when she committed her crimes. She was 17 years old when she committed her first murder. So there's also those kind of similarities. I think, think that there are also some slight differences to many. Rose west was more transgressive than Myra Hindley. She was really very sexually aggressive. She was abusive, in fact, she tortured girls and women. She was incestuous. She was a consumer of really hardcore pornography. She was a possession of sex boys, which meant people at the time found rather titillating. And she was a sex worker. But I think the biggest difference about Rose west is that she was a mother. She actually had eight children. And this was the fact that she sexually abused and killed her own daughter as well as a stepdaughter was, you know, out of this. People just couldn't comprehend that motherhood as such should have precluded her actions. I mean, of course, no one bothered to mention that Fred west was a father who sexually abused his own daughters and other girls and women. But that's another issue. So that was the motherness. The fact that she was a mother was galling. But there were three other different interpretations that we get in the 1990s that weren't there in the 1960s. And these were the themes of serial killers, the themes of pedophilia, and the theme of sexual sadism. So Hindley was known as a sex murderer, but west was a sexually sadistic serial killer. So the serial killer narrative comes in at this point. It was invented in the 70s, in fact, by an FBI agent, Robert Ressler. But it became popular in the 1980s with Rose West's trial. Sexual sadism was also there with Rose west and not in the case of Myra Hindley. Sexual sadism has a long history by this stage, almost a century long history by this stage. That even though Hindley, we know from the recording, was present when at least one of her victims was sexually tortured, there was no suggestion at the time that Hindley engaged in those acts for her own personal sexual arousal, which is necessary for sexual sadism. This was not the case for Roseworth. She enjoyed torturing, sexually torturing these young people. And paedophilia is the other explanation that was there with Rose west, not with Hindley. From the mid-1980s there had been renewed information or knowledge about women who were pedophiles. Before this it was just assumed it was it was only men. And there's a very important piece of research done revealing that one fifth of sexually abused boys named a woman as the abuser. So there's greater awareness of female abusers and that really came to the fore with with Rose West. So in other words, the template is definitely there, but there are also these additional elements that make it particularly shocking and evil for people commenting at the
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to understand the ways in which there was sort of, in some ways it sounds like kind of already a way for society to be primed to be freaked out by this. And then as more details come through, kind of getting added to the template that's there. But the other aspect of the template we talked about earlier in terms of Myra Hindley and sort of that I want to pull out a little bit further is kind of not just the fear that she created or was seen to create, but kind of the template that was created in the public's mind of how to treat someone like that. Because that seems to come up a lot when we move to the case of Eileen Warnes, who kind of in some ways seems to almost be like a bit what you were saying earlier about Myra Hindley in terms of like she was treated in a particular way by the courts in terms. And then in terms of her punishment, the length of it, the intensity of it, the continued focus on it. Do we see a sort of template there going on in terms of how society is thinking about kind of who gets to be a victim, who gets to show remorse, how people are punished for crimes?
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Professor Joanna Burke
Yeah. Amy Wuornos, again, for people who don't know her, American from Florida, sentenced to death for killing seven white middle aged men in 1989 and 1990. She killed these men in the context of earning a living as a sex worker. And the phrase that's used at the time she was a sex worker exit to exit, meaning that she did her work between exits on the highways in rural Florida. And she always claimed that she was acting, she acted in self defense because these men either refused to pay or they were violent towards her. And you know, the fact that she was a sex worker is really important in trying to understand public reactions to her because a group of a large group Significant group of dominance feminists, sometimes called radical feminists, came to her defense and actually supported the. Supported her. In fact, she was initially even fettered by these feminist dominance feminists for being a soldier who killed the enemy, if you like. So feminist feminists are those who argue that sexual oppression is at the core of female oppression more generally, so that men's sense of sexual entitlement is the site on which patriarchal structures are sustained. So unlike socialist feminists of the period who emphasizes economic exploitation, these feminists honed in on issues of prostitution, issues of pornography, and what they called compulsory heterosexuality. And many were carceral feminists. In other words, they wanted to increase prison sentences. And they saw Wuornos as a sex worker who had killed these nasty embodiments, if you like, of patriarchy, to use their kind of language. You know, they said that her victims were in fact, not innocent victims. They were men who frequented sex workers, had reputations for abusing women. In other words, bluntly, they deserved what they got. And so the, you know, the men themselves, their friends and relatives were effectively raised from the topic, from the story, from War's story. And they pointed out, and this is a fair point, actually, that violence is an occupational hazard for sex workers, particularly those plying their trade on highways. You know, at around the time that Wuornalls was selling sex, research found that nearly 80% of sex workers had been raped, had been raped that year. And on average, on average, each of these women had been raped 33 times. So, you know what their, their argument was that, well, okay, wornall saw around 2000 clients a year as a sex worker. So the claim that seven of them had assaulted her was plausible. That's the line. But, you know, I found it really difficult to understand. In fact, I was quite bewildered by the sympathy that Wuornos got for killing these people. You know, why did this group of feminists come to her defense? Well, I think partly it's because Wuornos had sex with women and she targeted men, most of whom were using her as a sex worker. So in other words, she was easily co opted into the sort of radical feminist critique of prostitution and pornography. Again, going back to what we saw with Bruce west and Mara Hindley, that prostitution, pornography central to the patriarchal oppression of girls and women. Now, of course, Rose west also had sex with women, but