When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán. Book review

The Moors Murders and the Manson Family murders have both been seen as a dark reflection of the permissive Sixties: Manson, the evil twin of the hippie ideal; Brady, the wannabe existentialist waging a perverted war against everything society held dear. Denis Nilsen and Fred and Rose West represented, to some, the intense alienation and fracturing of society during the Thatcher-Major years: Nilsen, the isolated loner preying on vulnerable young men; the Wests murdering women whose disappearance barely registered on a numb, self-interested population.

So, it was inevitable that a sparklingly dark writer like Chile’s Alia Trabucco Zerán should eventually apply the same lens to murders committed solely by women. In her book When Women Kill she seeks to interpret how female acts of violence tell the changing story of women in Latin American society. With only a few stylistic missteps, Zerán does a remarkable job. This book fascinates, illuminates and horrifies in equal measure, yet never falls into the trap of sensationalism or voyeurism. It’s an elegant examination of how the act of murder uncovers truths society never wants to confront.

As Zerán says: “It’s easier for people to imagine a dead woman than a woman prepared to kill.” All societies accept that men are violent, but struggle to comprehend cruelty at the hands of women. Would Brady have imprinted so strongly on the British psyche without Myra Hindley as accomplice? One doubts it. He’d just have been another addition to the ranks of male sexual murderers.

Zerán begins with the story of Corina Rojas. In 1916 in Chile, divorce was illegal. Rojas, a wealthy woman, had a lover and at first tried to employ the ministrations of a ‘witch’ (the quintessentially dark female archetype in humanity’s subconscious) to make her husband sicken and die. When witchcraft failed, she hired a hitman. The crime was more Keystone Cops than mafia contract killing, so Rojas was quickly caught and charged. But it was adultery which really damned her. Adultery was a criminal offence in Chile until 1994 – and women could face up to five years in jail; men, just 18 months.

Rojas, in the eyes of Chilean society, killed her husband twice: she took his life, but she also robbed him of his manhood by sleeping around behind his back.

Rosa Faúndez is the next killer under Zerán’s microscope. This time we shift to the other end of the social spectrum. Faúndez was a newspaper vendor, a woman from the streets. When a chopped up body was found wrapped in tabloid news pages, it didn’t take long for the police to make their way to Faúndez’s door and discover that she’d strangled and then dismembered her husband. Detectives didn’t care that Señor Faúndez was a violent brute who’d beaten her – what really discombobulated Chilean society was that a woman could murder in such a way. Sure, a woman might hire a hitman, or poison her enemy – but to strangle and dismember? Only a man could carry out such barbaric acts.

The murder took place in 1923, and the public and press – not to say prosecutors – drew links between what Zerán calls Faúndez’s “gender disobedience [and] the advances in the feminist movement”. Faúndez was a “defective woman” – she just wasn’t feminine enough – and her conviction was necessary so that “husbands could now sleep soundly”. A warning: perhaps Chilean publishers are less squeamish that their European counterparts, as the book contains horrific images of police posing with the dismembered remains of Faúndez’s husband.

Perhaps the strangest case is that of Carolina Geel who shot her lover dead in a crowded restaurant in 1955. The killing eerily echoes the Ruth Ellis case, the last woman hanged in Britain – though Geel, unlike Ellis, was not a victim of domestic violence. Geel was everything that conservative and patriarchal Chilean society hated: a liberated woman, who worked for herself (as a successful writer), and took lovers as she pleased. Her work contained allusions to lesbianism – so Geel was another woman beyond society’s limits. She represented the terror such a male-dominated society had of the concept of ‘free women’.

Geel’s crime seemed to say to Chilean males: 'you’re no longer safe, look what women’s liberation has done, now they’re shooting us in broad daylight’. The only flaw in Zerán’s telling of this case is her lack of much sympathy for the victim – a man who seemed to genuinely love Geel. Her motive for murder was never established, adding to the crime’s dark mystique.

The final case is the most tragic – the story of Teresa Alfaro, a downtrodden domestic servant who in the early 60s murdered the three children of Magaly Ramirez, the woman who employed her. Alfaro had been forced to undergo three abortions on her employer’s orders if she wanted to keep her job.

With ghastly irony, Alfaro put strychnine in baby milk and gave it to Ramirez – who went on to unwittingly administer the deadly poison.

Magaly Ramirez represented Chile’s feminine ideal: she was a midwife, with a loving middle class family. Alfaro had none of that – she was ‘the anti-woman’. Alfaro’s crimes are like a scream of murderous rage from underclass women against ‘the sisters’ who have left them behind. “If she had three abortions, she would kill three of Ramirez’s children,” Zerán says, positing that Alfaro vengefully transformed Ramirez into a “non-mother”.

It’s striking that despite the many differences in these women’s lives, they share one common trait: after conviction, they are all dealt with relatively leniently. None were sent before the firing squad – the means of execution in Chile – and most had their sentences reduced, sometimes to just a few years. That in itself, says Zerán, reveals the state’s control over what it means to be a woman: by pardoning such violent offenders, the courts are telling society ‘don’t worry, they’re just women, we can let them go and we’ll all still be safe’.

I await a British Zerán. Every nation needs such a writer to tell its own society’s story of what it means when women kill.

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán is out now from And Other Stories priced £11.99