Murder

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

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

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

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

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

closedConvictedContemporary

Susan Lucille Wright

Convicted: Susan Lucille Wright

On the night of January 13, 2003, a young Houston mother tied her husband to their bed with neckties and a bathrobe sash, then stabbed him 193 times. Forty-one wounds landed on his face. Forty-six on his chest. Seven in the groin. The force was so relentless that a knife tip snapped off inside his skull. Then she dragged his body to the backyard and buried it in a hole he had dug for a garden fountain. She was 26. He was 34, a six-foot-two flooring salesman who weighed 220 pounds. Their children, ages four and eighteen months, were somewhere in the house. Susan Wright's case became one of the most watched murder trials in Texas history: broadcast live on Court TV, dissected on Snapped and 48 Hours, and eventually turned into a Lifetime movie. A prosecutor climbed onto the blood-soaked mattress in open court to reenact the killing. A former fiancée came forward years later with new allegations of Jeff Wright's violence. And through it all, the central question never fully resolved: was Susan Wright a cold-blooded killer who seduced her husband into restraints to collect $200,000 in life insurance, or a battered woman who reached her limit on a January night and could not stop? The answer, locked somewhere in the details of that bedroom, has haunted the case ever since.

mariticidedomestic violence defense

closedConvictedHistorical

Valerie Jean Solanas

Convicted: Valerie Jean Solanas

On the afternoon of June 3, 1968, Valerie Jean Solanas rode an elevator to Andy Warhol's Manhattan studio, pulled two firearms from a paper bag, and opened fire. She shot Warhol three times, hit art critic Mario Amaya in the hip, and attempted to execute Warhol's manager before her gun jammed. Then she walked out, hailed a cab, and waited. That evening, she surrendered to a Times Square patrolman, handed him both weapons, and offered nine words of explanation: 'He had too much control over my life.' Warhol survived, barely, after five hours of surgery during which he was briefly declared dead. He never fully recovered. Solanas, a woman with an IQ of 131 who authored one of the most provocative feminist texts of the twentieth century and held a psychology degree with honors, spent the rest of her life cycling through psychiatric wards and welfare hotels. She died alone in a San Francisco flophouse in 1988, her body undiscovered for days. What drove her to The Factory that afternoon, and what her life reveals about genius, mental illness, and the violence that festers at society's margins, remains as unsettling now as it was then.

Valerie SolanasAndy Warhol shooting

closedConvictedHistorical

Magdalena Solís

Convicted: Magdalena Solís

On a May night in 1963, a fourteen-year-old boy named Sebastián Guerrero crept close enough to a limestone cave in rural Tamaulipas, Mexico, to see what was happening inside. What he witnessed sent him sprinting more than twenty-five kilometers through scrubland and darkness to the nearest police station, his lungs burning, his story so horrific that the officer on duty refused to believe him. That decision cost two people their lives. The officer who eventually agreed to escort Guerrero back to the caves was found the next day with his heart cut from his chest. At the center of it all was Magdalena Solís, a former prostitute from the slums of Tamaulipas who had, in the span of a few months, transformed herself into a goddess. Or, more precisely, allowed herself to be transformed, then seized the role entirely. Known as 'The High Priestess of Blood,' Solís presided over at least eight confirmed murders in the isolated village of Yerbabuena, orchestrating rituals so brutal that investigators who arrived at the scene struggled to process what they found. The true death toll, authorities suspected, reached fifteen or sixteen victims. Solís would serve fifty years in prison; whether she lived to see her release remains, to this day, unconfirmed.

cult leaderfemale serial killer

closedConvictedHistorical

Delfina María de Jesús González

Convicted: Delfina María de Jesús González

Delfina de Jesús González, along with her sister María de Jesús González, were Mexican serial killers. They operated a bordello in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, luring poor girls with promises of good jobs, only to force them into prostitution. The sisters murdered the girls when they became ill, unattractive to clients, or stopped complying. The exact number of their victims remains unknown, with estimates ranging from 91 to 150 people.

murderhuman trafficking

closedConvictedHistorical

Lavinia Fisher

Convicted: Lavinia Fisher

Her last words were an invitation: 'If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me. I'll carry it.' Then, according to those who witnessed it, Lavinia Fisher jumped from the scaffold herself rather than wait for the hangman's hand. The year was 1820. The crowd numbered roughly 2,000. And the woman swinging from the gallows outside Charleston's Old City Jail had never been convicted of murder. Not a single count of it. History remembers Lavinia Fisher as America's first female serial killer, a poisoner and innkeeper who disposed of hundreds of travelers in the South Carolina backcountry. The problem is that almost none of that is true. What is true is stranger, in some ways more troubling, and far more human: a charismatic, defiant woman who terrorized a government watchman, possibly ran with an organized outlaw gang, and went to her death cursing the city that condemned her. The legend swallowed the real story whole. It's long past time to dig it back out.

Lavinia Fisherhighway robbery

appealedConvictedHistorical

Celeste Beard Johnson

Convicted: Celeste Beard Johnson

At 3:00 in the morning on October 2, 1999, Tracey Tarlton crept into a sleeping man's bedroom in the affluent Westlake Hills neighborhood of Austin, Texas, and pressed a 20-gauge shotgun against his abdomen. Steven Beard, a 76-year-old retired Fox Broadcasting executive worth millions, never heard her coming. His much younger wife was asleep in a separate wing of their lakeside mansion. Or so she claimed. Celeste Beard Johnson was beautiful, charming, and seemingly devoted. She was also, investigators would discover, spending at a pace that defied grief: more than $670,000 burned through in the months surrounding her husband's wounding and death. When Tarlton was arrested six days after the shooting, police found a shrine of Celeste's photographs in her home. When Tarlton finally broke her silence, she described a calculated manipulation, a manufactured love affair, and a cold-blooded plot to collect an inheritance. Celeste's own twin daughters took the stand against her. A phone call, recorded by one of those daughters, captured Celeste screaming that she had 'hired somebody' to have Tarlton silenced. In March 2003, a Travis County jury found Celeste Beard Johnson guilty of capital murder. She is currently serving a life sentence at the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, Texas, with parole eligibility not until 2042, when she will be nearly 80 years old. She has always maintained her innocence. Her daughters disagree.

female killerTexas murder

verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Rosemary Pauline West (née Letts; also known as Jennifer Jones since 2020)

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.

serial killerfemale serial killer

verdict reachedConvictedContemporary

Diane Michelle Zamora

Convicted: Diane Michelle Zamora

In the fall of 1996, a nineteen-year-old Naval Academy midshipman named Diane Zamora sat in her barracks at Annapolis, trading stories with her fellow cadets about devotion and sacrifice. She had a fiancé, she told them. He loved her so much that he had killed a girl for her. She said it like a badge of honor. What the cadets did next would unravel a nine-month-old murder and destroy two of the most promising military careers in Texas. Diane Zamora had grown up in Crowley, Texas, with straight A's, a National Honor Society pin, and dreams of becoming an astronaut. Her boyfriend, David Graham, was bound for the Air Force Academy. Together, they looked like the future. But on the night of December 3, 1995, a sixteen-year-old girl named Adrianne Jones climbed into Graham's car and never came home. What followed was one of the most chilling true crime cases of the 1990s: a story about jealousy so corrosive it became lethal, two killers who confessed and then blamed each other, and a murder that a jury watched unfold on Court TV. Zamora is currently serving a life sentence in Texas. She won't be eligible for parole until 2036.

love triangle murderTexas true crime

closedConvictedHistorical

Miyuki Ishikawa

Convicted: Miyuki Ishikawa

Miyuki Ishikawa was a Japanese midwife and real estate agent turned serial killer. During the American occupation of Japan, she and several accomplices were involved in the deaths of dozens of infants. These horrific events, known as the Kotobuki San'in incident, marked one of the most devastating crime sprees in post-war Japan.

