Source: K. Ramsland

I will say right up front, this is an observation, not a claim about causation. I expect to get some angry responses. I’m offering anecdotes told by killers, not scientific data or corroborated facts.

That being said, I have run across this item in several bios of serial killers, and I have wondered if it was a contributing factor to their issues. It seems logical that if your mother does not accept who you are in your most fundamental form, this attitude would have a negative impact.

Henry Lee Lucas was born in 1936 in the backwoods of Virginia. His mother, Viola, made a living for her family with prostitution and bootlegging. He said that she would dress him up like he was a little girl, which humiliated him. ( does contribute to violence.) One expert who wanted to corroborate this odd claim found a half-sister who said she had a picture of Lucas with curls in his hair, wearing a dress. Psychologists who later evaluated him interpreted his hatred of his mother — his first murder victim — as the source of his violent misogyny. He confessed to hundreds of murders, although most of his tales were lies.

In 1976, Lucas had teamed up in Florida with arsonist and serial killer Ottis Toole, who enjoyed mutilating corpses. Toole had his own gruesome story. Born in 1947 in Jacksonville, Florida, he was abandoned young by his father. He, too, said that his mother dressed him as a girl. Supposedly, she was a religious fanatic, while Toole’s grandmother was some kind of Satanist. Toole said he’d watch this woman dig up graves in search of body parts for her rituals.

Toole committed his first of many murders at age 14. A traveling salesman had picked him up for and once they were in the woods, Toole ran the man over with his own car. Yet Toole dressed in drag to get rides while hitchhiking and to hunt for “dates” at rescue missions. It's not clear what part his early experience as a "girl" played.

A child killer in this category is Doil Lane. He picked up Nancy Shoemaker in Wichita, Kansas in 1990, to rape and murder. He then took her underwear as a souvenir. Tips came in about Lane, and during questioning, he signed a search warrant. Officers found "missing" posters that featured a photo of the girl, along with about two hundred pairs of girls’ panties. Doil said he liked to try them on.

Lane’s mother mentioned that her son had been falsely suspected in another incident in Texas. An investigation turned up the 1980 murder of 8-year-old Bertha Martinez. Bertha was last seen riding her bike outside her home in San Marcos, the town where Lane had resided at the time. Reportedly, she'd followed a man and woman who'd told a group of children they were looking for their dog. Six days later, Bertha’s body was found inside a shed. She had been beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. Missing were her glasses and underwear.

Eventually, Lane told police that he “had a problem.” He said that his mother had dressed him as a girl when he was young, so he liked girls' underwear. Finally, Lane admitted to involvement in the murder of both girls and handed over a pair of panties he'd taken from one. He was convicted in both states.

Then there was Charles Albright, the so-called Texas Eyeball Killer. Born in 1933, he was placed in an orphanage and adopted. His mother, Delle, was an elementary schoolteacher, strict and over-protective. She not only dressed young Charles as a girl at times, but also gave him a doll. In addition, she changed his clothes frequently each day to keep him clean.

Charles wanted to be a taxidermist, so Delle helped him to learn how to skin and stuff birds that he'd shot himself. However, she would not let him use the expensive glass eyes sold in taxidermy shops. Instead, he got buttons. Oddly enough, he was later convicted of killing three women and surgically removing their eyes (which got him the creepy moniker). What became of these eyes is unclear.

Regardless of the general effect of dressing boys like girls, it does seem clear that for at least three of these offenders, their mothers' decisions to treat them as girls did influence their development into violent predators with specific — at least, as they tell it.