Why Do Some Girls Form Deadly Pacts? |
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There’s little research on girls who’ve formed pacts to kill.
Yet, in those pacts we're aware of, we see some common traits and behaviors.
These traits and behaviors might prove useful for prediction and prevention.
Recently, two teenage girls in Florida were accused of plotting to murder a classmate. Isabelle Valdez, 15, and Lois Lippert, 14, students at Lake Brantley High School in Altamonte Springs, had told a friend, who’d then reported the imminent attack. Police searched them and found a knife in Valdez’s backpack. She admitted that she’d planned to use it on a boy. In an apology to her parents, Valdez wrote, “I've known there's been something wrong with me since I was little. I deserve what's coming for me as I am also disgusting, cruel, and useless.”
Her reasoning was bizarre: She thought the boy resembled Adam Lanza, the suicidal mass murderer of 20 kids and six adults in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Killing this boy, Valdez thought, would resurrect Lanza and create a “blood bond” between the three of them. Lippert allegedly assisted by supplying items, she sharpened the knife, and drew graphic sketches for Valdez. After their arrest, they laughed together in the police car and complained about the snitch who’d blocked their plan. Lippert reportedly said, “This is such a bonding experience.”
This incident recalls the 2014 case in which 12-year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier attempted to sacrifice their friend, Payton Leutner, to appease the tentacled Internet boogeyman meme, Slender Man. Payton survived the stabbing—barely. The girls were to be tried as adults. One took a plea, but both were determined to be not guilty by reason of mental disorder; Geyser had symptoms of early-onset schizophrenia.
And this case was similar to the obsessive friendship between two 15-year-olds, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, whose bond in fantasy tales warped their perspective. When Parker’s mother interfered, they formed a plan, then bludgeoned her to death with a brick on June 2, 1954.
But these pacts aren't limited to shared delusions. Sometimes, it’s mutual meanness.
When Skylar Neese, 16, went missing in 2012, a surveillance video showed her getting into a four-door sedan. Under questioning, two of Neese’s friends admitted to joyriding and dropping her off just before she disappeared. One seemed nervous, the other stone-cold. Their stories failed to match, so detectives used the video to pressure them. One finally cracked and admitted that they’d killed her. “We didn’t like her,” she said.
In Britain in 2014, a 13- and 14-year-old posted selfies on Snapchat of stabbing and bludgeoning Angela Wrightson to death. They’d used a shovel, a screw-laden plank, and a heavy television. Wrightson had over 100 injuries, mostly to her head. The girls had thought the attack was fun.
Similarly, in June 2020 in Australia, two teenage girls encouraged the torture of two young men whom they’d invited to a party to rob. One victim, trying to escape, plunged to his death. The girls uploaded their video to social media, after which they were arrested.
Since murder by teenage girls is rare—especially those incidents involving a pact—focused research is scarce. Still, some girls with a violent streak grow bolder with support. We can look to what we know about extreme childhood antisocial disorders to consider red flag behaviors that might signal such pacts before they grow deadly. Most of this research has been done with juvenile males, but joining these results to studies of adult female offenders helps to interpret the behavior of adolescent girls.
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Many killing teams follow a common pattern: Two people develop such a psychological bond that the one with violent intent feels safe enough to describe a fantasy, goal, or plan. They then groom or manipulate the friend-accomplice to consider acting it out. Studies show that this weaker person might have a dependent or unstable personality. Even if they know a plan is wrong, they can’t easily say no. They might even see it as a way to solidify a bond they crave. The idea of the crime excites this team and provides a shared sense of identity, like a secret club. The dominant person maintains psychological control, but each plays a role. They keep their shared deviance a secret, cementing the bond.
The callousness seen in these pacts suggests that the girl who propels the attack might be at risk for psychopathy. We don’t diagnose kids as psychopaths, but research on troubled boys has yielded three key signals that put them at risk for the disorder: grandiosity with manipulative features, bold impulsivity, and callous-unemotional traits (lack of empathy and emotional responsiveness).
Dr. Robert Hare, who created the most widely used standardized assessment for identifying psychopathy, the PCL-R, researched adult female offenders. “The correlates and the predictive power of the PCL-R are much the same for female and male offenders,” he says, adding that females with higher psychopathy scores show deficits in conceptual reasoning, flexibility, and problem-solving. They excel at deception and manipulation.
An alternate but overlapping conception of psychopathy is the triarchic model, which emphasizes boldness, disinhibition, and malignant narcissism. The psychopathic personality inventory focuses on fearless dominance and impulsive antisociality. Using this assessment, Falkenbach and her colleagues found no differences between high-scoring males and females on callousness and instrumental aggression, but females expressed more dramatic and unstable emotions.
These studies don’t specifically address girls who form killing pacts, but we do see callousness, boldness, and narcissism from one team to another. These behaviors point to potential trouble ahead for such girls, especially when coupled with friendships revolving around dramatic obsessions and or cruelty. We should educate teachers and parents to be vigilant—and careful—about these signals.
Falkenbach, D. M, Reinhard, E. E., Roelofs Larson, F. R (2017). Theory based gender differences in psychopathy subtypes, Personality and Individual Differences, 105, 1-6,
Hayden, K. (2018). The female world of love and ritual violence: The Slender Man case and popular news depictions of female adolescent violence, in Mcqueeney, K., & Girgenti-Malone, A. (Eds.). Girls, Aggression, and Intersectionality: Transforming the Discourse of "Mean Girls" in the United States. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315163697
Hernandez, K. A., Ferguson, S., & Kennedy, T. (2020). A closer look at Juvenile homicide. Springer Nature.
Salekin, R. T. (2016). Psychopathy in childhood: Why should we care about grandiose–manipulative and daring–impulsive traits? The British Journal of Psychiatry, 189–191.
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