infanticideserial killer

closedConvictedHistorical

Karla Faye Tucker

Convicted: Karla Faye Tucker

When Houston homicide detectives arrived at Jerry Lynn Dean's apartment in the predawn hours of June 13, 1983, they found a pickaxe still lodged in Deborah Thornton's chest. Both victims had been hacked to death in what investigators later described as one of the most savage double homicides they had encountered. The woman who swung that pickaxe was twenty-three years old and weighed barely over a hundred pounds. Her name was Karla Faye Tucker. Fourteen years later, she would become the first woman executed in Texas since 1863, and only the second woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment. By then, Pope John Paul II had pleaded for her life. So had Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, and the brother of one of her victims. Governor George W. Bush said no anyway. The story of Karla Faye Tucker is many things at once: a portrait of catastrophic childhood neglect, a chronicle of breathtaking violence, and one of the most polarizing death penalty cases in American history. It is a story about who we decide deserves to die, and whether a person can become someone genuinely new behind bars. It has no clean ending and no comfortable moral. But it begins, as these stories so often do, with a girl nobody saved in time.

female death rowTexas executions

closedConvictedHistorical

Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)

Convicted: Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)

'I won't be troubled long. He'll go like all the rest of the Cottons.' That was Mary Ann Cotton's assessment of her seven-year-old stepson Charles Edward, delivered to a parish official in West Auckland, County Durham, in the spring of 1872. Five days later, the boy was dead. It was the statement that finally brought her down. By the time investigators began pulling at the thread, they found two decades of bodies behind it: eleven of her thirteen children, three of her four husbands, her own mother, and a string of lodgers and stepchildren, each one dead of 'gastric fever,' each one insured, each one mourned briefly and then forgotten. The death toll, historians estimate, may have reached twenty-one. Mary Ann Cotton was a nurse, a mother, a wife. She was trusted by the sick she nursed and by the physicians who signed off on her victims' deaths. She understood, precisely, that Victorian medicine would not look twice at a working-class child dying of gastroenteritis. She killed for insurance money: modest sums, accumulated over years, in exchange for the lives of nearly everyone who had ever depended on her. She was only ever convicted of one murder. She was hanged in Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, in a botched execution that left her strangling at the end of a too-short rope. She was forty years old. The full story of what she did is both a portrait of individual evil and an indictment of a system that made it catastrophically easy.

serial killerVictorian era

closedConvictedHistorical

Gu Kailai

Convicted: Gu Kailai

On November 15, 2011, British businessman Neil Heywood was found dead in his room at a Chongqing hotel. Chinese authorities ruled it alcohol poisoning, cremated the body without an autopsy, and closed the file. It was, by every official measure, an unremarkable death. What the world did not yet know was this: November 15 is also the birthday of Gu Kailai, the wife of one of the most powerful politicians in China, a woman who had spent her life accumulating credentials, connections, and carefully constructed respectability. She had lured Heywood to that hotel. She had watched her aide carry his incapacitated body to the bed. And she had poured potassium cyanide into his mouth herself. The case that unraveled in the following months would expose a world of princeling privilege, illicit fortunes, cover-ups at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, and a murder so brazen that it triggered the largest political crisis in China since Tiananmen Square. This is the story of Gu Kailai: lawyer, author, power broker, and killer.

Gu KailaiNeil Heywood murder

verdict reachedAcquittedContemporary

Casey Marie Anthony

Subject: Casey Marie Anthony

On July 15, 2008, Cindy Anthony called 911 in a panic, telling the dispatcher that her daughter Casey's car smelled 'like there's been a dead body' in it. Her granddaughter, two-year-old Caylee Marie Anthony, had been missing for thirty-one days. Thirty-one days Casey had spent partying with friends, sleeping at her boyfriend's apartment, and getting a tattoo on her shoulder that read 'Bella Vita': Beautiful Life. She had told anyone who asked that Caylee was with a nanny named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez. The nanny did not exist. When Caylee's skeletal remains were found in December 2008, less than a mile from the Anthony family home, duct tape near the child's skull, the case exploded into a national obsession. What followed was one of the most polarizing murder trials in American history: a courtroom battle over chloroform, swimming pools, family secrets, and the limits of reasonable doubt. On July 5, 2011, the jury delivered a verdict that left much of America stunned. Casey Anthony walked free. The question of what really happened to Caylee Marie Anthony has never been answered in a court of law, and it likely never will be.

casey anthonycaylee anthony

verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Carolyn Warmus

Convicted: Carolyn Warmus

On the night of January 15, 1989, Paul Solomon unlocked the door to his Greenburgh, New York condominium and found his wife, Betty Jeanne, sprawled on the living room floor. She had been shot nine times and pistol-whipped about the head. He had spent the evening bowling with friends, then drinking and having sex with his mistress in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. The two stories would collide in a courtroom spectacle that transfixed a nation. Carolyn Warmus was 25 years old, the daughter of a Michigan insurance mogul worth an estimated $150 million, a Columbia University-educated teacher working at the same Scarsdale-area school as her married lover. She was beautiful, ambitious, and, prosecutors argued, capable of cold-blooded murder. The press called it the 'Fatal Attraction' case, a nod to the 1987 thriller about a married man whose affair spirals into obsession and violence. But the deeper you look at this story, the more the tidy tabloid narrative frays at the edges. Who was the real obsessive? Who, exactly, had the most to gain? And was the woman convicted of Betty Jeanne Solomon's murder actually the one who pulled the trigger? Nearly four decades later, those questions remain stubbornly, disturbingly alive.

fatal attraction murderCarolyn Warmus

closedConvictedHistorical

Vera Renczi

Convicted: Vera Renczi

Thirty-two men lay in zinc-lined coffins in the wine cellar beneath a Romanian chateau, each one poisoned with arsenic by the woman who had loved them. Or so the story goes. Vera Renczi, dubbed the 'Black Widow' and 'Chatelaine of Berkerekul,' is one of history's most notorious female serial killers: a wealthy beauty who allegedly confessed to murdering 35 people during the 1920s, including two husbands, dozens of lovers, and her own son. According to the legend, she laced their wine when she feared they might leave her, then kept their bodies in the cellar so they never could. Police reportedly found her sitting peacefully among the coffins. But here is where the story fractures. When the Guinness Book of World Records investigated in 1972, researchers found nothing verifiable: no arrest records, no trial transcripts, no regional newspapers, no prison files. Every account traces back to a single 1925 dispatch by an American journalist who cited no primary sources. Photographs circulated as Renczi's have been identified as a Russian actress dead since 1910. The Daily Mirror once published a photo of a living Spanish fashion model and called it Renczi, later apologizing unreservedly. Was Vera Renczi a monster, or a myth? The answer, it turns out, is more unsettling than either option alone.

serial killerblack widow

closedConvictedHistorical

Elizabeth Báthory

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.

serial killertorture

appealedConvictedHistorical

Pamela Ann Smart

Convicted: Pamela Ann Smart

On the night of May 1, 1990, Gregg Smart came home to his condominium in Derry, New Hampshire, and found two teenagers waiting in the dark. One pressed a .38-caliber pistol to his head and fired. Gregg was 24 years old. His wife, Pamela, had arranged to be elsewhere. She was 22, a media director for a school district, and the woman who had seduced 15-year-old student Billy Flynn and, prosecutors argued, steered him toward murder to avoid a costly divorce and collect $140,000 in life insurance. When Pamela's own friend put on a police wire and recorded her coaching a witness to lie, the case cracked open like a fault line. What followed was the first murder trial in American history broadcast live on television, gavel to gavel, drawing roughly 150 reporters from around the world and turning a quiet New Hampshire courthouse into a global theater. Pamela Smart sat at the defense table and showed no emotion when the jury came back. She has been in prison ever since, more than three decades now, still filing petitions, still insisting the system failed her. The teenagers who pulled the trigger have all been paroled and gone home. She has not.

