I have been accused of seeing things in woman=good and man=bad terms. This criticism is in some respects valid. I have seen tendencies in my writing to see the sexes in these terms.
However, I have often written about evil women. One of those evil women was Velma Barfield, a serial poisoner who was eventually executed. There was a hue and cry over her death sentence and she attracted many powerful supporters including evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth. It seems to me that a similarly situated male murderer would not have gotten the support Velma Barfield did.
It also seems to me that Velma Barfield was a classic hypocrite, manipulating religious faith in pursuit of her foul deeds, and that her supposed jailhouse conversion was just a continuation of that same wicked pattern.
My story on her is at http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/women/velma_barfield/1.html.
At least in this case, did I depict a woman as evil?
What do you think of Velma Barfield? Did she convert in jail? Or was her supposedly newfound faith just the same-old same-old?

