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  Praise for When She Was Bad

  “Without getting weighed down in jargon.… When She Was Bad forces readers to reconsider the notion that such women are always victims of circumstances, not people of free will.”

  — Detroit Free Press

  “Pearson’s timely look at the female shadow is impossible to put down. This groundbreaking book about female aggression against men and children is one of the reasons I became a feminist — a respect for human rights.”

  — Susan Swan, author of The Wives of Bath

  “Intense, well-written and heavily researched, Pearson gives us a book long overdue for today’s society.”

  — Francine Prose, The New York Observer

  “An award-winning feminist journalist explodes the myth that women are not involved in violence except as victims.… Debunking PMS and postpartum mood swings as excuses for murder and mayhem, Pearson dares take a stand some may find antithetical to America’s media driven cultural denial of women’s capacity for violence; namely, that evil exists regardless of the gender embodying it. Strong popular science.”

  — Booklist

  “A compelling, frightening look at women, not as victims of violence, but as perpetuators of it.… Gripping controversial material that sheds light on violence and society, and how women can get away with murder.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Patricia Pearson has written an intriguing book, written it very well indeed. She is a fine writer who knows how to combine graceful narrative with provocative zingers. I found much to agree with — and much to disagree with — in When She Was Bad, but my tilt was definitely in her favour.”

  — Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will

  “Patricia Pearson helps us understand that women’s direct and indirect methods of aggression make it more complex than men’s, that female aggression is part of female nature, and that the myth of female innocence serves neither sex well. When She Was Bad’s excellent writing makes it an easy read. It is a careful blend of anecdote, documentation, insight, and courage.”

  — Warren Farrell, Ph.D., author of Why Men Are the Way They Are

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Patricia Pearson is an award-winning writer and crime journalist. She won a National Magazine Award for her article on Karla Homolka, “Behind Every Successful Psychopath.” She is a contributing editor for Saturday Night, as well as writing for many other publications and for television both in Canada and the United States. Pearson lives in Toronto.

  Copyright © Patricia Pearson, 1997, 1998

  First published in 1997 by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  This edition with a new epilogue published by Vintage Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 1998.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright

  Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or

  by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage

  and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher,

  except by reviewer, who may quote brief pasages in a review.

  The individual experiences recounted in this book are true.

  However, in some instances, names and desciptive details have

  been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Pearson, Patricia, 1964–

  When she was bad: how and why women get away with murder

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36383-1

  1. Female offenders. 2. Violent crimes. 3. Violence. 4. Women - Psychology.

  I. Title

  HV6046.P42 1998 364.3’74 C98-930842-1

  v3.1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book is a strange job.

  “Here you go,” a publisher says at the outset, handing you a salary of sorts, and a deadline, “we’ll see you in two years.” And there you go indeed, in a state of high alarm, without any day-to-day ballast—no appointments, no tasks assigned each morning, no office colleagues to act as sounding boards, no clue as to what you are doing: equipped solely with a single idea, which you cling to like driftwood in a great, dark sea.

  Under the circumstances, which in my case led to hiding beneath my bed for rather long stretches of time, all assistance rendered is most gratefully received.

  And so I offer my thanks to:

  Sarah Lazin, my agent, who is also my beloved friend, for editing the proposal in the autumn of 1993 when it resembled a set of IKEA furniture instructions, shepherding me through the world of publishing with alacrity and wry asides, defending my interests with a genuine passion, and encouraging me to learn how to spell.

  Doug Pepper, editorial director at Random House Canada, who first encouraged me to write this book and continually supported me thereafter; Alice Wood at Little, Brown UK, who came on board early and provided astute commentary along the way; Jane von Mehren at Viking Penguin, my principal editor, who fielded neurotic questions with grace and patience, edited each draft with subtlety and precision, and reiterated her faith in the project whenever I misplaced mine.

  For their lighting the way intellectually, I am indebted most specifically to Candice Skrapec, for her insights into the commission of extreme violence; Coramae Richey Mann, for her research on female homicide offenders; Allison Morris, on female criminality; Alice Miller and Landon Pearson, on child abuse and cycles of violence; Kaj Björkqvist and his Finnish colleagues, for their excellent work on female aggression.

  For long conversations that served to refine my ideas, I’m grateful to my mother, Landon; Michael DeCarlo; Candice Skrapec; Pier Bryden; Diana Bryden, with whom I shared the horror of Bernardo’s trial; Barbara Moon; Diana Symonds; and Kate Fillion, who went through it all alongside me as she wrote her own book.

  For research in the field, I am immensely thankful to everybody who gave so freely of their time, resources, and expertise, including: Dr. Fred Mathews; Leroy Orozco; Donna Stewart; Stuart Asch; Bill Tillier; Toby Wong; Eric Hickey; Cedric Southerland; Justice Michael Corriero; the men in Steve Easton’s support group; Murray Straus; Michael Thomas; Reena Sommer; Kim Rossmo; Detectives Gierasch, Rice, and Cabrera; the staff of the Suffolk County district attorney’s office; court officials in Schenectady, San Jose, and San Francisco; Beth Valentine; the staff at New York Legal Aid, Juvenile Division; William Wood; Precious Bedell; Arlene Mohammad; Marti Salas-Tarin; and all the women at Miracle House, who were so welcoming one early spring weekend.

