American Board of Information Security and Computer Forensics

By Frank S. Perri, JD, MBA, CPA and Terrance G. Lichtenwald, PhD

Fraud Detection Homicide

Fraud detection homicide refers to white-collar criminals, regardless of gender, who resort to murder to silence those that may have detected or are in a position to detect fraud that a white-collar criminal perpetrates (Perri & Lichtenwald, 2007). These white-collar killers silence their victims in order to prevent them from divulging what they have discovered or could discover to law enforcement. These killers exhibit significant psychopathic traits that apply to both genders who exhibit extreme remorseless brutality (Perri & Lichtenwald, 2007). Fraud detection homicide cases overwhelmingly illustrate instrumental (planned) violence.

The Nancy Siegel Case

Jack Watkins, a widower, supported himself comfortably in his retirement years until he met Nancy Siegel. Watkins, 30 years senior to Siegel, met her in the fall of 1994, when she sold him a burial vault; soon thereafter the relationship became romantic. Within months after meeting him, Siegel began using Watkins’ personal information to open new accounts and had persuaded him to buy her thousands of dollars of luxury items and real estate. Siegel exerted as much control over Watkins’ financial affairs as she needed to have the ability to commit financial fraud to support her lifestyle; she isolated him from his family to inoculate herself from being discovered by them. On May 14, 1996, Watkins’ emaciated body was found near an access point to the Appalachian Trail in Loudoun, Virginia. The body was stuffed inside two duffel bags and then stuffed into a footlocker. The cause of death was cervical compression, and there were bruises and other marks on the body consistent with manual strangulation. A toxicology analysis revealed that Watkins’ blood and liver contained toxic levels of an over-the-counter medication with sedative effects, which suggested that Watkins had been ingesting extremely high levels of the medication for a period of weeks or months.

In January 2003, nearly seven years after Watkins was murdered, Virginia law enforcement officials identified his body through military fingerprint records and determined that Siegel had been receiving his Social Security checks. After a few months of investigating and watching Siegel, postal inspectors and an FBI agent approached Siegel after she had retrieved Watkins’ Social Security check from her post office box. She agreed to be interviewed and initially claimed that Watkins was alive and well, living in Pennsylvania with a woman named Ruth; but when the investigators told Siegel they knew what she was doing, she never provided them with any details about Watkins’ death, except to say that “[i]t didn’t happen the way you think.” The prosecution argued that Siegel murdered Watkins to prevent him from discovering and reporting her fraudulent crimes, a classic case of fraud detection homicide. Siegel was found guilty of murder.

The Sante Kimes Case

After the victim, David Kazdin, detected that his colleagues, Sante and Kenny Kimes, had committed mortgage fraud in which they obtained a $280,000 loan in his name, he began receiving threatening telephone calls from Sante demanding that he cooperate with the fraud scheme. Kenny indicated that it was his mother who made the decision to kill Kazdin after she stated to Kenny, “He knows too much and we got to do something about him, we’re going to have to kill him.” As Kenny left Sante to kill David, Sante said to Kenny, “Good luck. Do a good job.” According to the statement given by Kenny Kimes, when he went to Kazdin’s home, he followed Kazdin into the kitchen and shot him in the back of the head in his own home. After the killing, Kenny stated that he felt high from the killing and stopped by a florist shop to buy his mother flowers. Kenny stated, “In my mindset, I thought that I had completed a great duty for my mom. I felt that it was a significant completion and I wanted to celebrate.” In an attempt to control the impression others would form of her, during the trial, Sante told the jury that she loved Kazdin and “God bless him wherever he is. I need his help. I wish he was here today.”

