The true crime fascination with killer wives and mothers

The Pew Research Center found in 2022 that nearly 25% of top-ranked podcasts were true crime-related. In the next set of episodes, host Nat Cardona speaks with Dianne Berg, college professor and author of What's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill, to explore why this niche of true crime fascinates so many. 

In this first episode, we discuss the history of the public's nearly-fanatical interest in mothers and wives who commit murder and why societies are particularly fascinated by these stories. 

To learn more about Dianne Berg, click here. 

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Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hey there, as a listener of this podcast, you must be at least somewhat into the whole true crime genre.

But did you know that True Crime is the most common topic among top ranked podcasts?

To be specific?

The Pew Research Center reports that in 2022 almost a quarter of top podcasts are primarily about true crime.

Welcome to Lee Enterprise's Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles.

I'm your host Nat Cardona.

In the next two episodes, we're going to explore a very niche area of true crime stories.

The obsession that fans seem to have with killer wives and mothers.

But how does one even begin to tackle such a complex topic?

Enter Dianne Berg.

She's a professor at Clark University and the author of the article, what's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill her?

Research traces this phenomenon back to literature from the 15 hundreds and 16 hundreds with clearly printed details of the early fascination that people had with murderesses.

And here's my interview with Dianne just to kick things off.

Why don't you just tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do?

Nowadays.

Ok.

I, that's kind of hard to answer.

I mean, where he, ok.

Well, once upon a time before I decided to become an academic, I, was, the education program manager at a Museum of Medieval and Renaissance Arms and Armor, in Worcester, Massachusetts, called the Higgins Armory Museum, which is now sadly defunct.

I left years before, it, it went out, sort of went out of business. But while I was there, I learned a great deal about, armor and, and weapons and warfare and medieval politics and things.

I was always very interested in medieval renaissance, history and literature. But not so much that side of it. But it kind of opened up, a different window in, into these things for me doing that work.

And when I left there, I realized that what I had enjoyed most about that job was researching and developing education programs.

So, essentially, you know, going down research rabbit holes and writing things up.

So I went and I got a master's degree and I did the master's degree basically to see if I wanted to get a phd.

And after I had finished that, then I decided that I did indeed want to get a phd.

So, my dissertation, my doctoral dissertation focused on kind of, literary representations of true crime between about 1550, 1650.

And it was very interesting because the thing that jumped out at me when the project first started, the sort of germ of the project came about by accident when I was researching something completely different.

And I came across this pamphlet about a woman named Margaret Vincent.

And in 1616, she strangled two of her Children.

She had 31 was away at the wet nurse and so was spared and she did so because she believed that she was saving them, she was saving them.

She was taking them out of a sinful world.

And her reason for this was that she wanted to convert to Roman Catholicism.

And she thought if they didn't do that, then they were going to be damned.

And her husband was not on board with that because basically being a Catholic was illegal was essentially illegal in early 17th century England.

So she did this bad thing for what she believed were good reasons and this just rang a bell in my head because back in 2001, this woman named Andrea Yates in Texas who was an evangelical Christian.

She strangled all five, she strangled and drowned all five of her Children.

And like Margaret Vincent laid them out neatly on a bed and said afterwards that she had done so in order to save them.

And so the, you know, this really kind of struck me and I wondered how many other cases where they're out there like this because we always hear