  For making sure the research was correct, a special thanks to my fact-checker, Geri Savits-Fine. All remaining errors in this work are mine to shamefacedly claim.

  Finally, I thank my parents, my siblings, and my friends for their love throughout this taxing time, and my husband, Ambrose, whose warm, surrounding presence keeps me sane.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About The Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

  The Nature of Female Aggression

  MAYBE YOU MISTOOK ME FOR AN ANGEL

  Perceptions of Female Violence & the Vocabulary of Motive

  THE PROBLEM THAT STILL HAS NO NAME

  Women Who Aggress Newborns & Infants

  MEDEA IN HER MODERN GUISE

  The Use of Children as Pawns

  BALANCING THE DOMESTIC EQUATION

  When Women Assault Their Spouses or Lovers

  WOMAN AS PREDATOR

  Methods of the Multiple Murderess

  WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

  Women as Partners in Violent Crime

 
; ISLAND OF WOMEN

  The World of the Female Prison

  LET THE GUN SMOKE

  Holding Ourselves Accountable for Our Deeds

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  For Geoffrey and Landon,

  who gave me life and

  filled it with love

  I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.

  MARGARET ATWOOD, SURFACING

  GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

  The Nature of Female Aggression

  Everyone starts out totally dependent on a woman. The idea that she could turn out to be your enemy is terribly frightening.

  LORD ASTOR, British philanthropist, 1993

  This story of violence begins with a war. It was America’s war, the razzle-dazzle one in the Persian Gulf, where the desert was a proving ground for a new generation of heroes. Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf came out of that war, and General Colin Powell, and CNN, and high-tech missiles. And the soldiers who died on the sand, who were injured, taken prisoner, whose names we never caught—for them, yellow ribbons bedecked the nation’s trees. They were the heroes to whom one little girl, ten-year-old Tina Killie, of Wrightstown, Wisconsin, carefully penned a letter, at the instruction of her teacher, to support the troops of Operation Desert Storm. Tina addressed her envelope to “any soldier,” and her teacher mailed it to the United States Army.

  Months went by, the war wound down, and Tina Killie was dreaming up what to wear for Halloween when all of a sudden she received a reply. All the talk in her school and on television about the courageous men of war had distilled into a living human being, a hero with a heartbeat, with the desert in his boots and the sun in his eyes, crouched over a canteen table writing personally, to her. “Don’t be misled by my handwriting,” the letter began. “I am a guy—I just have fairly decent penmanship because I once took up calligraphy as an art.” The soldier seemed to know that he had to explain away, at once, the stereotypes of manhood and apologize for being nothing more or less than a person. “I shall [begin] what I hope will be a continued pen pal between us,” he wrote in his lovely script, “by giving a quick description of myself. I have been in the army ever since graduation [from high school in Las Vegas]. I am 6’1” and 165 pounds. I love to run … I used to run track in high school.”

  Army Specialist Anthony Riggs, one rank shy of sergeant, nicknamed “Slowpoke” by his buddies because he was gentle and hard to rile, had gone into the army because he couldn’t afford to go to college. He was stationed with the Forty-third Air Defense Artillery, D Battery, a unit that operated Patriot missiles in Saudi Arabia. Over the next four months, as America’s precision war gave way to a jagged peace, Riggs sent Tina more than a dozen letters. He included tokens of his adventure abroad, like a Pepsi bottle with Arabic script, and she sent him reminders of comfort, like carefully packaged boxes of chocolate chip cookies. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you Angel,” he wrote in one of his last notes. “It’s because you’re so nice to me and yet we’ve never met. It’s nice to know there are people like you still growing up in America.”

  Riggs’s surprise at her kindness was curious. It measured, perhaps, the distance American soldiers had traveled since World War II, when Yankees were so famous for their optimism. Now it was the end of the century, and Riggs was an African American who lived in the bleak heart of downtown Detroit, where optimism had been subsumed by a stalwart determination to simply survive. “I have no intentions of becoming one of this war’s casualties,” he wrote to his mother in Las Vegas. “With the Lord’s grace and his guidance, I’ll walk American soil once again.”

  On March 16, 1991, Specialist Riggs strode jubilantly across the airport tarmac in Fort Bliss, Texas, and gave his twenty-two-year-old wife, Toni Cato Riggs, a tentative “D’ya still love me?” hug. Toni had driven across the country to welcome him home with her three-year-old daughter, Ambere. For that, and for being home, he was immensely relieved. After spending several months equal parts scared and bored senseless, he’d made it to safe ground. He craved what was heartening: some french fries, a little romance, and when he got back to Detroit, a move out of there, to a small house being offered by the army on a base in Warren, Michigan.