Pamela Smartmurder for hire

closedConvictedHistorical

Leslie Louise Van Houten

Convicted: Leslie Louise Van Houten

Leslie Van Houten is an American convicted murderer who was a member of the Manson Family, a cult led by Charles Manson. Van Houten was involved in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, a crime for which she was convicted. During her time with Manson's group, she was known by various aliases, including Louella Alexandria, Leslie Marie Sankston, Linda Sue Owens and Lulu.

murderManson Family

verdict reachedDefendantHistorical

Lizzie Andrew Borden

Defendant: Lizzie Andrew Borden

Lizzie Andrew Borden was an American woman who was the main suspect in the axe murders of her father and stepmother on August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Despite being tried for the brutal crime, she was acquitted due to a lack of evidence. No one else was charged in the murders, and, despite ostracism from other residents, Borden spent the remainder of her life in Fall River.

murderacquitted

appealedConvictedHistorical

Kimberly Michelle Hricko

Convicted: Kimberly Michelle Hricko

On Valentine's Day 1998, guests at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore laughed through a murder mystery dinner called 'The Bride Who Cried,' a campy audience-participation whodunit where everyone got to play detective. Somewhere in that dining room sat Kimberly Hricko and her husband Steven. By morning, one of them would be dead. Kimberly was a surgical technologist with direct access to succinylcholine, a muscle paralytic that stops breathing and metabolizes so quickly it leaves almost no trace in the body. She had spent months telling friends and coworkers, in precise and specific detail, exactly how she planned to kill her husband: inject him with the drug, set a fire, make it look like a drunken accident. She had even bought the cigars she intended to plant at the scene. When Steven's body was found burned in their hotel bed that night, Kimberly told investigators he must have fallen asleep drunk while smoking. But the autopsy refused to cooperate: no carbon monoxide in his blood, no soot in his airways, no alcohol in his system. Steven Hricko had already stopped breathing before the first flame was lit.

poisoningsuccinylcholine

closedAccusedHistorical

Enriqueta Martí Ripollés

Accused: Enriqueta Martí Ripollés

On the morning of February 10, 1912, Barcelona police broke down the door of a ground-floor apartment on Carrer de Ponent and found something that would haunt the city for generations. Behind a locked interior door sat roughly fifty jars and basins arranged with terrible precision: congealed human blood, rendered fat, hand skeletons, bone dust, and small glass vials of finished elixirs, each one labeled in elegant calligraphy. Cowering in the front room were two children, one of them a five-year-old girl named Teresita who had been missing from the streets of El Raval for only days. The apartment's tenant was a woman named Enriqueta Martí Ripollés. By day, neighbors knew her as a ragged beggar who shuffled through Barcelona's poorest quarters with a child at her side. By night, she was something else entirely: wigged, jeweled, and dressed in silk, moving through the parlors of the city's wealthiest families and selling them preparations she claimed could cure tuberculosis, reverse aging, and treat venereal disease. Preparations made, authorities alleged, from the bodies of the city's most vulnerable children. She became known across Spain as "The Vampire of Barcelona." She was never convicted. She never stood trial. And the full truth of what happened inside that locked room may have been buried, deliberately and permanently, by the very people she served.

serial killerchild murder

appealedConvictedHistorical

Masumi Hayashi (林眞須美)

Convicted: Masumi Hayashi (林眞須美)

On a sweltering July evening in 1998, residents of a quiet Wakayama neighborhood lined up to ladle curry from a communal pot at their summer festival. Within hours, sixty-seven of them were fighting for their lives. Four never recovered: a local council president, his vice president, a ten-year-old boy, and a sixteen-year-old girl. Investigators would eventually determine the pot contained at least 130 grams of arsenic trioxide — enough poison to kill more than one hundred people. The suspect was a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four who had been seen loitering near the curry pots, alone, for over forty minutes. Before her arrest, a photograph captured her in her garden, smiling, hosing down a crowd of reporters. That image would follow her everywhere. Masumi Hayashi was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death on purely circumstantial evidence: no confession, no confirmed motive, no direct physical evidence. She has maintained her innocence ever since. Now sixty-three years old and still on death row, her case raises a question that haunts Japanese legal scholars: what if the evidence was never enough?

arsenic poisoningmass poisoning

closedConvictedHistorical

Gertrude Nadine Baniszewski

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.

murderchild abuse

closedConvictedHistorical

Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano

Convicted: Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano

At 7:08 on the morning of March 30, 1998, a correctional officer at Florida State Prison threw the switch on the electric chair. The woman strapped into it, asked moments earlier if she had any final words, had answered only 'No, sir,' and closed her eyes. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. Her name was Judy Buenoano, and she had spent the previous evening watching a hunting and fishing show, eating chocolates, and reading a Mary Higgins Clark murder mystery. The neatness of that detail feels almost unbearable: a woman convicted of poisoning her husband, her son, and her boyfriend with arsenic, spending her last hours absorbed in fiction about someone else's crime. Prosecutor Russell Edgar had a name for her. He called her the Black Widow, a woman who 'fed off her mates and her young.' The evidence bore him out. Across nearly two decades, Buenoano is believed to have poisoned at least three people and built a life on their insurance payouts. She never confessed. She maintained her innocence to the end, eyes shut, silent in the chair. This is the story of how she got there.

serial killerblack widow

closedConvictedHistorical

Felícitas Sánchez Aguillón

Convicted: Felícitas Sánchez Aguillón

Felícitas Sánchez Aguillón, also known as Sánchez Neyra, was a notorious Mexican nurse, midwife, baby farmer, and serial killer who operated in Mexico City during the 1930s. She became infamous for killing babies under her care, with a total of 40 to 50 murders attributed to her. Sánchez Aguillón was also referred to as 'The Ogress of Colonia Roma,' 'The Female Ripper of Colonia Roma,' and 'The Human Crusher of Little Angels.'

serial killernurse

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

closedConvictedHistorical

Jacqueline Sauvage

Convicted: Jacqueline Sauvage

At 7:27 PM on September 10, 2012, Jacqueline Sauvage called emergency services in rural central France to report that her husband was on the terrace of their home, shot three times in the back. He was dead. The night before, their only son Pascal had hanged himself. Jacqueline was 64 years old, married for 47 years, and had allegedly spent nearly five decades absorbing the fists, boots, and violations of the man now cooling on the terrace flagstones. She would later say she fired the shots with her eyes closed. The case that followed split France down the middle, drew nearly 436,000 petition signatures, forced a sitting president to act twice, and dragged into the open a question French law had never been designed to answer: what does self-defense mean for a woman who has been taught by decades of violence that by the time the threat feels immediate, it is already too late? This is the story of Jacqueline Sauvage, a woman the courts convicted of murder, the public embraced as a martyr, and history will not easily categorize.

domestic violencebattered woman syndrome

closedConvictedHistorical

Tracey Avril Wigginton

Convicted: Tracey Avril Wigginton

The police found her bank card tucked inside the dead man's shoe. His clothes had been folded neatly nearby, as though someone had taken great care with them, though no such care had been taken with Edward Baldock himself. He lay on the grass at Orleigh Park, stabbed twenty-seven times, his head nearly severed from his body. It was October 1989, and Brisbane was about to reckon with one of the most disturbing murders in its history. The woman whose card was found in that shoe was Tracey Wigginton, a 24-year-old who stood six feet tall and moved through the city's occult underground with quiet intensity. She had, by her own account and the accounts of her associates, been working toward this night for some time. She wanted to drink a human being's blood. When police caught up with her, she told them she had felt nothing while stabbing Baldock, that she had sat down afterward to smoke a cigarette and watched him die. At sentencing, she faced the cameras and said: "It's hard to be famous, isn't it? A legend in my own mind." This is the story of Tracey Wigginton: a troubled child from Rockhampton who became the most notorious female killer in modern Australian history, and the questions her case still provokes today about justice, rehabilitation, and the darkness that can take root inside a human being.