As an interesting side note, in order to avoid the death penalty, Kenny testified against his mother. He disclosed that he and his mother had drugged a 55-year-old banker by the name of Syed Ahmed. As Ahmed struggled against the sedative effects of the drugs, Sante and Kenny would take turns holding his head under water in a bathtub. In another case in which Sante and Kenny murdered 80-year-old Irene Silverman with the motive of fraudulently obtaining her residence in Manhattan, the sentencing judge stated, “It is clear that Ms. Kimes has spent virtually all her life plotting and scheming, exploiting, manipulating and preying upon the vulnerable and the gullible at every opportunity” (King, 2002). Forensic psychologist Dr. Arthur Weider stated that Sante demonstrated psychopathic personality features with “no guilt, conscience, remorse or empathy,” adding that Sante was “socially charming, arrogant, full of herself [and] egocentric coupled with a superiority complex” (King, 2002).

Kill Teams

About 68 percent of female serial killers operate alone, while the other 32 percent kill with either a male or female partner. Sometimes the male partner is dominant and at other times it is the female who is dominant. It is in the male-female serial killer partnerships that women participate in sexual homicides. Female-female serial killer partnerships are a unique complex phenomena and what is interesting about the Golay and Rutterschmidt case is not only is there a female-female kill team, but that they are in their 70s, debunking the myth that age slows down the psychopathic killer. Often, regardless of gender, two meet and establish an intimate familiarity that allows them to share fantasies that may be violent; when eroticized, this approval encourages acting out (Ramsland, 2007). However in the kill teams represented here, it was all business with no indication that their motive was to act out a fantasy.

The Case of Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt

“I am evil. . . . You have no idea how evil I am.”

~Helen Golay

In April 2008, jurors found Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, and Helen Golay, 77, guilty of first-degree murder for the deaths of homeless men Kenneth McDavid, 50, and Paul Vados, 73 (Deutsch, 2008). Prosecutors said the women recruited their prey from among the homeless of Hollywood and invested thousands of dollars in insurance policies on them by providing food and lodging (Keith, 2008). According to the prosecution, they took care of the men to the extent they needed them to stay alive for two years, the period in which insurers could not contest the policies for possible fraud. Golay collected more than $348,000 in life insurance proceeds from more than half-dozen insurance companies, while Rutterschmidt collected more than $246,000 from Vados’s death. Golay collected more than $1.5 million and Rutterschmidt more than $674,000 after McDavid’s death.

After the two-year waiting period, Golay and Rutterschidt would drug the men and then drive them to a secluded alley and run them over until they were dead. According to appellate court documents, while in custody, they discussed the circumstances of their arrests without knowledge that they were being videotaped. Rutterschmidt said: “That is very serious, everything dragged into Paul [Vados].” Rutterschmidt again blamed Golay for “mak[ing] all these extra insurances ... You were greedy. That’s the problem. That’s why I get angry. We had no problem with the relationship. You pay me and be nice and don’t make extra things. I was doing everything for you.” During the trial the jury saw the recorded videotape of the two; Rutterschmidt berated Golay, saying her actions in taking out 23 insurance policies raised a red flag when the men died. Rutterschmidt told Golay: “You cannot make that many insurances. It’s on your name, only.” Golay responded that she did not want to talk to Rutterschmidt, but the latter told her, “[Y]ou have to because you did all the insurances extra. That’s what raised the suspicion. You can’t do that. Stupidity.” Golay answered: “All they’re after is mail fraud. It is no mail fraud involved.” As the discussion continued, Golay reasserted that the insurance companies were complaining against them for “mail fraud”—“They have nothing else.” They discussed suing the insurance companies to get the benefits that had been denied.

Interestingly, the defense for Golay said, “This case is about the insurance industry retaliating against Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt. ... They don’t like the fact that two little old ladies are involved in an insurance scam. ... They are going to teach them a lesson. ... This is a nightmare for her. ... It’s unfortunate that two men are dead.” The defendant’s attorneys characterized the women as grandmotherly types, two “little old ladies” not physically capable of this (Pringle, 2008). Interestingly, Golay stated to her hairdresser, “I am evil...You have no idea how evil I am” (Huck, 2008). She laid out a scenario where a woman marries an older man, insures his life, and then uses Viagra to engineer a heart attack. Homeless people, Golay stated, were parasitic. As for the people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina: “she said those people were nothing. . . . They were just on welfare . . . they were useless to society” (Huck, 2008). Yet Golay, in attempting to control the impression others would form of her, said that McDavid “loved them and that he wanted to be part of our family” (Pringle & Kim, 2008).