of course her victims were female, they weren't johns. So Warnell's victims were all male clients, all johns. So that was a huge kind of difference. I also find that there's sort of a problem with this emphasis on Wool Noor's lesbianism because she actually did not identify as a lesbian, despite the portrait of her by Theron in the film Monster. I feel my really disliked, by the way. You know, most of Warnall's relationships, in fact had been with men, not with women, except for the final four years of her life. So the template does again have similar elements, pornography, prostitution. But there are differences there as well. And the difference, really big difference is her initial, at least support from dominance feminists. The other major difference is she gained the label of America's first female serial killer. You know, around only about 10 to 17% of serial killers are female. She's meant to be the first. Of course, she's no such. She wasn't the first in reality. But, you know, if you read any of the true crime stuff, Warnalls is the first America's first female serial killer. So that links in very much with the arguments that we heard around Ruth West.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, lots of very interesting similarities kind of happening and, and one of them that we've sort of hinted at, I suppose, but not talked about directly, and I think we should, is the emphasis on trying to make sense of these women's minds, of their thinking, of the kind of psychological profile that may or may not kind of explain their actions. And obviously that happens in terms of kind of media portrayals. But you also talk in the book that this happens in like the courtroom, like with actual psychologists. So can we talk about why that element has been such a big part of how the idea of an evil woman has been defined.
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Professor Joanna Burke
Psychology is really important in this, this whole story, particularly post Myra Hindley. Myra Henley did get attention from psychologists, but not so much at the time. She got attention from psychologists from the 1980s onwards when she committed her crimes. In psychology is a small, relatively uninterested, I mean, uninterested in issues of criminology and criminal women. So there wasn't that much discussion of her at the time in by psychologists. But all the other women psychology and pop psychology are really dominant in trying to create frames of meaning, trying to understand why or how they could have done these things. And there are, in the book, I think there are four main themes. And remember, none of the women in the book are clinically insane. So I'm putting aside the psychiatric arguments, which of course were their forms since the 19th century. So I'm only looking at the psychological arguments of, you know, how you explain sane women. And the most important ones, there are four of them. There's battered women syndrome. There's cycles of abuse and there's attachment disorders. And then there's a fourth one which I find particularly interesting. Compliant victim of a sexual seducer. So those are the most important for I think. I think Wuornos is a really good illustration of the uses that. Uses made by psychologists and pop psychology in understanding evil women. I think she's a really good example of this because she was actually diagnosed with personality disorders. But of course, legally, personality disorders are not mental illnesses. Sufferers know the nature and they know the consequences of their actions. So, you know, in many ways, diagnoses such as borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, are really the secular equivalent of just calling someone evil. And it's really interesting that rather than serving as evidence of insanity, in other words, it's insanity that led them to commit these crimes. Rather, they are moral judgments that are intended to imply greater dangerousness. Warnolds also makes a plausible case for what is known as attachment disorders. These were kind of invented by John Bowlby. He concluded through his research that if an infant is denied love by their caregivers, usually, and he meant mothers, they either become enraged and. Or withdrawn, and this affects their relationships throughout their life. So this was a really useful way for psychologists to understand Wuornos in particular, but also the other ones, and in retrospect, Myra Hindley as well. Because Wuorno's life, by any stretch of the imagination, had been one of unrelenting abuse amounting to twilight torture. You know, mother was 16 when she gave birth, never met her father, who had severe mental health problems, was convicted of raping a young child, committed suicide. Mother abandoned her. She was raped numerous times from the age of 12 onwards. She gave birth to a child at the age of 13. The baby was taken away. She was homeless from the age of 12. She was a sex worker in her teens. And it goes on and on, on and on and on. But, you know, the evidence again of this really traumatic childhood and youth, which is really good evidence for of course, she has an attachment disorder, did the opposite of winning her sympathy. In fact, rather than being regarded as mitigating circumstances, Warnos lengthy history of abuse, being abused and then raped by her johns served to make her more dangerous. And the fourth really important one in terms of the book, is the compliant victim of a sexual sadist. And this was the explanation given for Carla Homolka, who killed, along with her husband, three people, including her sisters. Sorry, sexually assaulted and then killed three people, including her sister. And initially, psychologists looked at her and they saw battered women syndrome. She was severely battered by her husband her entire marriage and he before her marriage, her husband was a serial killer. Even before he married her. He was a very violent, sadistic man. The problem though that psychologists faced when looking at, when applying battered Women's syndrome to Homolka was that Homolka didn't kill her batterer. She killed innocent young girls, young, late young women. So this enabled them to pull out this idea of a compliant victim of a sexual sadist. So another words, it's a term used applied only to women. There's no men who are compliant victims of a female sexual seducer. It's always compliant victims of a male sexual seducers. And it was used to explain why it is that some sexual seders, male sexual seders, can take over control of a previously virtuous good woman and turn her into the sexual seders, make herself so isolated, so dependent upon him that she will engage herself in acts of violence against other people. So these are just four of the psychological diagnoses that were used in a huge number of cases of women who commit these really, really terrible crimes. And they are intended to hold, help understand or explain why a woman in particular can go ahead and, and do violence. Because as I said earlier, you know, no one was very surprised that men would do these things. The, the trick was trying to explain why women would go ahead and, and commit violence.