  While Riggs was away, Toni had returned to the childhood home where her grandmother, Joan Cato, had raised her—a small wooden house on once-genteel Conley Avenue in Detroit. The yellow ribbon she had tied to the porch slumped in the cold March rain as the couple slogged back and forth between the house and Riggs’s Nissan Sentra, filling it up with their belongings, on their first day back in the city. By two in the morning, the car was crammed with old furniture, Ambere’s toys, Toni’s school books, Anthony’s army stuff, just one more haul to do, then a weary stretch of the shoulders and a fitful sleep. Anthony was still outside when Joan Cato noticed that the porch light had gone out. Toni went to the doorway to switch it back on. She stopped in mid-stride, jerked into stillness by gunfire. In Detroit, this was dismal and predictable terror, not shocking so much as depressing. When it stopped, Joan and Toni peered through the screen. They saw the Nissan pulling away. Oh, Lord, this was violence coming right on home. Anthony was on the ground. He was hit. Just like the war. That impersonal. Within moments, he was dead.

  It didn’t take long for the dispiriting irony of this veteran’s urban murder to be grasped by every politician and columnist in the nation. Within twenty-four hours, Detroit City Council’s president Maryann Mahaffey had pegged it “the great American tragedy.” In Washington, at the Senate subcommittee hearing on the Brady Bill, mandating a seven-day waiting period for handguns, Specialist Riggs arose repeatedly as the day’s bitterest case in point. Never mind Saddam Hussein. American men were dying at one another’s hands, in their own home-grown “combat zones.” The statistics spoke plainly. “During every 100 hours on our streets, we lose three times more young men than were killed in 100 hours of ground war in the Persian Gulf,” Health and Human Services secretary Louis Sullivan had testified. “Where are the yellow ribbons of hope and remembrance?” he wanted to know. A spokesman for Detroit’s mayor Coleman Young gave a statement. “A new war needs to be fought on the home front,” he said, “… so this gallant young man would not have died in vain.”

  Seven hundred citizens filed into Detroit’s Little Rock Baptist Church to honor the life of Anthony Riggs. Congresspersons Barbara Rose-Collins and John Conyers flew in from Washington to attend. The Reverend Jesse Jackson’s voice resounded from the pulpit, memorializing a man he did not know, who had been “any soldier” and was a different sort of hero now. “What is the redeeming value in this tragic loss of life? “Jackson asked. “Somehow Anthony has brought us together. By his blood a nation could be saved. Not Kuwait, but America. He illuminates and illustrates, by living and dying, the crisis and challenge of a generation of young African-American men. There’s a need to cry out: ‘Stop the violence.’ ”

  Detroit’s greatest soul singer, Aretha Franklin, her voice as eloquent as the preacher’s, led the congregation in a hymn, and Jackson escorted Toni to the coffin to pray. A bugler played taps while an American flag was lifted from the casket, ceremoniously folded, and handed to the solemn young widow. Toni wasn’t as articulate as the pundits and scribes who’d swept her husband up into their symbolic world, but she managed to echo their point: “I can’t believe I’ve waited all this time for him to come back and he does, and then I lose him again,” she lamented.

  The community rallied swiftly and emphatically around Riggs’s family. Tina Killie sent Anthony’s mother, Lessie, a sweatshirt that said, “Somebody in Wrightstown loves you.” A local Honda/Jeep Eagle dealership offered Toni a car. The NAACP posted a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. On March 23 homicide detectives found Anthony’s stolen car parked on a residential street about a mile from where he died. Strangely, the family’s packed belongings were still inside. It wasn’t a r
obbery. So what was it? Something gang-related? Riggs gunned down as a message? Mistaken for somebody else? Detectives also found a.38-caliber pistol in a Dumpster near the car, matching the bullets in the fallen soldier. They put through a registration trace. The ownership came back to someone named Antonio Shelby, who proved to be a local street tough and a crack dealer, currently on probation. Hauled in and grilled, Shelby told a story that turned this senseless urban murder on its head. He had lent his gun, he said, to nineteen-year-old Michael Cato, who was his friend. Cato was also, as it happens, the son of his godmother, Paula, and the brother-in-law of Anthony Riggs. Cato was the shooter, Shelby said. But it wasn’t his idea. The idea belonged to Toni.

  Michael Cato was arrested on March 25, on the strength of Shelby’s confession. Swiftly giving in to his predicament, having no talent for lies, he explained what had happened. Toni Cato Riggs, older sister, the smarter and tougher-minded of the two, who had protected Michael since they had been neglected as children by their drug-addicted mother, had asked him to murder her husband. She would split with Michael, she said, her two-hundred-thousand-dollar payoff in life insurance. Then they could get out of the neighborhood, do something better. So Michael borrowed Antonio’s gun, and the plan went into motion.

  Detroit was stunned. The pundits were speechless. What eulogies were there to fashion about this little twist? The killer was family. The violence had nothing to do with men at all, it had been arranged by a woman. Instantly, the voices of anguish fell silent. In place of a nation’s impassioned pleas for reconciliation came a couple of news stories reporting the gossip of neighbors. Toni Cato Riggs was promiscuous. She had been “runnin’ around with a lot of men.” It was whispered that she had herpes. Another rumor was that she was pregnant. “That’s a fact,” a Conley Avenue neighbor named Ollie Hicks told USA Today, though it wasn’t. “I always knew she was selfish and self-centered,” said Anthony’s mother, Lessie.