"..poison is more popular among women killers than it is among men."

There is an interesting article on men vs. women killers over at the Washington Post:

Even with that tiny share, poison was still used in 901 murder cases listed in the data. The vast majority of cases involve one killer and one victim, and they knew each other well. Since a few cases involve multiple killers or victims, there are a total of 936 deceased and 1,108 offenders. That’s a big enough group to draw some fair conclusions about who uses it and who is killed.

Women are seven times as likely as men to choose poison as their murder weapon. As I said before, there are nine male killers for every one woman killer. So, in raw numbers, more men kill with poison than women do. But among men murderers, poison is used in just over one-third of one percent of killings. But for women, it is used in more than 2.5 percent of killings.

I always wonder about these low number of women killers. When women kill, they often do so with another person (boyfriend, Hitman etc.) who is blamed. They usually kill in a less direct way so that it is hard to figure out if they were the perpetrator. For example, a woman here in Tennessee had two different husbands die, one was stomped by cattle as he “sat” in his wheelchair and later was found to have been killed from a lethal dose of morphine and another husband was shot. However, it took years for the authorities to look into the first husband’s death. I wonder how many more people have been killed by women who have just never been caught?