Â鶹APP

15 Infamous Women Serial Killers In History

Today, we step out of the world of fiction and entertainment as depicted in movies and series about serial killers and into the actual world with such real incidences. We dig deep into the lives and actions of some of history’s most notorious female serial killers. Their stories are filled with psychological issues coupled with personal trauma which is all reflected in how they act on their victims.

In the most unfortunate events, some of these victims fall prey to the most unsuspecting women serial killers. It is of extreme importance that we acknowledge that highlighting these infamous women serial killers is not to glorify them but to shed light on how dark some human beings can get despite stereotypes associated with the female gender. We also commemorate the victims of these senseless serial killers whose lives were tragically cut short. Let’s delve into the list of 15 infamous women serial killers in history.

1. Elizabeth Báthory

, , via Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian serial killer from the family of Báthory, who owned land in the Kingdom of Hungary now known as Slovakia. Báthory and four of her servants were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and women between 1590 and 1610.  Her servants were put on trial and convicted, whereas Báthory was confined to her home. She was imprisoned in the Castle of Csejte. 

Stories about Báthory quickly became part of national folklore.  Legends describing her vampiric tendencies, such as the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. Nicknames and literary epithets attributed to her include The Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.

2. Aileen Wuornos

, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Aileen Wuornos was an American serial killer. Between 1989 to 1990, while engaging in street prostitution along highways in Florida, she shot dead and robbed seven of her male clients. 

Wuornos claimed that her clients had either raped or attempted to rape her and that the homicides of the men were committed in self-defence. Wuornos was sentenced to death for six of the murders. She was executed on October 9, 2002, by lethal injection after spending more than 10 years on Florida’s death row. Read more about 15 Most Cruel Serial Killers in Michigan. 

3. Giulia Tofana

, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Giulia Tofana was an Italian professional poisoner. She sold a poison called Aqua Tofana to women who wanted to murder their husbands. 

According to one version of events, Giulia Tofana fled to Rome and set up a poisoning ring that began to sell this poison to women who wanted to escape abusive or inconvenient spouses. There may have been 6 women in this poisoning ring active in the 1650s, including Girolama Spara, who took over after Giulia’s death.

4. Dorothea Puente

Dorothea Puente was an American convicted serial killer. In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks.

Puente’s total count reached nine murders and she was convicted of three and the jury remained deadlocked on the other six. Newspapers dubbed Puente the Death House Landlady. In 1993, she was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in 2011 from natural causes aged 82. 

5. Belle Gunness

, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Belle Gunness was also known as Hell’s Belle. She was a Norwegian-American serial killer who was active in Illinois and Indiana between 1884 and 1908. Gunness is thought to have killed at least fourteen people, most of whom were men she enticed to visit her rural Indiana property through personal advertisements.

Some sources speculate that Gunness committed as many as forty murders making her one of the most prolific female serial killers in history. Gunness seemingly died in a fire in 1908, but it is popularly believed that she faked her death. Her actual fate is unconfirmed. Read more about 35 Best Books about Serial Killers. 

6. Nannie Doss

Nannie Doss was an American serial killer responsible for the deaths of 11 people between some time in the 1920s and 1954. Doss was also referred to as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Blue Beard. 

Doss finally confessed to the murders in October 1954, after the death of her fifth husband. It was revealed that she had killed four husbands, two children, two of her sisters, her mother, two grandsons, and a mother-in-law. She pleaded guilty in 1955 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She died from leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1965.

7. Mary Ann Cotton

Mary Ann Cotton was a serial killer who killed many including 11 of her 13 children and three of her four husbands for their insurance policies. Her preferred method of killing was poisoning with arsenic. 

Cotton was convicted only for one murder that of her stepson. The body of the stepson was examined and found to contain arsenic. Cotton was convicted of his murder and sentenced to death. She was hanged at Durham Gaol. She did not die on the gallows from the breaking of her neck but died by strangulation because the rope was set too short, possibly deliberately. Read more on 15 Scariest Female Murderers. 