Neither of the women trusted each other, and Golay tried to get Rutterschmidt’s name removed from one of the policies. What is truly bizarre is that when Golay tried to change the fraudulently obtained insurance policies, Rutterschmidt called the insurance company and stated, “I want to report a fraud. ... I’m the fiancée, she [Golay] is not the fiancée” (Kim, 2008). Speaking in a heavy accent, Rutterschmidt began ranting and raving like a lunatic that Golay had committed fraud by listing herself as the beneficiary on the policies (Kim, 2008). Interestingly, Golay described Rutterschmidt as “crazy, very explosive, very loud . . . hard to deal with in public” (Pringle & So, 2008b). Yet Golay’s daughter Kecia described her mother exhibiting “thirty years of psychopathic behavior” (Pringle & So, 2006a).

Instrumental Homicide Versus Reactive Homicide

One of the interesting aspects of the cases presented so far and those to follow is that they represent murders that are planned consistent with research on the link between instrumental murder and psychopathy. Psychopathy appears to be one of the strongest predictors of aggression and violence, and the distinct psychopathic traits of lack of empathy and lack of remorse are the best indicators of aggression, especially in unprovoked aggression that is observed in the cases in this article (Reidy, et al., 2008a). Psychopaths tend to engage in violence, especially homicide, in a more predatory, instrumental manner and are willing to take their time to plan the kill as contrasted to non-psychopathic killers (Herve & Yuille, 2007). The behavior of the psychopath often is motivated by a clear goal, void of emotional reactivity, rather than a powerful emotion of rage or despair associated with crimes of passion (Woodworth & Porter, 2002).

For a homicide to be instrumental, the offense had to have been clearly goal oriented in nature with no evidence of an immediate emotional or situational provocation; the catalyst for the homicide has to be attributed to something other than spontaneous anger (Woodworth & Porter, 2002). In contrast, for reactive violence to be present there must be strong evidence for a high level of spontaneity/impulsivity and a lack of planning surrounding the commission of the offense; thus a rapid and powerful affective reaction prior to the act with no apparent goal other than to harm the victim immediately following a provocation/conflict (Woodworth & Porter, 2002). Reactive violence is more illustrative between family members and acquaintances, while instrumental violence is more illustrative of violence between strangers (Woodworth & Porter, 2002).

In fact, the mistake many in law enforcement make when they learn of a homicide that is between acquaintances is that the killer must have been angry; yet if the individual was psychopathic, then emotion had nothing to do with the kill—murder was a solution to achieve a goal (Perri & Lichtenwald, 2008b). Because their violence is often instrumental and committed without intense emotion, psychopaths would be less distraught and immobilized with fear or confusion in post-offense behavior (Hakkanen-Nyholm & Hare, 2009). This post-offense attribute is especially evident in the Munchausen syndrome by proxy offenders, fraud detection homicides, and the cesarean section homicide offenders, which should serve as a clue to investigators as to whom they should consider potential suspects.

The absence of emotion actually assists them in planning the kill and not killing reactively because a time requirement to predation is not necessarily present (Meloy, 2000). If there is an absence of emotions, empathy, and the ability to form attachments to others, what replaces these human qualities? According to Dr. Liane Leedom, the inability to have emotions is replaced by the motivation for dominance, control or power; to them, having power over another is the pleasure (Leedom, 2006). For those psychopaths who view homicide as an acceptable and ultimate solution to controlling others, Dr. Leedom’s views are accurate. Another way to think about what replaces these human qualities is to consider Dr. Martha Stout’s assessment when she states that life, in essence, is reduced to a contest and human beings are nothing more than game pieces to be moved about, used as shields or destroyed—it’s about winning to satisfy an intrapsychic need (Stout, 2005).

