20 of the most infamous female killers (2024)

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Stephanie Ashe

20 of the most infamous female killers (1)

When you try to imagine a murderer, your brain likely conjures an image of a man. That's probably because, statistically as far as we know, women are responsible for around11% of all murders. But that doesn't make the murders any less heinous.

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The women on this list have gone down as some of the most terrifying killers of all time.

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

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Countess Elizabeth Bathory killed over 600 young girls.

20 of the most infamous female killers (2)

Elizabeth Bathory used her wealth and position to torture those she considered beneath her, according to The History Channel. Bathory came from a prominent noble family in Hungary, and she married into another one when she wed Count Ferencz Nádasdy in 1575.

Sources say she convinced her husband to build a torture chamber in the castle they shared. She is said to have killed over 600 girls, mostly aged 10 to 14, after torturing them by "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."

Her powerful position kept her out of prison until 1610 when she moved on from servant girls to targeting the daughters of local nobles. She wasconvicted 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.

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Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children.

20 of the most infamous female killers (3)

The story of Andrea Yates, the Houston woman accused of killing her five children, captured America's attention in 2001. Yates was convicted of murder on five counts after she had methodically drowned all of her children one by one in the span of an hour, according to Time. The youngest was six months old, and the eldest was 7 years old.

A first trial in 2002convicted Yates of two counts of capital murder, but an appeals court later reversed this decision and she was foundnot guilty by reason of insanity in her second trial in 2006.

She will likely spend the rest of her life in a Texas mental hospital.

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Aileen Wuornos went on a killing spree in Florida.

20 of the most infamous female killers (4)

Aileen Wuornos was responsible for themurders of six different men. Between 1989 and 1990, she later confessed to shooting men who picked her up hitchhiking in self-defense after sheclaimed they beat or raped her, a claimthat 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.

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Evelyn Dick was called the "Torso Killer."

20 of the most infamous female killers (5)

In 1946, some children stumbled upon a torso in the woods that would later be identified as John Dick, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. His wife Evelyn was immediately accused of the murder and put on trial.

The couple had been estranged because Evelyn was allegedly having numerous affairs. When her home was searched, police also found the body of her infant son in a suitcase that had been filled with concrete.

After two trials, she was ultimately found not guilty for the murder of her husband, despite her father being found guilty of accessory to murder. She was, however, found guilty of manslaughter for the death of her son.She was released from jail in 1958 and immediately disappeared from public.

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Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel killed for Charles Manson.

20 of the most infamous female killers (6)

Charles Manson was a criminal mastermind who had the other members of his "family" to do his killing for him. Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel were all members of the infamous Manson Family and helped to carry out the group's most notorious murders at the LaBianca and Tate residences.

Atkins was convicted on eight counts of first degree murder and died in jail in 2009. Krenwinkel is still serving time in a California prison for her seven murder convictions. Van Houten was convicted of assisting in the murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and recently had a parole overturned by California Governor Jerry Brown.

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Juana Barraza is a former wrestler who killed elderly women.

20 of the most infamous female killers (7)

As a Mexican wrestler, Juana Barraza was known by her character name "The Lady of Silence." Butafter she was arrestedon charges of murdering elderly women in Mexico City, she wasdubbed the "Mataviejitas," or "Little Old Lady Killer."

According to authorities, Barraza would pretend to be a nurse or social worker so the women would let her into their home, at which point she would strangle them and take their possessions. When she was caught, police said she had a list of names and addresses of elderly women receiving government assistance.

She was convicted of 11 separate counts of murderand sentenced to 759 years in jail, where she remains today.

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Jane Toppan was a nurse whose patients became her victims.

20 of the most infamous female killers (8)

Jane Toppan began working at the Cambridge Hospital in 1885 and was so liked by her peers and patients that they dubbed her "Jolly Jane." She used her time at the hospital to experiment with different medications and drugs such as morphine and atropine to see the reaction in her patients.

She would later confess to killing at least 31 people. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to Taunton State Hospital for life.

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Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house and stole the social security checks of her victims.

20 of the most infamous female killers (9)

Dorothea Puente was an elderly woman who opened a boarding house in Sacramento. In reality, she was poisoning her residents and hoarding their social security checks, a racket that made her about $5,000 a month, according to Sactown magazine.

Police investigated her home in 1988 and discovered body parts buried in the backyard. Puente fled, but was later apprehended at a hotel in Los Angeles andtried for nine murders. 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.

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Velma Barfield poisoned her own mother.

20 of the most infamous female killers (10)

The "Death Row Granny" was a nickname given to Velma Barfield, a woman convicted of killing at least four people in North Carolina, including her own mother and two husbands, according to The New York Daily News. She says she did so by adding arsenic to their food or drink.

Although those are the only murders she admits to, there were multiple other people in her life who died under mysterious circumstances. At her trial in 1978, she claimed, "the devil made me do it" and that she had never intended to kill her relatives. The defense didn't work, and she was found guilty and executed in 1984.

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Leonarda Cianciulli famously turned one of her victims into soap.

20 of the most infamous female killers (11)

After a series of miscarriages and a fortune-teller's prophecy that Leonarda Cianciulli's children were at risk, she decided that she needed to sacrifice other peoplein orderto save them. Over the course of a year from 1939-1940 in Correggio, Italy, she killed three women and disposed of the bodies. She used caustic soda to disintegrate the bodies, and according to her court testimony, she turned one of the women's remains into soap, which earned her the nickname "la Saponificatrice di Correggio," or "the soap-maker of Correggio."

