Sexy, Sexy Murder: A History

The convoluted and made-for-tabloid Amanda Knox trial is over, and Amanda, aka “Foxy Knoxy,” has been set free. It’s probably not worth rehashing all the gory, tawdry details of the case, since you’ve either been alternately tsk-tsking and touching yourself over the trial or you’ve totally ignored it. Suffice to say that now, after the legal debates have been resolved by whatever weird court system the Italians have, there’s only one question remaining, one asked by both American and British lowbrow commentators: Hey, wouldn’t you like to hit that?

Yes, that’s a crude and disrespectful question to ask, but you have to admit that Amanda’s a pretty young lady, if not a car-crash-inducing beauty, and also apparently used to be, as the Brits say, ”up for it.” And some like a little bit of danger in their sex, I suppose; the kind of people who like to get choked out or held at knifepoint during orgasm, or fellate handguns, or burn each other with cigarettes, or feel the cold, twisted steel of a train accident under your back as you—what were we talking about again? Oh yeah, murderers are really sexy (legal note: not that Foxy Knoxy is a murderer or anything). Not the Cindy Crawford “theoretical model of female beauty” sexy, but the real, that-was-super-arousing-but-also-profoundly-disturbing-and-I-have-to-reconsider-my-identity kind of sexy. For instance:

THE MANSON FAMILY GIRLS
Easy one, right? I mean, the empty-eyed brainwashed look doesn’t really “do it” for me, but they had that whole free-spirit 60s thing going where they would have no-strings-attached sex with you in a field of flowers and then they can just coldly hit you up for gas money and walk away but you get emotionally involved and want to hang out with them all the time and then you meet their boyfriend, Charlie and—shit. Why do pretty, clean girls like that always fall for long-hairs who play folksy bullshit on acoustic guitar?

BONNIE ELIZABETH PARKER
I don’t feel like I need to make a case for the better half of Bonnie and Clyde, because holy crap, look at that picture! It’s literally everything you could ever want in a woman. Her story is way better than Romeo & Juliet, which was about a teenaged couple killing each other over a miscommunication. Dying in a hail of bullets is much more romantic.

SARAH SILVERMAN
Fun fact: Sarah Silverman killed a bunch of people. I would still have sex with her.

VERA RENCZI
Most female serial killers are about as good-looking as male serial killers—which is to say, they’ve got faces like the axes they chop their parents into pieces with. The Romanian heiress Vera Renczi, on the other hand, had the looks in the 1920s and 30s to turn men into cartoon caricatures of lust. She also turned 35 men into corpses, non-metaphorically, by poisoning them out of insane jealousy. If she were arrested today, the Daily Mail would devote an entire year’s worth of covers to her, and for good reason.

EVA BRAUN
It’s OK. Everyone has that fantasy where Eva’s beating you with a riding crop and screaming at you in German and you wake up with a massive erection. Perfectly normal. Speaking of the unspeakable, here she is in blackface. Pleasant dreams.