vampire killerAustralian true crime

closedConvictedHistorical

Patricia Dianne Krenwinkel

Convicted: Patricia Dianne Krenwinkel

Patricia Dianne Krenwinkel is a convicted American mass murderer and former member of the Manson Family. She participated in the notorious murders at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles on August 9, 1969, alongside fellow Manson Family members Tex Watson and Susan Atkins. The victims included pregnant actress Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent. During her time with Manson's group, Krenwinkel went by various aliases, including Big Patty, Yellow, Marnie Reeves and Mary Ann Scott, however, within The Family, she was most commonly known as Katie.

murdermass murder

closedConvictedHistorical

Debra Lynn Baker

Convicted: Debra Lynn Baker

In June 1990, as Jerry Sternadel lay dying in a Wichita Falls hospital, he did something extraordinary: he told doctors and family members exactly who had killed him. He named two women. One of them, his bookkeeper Debra Lynn Baker, would eventually be convicted of first-degree murder for poisoning him with arsenic administered in his cran-apple juice. The other, his wife Lou-Ann, was never charged. Baker's trial ended on the fourth anniversary of Sternadel's death with a verdict that stunned the courtroom: guilty of murder, sentenced to just ten years' probation and a $10,000 fine. No prison time. Not yet. The case of Debra Baker is a story of loyalty twisted into something lethal, of a privileged life built on a dead man's money, and of a justice system that the victim's own family condemned as a catastrophic failure. His daughter called it a terrible injustice. His first wife wrote a book about it. And Debra Baker, who refused to implicate her best friend even at the cost of a life sentence, walked out of that courtroom a free woman.

arsenic poisoningfemale killer

closedConvictedHistorical

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker

Convicted: Bonnie Elizabeth Parker

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker, a pivotal figure among American female criminals, captured the public's attention as part of the infamous duo Bonnie and Clyde. Their crime spree during the Great Depression positioned them as both feared outlaws and pop culture icons. Bonnie, born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, joined forces with Clyde Barrow in the early 1930s, embarking on a notorious journey that included bank robberies and violent confrontations with law enforcement. The duo's criminal activities culminated in their death in 1934 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, where they were ambushed and killed by police in their well-known Bonnie and Clyde car. The bullet-riddled vehicle and their dramatic demise are emblematic of their violent lifestyle. Bonnie and Clyde's funeral drew significant attention, reflecting their infamy. Their story remains a fascinating study of crime and desperation during one of America's most challenging eras, with Bonnie Parker at the heart of this enduring narrative.

bank robberymurder

closedConvictedHistorical

Daisy Louisa C. de Melker

Convicted: Daisy Louisa C. de Melker

Daisy Louisa C. de Melker, commonly known as Daisy de Melker, was a South African nurse accused of poisoning two of her husbands with strychnine to claim their life insurance. However, she was only found guilty of poisoning her only son with arsenic, the reason for which remains unclear. De Melker was the second woman in South African criminal history to be executed.

murderpoisoning

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

closedAccusedHistorical

Zheng Yi Sao

Accused: Zheng Yi Sao

Zheng Yi Sao, also known as Shi Yang, Shi Xianggu, Shek Yeung and Ching Shih, was a notorious Chinese pirate leader who wreaked havoc in the South China Sea from 1801 to 1810. Commanding hundreds of ships and thousands of men, she was responsible for countless acts of piracy, including theft, murder, and kidnapping. Despite her notorious criminal activities, she was never officially convicted.

piracymurder

closedConvictedHistorical

Jean Lee (born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright)

Convicted: Jean Lee (born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright)

On the morning of 19 February 1951, Jean Lee was too sedated to walk to her own execution. When the door opened and she saw the masked hangman waiting in his large felt hat and black goggles, she collapsed. Prison officers carried her to the trapdoor, placed her on a chair, and fitted the rope. At 8:00 a.m., seven stone and six pounds of unconscious woman dropped eight feet. She was thirty-one years old. Lee became the last woman ever executed in Australia, a distinction she holds to this day. But the story of how a girl from Dubbo, New South Wales, once a milliner and a waitress, arrived at that gallows is darker and more complicated than any simple narrative of guilt allows. Together with her lover, professional criminal Robert Clayton, and their associate Norman Andrews, Lee had participated in the torture and murder of 'Pop' Kent, a 73-year-old Carlton bookmaker, in November 1949. The three had tied the old man to a chair and spent an hour beating, stabbing, and ultimately strangling him in a bid to find his hidden cash. The neighbours heard him screaming. What followed was a legal saga that raised serious questions about coerced confessions, political interference, and whether a woman who hadn't delivered the final blow deserved to die for it. The Victorian government, unmoved by mass public protest, said yes. The High Court of Australia agreed. This is the story of Jean Lee: her life, her crimes, and the morning they carried her, unconscious, to meet the rope.

female murdererAustralia

closedAccusedHistorical

Onie Virginia Hill

Accused: Onie Virginia Hill

On the evening of June 20, 1947, a .30-caliber carbine was pressed against the window of a Beverly Hills mansion and fired nine times. Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, reading the newspaper on the sofa inside, was dead before he hit the floor. His right eye was found fifteen feet away. His girlfriend, Virginia Hill, had flown to Paris four days earlier. She described it as a spontaneous vacation. Nobody believed her. Not the investigators. Not the mob. Not the men who had watched her move money across state lines, carry intelligence between crime families, and charm her way through two decades in the highest ranks of American organized crime. Born dirt-poor in rural Alabama in 1916, Hill had transformed herself from a seventeen-year-old shimmy dancer at a World's Fair restaurant into the only woman ever officially identified as a Mafia associate. The United States Senate called her a "central clearing house" for organized crime intelligence. Everyone else called her the Queen of the Mob. When her body was found beside an Austrian brook in March 1966, authorities ruled it a suicide. Bruises on her neck, an unidentified substance in her blood, and a diary full of mob secrets suggested the real story was considerably more complicated. It almost always was, with Virginia Hill.

Virginia HillBugsy Siegel

closedConvictedHistorical

Sada Abe (阿部定, Abe Sada)

Convicted: Sada Abe (阿部定, Abe Sada)

When Tokyo police finally cornered their fugitive at a Shinagawa inn on May 20, 1936, they didn't believe she was who she claimed to be. The woman in the kimono was too calm, too composed, nothing like the monster the nation's newspapers had conjured over two days of breathless coverage. Then she reached into the folds of her robe and produced the severed genitalia of Kichizō Ishida, wrapped in a magazine cover, and the officers had no more questions about her identity. Sada Abe had strangled her lover to death in the small hours of May 18, carved her name into his arm in blood, and spent the subsequent forty-eight hours shopping, attending a cinema, and writing farewell letters at a series of Tokyo inns. She had planned, with characteristic precision, to kill herself one week later. Her arrest photograph, published across Japan's major newspapers, showed a woman who appeared almost serene. The nation could not look away. The case became known as the 'Abe Sada panic,' flooded police switchboards with thousands of false sightings, and inspired satirists to compare it to a military coup that had shaken the government just months before. Here was a life shaped by assault, exploitation, and a system that offered women like her no protection and no language for what had been done to them — and here, finally, was the story they couldn't stop reading.