Research also has shed light on the fact that the narcissistic subdimension of psychopathy is linked to the probability that a psychopath will resort to violence (Cale & Lilienfeld, 2006). The authors caution that narcissism is not the cause of violent aggression but should be understood as a risk factor, like psychopathy, that has been empirically linked to violent aggression, especially when someone has threatened their highly favorable views of themselves by not agreeing with them or through a perceived insult that to others are viewed as harmless (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998). Moreover, recent scholarship has identified that narcissists who displayed traits of extreme entitlement and exploitation of others to achieve their goals were more likely to resort to extreme forms of aggression and deleterious violence against innocent people even in the absence of provocation (Reidy, et al., 2008b). Some researchers have posited that the pathological form of narcissism is actually psychopathy in that when egocentricity, lack of empathy, and sense of superiority of the narcissist blends with the impulsivity, deceitfulness, and criminal tendencies of the antisocial, the result is a psychopathic individual who seeks gratification of selfish impulses through any means without remorse or empathy (Millon & Davis, 2000).

Psychopaths committing instrumental violence did not display a state of heightened emotional arousal at the time of the murder as contrasted to non-psychopaths whose reactive murders exhibited an emotional discharge such as “jealousy, rage, or a heated argument during the offense” (Woodworth & Porter, 2002). Thus the rage displayed by a psychopath should not be confused with the emotion-based rage that Woodworth and Porter refer to and that law enforcement erroneously concludes when they do not have any insights into the behavioral profile of a suspect. Quite the opposite holds true; psychopaths’ display of rage in the context of instrumental violence represents a dispassionate expression of their devaluation of others where murder is a viable option to satisfy their motives. Because they lack empathy, do not have the ability to anticipate remorse, and devalue others, instrumental violence is possible, especially given that their diverse motives to kill are not emotionally driven as they might be for a non-psychopath who engages in reactive murder.

Munchausen Syndrome by

Proxy: Psychopathic Mothers

and Caregivers

Interviewer: So when you were, you know, ready to do this thing, what was going through your head.

Female Killer: All I knew was that I was gonna do this thing, and there wasn’t anybody gonna stop me. I thought about it a lot, how I was gonna do it. The first one, the one I was charged with, I watched her  sleeping before I…her mouth was open, and I put my hand over like this (displays putting hand over the girl’s nose and mouth). It was warm, you know, her breath on my hand. She kicked a couple of times, but I held her down because she was so little. I can’t remember nothing after that.

Interviewer: Was there anything on her, like marks or anything someone could see?

Female Killer: No. I was good at not leaving no marks. It wasn’t hard because they were so little. It was like they was sleeping, and all I had to do was…that’s all I remember.

— Statement of female serialist (Schurman-Kauflin, 2000).

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a severe form of child abuse in which a parent or caretaker fabricates symptoms on behalf of another causing that person to be regarded as ill; the diagnosis has been widely accepted by clinicians in medically related fields (McKee, 2006). The persistent and repetitive inducement of serious injury or illness is a commonly reported characteristic of MSBP (Gross, 2008). Because MSBP entails deliberate injury to a victim through life-threatening methods such as poison or suffocation, the disorder has been considered to have an extremely high mortality rate. Within MSBP research, mothers are the most common perpetrators, but men have also engaged in MSBP, as well as caretaker daughters of elderly parents (Ben-Cherit & Melmed, 1998).

Syndromes are usually characterized by evidence that a particular person shares a particular behavior that is characteristic of a larger class of people. Syndromes are often used at trial as a justification of why someone may have killed, such as battered child syndrome. The authors caution, however, that the use of syndromes is fraught with abuse, particularly a psychological syndrome that can almost never successfully diagnose the causes of criminal conduct (Mosteller, 1996). When these pathological behaviors are labeled syndromes, professionals often fail to see people with MSBP to be in complete control of their behavior in that they have not lost touch with reality.

