8 cases · Violent Crime
Convicted: Rosemary Pauline West (née Letts; also known as Jennifer Jones since 2020)
In February 1994, police arrived at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, looking for a missing teenage girl. What they found instead would stop Britain cold: nine sets of human remains buried beneath the floorboards and garden of a nondescript terraced house — and that was only the beginning. Rosemary West, a 40-year-old mother of eight, sat at the center of it all. She had helped lure young women and girls to that house. She had participated in their torture, their sexual abuse, their deaths. She had then gone on living there — cooking meals, watching television, raising children — while the bodies of ten victims, including her own stepdaughter and her own teenage daughter, rotted in the earth beneath her feet. On 22 November 1995, a jury took less than two days to convict her on all ten counts of murder. The judge said she should never be freed. He was right. Thirty years later, Rose West — now calling herself Jennifer Jones — remains in a prison cell, in declining health, largely alone, still insisting she is innocent. This is the story of how ordinary evil hides in plain sight.
Convicted: Elizabeth Báthory
Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman from the powerful House of Báthory, is notorious for her alleged crimes as a serial killer. Between 1590 and 1610, she and her four accomplices were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and women. The victims were predominantly from the lower classes, and the crimes were purportedly committed in her estates across the Kingdom of Hungary. Báthory's trial resulted in the execution of her servants, while she herself was imprisoned in the Castle of Csejte where she eventually died in 1614.
Convicted: Gertrude Nadine Baniszewski
Gertrude Baniszewski was the primary perpetrator in the torture and murder of teenager Sylvia Likens in 1965. Likens was under the care of Baniszewski, who, along with her children and several neighborhood friends, subjected Likens to three months of brutal abuse and neglect. The torture escalated incrementally and culminated in Likens' death from extensive injuries and malnutrition on October 26, 1965, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Convicted: Matilda Mary Devine
Matilda Mary Devine, popularly known as Tilly Devine, was an English Australian organized crime boss. She was involved in numerous illicit activities including running sly-grog shops, which were illegal bars in Australia, leading razor gangs, and managing prostitution. She became a notorious figure in Sydney during the interwar years. Her criminal reign was marked with violence, lawlessness, and defiance of the authorities, which contributed to her fame and infamy alike.
Convicted: Kathleen Mary Josephine Leigh
Kathleen Mary Josephine Leigh, better known as Kate Leigh, was an infamous Australian criminal who dominated the underworld scene in Sydney during the first half of the 20th century. She rose to prominence as a madam, an illegal trader of alcohol and cocaine, and for running betting syndicates from her home in Surry Hills. Known as the 'Queen of Surry Hills’ and the 'Snow Queen', Leigh was also a sly groger and fence for stolen property, becoming the largest supplier of cocaine in Sydney.
Convicted: Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova
Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, also known as Saltychikha, was a Russian noblewoman, sadist, and serial killer from the Saltykov family in Moscow. She was notorious for her brutal treatment and murder of many of her serfs, especially women. Her crimes have often been compared to those of the Hungarian 'Blood Countess,' Elizabeth Báthory, who allegedly committed similar atrocities against servant girls and local serfs in her home, Čachtice Castle. The charges against Saltykova, however, are better documented and less disputed by historians.
Convicted: Karla Leanne Homolka (also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais)
She was blonde, pretty, and worked part-time at an animal hospital. She cried on cue for investigators. She told them she was a victim — a battered woman trapped in a monster's web. Canada believed her. Prosecutors believed her. They gave her a deal. Then the videotapes surfaced, and everything changed. The footage showed Karla Homolka not cowering in fear, but actively participating in acts so savage that seasoned law enforcement officers required counseling after viewing them. Among the victims captured on those tapes was her own fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy — drugged, assaulted, and dead by Christmas. The plea bargain had already been signed. Double jeopardy protections made it untouchable. The deal that spared Karla Homolka from a murder conviction — struck before prosecutors had seen a single frame of evidence — would become the most reviled legal arrangement in Canadian history, immortalized forever as 'the Deal with the Devil.' She served twelve years. Then she walked free, changed her name, married, had three children, and disappeared into ordinary life. She is out there still. This is how it happened.
Convicted: Stephanie St. Clair (also known as Stephanie Saint-Clair; later Stephanie St. Clair Hamid)
On October 23, 1935, a Bronx gangster named Dutch Schultz lay bleeding from four bullet wounds in a Newark chophouse, the victim of a Murder Inc. hit ordered by Lucky Luciano. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, a telegram arrived at his hospital bedside. It read: 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap.' It was signed 'Madame Queen of Policy.' The woman who sent it had survived a murder contract, a cellar full of coal dust, and a decade of all-out war with the most dangerous mobster in New York. She had done it all without the backing of any organized crime family, without the protection of the law, and without the privilege that white men in her industry took for granted. Stephanie St. Clair was a Black woman from Guadeloupe who had arrived in Harlem with nothing and built a half-million-dollar criminal empire, educated her neighbors about their constitutional rights, and exposed a corrupt police department before the world. She was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable figures in American organized crime history. Almost nobody knows her name.