8. Juana Barraza

Juana Barraza is a Mexican serial killer sentenced to 759 years in prison for the killing of 16 elderly women. She was also dubbed as La Mataviejitas read as The Little Old Lady Killer. 

The authorities and the press have given various estimates as to the total number of the Mataviejitas victims, with estimates ranging from 42 to 48 deaths. After the arrest of Juana Barraza, the case of the Mataviejitas was officially closed despite more than 30 unresolved cases.

9. Leonarda Cianciulli 

, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Leonarda Cianciulli was an Italian serial killer. She was known as the Soap-Maker of Correggio. Leonarda murdered three women in the town of Correggio, Reggio Emilia, in 1939 and 1940, and turned their bodies into soap using caustic soda and teacakes.

Cianciulli was found guilty of her crimes and sentenced to thirty years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. She died of cerebral apoplexy in the women’s criminal asylum in Pozzuoli on 15 October 1970. A number of artefacts from the case, including the pot in which the victims were boiled, are on display at the Criminological Museum in Rome

10. Jane Toppan

, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Jane Toppan nicknamed Jolly Jane, was an American serial killer who is known to have committed twelve murders in Massachusetts between 1895 and 1901. Jane confessed to a total of thirty-one murders. The killings were carried out in Toppan’s capacity as a nurse, targeting patients and their family members. 

Toppan, who admitted to having committed the murders to satisfy a sexual fetish, was quoted as saying that her ambition was “to have killed more helpless people than any other man or woman who ever lived” On June 23, 1902, in the Barnstable County Courthouse, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed for life in the Taunton Insane Hospital. She died there on August 17, 1938, at the age of 84.

11. Elfriede Blauensteiner

Elfriede Blauensteiner was also known as The Black Widow. She was an Austrian serial killer who murdered at least three victims by poison. In each case, she inherited the victim’s possessions.

Although she was only convicted of a total of three murders, Austrian police believe that she may have murdered at least 10 people. In 1997, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving less than seven years of her life sentence, Blauensteiner died from a brain tumour in 2003.

12. Miyuki Ishikawa

Miyuki Ishikawa was a Japanese serial killer. During the US occupation of Japan, she and several accomplices are believed to have murdered dozens of infants, a crime spree known as the Kotobuki San’in incident.

In the late 1940s, during the immediate postwar period, many babies were kept at Kotobuki San’in. Most of them were born out of wedlock, and their real mothers were too impoverished to properly raise their children. Due to a decrease in foster parents, Ishikawa who was a midwife,  chose to neglect numerous infants, many of whom died as a direct result. 

Because the victims were deserted children, Ishikawa insisted that parents were responsible for their deaths. In 1952, the Tokyo High Court sentenced Ishikawa to four years in prison. Read more on 15 deadliest women serial killers. 

13. Maria Swanenburg

, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maria Swanenburg was a Dutch serial killer who murdered at least 27 people and was suspected of killing more than 90 people. Her first victims were her parents. It was established with certainty that Swanenburg poisoned at least 102 people with arsenic between 1880 and 1883. Twenty-seven of her victims died, of whom 16 were her relatives. 

Swanenburg’s motive was the payout of her victims’ insurance or their inheritance. She had secured most of the insurance policies herself. Swanenburg was found guilty of having killed at least three victims, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment in a correctional facility, where she died in 1915.

14. Dana Sue Gray

Dana Sue Gray is an American serial killer who murdered three elderly women in 1994. She was caught after a fourth intended victim survived and identified her. 

Gray says she committed the murders to support her spending habits. She is serving her sentence in the California Women’s Prison in Chowchilla.

15. Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley was a serial killer of small children, murders she committed in partnership with her boyfriend Ian Brady. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17, at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The pair was charged only for the murders and received life sentences. Their crimes were the subject of extensive worldwide media coverage.

Characterised by the press as the most evil woman in Britain, Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but was never released. She died in 2002, aged 60, after serving 36 years in prison.

In conclusion, as we empathize with the unsuspecting victims of these women serial killers, what is more, reassuring is that justice was served and none of the women serial killers went unpunished for their cruel crimes. Read more on 10 serial killers that were never caught.