She wassentenced to 30 years in prison and three years in a criminal asylum. She died in 1970.

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Amelia Dyer is suspected of murdering hundreds of babies in England.

20 of the most infamous female killers (12)

Amelia Dyer may be one of themost prolific serial killers in England's history. It was discovered in the late 1890s that she had been "baby farming," or collecting babies to "care" for them in exchange from money. Instead, she would starve them or give them liquid opiates.

She wassentenced to six months of hard labor for neglect, but then her crimes progressed to strangling the infants and dumping them in the river.

One of those bodies was found and traced back to her. She confessed and wassentenced to death by hanging in 1896, according to the BBC. She is suspected of killing hundreds of babies, but it's impossible to know just how many infants were killed.

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Nannie Doss killed several family members, including four husbands.

20 of the most infamous female killers (13)

Nannie Doss killed four of her five husbands, at least two children (and two other died of a suspicious "food poisoning"), her mother, her two sisters, and a mother-in-law. Miraculously, it wasn't until the death of her fifth husband that anyone became suspicious.

An autopsy revealed an extremely high amount of arsenic in his system, and Doss was charged with his murder. She confessed to killing the others but was only tried and convicted on one count of murder. She died in prison in 1965.

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Waneta Hoyt smothered her five children.

20 of the most infamous female killers (14)

From 1965-1971, Waneta Hoyt lost five children to what was assumed to be Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Medical professionals were fascinated by the story and wrote about the family in journals, using their story as proof that the mysterious ailment must run in families, according to The New York Times. Other professionals called this "statistically impossible" and an investigation began.

Years later in the '90s, authorities say Hoyt confessed to smothering all of the children though she later recanted. She was sentenced to 75 years in prison and died shortly after.

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Tillie Klimek appeared to have psychic abilities when she "predicted" the deaths of her victims.

20 of the most infamous female killers (15)

Tillie Klimek got quite a reputation in Chicago for her "psychic" abilities, but her visions always centered around a very specific prophecy — the death of her husbands, according to the New York Daily News. She seemed to know the exact date each of her husbands would die.

Police eventually realized that Klimek was able to predict these deaths because she was putting rat poison in her husbands' food (investigators found arsenic in all of theirbodies). She also is suspected of killing neighbors and friends with food or candy she had prepared. Klimek was found guilty and died in jail in 1936.

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Katherine Knight killed her boyfriend and cooked his body parts.

20 of the most infamous female killers (16)

Katherine Knight worked in a slaughterhouse in Australia before she decided to put her skills to use killing and skinning her boyfriend, John Price,in 2000, according to The Guardian. By the time police found what was left of his body, some of his body parts had been prepared to serveto Price's children with vegetables and gravy, and his head appeared to be cooking in a pot for a stew.

She was sentenced to life without parole in 2001 for the stabbing death of her husband and is still serving time.

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Mary Ann Cotton is considered Britain's first serial killer.

20 of the most infamous female killers (17)

Mary Ann Cotton is thought to be the first serial killer to terrorize England. She is suspected of poisoning at least 20 people, including multiple husbands and 11 of her children, among others. She was only convicted of one killing — that of her stepson Charles Edward Cotton — who authorities say died from arsenic poison.

Cotton never admitted to any of the murders but was hanged for her crimes in 1873.

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Stacey Castor poisoned her husband and tried to blame her daughter for it.

20 of the most infamous female killers (18)

Stacey Castor is another woman who used poison to kill, but she did one thing differently — she tried to blame her daughter for it, according to Syracuse.com. After her second husband died of antifreeze poisoning in 2005, she also tried to kill her daughter with a mix of medications. To cover her tracks, she wrote a suicide note from her daughter in which "her daughter" confessed to killing both Castor's first and second husbands.

Her daughter survived the ordeal, and Castor was arrested and convicted on charges of first-degree and attempted murder. In 2016 she was found dead in her cell of apparent heart disease.

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Rita Gluzman killed her husband with an ax.

20 of the most infamous female killers (19)

In 1996 Rita Gluzman was convicted and sentenced to death for killing and dismembering her husband, a renowned cancer researcher, according to The New York Times. She murdered him with an ax, reportedly after he said he was leaving her for another woman.

Gluzman recruited her cousin to help, and the cousin later confessed to helping cut up the body while she cleaned up the blood. They were caught when a police officer saw her cousin trying to dump the body in the Passaic River.

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Stella Nickell mixed poison with Excedrin to kill her husband.

20 of the most infamous female killers (20)

Stella Nickell was inspired by the Chicago Tylenol murders, in which someone added cyanide to Tylenol and put them back on store shelves, and decided that was the best way to kill her husband, according to PBS. She put cyanide in Excedrin capsules, which her husband took.

After his death, she put more of the Excedrin cyanide mixture on store shelves, in an attempt to frame her husband's death as an accident, and therefore get her an insurance payout. Her plan didn't work, and she was convicted of his murder, as well as that of a local woman who bought some of the tampered-with medicationand died. Nickell will be up for parole in 2018.

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Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a nursing home and killed many of her patients.

20 of the most infamous female killers (21)

Amy Archer-Gilligan was a prominent member of the Windsor, Connecticut, community where she also ran a home for the elderly in the early 1900s. Such a facility is expected to have patient deaths, but the residents began noticing that an unusually high number of people seemed to die while staying there:From the years of 1907 to 1916, 60 residents died.

An investigation was launched and 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.

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