17 of the most notorious female serial killers (2025)

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Adriana Belmonte

2018-07-01T18:43:10Z

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (1)

Although female serial killers are thought to be less common than male serial killers, they certainly exist.

They're also just as brutal as the men.

From the "Little Old Lady Killer" to the "soap maker of Correggio," these are some of the most prolific and horrifying female serial killers throughout history.

Editor's note: A warning some of these accounts feature graphic depictions of violence, sexual abuse, and murder.

Aileen Wuornos

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (2)

Aileen Wuornos, who was working as a sex worker, was convicted and executed for the murders of six different men between December 1989 to November 1990. She confessed to shooting men who picked her up hitchhiking in self-defense after sheclaimed they beat or raped her, a claim that she later recanted.

Wuornos was sentenced to death in 1992 and was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. Her story was portrayed in the film "Monster," with Charlize Theron playing Wuornos.

Judy Buenoano

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (3)

Judy Buenoano was known as the "Black Widow" and was executed in the electric chair in 1998. She had been convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic, drowning her son who was partially paralyzed (who began needing leg braces after showing signs of arsenic poisoning), and attempting to kill her fiancé with a car bomb.

The motive appeared to be insurance money, as she received around $240,000 for the deaths of her husband, son, and a former boyfriend. Although Buenoano never admitted to any of the killings, she was nevertheless the first woman to be executed in the state of Florida since 1848.

Juana Barraza

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (4)

Juana Barraza was dubbed the "Mataviejitas," or "Little Old Lady Killer" after 16 elderly women were found strangled to death in Mexico City in 2005. According to The Guardian, forensic profilers believe Barraza’s killings were to release the rage she had towards her own alcoholic mother, who gave her away at age 12 to a man who abused her.

She used objects such as phone cables, tights, or her stethoscope to strangle her victims. She became one of Mexico’s most prolific serial killers and was eventually sentenced to 759 years in prison for 11 separate counts of murder. She is still in prison today.

Jane Toppan

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (5)

Jane Toppan was born Honora Kelley and known as "Nora" but her name was changed to Jane Toppan after she was taken in by the Toppan family as an indentured servant.

She later became a nurse and was called "Jolly Jane" because of her cheerful demeanor. However, she was secretly experimenting with drugs such as morphine and atropine on her patients and then started poisoning specific people in her life, one of them being her foster sister, Elizabeth Brigham.

Toppan confessed to Brigham’s killing in 1902: "I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out." She later admitted to killing at least 31 people but a jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, so Toppan was sent to Taunton State Hospital for life.

She claimed the reason behind her murderous ways was because the man she loved at 16 left her for another woman. "If I had been a married woman, I probably would not have killed all of those people. I would have had my husband, my children, and my home to take up my mind," she said.

Gesche Gottfried

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (6)

Gesche Gottfried was arrested and sentenced to death in 1831 for murdering 15 people with arsenic over a span of 14 years. She was beheaded in front of a crowd of 35,000 people in Bremen, Germany, and was the last person to be publicly beheaded in the city.

Gottfried is said to have murdered her parents, two husbands, a fiancé, her children, and even some of her friends.

Amelia Dyer

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (7)

Amelia Dyer's killings began with "baby farming," when someone would take in an unwanted baby in exchange for money. After becoming widowed, Dyer apparently learned of the practice and began advertising her "service" as a babysitter or caretaker in the newspaper.

Instead of taking care of the child, Dyer would murder the baby by starvation, drugs, or strangulation.

Eventually, doctors became aware of the number of deaths of children in her care, and Dyer was sentenced to six months of hard labor for neglect, according to the BBC. She then went back to murdering children and started disposing of their bodies in a riverinstead to thwart suspicion. It is believed she may have murdered hundreds of infants.

One of those bodies was found and traced back to her. After confessing to her crimes, she was hanged on June 10, 1896.

Kristen Gilbert

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (8)

Kristen Gilbert was a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts and was convicted of killing four patients (all veterans) and attempting to kill three others by injecting them with a drug called epinephrine.

Prosecutors sought the death penalty since Gilbert's case occurred on federal grounds, but the jurydecided in 2001 that she should spend the rest of her life in prison. She is serving out her sentence at Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Texas.

Nannie Doss

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (9)

Nannie Doss was sentenced to life in prison in 1955 after confessing to murdering her previous four husbands. An autopsy had been performed on her last husband and the findings indicated that arsenic was the cause of death. It was the same poison that Doss later said she used to kill three of her previous husbands who had all died mysteriously.

According to Tulsa World, her first husband escaped after someone tipped him off about eating her food and told a reporter that three of their five children died young. Although she also confessed to killing her mother, sister, grandson, and mother-in-law, she was only charged with the deaths of her husbands.

