Discover History's Most
Notorious Women in Crime

Explore high-profile legal cases, track judicial proceedings in real time, and uncover the stories of women whose lives intersected with the legal system—presented with objectivity and without assumptions of guilt or innocence.

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Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini
closedConvictedContemporary

Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini

Convicted: Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini

On Thanksgiving morning 2016, a motorist on a desolate stretch of California interstate spotted a small, trembling figure bound by restraints — a young mother, barely 87 pounds, branded with a burn mark and shorn of her hair. The nation wept. Then it seethed. Sherri Papini's story of abduction by two armed Hispanic women became a media sensation, a missing-person case that swallowed millions in investigative resources and detonated fear across Latino communities nationwide. FBI sketch artists disseminated her descriptions of the alleged kidnappers around the world. The California Victim Compensation Board cut her 35 separate checks. Her husband stood beside her, steadfast. But from the beginning, detectives noticed the details didn't quite fit — and a strand of male DNA clinging to her clothing would, years later, unravel everything. What investigators eventually uncovered wasn't a kidnapping. It was a 22-day escape to an ex-boyfriend's apartment in Costa Mesa, complete with self-inflicted wounds, a wood-burning brand from Hobby Lobby, and a web of prepaid-phone deception that had been spinning since at least December 2015. This is the story of how a California mother staged one of the most elaborate hoaxes in modern American law enforcement history — and why, even after conviction, she refuses to stop rewriting it.

kidnapping hoaxfalse report
Ghislaine Maxwell
verdict reachedConvictedContemporary

Ghislaine Maxwell

Convicted: Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell, once a high-profile British socialite, became globally notorious following her association and subsequent legal trial with financier Jeffrey Epstein. Her life transformed dramatically from attending elite social gatherings to facing charges in a New York trial for sex trafficking and child abuse. Maxwell's case captured international attention due to its depth of criminal activities intertwined with the lifestyles of the influential. Convicted in 2021, Maxwell was handed a 20-year prison sentence, underscoring her pivotal role in facilitating Epstein's network of sexual exploitation. This outcome not only secured a measure of justice for the victims but also highlighted the severe implications of power misuse in elite circles. Currently, Maxwell remains incarcerated, her previous affluent lifestyle starkly contrasted by her life behind bars, continually making headlines and prompting discussions about accountability and the social elite.

sex traffickingchild abuse
Anna Vadimovna Sorokin
ongoingConvictedContemporary

Anna Sorokin

Convicted: Anna Vadimovna Sorokin

When Rachel DeLoache Williams returned from a luxury week at the Surf Club in Marrakech in the spring of 2017, she was $62,000 poorer. Her friend had promised the wire transfer was coming. It never came. The friend was Anna Sorokin, the 26-year-old daughter of a Russian truck driver who had spent four years convincing Manhattan's elite that she controlled a 60-million-euro European trust fund. Operating under the alias Anna Delvey, she defrauded banks, luxury hotels, and private individuals of approximately $275,000, forged financial documents, bounced checks, and nearly secured a $22 million bank loan using fabricated paperwork. When she was arrested, tried, and convicted in 2019, she hired a courtroom stylist and showed up in Saint Laurent and Victoria Beckham, making international headlines for her courtroom looks as much as her crimes. Netflix paid $320,000 for her story. The state took most of it under the Son of Sam law. She was released from prison, immediately detained by ICE, held for nineteen months, then released to house arrest in a 470-square-foot East Village apartment. She started selling art and made $340,000. She appeared on Dancing With the Stars wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor. Her deportation case remains unresolved. Anna Delvey, it turns out, is very hard to get rid of.

con artistfraud
Jodi Ann Arias
appealedConvictedContemporary

Jodi Arias

Convicted: Jodi Ann Arias

When Travis Alexander's friends broke into his Mesa, Arizona home on June 9, 2008, the smell told them everything before their eyes could. He had been missing for five days. Inside the master bathroom, they found him crumpled in the shower: twenty-seven stab wounds, a throat slashed nearly to the spine, and a single .25-caliber bullet in his forehead. He was thirty years old. Within days, investigators had a name: Jodi Ann Arias, his ex-girlfriend, an aspiring photographer with a smile that charmed everyone she met. She would eventually confess to the killing, but not before telling two other stories first. What followed was one of the most-watched murder trials in American history, a 64-day courtroom spectacle broadcast live to millions, fueled by explicit text messages, recovered photographs of the victim alive in his shower just hours before his death, and a defendant who took the stand for 18 consecutive days and insisted she acted in self-defense. The jury didn't believe her. Neither did much of the country. She is serving life without parole. From a Nevada convention hall where two ambitious young people first locked eyes, to a prison cell in Goodyear, Arizona where Arias now sells artwork and writes a Substack blog, this is the full story of a killing that America could not look away from.

