Is The Hunting Party's Wolf-Obsessed Brenda Lowe Based on a Real Serial Killer?

The Hunting Party's skilled team found themselves tracking a rare breed on their latest recovery mission: a female serial killer.

Their elusive target in the new NBC thriller’s third episode, simply titled "Lowe," was Brenda Lowe, described as a “highly volatile and unpredictable” killer with at least 17 brutal murders to her name. 

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“She’s one of the most prolific female serial killers ever seen,” the task force’s secretive leader Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler) remarked just before FBI profiler Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh) and her team embarked on the dangerous recovery mission.

Brenda was one of dozens of notorious killers who escaped from a secret government prison, The Pit, after an unexplained explosion brought the facility down in the series' premiere episode.

This fictional killer, played by Colleen Foy, is distinctive not only because of her gender — the University of Michigan estimates just 8.6 percent of known serial killers in the U.S. are female — but also for her unusual method of killing. The reclusive Montana resident trained a pack of wolves to kill anyone who came onto her sprawling property, reserving particular vitriol for trespassing hunters. 

Brenda is a work of fiction, but her character does share some commonalities with real-life killers. 

To find out more, continue below: 

Aileen Wuornos

Once dubbed “America’s first female serial killer” Aileen Wuornos’ crimes continue to live in infamy. The Florida sex worker confessed to killing seven men (although she was convicted of killing only six), while working along Florida’s Interstate 75 corridor, according to Florida’s WFLA.

Wuornos claimed at trial that she killed the men in self defense, but she later fired her attorneys, dropped her appeals, and told a panel of psychiatrists that she believed she’d kill again if she was ever released, The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. She was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Her life story and brutal killing spree were the subject of the 2003 blockbuster movie Monster, which earned Charlize Theron an Academy Award for her compelling portrait of the complicated killer. 

Much like The Hunting Party’s fictional Brenda, who Bex described as having “anti-social tendencies,” researchers, including one who evaluated Wuornos before her death, concluded in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that Wuornos met the clinical definition for Antisocial Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.

Belle Gunness

Brenda was a killer most comfortable on her own turf, not unlike the alleged female serial killer Belle Gunness. Although Belle was never convicted, she’s suspected of killing a string of husbands, romantic suitors, and foster children in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

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Originally a native of Norway, Belle moved to the United States in 1881, settling with her husband Mads Sorensen in Chicago, per a profile by the LaPorte County Historical Society Museum. After Sorensen mysteriously died on the only day two overlapping life insurance policies were in effect, Belle moved to a farm with her foster children in La Porte, Indiana. There she married Peter Gunness, but the marriage would be short-lived. Just after the pair tied the knot, one of Peter’s children died under suspicious circumstances and Peter died himself less than a year later. Single once again, Belle took out a newspaper ad searching for good and reliable men willing to partner with her on the farm, but many of the suitors had a habit of disappearing. 

Her alleged crimes came to light after her house caught fire in 1908. Authorities rushed to the scene and discovered four dead bodies inside, including three children and one woman with a missing head. Without the head, authorities could never be sure that Belle perished in the fire. During a search of her property, they discovered at least 13 bodies buried around the farm, according to the museum. 

Ted Kaczynski 

As Bex explained, Brenda saw society as a “cage” and retreated into the wilderness to live a solitary life among her wolves. That’s not unlike Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who left society behind to live in his own primitive cabin. 

Kaczynski was once a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, but after he became convinced that technology was ruining society, he left behind the world of academia to live alone in the Montana woods, per CNN.

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Over a nearly 20-year period, beginning in 1978, Kaczynski sent a series of mail bombs to random targets, ultimately killing three people and wounding 23 others with the bombs. He was finally captured in 1996 after his 35,000-word manifesto explaining “the ills of modern society” was published in The Washington Post in 1995, per the FBI. His brother David Kaczynski read the essay and believed his troubled brother may have been the author. David contacted authorities and provided letters and documents from his brother that allowed them to match the linguistics in the manifesto.

Susan Monica & Other Animal Lovers

The fictional Brenda made it clear she loved her wolves more than people. While no one has been documented as having trained wolves to kill, like her character, there are some killers who used animals to help them carry out their deadly deeds. 

One notable real-life killer is Oregon pig farmer Susan Monica, who was convicted of killing two handymen on her farm and then feeding their bodies to her pigs to dispose of the evidence, according to The Associated Press. 

Much like Brenda, Monica preferred the company of animals. 

"I do not value human life very much," Monica said in a taped confession played in court, according to Herald and News. "My feeling is the only thing wrong with the planet is there's people on it. If not for us, all the other animals, even dodo birds, would be here."

Canadian serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton is also suspected of feeding his victims to his pigs. Pickton targeted sex workers and drug users, luring them out to his farm where he killed them, per The AP. Although Pickton bragged about killing as many as 49 women, he was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.

In another chilling case once profiled in Los Angeles Magazine, Robert James tried to use two rattlesnakes to kill his wife Mary, but after the venom was taking too long to kill her, he drowned her in the bathtub instead.

In The Hunting Party, when Brenda learned her land had been sold off and her beloved wolves were killed, she had a “full psychotic break,” targeting anyone she encountered in the woods. Luckily, a quick-thinking Bex was able to talk her down long enough to get a shot fired off, wounding her and allowing the team to get this dangerous killer back into custody.

To see who the team is tracking down next week, watch new episodes of The Hunting Party on Mondays at 10/9c on NBC and streaming on Peacock the next day.