An average girl became the ‘White Widow’

Mudshark Samantha Lewthwaite, dubbed the "White widow", the British fugitive widow of 7/7 bomber Jermaine Lindsay, right, are pictured together in a family photo.
When Samantha Laithwaite’s husband blew up a London subway, she played the grieving victim. Then she became a killer.
She grew up middle-class in suburban Buckinghamshire, England, and was considered an average girl in every way. Her father, Allen, was a former British Army soldier-turned-lorry driver; her mother, Christine, a homemaker. She has one older brother, Allen, and friends recall that as early as junior high, Samantha Laithwaite was a pretty and popular girl. When her parents broke up in 1994, she took it hard but seemingly no harder than most of her friends whose parents had divorced. She wasn’t particularly ambitious or studious, but she was a good girl who was shy around boys, considered by classmates to be exceptionally warm and decent.
Today, she is known as the White Widow, wanted in connection with last week’s attack on the Westgate Mall in Kenya. But Laithwaite, 29, has been known to law enforcement since July 7, 2005, when her then-husband detonated a bomb in London’s subway system, killing himself and 26 civilians; back then, she was the weeping, 8-months-pregnant widow who became the subject of national sympathy.
So, how did this nice young girl grow up to become one of the world’s most wanted terrorists?
BROKEN HOMES, BROKEN LIVESAs wild as Laithwaite’s story seems — the white woman from the West who decides to become a radical Islamic jihadist — it is not without precedent. There is Rabiah Hutchison, the former Australian surfer girl tuned “grande dame of terror,” once married to a bin Laden confidante. “I would defend Islam with my life,” she told ABC News in 2008, “so that makes me a filthy, dirty, subhuman terrorist.”
There’s also “Mama Shabab,” a Canadian woman who runs a safe house for terrorists in Somalia; Colleen Rose, a. k. a. “Jihadi Jane,” the American woman facing a life sentence for aiding and abetting terrorists, and Muriel Degauque, a Belgian woman who committed the 2005 suicide bombing of a US convoy in Iraq (only she was killed).
They all have certain things in common, says Mia Bloom, professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts and author of the book “Bombshell: Women and Terrorism”: broken homes, low self-esteem, lost souls in search of purpose.