Jodi AriasTravis Alexander

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Myra Hindley
closedConvictedHistorical

Myra Hindley

Convicted: Myra Hindley

On the morning of October 7, 1965, eighteen-year-old David Smith walked to a public telephone box in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, hands shaking, and dialed 999. The night before, he had watched his brother-in-law bludgeon a seventeen-year-old to death with an axe. The brother-in-law was Ian Brady. The woman who had invited him to witness it was Myra Hindley. What that phone call exposed would redefine evil in the British imagination for generations. Between 1963 and 1965, Brady and Hindley abducted five children and teenagers from the streets of Greater Manchester, sexually assaulted them, and buried four in shallow graves on the desolate expanse of Saddleworth Moor. The fifth was killed in Hindley's living room. The evidence police found inside that house was staggering in its horror: photographs of a ten-year-old girl bound and gagged in Hindley's bedroom, and sixteen minutes of audio tape capturing that same child's final, agonized moments. A luggage ticket for the suitcase containing these materials was found hidden inside the spine of Hindley's Catholic prayer book. Myra Hindley would spend thirty-six years in prison, applying repeatedly for parole, insisting she had changed. The British public never believed her. One of her victims, Keith Bennett, has never been found. His mother died in 2012, still waiting. This is the story of how an ordinary girl from Gorton became the most reviled woman in British criminal history.

Myra HindleyMoors Murders
Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)
closedConvictedHistorical

Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)

Convicted: Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)

At 12:30 in the morning on March 4, 2005, Martha Stewart walked out of the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia. She was 63 years old. America's most famous homemaker, a woman who had watched her personal fortune touch $1.2 billion, had just served five months in federal prison for crimes that traced back to a single phone call and a stock sale that saved her exactly $45,673 in avoided losses. The story of how the most recognizable domestic brand in American history came undone involves ImClone Systems stock, a Merrill Lynch broker named Peter Bacanovic, a frightened assistant named Douglas Faneuil who became the government's star witness, and a prosecutor named James Comey who would one day lead the FBI. It involves a woman who grew up in working-class Nutley, New Jersey, modeled for Chanel at 15, navigated Wall Street in the 1960s, and built a media empire from scratch, only to lie to federal investigators over a transaction that, compared to her net worth, was pocket change. The crime was almost comically small. The cover-up was not. And the consequences reshaped one of the most iconic careers in American business history.

insider tradingwhite-collar crime
Karen A. Read
verdict reachedAcquittedContemporary

Karen A. Read

Subject: Karen A. Read

"Karen Read is innocent." The jury foreman said it plainly, on national television, the morning after a Massachusetts jury acquitted Read of second-degree murder in the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. She had faced the possibility of life in prison. Instead, she walked out of a Dedham courthouse on June 18, 2025, into a crowd of more than a thousand supporters dressed in pink, their cheers rising over Norfolk County like a verdict of their own. O'Keefe was found unconscious in a snowbank at 6:03 a.m. on January 29, 2022, on the front lawn of a fellow officer's Canton home. He died that morning. For three and a half years, the question of how he ended up there consumed two trials, a hung jury, a state police corruption scandal, a Netflix documentary, and a movement that circled the globe. The prosecution said Read hit him with her SUV and left him to freeze. The defense said he was killed inside that house, and that Read was framed by the very institution meant to find justice for him. The jury, in the end, believed neither side completely. That complicated, unresolved truth is what makes this case impossible to put down.

Karen ReadJohn O'Keefe
Maria Licciardi
verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Maria Licciardi

Convicted: Maria Licciardi

When Italian police raided what they believed was Maria Licciardi's hideout in June 2001, they expected a spartan fugitive's den. Instead, they found marble floors, a grand piano, and an outsize Jacuzzi — all tucked inside an attic bristling with surveillance cameras. The most powerful woman in the Neapolitan underworld had vanished again, as she always did, slipping back into the maze of streets where she had been born fifty years earlier. A fellow mafioso once told investigators that Maria Licciardi was more dangerous than Sicily's most-wanted fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro. Italy's Interior Ministry called her the 'strategic head' of a criminal confederation controlling twenty rival Camorra clans. She brokered peace between warring gangsters, dispatched kill orders through a pentito who later testified that 'talking with Maria was the same as talking with Gennaro, the boss,' and in 1999 recalled an entire heroin shipment on quality-control grounds — a decision the Lo Russo clan defied, triggering at least eleven overdose deaths in a single month. She earned three nicknames: La Madrina, La Piccolina, and La Principessa. She earned each of them. This is the story of the woman who ran Naples.

