- When finally arrested connection with the crimes five years ago, she claimed that she had transitioned into a female to stop her male persona from being violent
- Experts have in past said there is no evidence that hormone therapy in gender treatments helps reduce aggression or violence
A transgender woman who killed three sex workers in 1990 may have been motivated by jealousy, a criminologist has suggested.
Donna Perry – who used to be known as Douglas Perry before undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 2000 – murdered 26-year-old Yolanda Sapp, 34-year-old Nickie Lowe, and 38-year-old Kathy Brisbois.
Their naked or partially exposed bodies were found dumped on the banks of the Spokane River in Washington state.
When finally arrested connection with the crimes five years ago, she claimed that she had transitioned into a female to stop her male persona from being violent.
‘Douglas didn’t stop, Donna stopped it,’ Perry told police about the killings, according to an affidavit filed in January 2014. ‘I’m not going to admit I killed anybody, I didn’t. Donna has killed nobody.’
When asked if Doug was responsible, she responded: ‘I don’t know if Doug did or not, it was 20 years ago and I have no idea whether he did or did not,’ according to ABC News.
And crime expert Brian Frederick told Channel 5’s latest episode of Making a Serial Killer. which is available on My 5, that Perry may have picked the victims based on their looks.
‘I can imagine that there was also a little bit of jealousy,’ he told the documentary.’
‘He picked some attractive victims, perhaps more attractive than he could ever plan to be as Donna and he felt that they were squandering this beauty by giving sex to other men who didn’t necessarily have the purpose that he had. He was mission oriented.’
Jim Dresback, a former Spokane detective, said that Perry’s former girlfriend Claire-Anne – who was also a sex worker who suffered with cocaine addiction – may have served as motivation as well.
‘It was interesting that Claire-Anne was booked in to jail on the night that two of these people were killed,’ he told the programme.
‘Now she’s back in jail again and that makes Doug Perry mad and then he finds somebody to take out on. ‘And the first people he’s gonna look at are the people that maybe he thinks are standing in the way.’
Criminologist Brian also denied the common theory that ‘Douglas Perry decided to become Donna Perry in order to escape conviction’.
‘I’m not convinced by that,’ he said. ‘I think that was the end game the entire time.
‘His procuring sex workers, his having sex with them, him discarding of the bodies, this reverent irreverence he had towards them was all part of the masterplan.
‘The expert touched on the killer’s childhood – which was riddled with ‘hypermasculinity’ and sexual harassment from her father.
‘He needed to perfect, he needed to become, he needed to get away form the little boy that was raped by his father and become a woman who could actually provide sex to other men. That was the game plan.
‘In Perry’s mind, Perry was killing the thing that he hated and then trying to become the perfection of it,’ he added.
‘Knowing full well that he wouldn’t be approved, knowing that he would have to go out of the country to get that surgery – probably bolstered his hatred towards women because they were born with this, they didn’t have to go through the work that he had to go through.
‘They weren’t denied their sexuality.’
Experts have in past said there is no evidence that hormone therapy in gender treatments helps reduce aggression or violence.
Brian Harris, a homicide detective, also told the Channel 5 programme that Donna Perry being transgender has nothing to do with her being a murderer.
‘When you come down to the law, did Donna Perry, at the time that she was Douglas Perry, did she know the taking of life was wrong? Was against the law? And clearly, it would be yes. Resoundingly, it would be yes.
‘In the eyes of the law it doesn’t matter what the genitalia says, what matters in this case is what the DNA says.
‘Donna Perry, Douglas Perry… they’re one and the same. They are the killers. Donna Perry is not a sex offender. Donna Perry is a serial killer.’
The victims’ families embraced and cried in the court hallway at the conclusion of the trial, which took place 27 years after the serial killings, in 2017.
‘I’m so happy that it’s finally done and over with and we have some sort of closure for my aunt and these two other women. It’s amazing,’ Chilsea Patzer, Nickie Lowe’s niece, told KREM2 at the time.
All three victims were sex workers in Spokane and were all shot during a four-month span in 1990.
The cases went unsolved until 2012, when Perry was convicted in federal court for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
During that investigation, her DNA was entered into a national database and came back a match to evidence in the cold-case murders.
Prosecutors contended during the two-and-a-half-week trial that Perry changed her gender to avoid suspicion in the serial killings.
‘She gelded herself like you would a farm animal,’ Deputy Prosecutor Sharon Hedlund told the jury in closing arguments.
A woman who had shared a cell with Perry during a stint in an Oregon prison in 1998 told police that Perry confided in her that she had killed prostitutes ‘because she couldn’t breed and the women had the ability to have children and they were wasting it being “pond scum”.’
Defense lawyer Pat Donahue tried to convince the jury that his client’s DNA and fingerprints were linked to the victims because as a man, Perry had used the services of prostitutes.
