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I think the women who fangirl over murderers are literally insane. Especially when it's a guy who killed his last wife/girlfriend. Why on earth would you think this is a good idea?
But historically there have been lots of guys who never got married, and lots of 'old maids', even in the days before women were allowed work or be independent of a man. There have always been losers in the reproduction stakes.
People draw wild, overgeneralized inferences from this. Supposing 1% of women are sufficiently deranged to get turned on by and reach out to serial killers. In the modern media ecosystem, that serial killer would receive millions of contacts indicating interest. Usually, it's more like hundreds (and, notably, only for the particularly handsome; I'd be curious about the more typical serial killer numbers). A cute female serial killer would probably receive thousands.
A vanishing minority of both sexes think like that.
How many cute female serial killers are there? We can't make the comparison directly because women tend to be accomplices, not killers themselves. I can tell you that Myra Hindley, for one, was not getting love letters from attracted men.
Takaoka Yuka got quite a lot of fandom - not a serial killer, but we started out discussing murderers in general (okay, sure, she didn't manage to kill him, so she's an attempted murderer, but it's the thought that counts).
I used to moderate a board for stalkers/fans of stalkers, and there was a lot of love for her there. I remember saying on said board that she probably didn't deserve as much sympathy as lots of them were extending - because while yeah, sure, host bars are designed to hook people into whaling away vast sums of money on parasocial fake romance, and as such getting murdered by angry customers is absolutely an occupational hazard that's baked in, Yuka was a hostess herself and thus couldn't really claim ignorance or innocence of that game.
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Not a serial killer, but Casey Anthony got plenty of male simps despite killing her kid ("allegedly"). But that's probably because she was decently attractive and she presented herself as the partygirl slut archetype.
Yeah, I don't get it. My wires may be crossed for weirdness, but not that weird. It's like the women who are the 'other woman' or a mistress in an affair, going online to their own sub-Reddit about how the guy has been sneaking around on his wife and lying to her and constructing almost a double life for five years, but oh noes he still hasn't got that divorce so we can marry, like he promised me back at the start! Yeah, of course he hasn't you dummy, a guy who has demonstrated he's a cheater and liar when it comes to intimate affairs and you think he's not lying to you?
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Well you say that..
"Academic and journalistic reviews of these massive files confirm that alongside hate mail, Hindley routinely received fan mail, expressions of romantic infatuation, and explicit marriage proposals from male strangers."
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Having someone willing to kill for you is sometimes fairly useful, particularly if you are bad at killing people. It was considerably more useful in the EEA, as @IGI-111 notes.
Yeah, but "guy convicted for violently assaulting/raping/killing previous partners" is not a good bet on "but the leopard will never eat my face".
Well, I was more addressing the "murderer" part than the specific "black widower" part.
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Your children inherit the drive and ability for violence which makes them more fit in a setting where this is rewarded, which was most of human prehistory. Evolution barely cares about the fact that you might get killed by the violent partner you picked so long as you can survive long enough to have children that survive you both.
If people couldn't turn off their rational self interest in the service of genetic fitness, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. You can call people who act on their instincts insane, antisocial, what have you, that doesn't change the existence of the instincts.
Guys violent to their partners tend to be violent to offspring as well, and mothers who can't protect themselves and their kids die early and leave no lasting genetic heritage.
It's a bit of a 'just-so' story, and I think the real answer is simpler: it's mental derangement, the same as other mental illnesses. We can dress it up all we like that "well, illness X must have some benefit or else it wouldn't have survived this long, it would have been evolved away" but we can see that craziness has survived over the generations just fine.
Mental illnesses stem from necessary processes or they wouldn't exist. Indeed almost every single one is simply an acute version of a healthy and necessary mode of thinking.
Moreover I think the attraction falls of the same cliff the returns of violent tendencies do in proportion to the danger to offspring. Purposeful killers that these women can talk themselves into thinking they can get on the good side of is far more attractive than indiscriminate low inhibition brutes, but they are both more attractive than a male rape victim, all things being equal.
That's like saying cancer stems from necessary processes or it wouldn't exist. Yeah, cancer is a physical process gone wrong, but it'll still kill ya. Same with mental illnesses - there is no cosy justification for wife-beaters that "oh but this is evo-psych, she wants my violent genes so the kids will succeed, so it's okay if I slap her around and threaten to murder the kids, I'm just demonstrating my genetic fitness!"
In no way does cancer improve your reproductive fitness. However, all the things that do more than it lowers it and are carcinogenic are desirable and desired.
Nature doesn't care that an externality merely exists, only that it's negative effects are less powerful that the positive effects that generate it.
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