Sada AbeJapan true crime

closedAllegedHistorical

Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)

Alleged Offender: Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)

They came to La Porte, Indiana, one by one, with their life savings tucked in their coat pockets and her letters folded in their hands. A warm heart waiting, she had promised. A fine farm. A future. Belle Gunness wrote those letters for years, placing matrimonial advertisements in Norwegian-language newspapers across the Midwest, casting for men who were lonely and solvent and, crucially, willing to tell no one where they were going. When investigators finally dug up her farm in May 1908, they found the answer to where those men had gone: butchered, dismembered, folded into gunny sacks, and buried in shallow graves near the hog pen. More than forty victims lay scattered beneath the Indiana soil. Then the farmhouse burned, a headless torso was found in the ruins, and the question of whether Belle Gunness had died alongside her crimes or simply escaped them has never been definitively answered. One of the most prolific female serial killers in American history, she was never charged with a single murder. This is her story.

serial killerfemale serial killer

closedConvictedHistorical

Adele Vicuna Craven

Convicted: Adele Vicuna Craven

When Ronald Scott Pryor crouched in the basement of a handsome Edgewood, Kentucky home on July 12, 2000, a crowbar in his hand, he was waiting for a signal. It came from upstairs, from the pilot's wife: a whispered code phrase, 'the ferret is loose.' What followed would expose one of the most calculated murder-for-hire plots in Northern Kentucky history, orchestrated by a woman trained in the science of death, fueled by a secret affair, and financed by a half-million-dollar life insurance policy. Adele Vicuna Craven was a trained mortician turned stay-at-home mother, living inside the comfortable shell of a life she had come to despise. Her husband, Delta Airlines pilot Stephen Craven, earned $200,000 a year and had no idea his wife had not only taken a lover but had shopped around for someone willing to kill him. Pryor bludgeoned Stephen with a crowbar twelve times. When Stephen survived, Adele handed Pryor a firearm. Three shots finished the job. The case would consume nearly four years of courtroom battles, produce a mistrial, and ultimately force Adele into a guilty plea that sent her to the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women for the rest of her natural life. This is the story of how a marriage rotted from the inside out, and what one woman was willing to do to escape it.

murder-for-hirelife insurance motive

closedConvictedHistorical

Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss

Convicted: Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss

She sat across from Tulsa police Captain Harry Stege in November 1954 and giggled. She giggled when she described stirring rat poison into her husband's coffee. She giggled when she confirmed she had poisoned four of her five husbands. She giggled when the officers pressed her about the grandchildren, the sisters, the mother. The laughter never quite left her face. Nannie Doss was 49 years old, soft-featured, grandmotherly, and by the time she was arraigned on November 29, 1954, the prime suspect in at least eleven deaths spanning four states and nearly three decades. Her weapons were domestic and unremarkable: stewed prunes, corn whiskey, a slice of prune cake, a cup of morning coffee laced with arsenic. Her victims were the people closest to her, the ones who ate at her table and slept in her bed. Investigators called her 'The Giggling Granny.' The press added 'The Black Widow,' 'Lady Bluebeard,' and 'The Lonely Hearts Killer.' Each nickname captured a piece of her; none captured all of her. Because behind the laughter sat something more complicated and more chilling: a woman who had dreamed her whole life of storybook romance, and who killed, methodically and repeatedly, every time reality fell short of the fantasy. This is the story of Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss, born in rural Alabama in 1905 and buried in a prison cemetery in Oklahoma in 1965. In between, she made sure a great many people never made it out alive.

female serial killerblack widow killer

closedConvictedHistorical

Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan

Convicted: Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan

Between 1911 and 1916, forty-eight elderly residents died inside the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in Windsor, Connecticut. The Jefferson Street Home in Hartford housed seven times as many residents and buried a similar number in the same period. The math was damning. The woman behind those numbers was Amy Archer-Gilligan, known to her congregation as 'Sister Amy,' a woman who donated a stained-glass window to St. Gabriel's Church and whom neighbors described as compassionate and devout. She was also a poisoner of breathtaking audacity. She had purchased more than ten ounces of arsenic from a local drugstore, enough to kill over a hundred people. She had forged a dead man's will. She had taken out life insurance policies on her husbands and encouraged her elderly boarders to name her as their beneficiary. When Connecticut state police exhumed five bodies, every single one tested positive for poison. The case scandalized the nation, inspired one of Broadway's most beloved dark comedies, and forced Connecticut to overhaul its elder care laws entirely. It also left behind questions the courts never fully answered: how many people truly died at Amy's hands, and how long had she been killing? This is the story of Sister Amy.

serial killerfemale serial killer

appealedConvictedHistorical

Judith Maryanne Moran

Convicted: Judith Maryanne Moran

On the morning of June 15, 2009, a small deli on Union Road in Ascot Vale erupted in gunfire. Desmond 'Tuppence' Moran, 68, was shot seven times as he reached for his wallet to pay for lunch. He was dead before ambulances arrived. Within minutes, a woman appeared at the scene, wailing his name over and over: 'Dessie, Dessie.' That woman was Judy Moran, his sister-in-law. Police would later allege she had driven the hitman to the cafe herself. Judy Moran was already one of the most recognizable figures in Australian criminal history. She had buried a husband, two sons, and a former partner, all victims of the Melbourne gangland war that consumed more than thirty lives between 1998 and 2010. She had written a memoir, given interviews, become something close to a tabloid fixture. And according to a Supreme Court jury, she had decided that grief was no longer enough, that the time had come to collect what she believed she was owed, in blood and in cash. This is the story of a woman who survived everything Melbourne's underworld could throw at her, only to become its instrument at last.

Melbourne gangland warMoran criminal family

Sante Louise Kimes (née Singhrs; also known as Sandra Louise Singhrs, Sandra Chambers)

closedConvictedHistorical

Sante Kimes

Convicted: Sante Louise Kimes (née Singhrs; also known as Sandra Louise Singhrs, Sandra Chambers)

When New York City police stopped Sante Kimes and her son Kenny on an unrelated bad-check warrant on July 5, 1998, they expected a routine collar. What they found inside the car rewrote the definition of premeditation: two loaded pistols, plastic handcuffs, wigs, fright masks, syringes, a date-rape drug, an empty stun gun box, thirty thousand dollars in cash, a forged deed to a $7.7 million Manhattan mansion, and fifteen notebooks in which Sante had carefully practiced forging an 82-year-old woman's signature. Irene Silverman, the socialite who had rented a room to Kenny just weeks earlier, was already gone. Her body has never been found. It was the ending of a story that had begun decades earlier in the dust of Oklahoma City, wound through con jobs and slave-keeping and a White House party crasher and insurance fires, and arrived at last at the feet of a woman a judge would call 'a sociopath and a degenerate.' Sante Kimes was 64 years old and had not yet finished.

serial killercon artist

closedConvictedHistorical

Kathleen Mary Josephine Leigh

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.

gangstermadam

closedAccusedHistorical

Opal Margaret "Peggy" Holder Lowe

Accused: Opal Margaret "Peggy" Holder Lowe

The man who walked into Peggy Lowe's bank branch that September morning in 1981 had a new name, a government-issued identity, and $800 in his pocket, courtesy of the United States Federal Witness Protection Program. He had earned that protection by testifying about a prison murder. What federal prosecutors did not yet know, what they could not have imagined, was that he had committed that murder himself. Marion Albert Pruett was a liar so accomplished he fooled the government, and Peggy Lowe, a 43-year-old branch manager and grandmother who had spent her career helping ordinary people manage their savings, was the one who paid for that failure with her life. He chose her branch specifically because no men were on staff, believing women would resist less. He robbed the register of roughly $7,000, and when her phone rang mid-robbery — her son calling, an ordinary moment in an ordinary day — Pruett made a decision that sealed her fate. He took her instead. The full horror of what followed, from a dirt road in Sumter County, Alabama, to a death row press conference in which Pruett boasted about his crimes and tried to sell victim information to television producers, is a story about institutional failure, ordinary evil, and one woman whose name deserves far more than a footnote.