Dorothea Puente

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (10)

Dorothea Puente's crimes were revealed in 1988 after homicide detectives searched for a missing man at his last known address: Puente's house in Sacramento, California. Body parts were discovered buried in her backyard and authorities soon learned they belonged to four women and three men, ranging from the ages of 52 to 79.

Puente was accused of poisoning her tenants with prescription drugs for their Social Security checks. She fled the city but was eventually apprehended in Los Angeles, and wastried for nine murders (two other killings were attributed to her). She was sentencedto life in prison without the possibility of parole after she was found guilty on two counts first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder.

Puente died at the age of 82 while incarcerated at Central California Women's Facility.

Myra Hindley

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (11)

Myra Hindley and her boyfriend, Ian Brady (pictured above), killed five children together and buried them inSaddleworth Moor in northwestern England during the 1960s.

In 1966, they wereconvicted in three of the deaths. The couple later confessed in the 1980s to killing two other children during that time.Most shockingly, some of the children weretortured and molested before their deaths, and the couple kept photographs and an audio recording of one of the victims.

Brady died inhigh-security psychiatric hospital in 2017 and Hindley died in 2002 while still incarcerated.

Amy Archer-Gilligan

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (12)

In the early 1900s,Amy Archer-Gilligan appeared to be operating a nursing home in Windsor, Connecticut. But many of the residents began dying after naming her in their life insurance policies — in aspan of five years, at least 48 people died while in her care (including her second husband).

After an investigation, authorities discovered that she had murdered people by using arsenic or strychnine. Archer-Gilligan was arrested and indicted for poisoning five people. At the discretion of the state's attorney, however, she was tried for only one of the murders. She was sentenced to life in prison in 1917 and eventually transferred to a mental hospital.

She died in 1962 at the age of 89.

Rosemary West

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (13)

Rosemary West and her husband, Fred, subjected teenage girls (one of them their own daughter) to torture and sexual abuse. They also murdered and dismembered most of their victims.

The police finally caught the couple in 1994. For the brutality of her crimes, West was found guilty of 10 murders and sentenced to life in prison. Fred died by suicide.

Beverley Allitt

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (14)

Beverley Allitt was dubbed the "Angel of the Death" after killing numerous children in her care in Britain. She was charged with murdering four children by injecting them with high doses of insulin.

Allitt was diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome by proxy but still deemed fit to stand trial. She was found guilty and given 13 life sentences in 1993 for four murders, three attempted murders, and six counts of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent.

She is currently incarcerated at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire, England.

Elizabeth Bathory

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (15)

Elizabeth Bathory was whispered to be avampire because of her bloodlust. After she married a count in 1575, sources say that her husband built her a torture chamber in their castle where, according to History.com, Bathory enjoyed "jamming pins and needles under the fingernails of her servant girls, and tying them down, smearing them with honey, and leaving them to be attacked by bees and ants."

After she moved on from servant girls to targeting the daughters of local nobles, Bathory's crimes were discovered and she was convicted for 80 counts of murderin 1611 and confined to a room of the castle that is said to have only had slits for food and air. She died three years later in 1614.

Leonarda Cianciulli

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (16)

Leonarda Cianciulli ran a small shop in Correggio, Italy, in the 1930s. According to BBC, she was warned by a fortune teller that her children were in danger and she came to believe she needed a human sacrifice. Cianciulli lured three women into her shop, drugged them, killed them with an axe, and disposed of their remains by boiling them in caustic soda.

According to her court testimony, she turned one of the women's remains into soap that she gave out to neighbors, which earned her the nickname "la Saponificatrice di Correggio," which translates to "the soap-maker of Correggio."

Cianciulli was diagnosed as "manic" but still able to stand trial. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. She died in 1970.

Karla Homolka

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (17)

Karla Homolka and her husband, Paul Bernardo, were responsible for a series of sexual assaults and murders throughout Canada. In 1993, she plead guilty to two counts of manslaughter in exchange for a reduced prison sentence, as she claimed that she was an unwilling accomplice to the murders.

Homolka was released from prison in 2005 and relocated to Quebec, Canada,under a new name. Bernardo is serving a life sentence.

Dagmar Overbye

17 of the most notorious female serial killers (18)

Dagmar Overbye lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, and made money by helping women find homes for their babies. But instead of finding families for the children, she would strangle them. She was caught in 1920 after one mother changed her mind and grew suspicious when Overbye said she didn't know where the baby was. Authorities later found bones in Overbye's stove.

Overbyeconfessed to the murders of 16 infants(though due to lack of evidence, she was only convicted of murdering nine) and was sentenced to death. She would have been the first woman to receive the death penalty had King Christian X not commuted the sentence to life imprisonment due to Overbye's gender.

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