Dr. Geoffrey McKee, forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, had the opportunity to evaluate hundreds of murder defendants, including women such as Susan Smith who strapped her children in her car and then allowed the car to run into a body of water, drowning them. In his book, Why Mothers Kill (2006), Dr. McKee outlines multiple behavioral reasons why mothers kill their children ranging from the psychotic/depressed mother, the abusive/neglectful mother to the psychopathic mother who exhibits MSBP. Dr. McKee indicates that mothers who demonstrate narcissistic and psychopathic traits are found in persons with MSBP, further stating “few of us can imagine someone who could deliberately and repeatedly injure a child and then deceptively thwart the well-intentioned efforts of medical personnel to successfully treat the highly vulnerable victim.” Abandonment or neglect of biological children is more diagnostic of psychopathic women, and this observation makes sense given psychopathic inability to bond with others in emotional/humanistic manner (Strachan, 1993). Hundreds of infants and young children die at the hands of their mothers, and newborns are abandoned in public or are discarded and left uncovered to die. Although many may be mentally ill and be housed in forensic hospitals, women convicted of killing their children will display a wider array of characteristics, including those of psychopathic mothers (McKee, 2006).

In a deceitful way, the mother destroys the child that supports the myth of motherhood in order to satiate her narcissism. During the pregnancy, the mother is the center of attention and the need for narcissistic attention is fed; but once the child is born the attention shifts to the well-being of the child, and the perceived benefits of motherhood, the attention, are replaced by the realities of parenthood. Thus the mother attempts to project the myth of the nurturing and caregiving female by placing herself in the role of the heroic mother who saves her child. Placing herself in the role of the mother-hero garners the narcissistic approbation she craves by usurping the myth to her benefit at the expense of the child who was simply a means to an end. For these women, children, like a commodity, are objects to be used for self-gratification. The value of the child is dependent on what they get out of them; if they are more valuable alive, then they are kept alive, but if they happen to die, they can always have another without remorse. It was never about upholding the myth of motherhood; the myth was a guise for their narcissism because these mothers never formed any real attachments/bonding to their children in the first place, symptomatic of psychopathy.

Part of the problem in the detection of MSBP and caregiver abuse is that the deaths can be staged, victims might be too young or too old to not rule out a medical explanation, there are no outward signs of foul play, no marks, no weapons, no struggle, natural death is plausible, and no outward signs of caretaker stress that might be an indication of wrongdoing to law enforcement, because psychopaths are capable of holding themselves up under a perceived stressful situation without showing emotion because there were no emotions to manage in the first place. Yet it is this lack of emotion that should be a sign that law enforcement should not ignore when investigating a potential suspect. The mother of a dead child gets a lot of attention from the ambulance crew, the emergency-room folk, the doctors, the nurses, the social workers, and then she gets attention from family, friends, neighbors, the funeral home, and clergy (Brown, n.d). Then when the excitement dies down, she starts the process all over again.

Marybeth Tinning, over the course of 14 years, kept taking her kids to the hospital and collecting flowers at their funerals until she was eventually found to have killed nine of them. She was a “predator” and a woman who “located her well-spring of power in maternity” (Pearson, 1997). The mystery of how these women eluded suspicion is really no mystery at all; they were accomplished liars, and it helped that medical science had settled on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) as an explanation. Above all, argues Pearson (1997), these women got away with their crimes for years because so few of us are willing to acknowledge that women are as capable of cool and calculating brutality as men are, again relying on the myth that females are incapable of such monstrosities.

In November 1997, the Journal of Pediatrics published the results of a terrifying experiment; doctors at several hospitals in Great Britain had decided to covertly videotape 39 parents—most of them mothers—whom medical personnel had begun to suspect were deliberately bringing their young children to the brink of death (Southall et al., 1997). In 30 of the 39 cases, the parents were observed intentionally suffocating their children; in two they were seen attempting to poison a child; in a third, the mother under surveillance deliberately broke her 3-month-old daughter’s arm. Many of the parents seemed as methodical and as brazen, as scoured of fear or conscience, as any serial killer. “Abuse was inflicted without provocation and with premeditation, and in some instances, involved elaborate and plausible lies to explain consequences” (Southall et al., 1997). For example, one mother claimed that she had suffocated her son because of stress related to his crying and continually waking her from sleep. However, under surveillance, the mother was seen, with premeditated planning, to suffocate her infant when he was deeply asleep.