Peggy LoweMarion Albert Pruett

closedConvictedHistorical

Ruthann Greenzweig Aron (now known as Ruth Ann Green)

Convicted: Ruthann Greenzweig Aron (now known as Ruth Ann Green)

The manila envelope contained five hundred dollars and what Ruthann Aron believed was the beginning of a solution. In June 1997, the Cornell-educated real estate developer, former Maryland Senate candidate, and sitting Montgomery County Planning Board member slid that envelope across a counter at a Gaithersburg hotel as a down payment on the murders of two men: her husband, urologist Dr. Barry Aron, and her former attorney, Arthur G. Kahn. The man receiving the money was an undercover police detective. He had already recorded her approximately fifteen times. Every word she had spoken about the killings she wanted done had been preserved on tape. What followed was one of the most surreal true crime sagas the Washington suburbs had ever produced: a mistrial triggered by a juror who had concealed her mental health background, a 'dream team' defense built on brain injuries and allegations of childhood abuse, and a no-contest plea that sent a woman who had once nearly reached the U.S. Senate to a state prison cell. Decades later, after her son died on September 11, 2001, after she reinvented herself under a new name in Florida, after she self-published a 700-page memoir declaring herself the real victim, Ruthann Aron was still fighting to erase what those tapes had captured. She never succeeded.

murder-for-hiresolicitation of murder

verdict reachedAcquittedHistorical

Andrea Pia Yates

Subject: Andrea Pia Yates

On the morning of June 20, 2001, a thirty-six-year-old Houston woman dialed 911 at 9:34 a.m. and told the dispatcher three words that would ignite a decade of legal and psychiatric reckoning: 'I just killed my kids.' Andrea Pia Yates had drowned all five of her children, ages seven months to seven years, one by one in the family bathtub. She then laid their bodies on the bed and waited. What followed was not a simple story of evil. It was a story of a shattered mental health system, a traveling preacher whose fundamentalist teachings poisoned a household, a psychiatrist who ignored explicit warnings from a colleague, and a husband who left his visibly psychotic wife alone with five small children on a morning that could not be undone. Andrea Yates was convicted, then acquitted, then quietly disappeared into a Texas psychiatric hospital, where she remains today at sixty-one. The case reshaped Texas law, redefined public understanding of postpartum psychosis, and asked a question American courts still struggle to answer: when a mind is so thoroughly broken that it cannot distinguish reality, what does justice require?

filicidepostpartum psychosis

verdict reachedAcquittedContemporary

Amanda Knox

Subject: Amanda Marie Knox

In a Florence courtroom on June 5, 2024, Amanda Knox wept. She had crossed the Atlantic for the first time in over a decade to stand before Italian judges on a slander charge she had carried like a stone since the night police interrogated her without a lawyer for fifty-three hours and she signed a statement accusing an innocent man. The court re-convicted her. She had already served the time. Seven months later, Italy's highest court upheld that conviction. It was the final word in a legal saga that had consumed nearly eighteen years of her life, begun when her British roommate Meredith Kercher was found stabbed to death in their shared Perugia apartment in November 2007. Knox was twenty years old. She would be tried four times, convicted twice for murder, acquitted twice, convicted again for slander, and acquitted of murder a final time by a court that cited "stunning flaws" in the original prosecution. Meredith Kercher's actual killer, Rudy Guede, served thirteen years and walked free in 2021. The question the world has argued about ever since is not simply whether Amanda Knox killed anyone. It is about what happens when a justice system, an international media frenzy, and a culture hungry for a villain fix their gaze on a young woman and refuse to look away.

wrongful convictionacquittal

closedConvictedHistorical

Jane Toppan

Convicted: Jane Toppan

Jane Toppan, better recognized by her chilling alias 'Jolly Jane', is infamous for her role as a serial killer in the annals of American crime history. As a nurse, she exploited her position of trust to commit heinous acts, targeting primarily her patients and their relatives in Massachusetts between 1895 and 1901. Toppan's case is particularly notorious as she is believed to have taken the lives of over 100 individuals, though she confessed to 31 murders. Her motivation was rooted in a perverse sexual fetish that drove her to attain a grim satisfaction from the act of murder. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Toppan's life was marked by early trauma. Following the death of her mother, she and her sister were given up for adoption by their father. The Toppan family took her in, leading to her adopting their surname. Despite the hardships of her past, Toppan managed to maintain a facade of normalcy. Her cheerful demeanor earned her the nickname 'Jolly Jane', a stark contrast to her sinister actions. Her killing spree finally came to an end when an autopsy on one of her victims revealed lethal doses of poison, leading to her arrest and subsequent conviction. Her case serves as a grim reminder of the potential for evil that can lurk beneath the surface, even in those entrusted with the care of others.

serial killernurse

closedConvictedHistorical

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (née Hobley)

Convicted: Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (née Hobley)

'You'll know all mine by the tape around their necks.' When Amelia Dyer spoke those words to Reading police in the spring of 1896, she did so with the calm of a woman who had been getting away with murder — quite literally — for two decades. On March 30, 1896, a bargeman pulled a brown paper parcel from the River Thames near Caversham. Inside was a baby girl, strangled with white dressmaker's tape. She would not be the last. By the time detectives closed in on the mild-mannered, churchgoing widow operating out of a modest terrace on Kensington Road, seven infant bodies had been recovered from the river. Experts now estimate that Amelia Dyer — the 'Ogress of Reading,' a trained nurse turned baby farmer — murdered between 200 and 400 children over twenty years, making her one of the most prolific killers in British history. The jury took four and a half minutes to convict her. The tape never lied. This is her story.

serial killerVictorian era

closedConvictedHistorical

Mary Flora Bell

Convicted: Mary Flora Bell

The morning after Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown to death, she broke into a nursery school and left four handwritten notes claiming responsibility for the killing. Police dismissed them as a prank. The author was ten years old. What followed over the summer of 1968 in Scotswood, Newcastle, was one of the most disturbing chapters in British criminal history: a child killer operating in plain sight, in broad daylight, returning to mutilate a victim's body with broken scissors, and sitting with the grieving families of her victims as though nothing had happened. Mary Flora Bell was not a monster who emerged from nowhere. She was a product of almost incomprehensible abuse, a girl whose own mother allegedly tried to poison her with sleeping pills and drop her from a first-floor window. That context explains nothing and excuses nothing, but it haunts everything. She would become Britain's youngest female killer on record, a title she still holds. This is her story.

juvenile killerchild murderer

closedConvictedHistorical

Christine Léa Papin

Convicted: Christine Léa Papin

Christine Léa Papin and her sister Léa Papin were both live-in maids who were convicted for the murder of their employer's wife and daughter in Le Mans, France on February 2, 1933. The crime, which was a shocking and brutal attack, stunned the country and has been the subject of numerous books, films, and studies. The sisters were found guilty and sentenced to prison, with Christine's sentence being commuted to life imprisonment after a retrial.

murdersisters

verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Lee Ann Armanini Reidel

Convicted: Lee Ann Armanini Reidel

On a cold January night in 2001, a man stepped into the rear parking lot of a Long Island gym to grab a CD from his car. He never made it back inside. Alexander Algeri, 32, was shot three times in the head and neck by a hired killer who mistook him for his best friend. The intended target, Paul Reidel, was alive. His wife had paid to have him killed. The case of Lee Ann Reidel is a story about money, a crumbling marriage, a mob-connected boyfriend, and a conspiracy so tangled that it destroyed everyone it touched, including an innocent man who had been the best man at the very wedding that set these events in motion. When the jury finally returned its verdict in a Suffolk County courtroom in March 2004, Lee Ann wept. She had smiled through most of the six-week trial. That detail alone tells you something about the woman at the center of this story.

murder-for-hiremistaken identity murder

verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Katherine Mary Knight

Convicted: Katherine Mary Knight

The dinner plates were already set when police broke down the back door of 84 St Andrews Street in Aberdeen, New South Wales, on the morning of 1 March 2000. Two place settings, two handwritten notes, two names: the children of John Price, a local miner who had not shown up for his shift. The food was still warm. So was what was in the pot on the stove, which turned out to be John Price's head, simmered with vegetables and seasoned with care. In the hallway, Price's skin hung from a meat hook his killer had recently installed in the living room ceiling. He had been stabbed at least 37 times. Katherine Mary Knight, a former abattoir worker with a decades-long history of escalating violence against the men in her life, was found unconscious at the scene from a drug overdose. She was 44 years old. On 8 November 2001, she became the first woman in Australian history sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. She remains at Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre today, aged 69, banned from access to knives and assessed as too dangerous to share a cell. This is her story.

