By VennerRoad, 12th Jul 2018
“There is no wickedness like the wickedness of a woman.” – Samuel Richardson, 1748.
Convicted killer Marissa DeVault
Women commit far fewer murders than men, but at times they more than match them for depravity. Erzsébet Báthory, the infamous Countess Dracula, murdered literally hundreds of young women. Baby farmer Amelia Dyer was held responsible for a dozen murders and is believed to have committed many more. There is though no need to dive back into history to find depraved women. The following are three single murders from contemporary America, the third being arguably the most shocking.
Marissa DeVault was a former stripper and single mother who found herself a high value man. Dale Harrell was no alpha male, but he was a catch for someone in her position. After DeVault’s conviction, his twin sister spoke lovingly of her brother.
The marriage was initially happy, and Marissa’s daughter was joined in due course by two more, but for whatever reason, Dale was not enough for her. First, she picked up a lover who was some twenty years her senior, then she plotted to murder Dale for the basest of motives: money. She chose a particularly gruesome method, battering him with a hammer as he lay sleeping, then she tried to frame a totally innocent man.
Dale did not die at once, but playing the rape card, she told the police he had been attacking her when Stanley Cook came to her rescue. Stanley was an old friend of Dale. A former military man, he had suffered brain damage which affected his memory. He had lived with the couple for several years and helped look after their daughters. DeVault managed to convince Cook that her fantasy scenario had actually happened, and he confessed to the crime.
As they can do when they are properly motivated, the police and their forensic experts did an excellent job, ruling out Stanley as the attacker in spite of his confession. The crime was committed on January 14, 2009; on February 9, Dale expired, and Marissa DeVault was charged with first degree murder, capital in Arizona.
Her trial was delayed as her attorneys wriggled to find some sort of defense, so-called battered woman syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder. In spite of her perverted influence on her daughters, who testified for the defense, the jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Her appeal against conviction was rejected by the Arizona Court of Appeals in 2016.
The psychopathic Jodi Arias
DeVault was tried at the Maricopa County Courthouse, where Jodi Arias would shortly be tried for and convicted of the murder of Travis Alexander. Travis and his siblings had had a difficult start in life, being raised by their paternal grandmother. Travis was a salesman for a legal services company and a motivational speaker. He was living the dream in Mesa, Arizona. Having become a Mormon, he was waiting for the right girl, and although nearly thirty when he met Jodi, was probably still a virgin.
That didn’t last long, their relationship was a classic case of sparks flying from the word go. It remains to be seen if the sexually experienced Jodi seduced him, led him on, or if he was just as culpable, but he clearly became infatuated with her. However, Jodi was not wife material for a Mormon, becoming his dirty little secret, and his ardour for her cooled, in spite of her clearly insincere conversion to Mormonism. For Jodi, love soon turned to hatred, and as well as slashing his car tyres she hacked into his e-mail with malicious intent.
Like Travis, Jodi was a native of California, and he must have felt a wave of relief when she told him she was moving back there. He didn’t realise this was part of a sinister and quite shocking plan to murder him. Having moved in with her grandmother, she staged a burglary, stealing a gun. Then she hired a car, and ensuring she had a good supply of gas so she could avoid CCTV at gas stations on the more than thousand mile round trip, she drove to Mesa, bluffed her way into his house with a promise of sex, then lured him into the shower.
As well as an excellent artist, Jodi was a photographer, and while Travis probably thought she was taking some flattering shots for her portfolio, she was setting him up. Asking him to turn his back on her and pose bodybuilder style, when he had done so, out came the knife. Travis was stabbed over two dozen times, after which she nearly hacked off his head, and for good measure put a bullet in it too. So-called criminal profilers claim this sort of overkill is indicative of a personal motive, in particular intense hatred.
Alexander’s friends and family didn’t need this kind of psychobabble to work that out.
Murdering Travis in the shower had the effect of destroying forensic evidence; along with the sheets from the bed, Jodi also put her camera in the washing machine, but this turned out to be a big mistake. As in the Marissa DeVault case, the forensic experts triumphed, and were able to retrieve photographic evidence from the camera. By the time of her arrest on July 15, 2008, eleven days after the murder, there was plenty more.