Camorrafemale crime boss
Sara Jane Moore
closedConvictedHistorical

Sara Jane Moore

Convicted: Sara Jane Moore

On September 22, 1975, a 45-year-old woman with a new .38-caliber revolver stood in the crowd outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel and fired one shot at the President of the United States. The bullet missed Gerald Ford's head by five inches. The day before, police had already arrested Sara Jane Moore on an illegal weapons charge and confiscated her gun; she walked free, bought a replacement the next morning, and tried anyway. She was not a trained operative, not a seasoned radical, not a career criminal. She was a five-times-married West Virginia bookkeeper who had somehow become simultaneously an FBI informant and a spy against the FBI, a woman so consumed by the revolutionary fervor of 1970s San Francisco that she convinced herself murdering a president would ignite a leftist uprising. She was wrong about nearly everything. But she came terrifyingly close to being right about one thing: five more inches, and American history changes. Sara Jane Moore died on September 24, 2025, in a nursing home in Franklin, Tennessee, at age 95, two days after the 50th anniversary of her attempt. This is the story of how an ordinary woman walked to the edge of history and pulled the trigger.

presidential assassination attemptGerald Ford
Mary Frith
closedConvictedHistorical

Mary Frith

Convicted: Mary Frith

Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse, was a notorious English pickpocket and fence operating in the London underworld during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Her criminal activities primarily involved theft, fencing stolen goods, and occasional highway robbery. She was a well-known figure in London, recognized for her unconventional behavior, including wearing male attire and smoking, both of which were highly unusual for women during the period.

theftfencing
Ruth Ellis (née Neilson)
appealedConvictedHistorical

Ruth Ellis (née Neilson)

Convicted: Ruth Ellis (née Neilson)

"It is obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him." With those eleven words, spoken calmly before a packed courtroom at the Old Bailey, Ruth Ellis handed the jury everything they needed. They deliberated for less than twenty-five minutes. Six weeks later, at nine o'clock on the morning of 13 July 1955, she walked to the gallows at Holloway Prison and became the last woman ever executed in the United Kingdom. She was twenty-eight years old. But the story of how a Welsh-born nightclub manageress came to fire four bullets into her racing-driver lover outside a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday is not a simple story of jealousy and rage. It is a story of sustained beatings, a miscarriage caused by a punch to the stomach, a secret weapon supplier who was never charged with a crime, and a justice system that hanged a deeply traumatized woman without once telling the jury what she had endured. Seven decades later, her grandchildren are still fighting to clear her name. The question hanging over the case has never been whether Ruth Ellis pulled the trigger. It has always been whether Britain should have pulled the lever.

last woman executed in UKcapital punishment
Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye
closedConvictedHistorical

Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye

Convicted: Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye

When Copenhagen police sifted through the cold ashes of a masonry stove in a Vesterbro apartment in the autumn of 1920, they found what they had feared most: charred bone fragments and a small, unmistakable human skull. The apartment belonged to Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye, a soft-spoken woman who had built a quiet business promising desperate, unmarried mothers a better life for their newborns. She charged them roughly 200 kroner, shook their hands, and took their babies. Then she burned them alive, drowned them, smothered them, or strangled them, disposing of the remains in her stove, her garden, or the building's loft. Between 1913 and 1920, she confessed to killing 16 infants. Police could physically confirm only 9. She is Denmark's most prolific known serial killer, the first woman sentenced to death in the country since 1861, and the architect, however grotesquely, of the child welfare laws that Denmark passed in 1923. Her nickname, whispered across Copenhagen for a century since, is 'Englemagersken': The Angel Maker. This is her story.

serial killerfemale serial killer

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Griselda Blanco Restrepo
closedConvictedHistorical

Griselda Blanco Restrepo

Convicted: Griselda Blanco Restrepo

On the afternoon of September 3, 2012, a gunman dismounted from a motorcycle outside a butcher shop in Medellín, Colombia, and shot a 69-year-old woman twice in the head. He was gone before anyone could stop him. The woman was Griselda Blanco Restrepo, and the method of her killing was one she had invented herself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Blanco built a cocaine empire that shipped 1,500 kilograms of product into Miami every month, generated an estimated $80 million monthly, and left dozens if not hundreds of people dead on both sides of the Atlantic. She mentored Pablo Escobar. She pioneered motorcycle assassinations. She named her youngest son Michael Corleone, after the Godfather character, because she saw the parallel and felt no shame in it. She was convicted of federal drug trafficking in 1985. She beat a capital murder case when her star witness was caught having phone sex with prosecutors' secretaries. She served nearly two decades in prison, suffered a heart attack, was deported to Colombia, and allegedly became a born-again Christian. None of it was enough to save her. The killers who found her outside the Carnicería Cardiso that September afternoon were never identified. She was buried at Jardines de Montesacro cemetery in Medellín, in the same ground as Pablo Escobar. The Godmother of Cocaine, who had ordered the deaths of husbands, rivals, and at least one two-year-old child, ended her life on the same streets where she had built her legend: in Medellín, violently, by surprise. This is her story.