Katherine KnightAustralian true crime

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

appealedConvictedHistorical

Elena Kiejliches

Convicted: Elena Kiejliches

Three days after her husband was shot to death inside their Staten Island home, Elena Kiejliches packed her two young children into the car and drove to Disney World. When she returned, she told authorities that Borys Kiejliches might have simply walked out on the marriage. What investigators eventually uncovered was something far darker: a calculated killing rooted in an eighteen-month affair with an aspiring rapper she had met at a Manhattan traffic light, a man she had showered with more than $85,000 in cash, jewelry, and gifts. The body of Borys Kiejliches, a jet-fuel magnate worth an estimated $3 million, turned up a month later in a marsh near the Belt Parkway, wrapped in carpet and stuffed in a cardboard barrel. Elena has maintained her innocence ever since, and her defense attorney still believes her. But a Staten Island jury did not. In 2002, she was sentenced to 22 years to life. This is the story of a marriage, a murder, and a cover-up that stretched from a quiet hilltop neighborhood all the way to a Florida theme park.

spousal murderStaten Island crime

closedConvictedHistorical

Anne Perry

Convicted: Anne Perry

Anne Perry, born as Juliet Marion Hulme, is a British writer known for her historical detective fiction. However, before gaining fame as an author, she was involved in a notorious murder case in New Zealand in 1954, when she and her friend, Pauline Parker, killed Pauline's mother, Honora Parker. The two teenage girls were convicted of the crime and Juliet was incarcerated until 1959. After her release, she moved to England and changed her name to Anne Perry.

murderhistorical

closedConvictedContemporary

Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio

Convicted: Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio

Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio, a former professional wrestler and a Mexican serial killer, also known as La Mataviejitas, was sentenced to 759 years in prison for the murder of 16 elderly women. The first murder attributed to Mataviejitas has been dated variously to the late 1990s and to a specific killing on 17 November 2003. Estimates of the total number of the Mataviejitas victims range from 42 to 48 deaths. After Barraza's arrest, the case was officially closed despite more than 30 unresolved cases. Two other individuals, Araceli Vázquez and Mario Tablas, were also arrested in 2005 and labelled as The Mataviejitas by police and media.

serial killermurder

closedConvictedHistorical

Susan Denise Atkins

Convicted: Susan Denise Atkins

Susan Denise Atkins was a member of the 'Manson Family', the cult led by Charles Manson that committed a series of nine murders at four locations in California over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969. Known within the Manson family as Sadie, Sadie Glutz, Sadie Mae Glutz or Sexy Sadie, Atkins was convicted for her participation in eight of these killings, most notably the Tate murders. She was originally sentenced to death, but her sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court invalidated all death sentences issued prior to 1972. She was incarcerated until her death in 2009, at the time being California's longest-serving female inmate.

murdercult

verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen

Convicted: Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen

At 5:25 on a March morning in 1986, Joyce Cohen called 911 from her Coconut Grove mansion and told dispatchers that burglars had shot her millionaire husband four times in the head while he slept. Then she kept police waiting outside the house for more than eight hours. It was the first of many decisions that would define the rest of her life. The story of Joyce Cohen is a portrait of poverty survived and luxury squandered, of a woman who clawed her way from foster homes in Illinois to the highest rungs of Miami society, only to watch it all collapse in a single pre-dawn hour. What followed was a nearly three-year investigation, a sensational trial, a jailhouse informant who failed three polygraphs, and a lead detective who privately believed the whole prosecution theory was wrong. Joyce Cohen has maintained her innocence for nearly four decades. She is in her late seventies now, housed at Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida, with a parole board having pushed her release date to 2048. The mansion is gone. The Jaguars are gone. Stanley Cohen has been in the ground since 1986. And the full truth of what happened that night may never be known.

murder-for-hirefemale murderer

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

closedConvictedHistorical

Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova

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.

murdertorture

closedConvictedContemporary

Karla Leanne Homolka (also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais)

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.

serial killerfemale offender

verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Genene Anne Jones

Convicted: Genene Anne Jones

Genene Anne Jones was a licensed vocational nurse who is responsible for the deaths of up to 60 infants and children during the 1970s and 1980s. She used injections of digoxin, heparin, and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, leading to numerous fatalities. Convicted in 1984 for murder and injury to a child, the exact number of her victims remains uncertain due to missing and destroyed hospital records.

serial killernurse

closedConvictedHistorical

Stephanie St. Clair (also known as Stephanie Saint-Clair; later Stephanie St. Clair Hamid)

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.

Harlemnumbers racket

closedConvictedHistorical

Aileen Wuornos

Convicted: Aileen Carol Wuornos (née Pittman)

Her last words from the execution chamber stopped the witnesses cold. "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back." Moments later, at 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002, Aileen Carol Wuornos was pronounced dead. She had declined her final meal. She accepted only a cup of coffee. Between November 1989 and November 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven men along the highways of Florida, each of them a middle-aged motorist who had stopped for a woman working the roads. She took their money, their cars, and their lives. She was a highway prostitute operating under multiple aliases, a drifter with a .22 and a history that read less like a criminal file and more like an indictment of everyone who had ever failed her. She was raised by alcoholic grandparents after her mother abandoned her at age four. Her father, whom she never met, was serving a life sentence for raping a seven-year-old child when he hanged himself in his prison cell. She was pregnant and living on the streets by fourteen. She told police, and later the courts, that every man she killed had attacked her first. The jury in her first trial deliberated for less than two hours before convicting her. She received six death sentences in total. The tabloids called her America's first female serial killer. The more precise truth: she was the first woman formally profiled by the FBI as a serial killer. The distinction hardly seemed to matter by the end. What mattered was that seven men were dead, and Aileen Wuornos had spent a lifetime arriving at that outcome.

serial killerfemale serial killer

appealedConvictedHistorical

Virginia Gail Larzelere

Convicted: Virginia Gail Larzelere

At approximately 1:00 p.m. on March 8, 1991, a masked gunman walked into a quiet dental office in Edgewater, Florida, and fired a sawed-off shotgun through a wooden door. Behind that door, cowering against the wood, was Dr. Norman Larzelere. His last audible words were a name: his son's. Witnesses heard him call out 'Jason, is that you?' before the blast tore through his chest. On the other side of the door stood his wife, Virginia, who promptly called 911 and performed CPR on the man she had allegedly just arranged to have killed. She had spent the preceding months taking out seven life insurance policies on Norman totaling $2.1 million, and prosecutors alleged she had forged his signature on every one of them. What followed was one of Florida's most tangled criminal sagas: a death sentence, fifteen years on death row alongside Aileen Wuornos, a defense attorney later convicted of sixteen felonies who was allegedly consuming a liter of vodka and methamphetamine daily during her trial, and a son who was acquitted of the very conspiracy that sent his mother to the electric chair. Virginia Larzelere has maintained her innocence for more than three decades. The legal fight is still not over.

