"Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer?"
About this Quote
The phrasing matters. “Often” signals this isn’t a one-off curiosity; it’s a recurring misconception, a pattern of audience disbelief. “Any such thing” frames female serial killers as almost mythical, as if the category itself is suspect. That rhetorical distance reveals the subtext: we’ve trained ourselves to treat serial murder as a male archetype, and women as narratively incompatible with predation. When women kill, popular culture tends to reach for “exception,” “madness,” “self-defense,” or “victimhood” before it reaches for “serial killer.”
Brown’s profession tag - entertainer - is crucial context. She’s not delivering a peer-reviewed correction; she’s working a stage-ready premise shaped by TV’s true-crime economy, where shock and stereotype are both currency. The intent is to hook an audience with a taboo reversal (“women can be monsters too”) while positioning herself as the guide who will puncture a comforting myth.
It works because it exploits a tension we don’t like to admit: gender equality is easy to endorse in the abstract, harder when it requires equal capacity for cruelty. The line isn’t just about criminology; it’s about the stories we prefer to tell, and who we allow to be the villain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Munchhausen Syndrome and Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy (Pat Brown)
Evidence:
Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer. (Chapter 1: "A Bizarre Psychopathic Condition"). This sentence appears as the opening line of Chapter 1 of a Crime Library multi-page article series credited to Pat Brown. The site reproduces the quote in context, immediately followed by discussion of misconceptions about serial homicide and gender. However, the Crime Library page as currently accessible does not display an original publication date/year for the piece, so I cannot (from the primary source itself) verify the exact year it was first published online, nor confirm whether an earlier print/TV transcript source exists. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Brown, Pat. (2026, February 19). Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/often-i-am-asked-if-there-is-any-such-thing-as-a-163179/
Chicago Style
Brown, Pat. "Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer?" FixQuotes. February 19, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/often-i-am-asked-if-there-is-any-such-thing-as-a-163179/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer?" FixQuotes, 19 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/often-i-am-asked-if-there-is-any-such-thing-as-a-163179/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2026.
