

Jun 4, 2013 - by Eponymous Rox - 0 Comments

Jodi Arias life/death mask (illustration by Eponymous Rox)





Women rarely kill

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 90 percent of all murders committed annually are perpetrated by males.

However, as can be seen throughout history, it's the remaining minority who traditionally get the most press, public scorn, and the book thrown at them.

Moreover, when females do slay, knives and guns aren't their favorite weaponry.

"Women are different in whom, how and why they kill," crime analyst James Alan Fox of Northeastern University elaborated in a 2012 ABC interview. "Extreme violence is far more alien to females than to males."

Ladies prefer poison

Whether it's a faithless lover, a wife-beating husband, or a pensioner whose death she stands to benefit from, when a woman decides to kill she's apt to do it with arsenic, antifreeze or a pillow rather than a blade, blunt object or firearm.

"Women tend as a rule to do softer killings. Poisoning, suffocation, those sorts of things," ex-FBI profiler Gregg McCrary told ABC. "Rarely are they the slasher types or inflicting a lot of bodily damage."

Consider as well that women are usually smaller than men, and socialized from birth to be nurturing and nonaggressive.

"Destruction and the ability [to] use power to knock someone down is so tied into a masculine identity." Dr. Michael Welner, forensic psychiatrist and chairman of The Forensic Panel, explained on ABC's Good Morning America. "That's not part of what makes women feminine."

Sometimes females use weapons in self defense

Occasionally, during out of control domestic altercations, the last thing some abusive males witness is a total shocker for them.

They never expect to see their battered women brandishing weapons.

That too, according to criminologists like James Alan Fox, is the case in most intimate-partner homicides where the accused was a woman and her victim a man:

"For women, killing is often seen as a last resort -- a defensive move."

"I think I was inconsistent in my lies. Yes."

When prime suspect Jodi Arias was first apprehended for the 2008 murder of Travis Alexander, she claimed to know nothing about it.

Later, jailed, she made a sudden about-face, stating she'd witnessed the doomed man's assault by a murderous pair of masked intruders, and that her own life had been weirdly spared during the bloody confrontation.

Finally, years after the fact and awaiting trial, Arias confessed to the crime, although pleading self defense and "amnesia."

But while weeks of sordid testimony and thousands of salacious e-mails may have disclosed the depth of her and Alexander's sexual deviance and a deeply unhealthy bond, in the end not a shred of this scandalous material supported her contentions.

On the other hand, if one weaves together defendant Arias' contradictory tales with probabilities, statistics and a body of evidence, it reveals the most likely reason she couldn't remember an exceptionally vicious, prolonged knife attack which left the petite woman with barely even a scratch.

Love or money?

There's no question that this truly troubled female wanted an insensitive, fickle, and philandering lover dead.

She was seeking revenge for being sucked into an emotionally abusive relationship that, despite her various compromises, wasn't going to end in marriage after all. It was just simply going to end.

Yet experts agree that stabbing Alexander 27 times and nearly decapitating him not only required intense malice, but great physical force as well. During which the victim strenuously battled to survive.

Clearly a woman would have been no match against such a frenzied show of strength, even one with "six-pack abs" as Arias allegedly had, even one pitted against a wounded male, even one oozing with venom and evil.

So who is the madman Arias coaxed to do her killing?


Eponymous Rox writes about cops, curs and killers for Crime Magazine, the GatherNews agency, Associated Content, and the Killing Killers website. Visit Killing Killers today and cast your anonymous vote in the Arias opinion poll: Do you think Defendant Arias should be sentenced for life or put to death for murdering her ex-boyfriend?


Total views: 4097