What followed next was lie after lie after lie. At first, she denied ever being at his house, and had in fact set up an alibi which involved leaving messages on his phone. When confronted with evidence that she was indeed there, she claimed to have been present when Travis was murdered by two people dressed as ninjas, one of them a woman. Finally, when even that story could not hold up, she admitted killing Travis but claimed she did so in self-defense. As part of her defense, she claimed to have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and psychologist Richard Samuels was happy to testify to that effect at $250 an hour.
Worse by far though was the testimony of so-called domestic violence expert Alyce LaViolette who interviewed Arias at length, then, adopting the strict feminist position of women being incapable of evil, effectively blamed Travis for his own death. The person who posted this short clip to YouTube commented that it was the moment she gave away a piece of her soul. It should be pointed out that Travis never assaulted Joid; the injury to her finger was probably caused as he fought frantically for his life after being stabbed in the back.
Alyce LaViolette’s so-called expert testimony was too much even for many involved in the sexual grievance industry. Many people also voted down her books on Amazon; as recently as January this year, one person commented (verbatim):
“The author is an embarrassment to her craft and makes a mockery of any women who truly needs to use battered women syndrome as self defense in court. She should be ashamed of what she has done.”
If LaViolette is an embarrassment to her “craft”, Arias is an embarrassment to womanhood. The lies she told on the stand included that one day she had walked in on Travis while he was masturbating to child porn on his laptop computer, child porn featuring a young boy!
Although there could never be any doubt about her guilt, it took two sentencing hearings to put Arias behind bars for the rest of her life. One juror insisted on holding out against the death penalty, which in Arizona has to be unanimous. If you wonder where Aris gets it, look no further than her mother, who likewise blamed Travis for her daughter’s predicament, claiming he had beaten her, an outright lie.
The murderous Whitehead twins
To say Nikki Whitehead had a bad start in life is a classic understatement. She was born in prison. Although clearly determined not to follow in the footsteps of her mother Lynda, she may have avoided drugs and prison, but she was unable to avoid men, and aged just seventeen she was the mother of twin daughters, alluringly named Jasmiyah and Tasmiyah. Her daughters were nothing if not intelligent, and seemed to have a bright future, but there were custody issues. They were raised initially by their great-grandmother.
When she was twenty-five, Nikki found herself a much older lover; Robert Head was thirty years her senior, but such relationships can and do work out – ask Ritchie Blackmore! He accepted her daughters, and they would surely have gone on to university, but in January 2010, Nikki was found dead in the home she shared with her man.
The crime scene was said to be like a slaughterhouse with an overpowering smell of blood; Nikki’s near naked body had been dumped in or forced into the bath, which was full of water. She had obviously fought fiercely for her life as she was stabbed repeatedly. A criminal profiler would almost certainly have identified the killer as a male between the ages of 25 and 40 with a contempt perhaps an overt hatred for women, but criminal profiling is largely junk science, and this was no sex murder.
It was the girls who found, or claimed to have found, their mother’s body. They were not treated initially as suspects, and did their best to point the finger of suspicion at a more plausible suspect, but this was not the first time the girls had attacked her, and slowly the terrible truth began to dawn on the detectives assigned to the case.
The murder appears to have been prompted by Nikki’s strict disciplining of the girls. She obviously had great aspirations for them, and was determined they would neither end up in the drug world like her own mother or pregnant in their teens like herself. On one occasion she took away one of the girls’ cellphones because of...what do teenage girls use their phones for that might incur a mother’s disapproval? On another occasion, at the age of just thirteen, one of them sneaked out in the middle of the night, which prompted Nikki to call 911. No one had a bad word to say about Nikki Whitehead, except her ungrateful daughters.
In spite of the overwhelming evidence of their guilt, both girls were allowed to plead to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, and it was an incredible four years before they actually faced trial, in reality a sentencing hearing. They were tried separately and are currently being held in separate prisons having both been sentenced to thirty years in prison, although they were actually eligible for parole last year.
Now here is the punchline, nobody is prouder of the girls than their great-grandmother, after all, they are continuing their education behind bars. It remains to be seen if any woman would make such an outrageous claim about a man who had murdered her granddaughter, but women are never to be judged by the same standards as men, even when their victims are totally innocent women, in this case a woman who had struggled to make the best life possible for her unrepentant killers.
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