Nimhans has not conducted any research on women serial killers so far for lack of information and data.
“This is the perhaps the first time that there’s a woman serial killer; it’s always men into these kinds of crimes. There’s no study done on women serial killers because of lack of data and possibly less number of psychiatrists in the country. Mallika may be the first such woman,” said Dr B D Nagaraja, director, Nimhans.
Women form “only 10 per cent of the total criminal population,” said Prof Chandrashekhar, Department of Psychiatry, Nimhans.
“Dandupalya, the notorious serial killers and necrophiliacs, who had struck terror in Karnataka, especially Bangalore in the early 2000, had women accomplices but they were a different group all together. Women, who were either blood relatives of the gangsters or their wives were part of the gang, more to do the ground work, of identifying a house or the victim and help in the process of gaining entry into the victim’s house,” said a senior police officer.
Why do women kill? Is it against their inherent trait of being nurturers? “It’s more a social expectation than an inherent trait. The reasons why they take to crime are more or less the same as men — quick way of earning money, personality disorder, low IQ in scholastic abilities and environmental factors such as negative parental experience, violent childhood and broken family etc,” explained Dr Chandrashekhar.
On Mallika’s alleged use of cyanide to put an end to her victims, he said, “it could be a learnt behaviour. Not specific to this case, but cyanide poisoning came to limelight after Sivarasan and Shobha, the LTTE members and assassins of Rajiv Gandhi consumed cyanide when the SIT zeroed in on them in Bangalore,” he added.
Dr Malini, Assistant Director, Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) also said that till date they have not had a single case of a woman serial killer.
“We have conducted narco analysis and brain mapping of around 70 women criminals from all over India, who may have committed two to three murders at the most. Almost all of them admitted that they had murdered for money or sexual gratification. We had a recent case, of a woman, mother of two children, who killed her husband because she had an extra marital affair with a man, who was politically quite influential,” she said. “The woman admitted that her husband came to know of her affair and was threatening to eliminate her boyfriend. Theirs was a love marriage,” said Dr Malini.
She added that women criminals do not share a common socio-economic background. “We have also had women from affluent classes who killed their husbands because of extra marital affairs. But we have no experience of a woman serial killer,” she added.
Dr Rajni, Psychiatrist, Central Prison, Parapanna Agrahara said that there are 4,800 prisoners in the prison, out of which only 150 are women. “An interesting aspect of women convicts held under Section 302 of the IPC (murder) is that most of them were married young, below 18 years. It may be a strong contributing factor to their crime,” she said.