The majority of other cases showed attempted suffocation when the child was asleep or lying passively on the bed. The disturbing feature was that these were women (and a few men) who masqueraded as good parents, the sort who rushed their children to the emergency room when they had trouble breathing, and stood by them with fortitude and devotion while the doctors puzzled out what was wrong. They were conning; they could give the appearance of the concerned mom the minute a doctor or nurse walked in the room, enjoy the social prestige of a mysterious disease, the proximity to powerful medical professionals, they liked the attention and the drama—the wail of the sirens, the adrenalin rush of the emergency room (Brown, n.d.). With further investigation, it turned out that the 39 patients under surveillance, ages 1 month to nearly 3 years old, had 41 siblings, and that 12 of those siblings had died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Cesarean Section Homicide

Cesarean section homicide is based on the motive to obtain a baby by murdering the natural mother and removing the baby from the womb through cesarean section. The behavioral profile of these women suggests that the abductors use a confidence style approach to the victim mother whom they have befriended, deceived, conned, or recently met (Burgess et al., 2002). The offenders faked their pregnancies by gaining weight, wearing baggy clothes, setting up nurseries, showing friends fake sonograms, and stalking their victims (Geberth, 2006). Cutting instruments such as knives are used, but a tool as simple as a pair of car keys was used to cut the mother open, and methods of killing the mother include strangulation and gunshot (Burgess et al., 2002). The abductors carefully planned the murder attempting to effectively cover up their crime and avoid detection; this behavior is more consistent with psychopathy than psychosis (Geberth, 2006). Some of the women kill for their own purposes, while others do so to please a male partner (Burgess et al., 2002).

Narcissistic traits of extreme entitlement and exploitation coupled with psychopathic traits of remorselessness and lack of empathy are risk factors to consider, given that the desire of the mother is not to bond with the child, but to garner more attention that accompanies motherhood via remorseless and brutal violence (Brown, 2009). The narcissistic blow over not being able to have a baby because of fertility problems may play a role in the motive, but this is not always the case where women abducted the child to sell it for profit (Burgess et al., 2002). In addition, the alleged motive of their overwhelming desire to have a child is muted by cases in which the woman kills to take the child but also voluntarily had tubal ligation to prevent pregnancy. Interestingly, MSBP and cesarean section homicide are the flip sides of the same mythical coin in that the women destroyed objects that gave rise to the myth they exploited to support their narcissistic sense of entitlement.

The murder of Bobby Jo Stinnett by Lisa Montgomery is one such cesarean section homicide. Although Montgomery knew Stinnett through their mutual dog-breeding interests and a related Web site, Montgomery signed on the Web site with a different username in order to make an appointment with Stinnett about buying a dog. The day before the murder, Montgomery drove her car from her Malvern, Kansas, home to Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri, in what police said was a practice run, and Montgomery ordered a birthing kit online and studied how to perform a cesarean section. After being arrested for the crime, Montgomery was recorded in a telephone call with her husband saying that she was “messing with” the psychiatrists by saying she heard voices. Interestingly, the defense attempted to explain her behavior by showing the jury brain scans, arguing that she could not stop herself from committing the crime because of an abnormality in the region of the brain that controlled aggression. Consider that neurobiological impairments may be considered risk factors for antisocial behavior, but this method of assessment should not be over-interpreted as representing a causal one-to-one relationship with behavior (Glenn & Raine, 2009). An abnormality in a particular brain region does not imply that the abnormality was the cause of a specific crime (Glenn & Raine, 2009).

The medical examiner, Dr. Mary Case, told the jury that the large amount of blood on the bottom of Stinnett’s feet showed she had her feet flat on the floor—either standing or sitting with her knees raised—when she was cut. “The evidence to me (Dr. Case) shows that she regained consciousness while the incision was being made, a struggle ensued and she was strangled again” (Stafford, 2007). Meanwhile, several witnesses from Montgomery’s hometown testified about her actions and demeanor after she said she had given birth. Five women who knew Montgomery said she and her husband were ecstatic about their new baby girl and she showed no signs of being upset; she answered all of their questions about giving birth to the child.