- [46:45]
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- [47:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
so much of the psychological elements that you've examined there are kind of the why did they do the thing? There's also in your book the what happens afterwards? And is that an element in terms of how much the label of evil sticks? The extent to which, for instance, they do or don't seem to show remorse?
- [47:35]
Professor Joanna Burke
You know, showing remorse is clearly an issue. It's one of the big reasons why Rose west is, is probably the most difficult to understand because Rose west has never admitted that she committed these terrible, terrible, terrible crimes to this day. She stopped giving interviews in 2001, so I haven't been able to interview her, but she has not shown remorse. You do see though that the other women that remorse has been shown. I Mean Myra Hindley. You read a lot of reports on Myra Hindley. The whole thing is how she showed remorse and was a hard, cold figure. And again, the police snapshot, mug shot, sorry, was an important bit of evidence for that, but it's not true, you know, I mean, during all the police interviews, she showed immense remorse for what she did. She even at some stage, admitted that what she did was worse than what her co offender did because she knew what she was doing and she knew it was wrong. And the problem that many of these evil women face is that they can never be anything other than. Than monstrous. And anything, any evidence to the contrary, is interpreted as manipulative, duplicitous. And, you know, Hindley is a really, really good example of that. Now, admittedly, it did not help her cause that in 1987, I think it was 21 years after her initial conviction, she confessed to having played a role in two other murders. So this was a really important dividing line, I guess, between some people who were supporting her, at least going on parole, and others because she confessed to two more. But she confessed those in the context of extreme remorse. She really transformed her life within prison, and remorse was a very big aspect of that. She returned to her Catholic faith, and everyone who had dealings with her in prison believed that she had been actually rehabilitated. But as I say, no amount of remorse could work, if you like. And part of the problem is there's the three Rs, if you like, there's remorse, there's repentance, and there's restitution. But, you know, these are very uncertain things. I mean, who should judge? Who is the right to judge whether someone is remorseful, repentant, and willing to make amends? And how should they do it? I mean, women who commit these terrible, terrible crimes face probably, I think, greater difficulties in convincing other people that they have been reformed than evil men do, you know, because precisely because of the entrenched ideas about femininity as somehow inherently manipulative and deceptive. So, you know, if women cry, they're accused of shedding crocodile tears. If they act stoical, they are heartless. You know, there's no kind of way around that. And, you know, the. The narrative of evil as opposed to badness or even very, very badness is really important in cementing this refusal to believe that it is possible for these women to feel remorse.
- [51:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to have that element of the, I suppose, in template, right. The kind of embeddedness of the public imagination added. What then about. I Think, I hope, one of the only strands left of what you mentioned at the beginning that we haven't pulled on yet, the way in which you and I view history as being interesting in and of its own right, but also helpful in better understanding where we're at now and maybe even what could be done going forward. What do you think we can learn from these cases that we've discussed? Obviously, that you go into more detail in the book about, about these questions of what can be done, what should be done around people that have horrible lies before they commit crimes, commit horrible crimes, get this kind of media attention? Like, do we, Are we inevitably just going to see kind of more cases like this in the media going forward? Are there alternatives we could be thinking about?
