The Landlady Serial Killers BY Claritin Introduction We are going to talk about serial killers, and how we can relate them with the main character of the short story The Landlady. We are going to focus mainly on woman killers, but also in serial killers in general. The information of our presentation is based mostly on online sources … (page) and the text.
We will describe some characteristics that have a meaningful influence in the total description of the killers like personality, personal experiences, psychology ,method of killing among others and also we are going to provide the specific part of the short Tory in which we think this characteristic it’s reflected. When we talk about serial killers we mean a person who has killed more than 3 people, they do not have any kind of relationship with the victim.
The methods are not always the same; they tend to change some procedures. After killing a person they wait for a while to catch another victim. This is because they do not want to call the police’s attention, so they wait things to calm down to pick other person. In the text in the text we can see that Billy and The Landlady don’t have any special relationship, they Just have met each there and we know that she waited her victims for years.
Billy says that the last entry is over two years old and the other one is nearly a year before that, so it tells us about the period she waits to catch a new victim Characteristics 1- Women are more successful than the boys, because they are more careful, precise, methodic, persuasive and manipulative when they commit the murder. They look very normal. Billy described her like the mother of one’s best school-friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holiday and they usually have a permanent Job in the midland case she is the owner of the place. A.
Keller & Keller had made a classification between the women who kill alone and the ones who kill with a companion. According to this classification we have that: b. The women who commit a murder along they usually are mature, careful, they don’t have an antisocial behavior and they are strongly organized. They usually attack their victims in their own houses or in workplace. The weapons are usually a poison, suffocation, or an injection with a special poison c. The ones that commit the murder with a companion hey are younger, aggressive in theirs attacks. They are not organized and usually they don’t have a careful plan.
They attack in many different places and their weapons are blade weapons or torture. 2- Generally the victims of the same killer have common characteristics they have something that the killer heats. It could be sexual differences like homophobia, if they victims are prostitutes. Racial reason ethical reason and other case consist in that the killer has a feeling of control, possession, domination and belonging to his/her victim hey consider the victim as a possession so they persuade the victims with nice treats, gifts Just to get the victim’s trust and when they get it they kill them. Generally the serial killers had suffered some kind of traumatic experience in the psychologically abused in their childhood or had the death of some important family member Studies are demonstrated that those are the most common situations that we can find in the past of a serial killer . This events in their lives could have some influence in the way they chose their victims . By Ex . A person who has been abused n his childhood may have the tendency to choose his victims with the same features of his aggressor.
In the story we don’t know anything about the past of the landlady but Billy try to guess a part of her past to give meaning to her behavior. He think that she might have a son around his age and that’s why she is so kind and good with him but if we read carefully we can see that she is very picky about her guests she seem very interested in the way they look ( their skin ,the smile ,the eyes etc) 4 Serial killers usually create like a parallel reality where they are not consider killers and their cities have not died.
They do this as a way of protecting themselves and not to feel guilty of their acts. That’s why something they deny their crimes. In the case of the landlady at first she talk in the past about the other victims and then she says that they are still there 5- In order to know the method of killing there have been several researches and it was found that poison is the commoner, firearms follow, next are injections, suffocation follows and finally strangulation is the less common way. In the text we deduce that The Landlady method is with a poisonous tea which notations cyanide.
She makes her victims drink it and next she stuffs them 6- When we talk about MODUS OPERANDI or MO we are referring to the pattern of action that a serial killer have. Every serial killer have some especial method of treat and murder their victims,we can consider this “THEIR SIGNATURE”. This is also related to the personality and the motivation that lead them to kill in the first place . We can find all kind of “Signatures” like Jeffrey Dammed who was caught and convicted for killing a dozen of persons and keeping all kind of body parts in his freezer.
In the Landlady e see that she have a specific way of killing their victims by poisoning them and she has a peculiarity,she embalm the bodies so that she can keep them and continue her delusion.Although the short story has an open ending we deduce that The Landlady poisons Billy and then she stuffs him. Also we can say that Weaver is not her first victim and the others are in the house. As we said and explained before there are a lot of hints in the story that allow us to consider her as a serial killer and they also allow us to say that she fits in the serial killer’s profile
