While it may be historically less common for you to find a woman making deadly headlines, the following ladies are all seriously lethal. Over the centuries, these nightmare-makers tortured, maimed and ultimately killed anyone who stood in the way of what they wanted. And sometimes, they just really wanted to kill people. So disturbing.
1. Elizabeth Báthory: Largely considered the world’s most prolific female serial killer, the Hungarian countess murdered anywhere from 80-600 young girls that she lured to her castle. Witnesses at the time dubbed her the “Blood Countess” after claims of her eating the flesh and/or drinking the blood of her victims came to light.
2. Delphine LaLaurie: A Louisiana socialite in the mid-1820s, LaLaurie was notoriously cruel to her family’s slaves. Following a house fire, residents discovered dozens of gruesomely tortured, maimed, and starved slaves hidden in the attic. The family fled to Paris and never faced charges.
3. Lavinia Fisher: America’s first convicted female serial killer, Fisher poisoned and robbed from the guests in the Charleston, South Carolina hotel she ran with her husband. They were both hanged for their crimes in 1820.
4. Jane Toppan: A trained nurse, Toppan confessed to 31 murders in 1901. She conducted twisted experiments on her patients and confessed to getting a sexual thrill when they were near death.
5. Anna Marie Hahn: Sent to America by her embarrassed family in Poland after having a child out of wedlock, Hahn quickly found a husband and brought her son over to start their family together. However, she also had a gambling problem and began poisoning and robbing the elderly members of her community. After a sensational month-long trial, Hahn was sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1937.
6. Amelia Dyer: “The most prolific baby farm murderer of Victorian England.” Dyer provided housing for pregnant women and would originally attempt to place the children in adoption…or allow them to die of malnutrition. She eventually stopped bothering with the adoption and was convicted twice for neglect, hanged for her crimes in 1896.
7. Bertha Gifford: Acting as a caretaker in her community, Gifford poisoned a reported 17 people over a span of 21 years. After a trial in 1928, she was deemed not guilty due to insanity and spent the rest of her life in a Missouri mental hospital until her death in 1951.
8. Amy Archer-Gilligan: She and her first husband opened the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm in the early 1900s and quickly found a profit in murdering their patients with poison. After the death of her husband and a second husband, likely also poisoned, Archer-Gilligan gained sole profits from the murder of 60 patients in her care. Families began to get suspicious and she was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1919.
9. Belle Gunness: In the early 20th century, Gunness killed a string of over 40 suitors and husbands in order to collect their life insurance settlements. She found most of her victims through a personal ad she placed in the local paper.
10. The Angel Makers of Nagyrév: A group of women led by midwife Júlia Fazekas in a Hungarian village who, between 1914 and 1929, poisoned roughly 300 people. Fazekas encouraged the women to get rid of their family members because, as she said, “Why put up with them?”