drug traffickingcocaine
Laren Renee Sims (alias: Elisa McNabney, also known as Elisa Redelsperger, Elisa Barasch, Shane Ivaroni, and 34+ other aliases — total 38 documented aliases)
closedAccusedHistorical

Laren Renee Sims (alias: Elisa McNabney, also known as Elisa Redelsperger, Elisa Barasch, Shane Ivaroni, and 34+ other aliases — total 38 documented aliases)

Accused: Laren Renee Sims (alias: Elisa McNabney, also known as Elisa Redelsperger, Elisa Barasch, Shane Ivaroni, and 34+ other aliases — total 38 documented aliases)

On Easter Sunday 2002, a jail officer in Brooksville, Florida found a woman dead in her cell. She had braided strips from her pillowcase into a rope and fastened it to an air duct in the ceiling. She was thirty-six years old, and she had been, at various points in her life, at least thirty-eight different people. Her FBI criminal rap sheet ran to one hundred and thirteen pages. Her real name was Laren Renee Sims. Most people knew her as Elisa McNabney, the glamorous, horse-loving wife of Sacramento trial attorney Larry McNabney. In the fall of 2001, she and her twenty-one-year-old legal secretary administered horse tranquilizer to Larry at a show in Los Angeles County, stored his body in a garage refrigerator for three months, buried him in a vineyard, liquidated over $500,000 in assets, and fled across the country in a red Jaguar. She was a former straight-A student with a reported IQ of 140. She was a mother who kept her teenage daughter by her side through the whole gruesome flight. She was a con artist, a forger, and a fugitive. When detectives finally traced her to a Florida beach, she looked up and said simply: "I'm the one you're looking for." This is the story of Laren Renee Sims: a woman who spent thirty years constructing false identities, fell into a marriage that may have saved her and ultimately destroyed her, and chose suicide over a courtroom. It is one of the most bizarre, cold-blooded, and strangely human cases in California criminal history.

poisoninghorse tranquilizer
SP
appealedConvictedContemporary

Sharee Paulette Kitley Miller

Convicted: Sharee Paulette Kitley Miller

Two days after her husband Bruce was shot dead at his junkyard in rural Michigan, Sharee Miller was spotted dancing at a nightclub. Within weeks, she had moved a new boyfriend into her home. She was twenty-eight years old, newly widowed, and utterly unbothered. The murder itself had been methodical: Sharee had spent months in AOL adult chat rooms, crafting a persona designed to ensnare a man named Jerry Cassaday, a former homicide detective. She told him Bruce was abusive, that he had mafia connections, that he had forced her to abort their babies. None of it was true. But Cassaday believed every word, and in November 1999 he drove nearly eight hundred miles to put a shotgun to Bruce Miller's back. When it was over, Sharee simply vanished from Cassaday's life. He died by suicide three months later, leaving behind a briefcase stuffed with printed chat logs, hotel receipts, and an airline ticket that told the whole story. What followed was something American courts had never quite seen before: a murder trial built almost entirely on digital evidence harvested from the early internet. This is the story of how a woman from a Flint, Michigan trailer park turned an AOL chat room into a weapon.

internet murderonline manipulation
Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)
closedConvictedHistorical

Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)

Convicted: Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)

On Easter Sunday morning, April 7, 1996, an East Rutherford police officer spotted a man dropping garbage bags into the Passaic River behind a small New Jersey electronics company. When Officer Richard Freeman approached, he found blood on the man's hands and clothing. Inside those bags were sixty-five pieces of what had once been Yakov Gluzman, a prominent cancer researcher, dismembered through the night with hacksaws and a scalpel after his wife and her cousin attacked him with axes in his own apartment. The woman who orchestrated it had once moved George H.W. Bush, UN Secretary-General U Thant, and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to action on her behalf. She had survived rape at age ten, near-starvation at eleven, and the entire machinery of Soviet bureaucracy. She had gone on an 18-day hunger strike to free her husband from the USSR. And then, more than two decades later, she waited in his darkened apartment holding an axe. Rita Gluzman became the first woman ever charged and convicted under the Violence Against Women Act, a law built to protect women from men like the one prosecutors said she had become. Tabloids called her the Jewish Lizzie Borden. She still calls herself innocent.

axe murderdismemberment

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