BLOG: Why some women turn to crime

1924 . . . It was the year my parents were born. In today's blog post, it was the year that started with a bang--the bang of hold-up theft in stores and banks. This week, we are learning what makes female criminals criminal!

I'd like to welcome Maryka Biaggio to Brook's Journal. Maryka is a fellow author in the Historical Novel Society, that I speak about so often. We've shared the joy of historical fiction in quite a few locations now, over the past years. Portland, Maryland, San Antonio, and this past summer in Las Vegas. Maryka has served on the HNS Board now for quite some time and is also a gifted author herself. I'd like to welcome her, as this is her first visit to my blog page and I certainly hope it won't be her last!

So, let's start off with a BANG and find out about Celia and Ed, a married couple who began a crime spree long before Bonnie and Clyde. So be sure to scroll down and READ ON, everybody!

WHY SOME WOMEN TURN TO CRIME

By: Maryka Biaggio

In January of 1924, a petite bob-haired woman and a handsome man robbed a Brooklyn grocery store. Over the coming weeks, they struck time and again. After each of their robberies, the newspapers went wild over the story, vying with one another for the best headline and the most colorful article. When the police couldn’t catch the duo, the newspapers pilloried them as bumbling Keystone cops. Gun Girl and the Tall Guy is based on the true story of Celia and Ed Cooney and how they amused not only New York citizens, but the whole country.

Why were Celia and Ed such big news in 1924? Why did the gun girl, aka the bob-haired bandit, inspire admiration among young women? Why did the public ridicule the Brooklyn police when they couldn’t catch the crooks? And what made the police commissioner so angry that he issued a shoot-to-kill order?

Could it be because a young, baby-faced woman was the one in charge of this duo? After all, she did most of the talking. She was the one who held clerks and customers at bay while her tall companion scooped up whatever cash he could find. The newspapers certainly gave her the leading role in their stories, reporting on how the “bob-haired bandit” or “pretty little holdup artist” wielded her weapon like an Old West gunman. They said she cussed like a sailor but also called the women she subdued “Honey.”

Celia and Ed Cooney predated Bonnie and Clyde by a decade and created a sensation, not just in New York, but across the country. Whoever heard of a pretty young thing robbing with such gleeful abandon? Soon enough, the experts weighed in with their theories about the gutsy gun girl: She was a Jekyll and Hyde, respectable by day and debauched desperado by night. She was surely a drug addict, for what normal woman would take up a life of crime? Or she’d been hypnotized by her tall companion, who was exploiting the poor girl against her will.

I believe that Celia and Ed Cooney garnered more press coverage than run-of-the-mill thieves because Celia was an anomaly: a woman who seemed to relish her role as a bandit. Then, as now, the bulk of crimes were committed by men, and people were fascinated by the story of the foxy girl who soothed her victims with reassuring words—all while brazenly pointing a gun at them.

Female criminals go against the grain. We tend to think of thieves as ruthless and lawless, and this simply doesn’t fit the stereotype of women. So a woman criminal fascinates in a way that a male criminal doesn’t. We wonder how a woman who is supposed to be nurturing and to play second fiddle to her man could take on the role of robber and even seem to enjoy her performance.

As it turns out, research shows that female criminals are far less common than male criminals. They take up much less space in our prisons than do men. And they turn to crime for different reasons than men do.

To accurately portray Celia and Ed Cooney, I needed to understand these gender differences. For many women, the road to prison begins with trauma. Studies show that more than 80% of incarcerated women in the U.S. report histories of physical or sexual abuse, compared with fewer than 20% of men. These experiences often lead women to run away, abuse substances, or turn to prostitution—behaviors that often draw them into the criminal justice system.

Criminologists call this the Pathways Perspective. The idea is simple: Women’s crimes typically emerge not from a hunger for power or profit, but from attempts to cope with trauma and survive in an unequal world. By contrast, men are less likely to describe victimization as the entry point to crime. Male offenders are often propelled by peer dynamics, aggression learned early in life, or economic ambition. Trauma plays a role, but it is rarely the central narrative.

Gender differences in criminal behavior become clearer when we look at the crimes themselves. Men dominate violent and predatory crime: In the U.S., 80% of violent crime arrests and 90% of homicide convictions involve male offenders. In the U.K., men commit 98% of sexual offenses and 82% of violent crimes.

Women, meanwhile, cluster in other categories. They are more likely to be arrested for property crimes, fraud, or drug-related offenses. In fact, drug crimes account for one in four female state prison sentences, nearly double the proportion for men. Theft, fraud, and shoplifting also show disproportionately high female involvement.

These patterns reflect the motives at play. Women often cite economic necessity, family pressures, or protection from abuse as reasons for offending. Men, in contrast, are more likely to frame their crimes around dominance, excitement, or material gain.

This distinction—survival for women, power for men—captures a broad truth about gender and crime. While men often take risks to climb higher in a criminal hierarchy, for instance, in a gang, women frequently commit crimes to stay afloat. Men’s crimes tell different stories—of power struggles, violence, and thrill-seeking—but women’s crimes remind us of the hidden costs of inequality.

The overall trends are hard to ignore. Women enter the justice system through pathways marked by trauma, mental health struggles, and economic desperation far more often than men. Their crimes tend to be less violent, but their lives more scarred.

Crime, in short, is not gender-neutral. Men and women travel different roads into the justice system, driven by different forces. And these differences proved to be true in the case of Celia and Ed. They were expecting their first baby, but they were merely scraping by. When Ed suggested the stick-up business, Celia at first balked. But they could think of no other way out of their cramped one-room apartment. So they planned to do a few jobs to get themselves set up and then quit the robbery business. But it didn’t turn out that way. And therein lies the story.

Fortunately, I had some excellent materials at my disposal as I wrote about Celia and Ed Cooney. Elizabeth Mahon featured them in her fascinating book Pretty Evil New York: True Stories of Mobster Molls, Violent Vixens, and Murderous Matriarchs, and Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson wrote a fine study in The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Crime Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York. So I was able to use these authoritative sources to shape a novel that stayed true to the facts.

But we all know that fiction can do something that nonfiction can’t: It can take us inside people and show us what motivates them to behave as they do. And that’s exactly what I strived to do with the gun girl’s story—get inside her head and show the reader how she justified or explained her actions.

I hope readers will enjoy the story of Celia and Ed, and also get a glimpse into the crime spree that fascinated New York and, for that matter, the whole country in the 1920s.

ALL ABOUT MARYKA

Maryka Biaggio

Maryka Biaggio, PhD, is a psychology professor turned novelist with a passion for history and the human spirit. After a successful academic career, she turned to writing historical fiction inspired by real people—figures whose lives illuminate the complexities of their time. Her debut novel, Parlor Games (Doubleday, 2013), was praised by New York Times bestselling author Daisy Goodwin as “a wildly entertaining and constantly surprising ride.” She has since published Eden Waits, The Point of Vanishing, The Model Spy, and Gun Girl and the Tall Guy.

Her work has earned numerous accolades, including the Willamette Writers Award, Oregon Writers Colony Award, Historical Novel Society Review Editors' Choice, La Belle Lettre Award, and a Michigan Upper Peninsula Notable Book Award. A board member of the Historical Novel Society North America Conference from 2015 to 2025, Biaggio is celebrated for illuminating overlooked historical figures with psychological depth and narrative grace. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

CONNECT WITH MARYKA: Website~ https://marykabiaggio.com/

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