- [52:32]
Professor Joanna Burke
This is the final chapter of the book, and I spent more time agonizing over this chapter than any other chapter in the book, except maybe the introduction, because it's a difficult one. I mean, I am an anti carceral feminist. By that I mean I believe that incarceration as the primary way of dealing with criminals and deterring others simply doesn't work. It's ineffective. So, you know, immersing myself in the crimes, the atrocities committed by these five evil women was a real challenge. Real challenge, you know, and although the book Five Evil Women is animated by this anti carceral, if you like, impulse, you know, I still have to admit that by removing these evil women from sadistic men and toxic environments, prison actually did rehabilitate them. You know, they certainly, certainly rehabilitated Hindley, Homolka and Tucker. So in other words, some form of incarceration, unfortunately, I think may be necessary when we need to incapacitate habitually violent offenders. But the point is that despite their horrendous crimes, none of the women discussed in my book fall into that category. None of them were habitually violent offenders. All could have made a positive contribution to society and basically keeping them permanently caged or killing them actually serves no function in protecting the public. So this has led many activists, including myself. I'm more an historian than an activist, I have to admit, to think, well, maybe we should return to sort of ideas about rehabilitation and reform of prison environments. This is not a new idea. This is a very old idea. In fact, it was probably the dominant idea in the 1970s, prior to the 1980s, I should say. In other words, you know, Restorative Justice Project, you know, is really, is part of this to meet victims and to discuss the harms inflicted, agree on some kind of reparations. It could be material could be emotional, could be symbolic, you know, an apology, et cetera, that could actually help not only the victims, but also the offenders. I do, though, and I'm very, very sympathetic to this. In fact, I'm a strong supporter of this. But I do think there are limits to these kinds of programs because they kind of, too often they position violence too much as a violation of personal relationships, overlooking broader contexts. So in other words, I'm a little bit wary of the way it individualizes distress and ignores the way social structures create the harms they claim to address. So, in other words, restorative programs aim to restore the status quo rather than to transform it. So in the end, in the book, I try and make an argument for something more radical. In other words, structural shifts in criminal justice systems and political work to ensure greater equality in society more broadly. So, in other words, transformative justice with the ultimate aim of bringing in the long term. We're talking about, of bringing about abolition of prisons, not merely their reform. And, you know, I'm really inspired by, and I have been for many years, inspired by the Critical Resistance Organization. This is founded by Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmour and others, which urges activists to focus on three strategies. And I hope I get these right. MDs, okay? M, moratorium on building prisons. D, decarceration, getting people out of prisons, and E, excarceration. And this is really important one. In other words, diverting people from contexts in which they may hit out violently. And, you know, I love the quote by Ruth Gilmour who says that, you know, abolition is not merely the absence of cops and prisons, it's the presence of anything. We need to secure that absence. So, you know, if we are serious about trying to ensure that the terrible carnage inflicted by Hindley, West Warnalls Homolka Tucker never occurs again, I actually think we need to do a lot more research on transformative thinking about the harms inflicted on these women and their partners. I mean, Hindley would not have offended if she had not fallen in love with Brady. Deeply wounded, sadistic sadist. Homlicha was battered senseless by her husband. Rapist. The childhoods of people like West Warnall's Tucker, unimaginably cruel. And the betrayal that these women felt as girls, as children, by teachers, social workers, medical personnel, neighbors, exacerbated this kind of fury. And let me just be really clear here, Miranda. It's not to minimize in any way their actions. And they knew what they were doing and they knew it was very, very wrong. But I do think we need to think about tackling violence in more radical and even holistic, if I dare mention that word, ways. And I think this is what I'm trying to do in the book.
- [58:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's clearly a lot to think about here. That goes right back to the goal you stated at the beginning of investigating history, to think about the present and future. So I think that I can see why you spent so much time on the last chapter of the book and the kind of amount of thinking that you've discussed here as well, that went into what this all could mean. I'm curious whether this is something you're continuing to think about or whether you're, I don't know, spending a year away from book projects or have a completely different topic you're looking into.
- [59:08]
Professor Joanna Burke
Deeply engaged in a book which is absolutely the opposite of Five Evil Women, you know, burnout. After writing Five Evil Women and I thought to myself, why not write about a topic which is happy, a celebration? So I am deeply embedded in a new project which is called this is not the Title. This is the kind of working title, if you like Wine and Women. So it's a celebration of cultures, female cultures, of drinking. It's a cultural history. Drinking is pleasure, is Sensuous, is creating communities of friends and political activists. Let me just tell you, there is no violence in my next book. No evil women, no evil men. And except for a little discussion on liver cirrhosis, breast cancer and alcoholism, it's otherwise a celebration of how we as individuals can create communities of other women and with men which celebrate the good things in the world. Celebrate love, laughter, happiness, a few tears, but nice things, good wine.
- [60:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That does sound in many ways the opposite of the book you've just written. But if anyone wants to learn more about what we've been discussing, they can of course go read that book titled Five Evil Women. Hindley West Warnes Homolka Tucker, published by reaction in 2026. Joanna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [61:04]
Jane Wakefield
Hi, I'm Jane Wakefield and I host the Human in the Loop in partnership with Gravity. That's Gravity with two E's helping organizations innovate with AI securely. We explore the rise of AI agents, their history, their potential, and the risks organisations must navigate as they scale search for Human in the Loop. Wherever you get your podcasts,