female killerdeath row

appealedConvictedContemporary

Kristin Margrethe Rossum

Convicted: Kristin Margrethe Rossum

When paramedics arrived at the San Diego apartment on November 6, 2000, they found Gregory de Villers lying in bed, unresponsive, his body blanketed in red rose petals, a wedding photograph pressed against his chest. His wife, Kristin, stood nearby in tears, telling them he had taken his own life. It looked like a scene from a movie. It was, in fact, staged to look like one. Kristin Rossum, 24 years old and a trained toxicologist with access to the county medical examiner's controlled substance supply, had poisoned her husband with seven times the lethal dose of fentanyl — then arranged his corpse in a tableau lifted from her favorite film, American Beauty. She was sleeping with her married boss, secretly using methamphetamine she stole from her own workplace, and her husband had just threatened to expose everything. The rose petals were the detail that haunted investigators, the detail that made the case famous, and the detail that ultimately helped convict her. This is the story of how a summa cum laude graduate with a drug habit, a secret affair, and a dangerous job became one of California's most notorious poisoners.

fentanyl poisoningAmerican Beauty murder

closedConvictedHistorical

Dorothea Helen Puente

Convicted: Dorothea Helen Puente

On the morning of November 11, 1988, police began digging up the yard of a blue-and-white Victorian boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. By the end of the day, they had found seven bodies. The woman who owned the house, a stout, silver-haired grandmother type named Dorothea Puente, stood nearby in a housecoat and watched. Detectives didn't consider her a suspect yet. They let her walk to a nearby café to get coffee. She never came back. For years, Puente had presented herself to social workers and city officials as a saint: a warm, generous landlady who took in the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless, the people no one else would accept. She cooked elaborate meals and sent tenants to bed with warm milk. She also drugged them, buried them in her yard, and cashed their Social Security checks. Prosecutors would later allege she collected over $87,000 this way, spending some of it on a facelift. The Death House Landlady, as the press called her, was eventually convicted of three murders and died in prison in 2011 at age 82, still insisting she was innocent. The full story of how Dorothea Puente became one of America's most prolific female serial killers is a portrait of survival twisted into something monstrous.

serial killerfemale serial killer

verdict reachedConvictedContemporary

Susan Leigh Smith

Convicted: Susan Leigh Smith

The lake was quiet when Susan Smith let her car roll in. With her sons, three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alexander, still strapped in their car seats, the 1990 Mazda Protegé sank 122 feet from shore at John D. Long Lake in Union County, South Carolina. It took approximately six minutes. Then Susan Smith ran to a nearby house and told a lie that gripped an entire nation: a Black man had carjacked her vehicle, her babies still inside. For nine days, America watched her weep on television while a manhunt consumed Union County and innocent Black men were stopped by police hunting a suspect who never existed. The lie collapsed on November 3, 1994, when Smith confessed and led divers to the sunken car. She was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. Thirty years later, she sat before a parole board via video link and said: 'I know what I did was horrible.' The board voted unanimously to deny her release. Her next hearing is in November 2026. This is the story of Susan Smith: her shattered childhood, her calculating deception, her infamous trial, and the question that still has no satisfying answer. What made a mother choose a man over her sons?

filicidematernal filicide

closedConvictedHistorical

Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr

Convicted: Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr

Two days before her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr was riding home alone along a dirt road near Briartown in Indian Territory when someone shot her in the back. Twice. She fell from her horse, and the shooter approached and fired again, leaving wounds across her neck, shoulder, and face. It was February 3, 1889, and the woman the New York Times would soon call 'a most desperate woman' never saw forty-one. Her murder has never been solved. History remembers her as Belle Starr, the 'Bandit Queen' of the Old West: pistol-carrying, sidesaddle-riding, a known associate of Jesse James who harbored outlaws at her ranch on the Canadian River. But the truth is both stranger and more human than the dime novel legend that was already being written before her body was cold. She had a classical education. She could play the piano. She had two children, a series of husbands who kept dying violently, and exactly one criminal conviction on her record: horse theft. This is the story of how a Missouri innkeeper's daughter became America's most famous female outlaw, and who might have been waiting in ambush on that winter road outside Briartown.

Belle StarrWild West outlaw

closedConvictedHistorical

Clara Hamilton Harris (later Clara Hamilton Harris Rathbone)

Convicted: Clara Hamilton Harris (later Clara Hamilton Harris Rathbone)

She survived the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. She held her fiancé's arm together with her bare hands while his blood soaked her white dress from collar to hem. She stayed until dawn with a screaming, inconsolable Mary Todd Lincoln, absorbing the widow's grief alongside her own. Clara Harris endured all of that — and still, eighteen years later, she never saw her death coming. On the night of December 23, 1883, in a consular residence in Hanover, Germany, her husband Henry Rathbone shot and stabbed her to death in their bedroom while their three children slept nearby. He then turned the knife on himself five or six times. He survived. She did not. A German court found Henry guilty but criminally insane. He was committed to an asylum, where he lived another twenty-seven years, apparently never fully comprehending what he had done. The children were shipped back across the Atlantic. Clara was buried in a foreign city cemetery and eventually disinterred when no family came to tend her grave. This is the story of a woman who sat two feet from history's most famous assassination, and lived to describe it — only to become the victim of a quieter, more intimate one. It is also the story of what trauma does to the people left alive in its wake: how it metastasizes, quietly, over years, until it destroys everything it touches.

Lincoln assassinationFord's Theatre

Murder

Jodi Arias

Myra Hindley

Karen A. Read

Ruth Ellis (née Neilson)

Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye

Susan Lucille Wright

Valerie Jean Solanas

Magdalena Solís

Delfina María de Jesús González

Lavinia Fisher

Celeste Beard Johnson

Rosemary Pauline West (née Letts; also known as Jennifer Jones since 2020)

Diane Michelle Zamora

Miyuki Ishikawa

Karla Faye Tucker

Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)

Gu Kailai

Casey Marie Anthony

Carolyn Warmus

Vera Renczi

Elizabeth Báthory

Pamela Ann Smart

Leslie Louise Van Houten

Lizzie Andrew Borden

Kimberly Michelle Hricko

Enriqueta Martí Ripollés

Masumi Hayashi (林 眞須美)

Gertrude Nadine Baniszewski

Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano

Felícitas Sánchez Aguillón

Griselda Blanco Restrepo

Jacqueline Sauvage

Tracey Avril Wigginton

Patricia Dianne Krenwinkel

Debra Lynn Baker

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker

Daisy Louisa C. de Melker

Sharee Paulette Kitley Miller

Zheng Yi Sao

Jean Lee (born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright)

Onie Virginia Hill

Sada Abe (阿部 定, Abe Sada)

Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)

Adele Vicuna Craven

Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss

Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan

Judith Maryanne Moran

Sante Kimes

Kathleen Mary Josephine Leigh

Opal Margaret "Peggy" Holder Lowe

Ruthann Greenzweig Aron (now known as Ruth Ann Green)

Andrea Pia Yates

Amanda Knox

Jane Toppan

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (née Hobley)

Mary Flora Bell

Christine Léa Papin

Lee Ann Armanini Reidel

Katherine Mary Knight

Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)

Elena Kiejliches

Anne Perry

Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio

Susan Denise Atkins

Joyce Lemay McDillon Cohen

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

Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova

Karla Leanne Homolka (also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais)

Genene Anne Jones

Stephanie St. Clair (also known as Stephanie Saint-Clair; later Stephanie St. Clair Hamid)

Aileen Wuornos

Virginia Gail Larzelere

Kristin Margrethe Rossum

Dorothea Helen Puente

Susan Leigh Smith

Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr

Clara Hamilton Harris (later Clara Hamilton Harris Rathbone)

Masumi Hayashi (林眞須美)

Sada Abe (阿部定, Abe Sada)