Recently Added Cases

The most recently added cases to our database

Recent Case Profiles

Griselda Blanco Restrepo
closedConvictedHistorical

Griselda Blanco Restrepo

Convicted: Griselda Blanco Restrepo

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

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

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

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

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

poisoninghorse tranquilizer
SP
appealedConvictedContemporary

Sharee Paulette Kitley Miller

Convicted: Sharee Paulette Kitley Miller

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

internet murderonline manipulation
Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)
closedConvictedHistorical

Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)

Convicted: Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)

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

axe murderdismemberment
AV
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
Opal Margaret "Peggy" Holder Lowe
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
CW
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
Debra Lynn Baker
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
KM
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
Diane Michelle Zamora
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
Susan Lucille Wright
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
JL
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
RG
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
LA
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
KM
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
EK
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
Clara Hamilton Harris (later Clara Hamilton Harris Rathbone)
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
VG
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
Celeste Beard Johnson
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
GT
closedAllegedHistorical

Giulia Tofana (also spelled Toffana, Tophana, Tophania; possible true surname: Mangiardi, per modern scholarship)

Alleged Offender: Giulia Tofana (also spelled Toffana, Tophana, Tophania; possible true surname: Mangiardi, per modern scholarship)

A woman stands over a pot of soup, a small vial in her hand. The liquid she has just tipped into the broth is colorless, odorless, invisible. Then something breaks inside her. She pulls the bowl away from her husband and confesses everything. That single moment of conscience, recorded in court testimony from the 1659 Roman poison investigation, may have unraveled one of the most elaborate criminal networks in early modern history. At its center, at least according to legend, stood a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, creator of a poison so perfectly engineered it mimicked natural illness, so cleverly packaged it passed as a devotional product bearing the image of a saint. Traditional accounts credit her with over 600 deaths, mostly husbands of women with nowhere else to turn. But modern scholarship tells a different story entirely: the woman behind the myth may have died quietly in her sleep around 1651, years before the trial that made her famous. Her real surname may not have been Tofana at all. And the network eventually prosecuted by Roman authorities may have been run by someone else. This is the true story of Giulia Tofana: part documented history, part deliberate mythology, and wholly extraordinary.

Giulia TofanaAqua Tofana
Rosemary Pauline West (née Letts; also known as Jennifer Jones since 2020)
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
Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (née Hobley)
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
Karla Leanne Homolka (also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais)
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
Karen A. Read
verdict reachedAcquittedContemporary

Karen A. Read

Subject: Karen A. Read

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

Karen ReadJohn O'Keefe
Ghislaine Maxwell
verdict reachedConvictedContemporary

Ghislaine Maxwell

Convicted: Ghislaine Maxwell

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

sex traffickingchild abuse
Elizabeth Anne Holmes
appealedConvictedContemporary

Elizabeth Anne Holmes

Convicted: Elizabeth Anne Holmes

Three weeks after a California jury found her guilty of federal fraud, Elizabeth Holmes had a one-way plane ticket to Mexico. The flight was booked for January 26, 2022. It was only canceled after prosecutors flagged the booking to her defense counsel. This was the woman Forbes had once called the youngest self-made female billionaire in America, worth an estimated $4.5 billion. The woman who had convinced Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, and Rupert Murdoch to stake their reputations on a technology company she founded at nineteen with her college tuition money. The woman who had promised to revolutionize medicine with a single drop of blood. By the time Holmes walked into Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas on May 30, 2023, her net worth was effectively zero. She now earns 31 cents an hour as a prison law clerk, helping fellow inmates write resumes. She is 41 years old, the mother of two young children, and confined to a minimum-security facility 95 miles from the city where she grew up. This is the story of how Elizabeth Holmes built one of the most audacious frauds in American corporate history, sustained it for years behind a black turtleneck and a practiced baritone voice, and ultimately couldn't outrun it. Not even with a one-way ticket.

white-collar crimeSilicon Valley fraud
Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr
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
Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini
closedConvictedContemporary

Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini

Convicted: Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini

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

kidnapping hoaxfalse report
Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)
closedConvictedHistorical

Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)

Convicted: Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)

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

insider tradingwhite-collar crime
Tracey Avril Wigginton
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
Judith Maryanne Moran
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
Katherine Mary Knight
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
Anne Perry
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
Jean Lee (born Marjorie Jean Maude Wright)
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
Matilda Mary Devine
closedConvictedHistorical

Matilda Mary Devine

Convicted: Matilda Mary Devine

Matilda Mary Devine, popularly known as Tilly Devine, was an English Australian organized crime boss. She was involved in numerous illicit activities including running sly-grog shops, which were illegal bars in Australia, leading razor gangs, and managing prostitution. She became a notorious figure in Sydney during the interwar years. Her criminal reign was marked with violence, lawlessness, and defiance of the authorities, which contributed to her fame and infamy alike.

organized crimeprostitution
Kathleen Mary Josephine Leigh
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
Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela
closedConvictedHistorical

Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela

Convicted: Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a South African politician and anti-apartheid activist who was convicted of kidnapping and fraud. In 1991, she was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault in relation to the death of 14-year-old activist Stompie Seipei. In 2003, she was convicted of fraud and theft related to a loan scheme.

kidnappingfraud
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko
verdict reachedConvictedHistorical

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko

Convicted: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was a Rwandan politician who served as the Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women. She was tried and convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for inciting troops and militia to carry out rape during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This makes her the first woman to be convicted of genocide by the ICTR and the first woman ever to be convicted of genocidal rape. In June 2011, she was sentenced to life imprisonment on seven charges.

genociderape
Daisy Louisa C. de Melker
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
Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)
closedAccusedHistorical

Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)

Accused: Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)

In a single year, 1838, an estimated 100,000 people died by her command, forced to swallow poison from the tangena nut and then prove their innocence by vomiting chicken skin. She ruled Madagascar for thirty-three years, expelled every Christian missionary on the island, mounted the skulls of approximately twenty-one Europeans on pikes along her coastline, and oversaw a population collapse that cut her island's people nearly in half. Her name was Ranavalona I, and for three decades she was the most feared sovereign in the Indian Ocean world. Western contemporaries called her the 'Mad Monarch of Madagascar,' the 'Bloody Mary of Madagascar,' the 'Female Caligula.' Revisionist historians see something else entirely: a pragmatic anti-colonial strategist who kept her island free from European domination at any cost. Both portraits carry weight. Born a commoner around 1778, she seized absolute power through a palace coup, eliminated the legitimate royal heir and his entire family, and never looked back. She died quietly, in her own bed, in her own palace, at approximately eighty-three years of age. France did not colonize Madagascar until 1896, thirty-five years after her death. The full story of her reign is one of blood, genius, and the terrible arithmetic of survival at the height of empire.

Ranavalona IMadagascar
Phoolan Devi
closedAccusedHistorical

Phoolan Devi

Accused: Phoolan Devi

At 1:30 on a July afternoon in 2001, three masked gunmen opened fire outside a government residence on Ashoka Road in New Delhi. Nine bullets found their mark. The target was Phoolan Devi, 37, a sitting Member of Parliament who had once been the most wanted woman in India, hunted across three states for a massacre that left twenty men dead on the banks of a river in Uttar Pradesh. She had been a child bride, a gang rape survivor, a feared dacoit who robbed from the rich and shared with the poor, and a democratically elected lawmaker. The arc of her life was so extreme that it seemed impossible any single person could have lived it. The man who would claim responsibility for her killing, a Thakur named Sher Singh Rana, said he did it to avenge the 1981 Behmai massacre. The Behmai case itself would not reach a verdict until February 14, 2024, exactly forty-three years after the killings that defined her legend. This is the story of a woman born at the very bottom of one of the world's most stratified societies, who refused to stay there, whatever the cost.

Phoolan DeviBandit Queen
Gu Kailai
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
Jiang Qing
closedConvictedHistorical

Jiang Qing

Convicted: Jiang Qing

Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, was a key figure in the Chinese communist revolution and the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. She played a significant role in the Cultural Revolution, leading the radical Gang of Four. In the aftermath of Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Jiang was arrested and convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes during the Gang of Four trial. She was held mainly responsible for the chaotic and violent period of the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in widespread human rights abuses and millions of deaths.

political crimehuman rights abuses
MH
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
Leila Khaled
closedDefendantHistorical

Leila Khaled

Defendant: Leila Khaled

Leila Khaled, born in 1944, is a Palestinian former militant and activist. She was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Khaled is known for being the first woman to hijack an airplane. Her first hijacking was in 1969 on a flight from Rome to Athens, which was diverted to Damascus. A year later, she attempted another hijack on a flight from Amsterdam to New York, but this was thwarted by the air marshals on board.

hijackingactivism
Fusako Shigenobu
closedConvictedHistorical

Fusako Shigenobu

Convicted: Fusako Shigenobu

On May 28, 2022, a 76-year-old woman in a black hat and gray suit walked out of a Tokyo prison and let her daughter drape a Palestinian keffiyeh around her shoulders. Cameras clicked. Supporters waved Palestinian flags. And Fusako Shigenobu, the woman Western media had dubbed 'the Empress of Terror,' blinked into the daylight after two decades behind bars. For thirty years before her arrest, she had been one of the world's most wanted fugitives: the founder of the Japanese Red Army, a group linked to bombings, hijackings, and one of the deadliest airport massacres in history. On May 30, 1972, three JRA militants opened fire with automatic weapons at Lod Airport near Tel Aviv, killing 26 people and wounding approximately 80 more in a crowded arrival hall. Shigenobu was never charged for that attack. Born in postwar Tokyo to a disgraced ultranationalist father, she transformed herself from a Kikkoman soy sauce office worker into a global revolutionary, building an armed network from the refugee camps of Beirut while raising a stateless daughter in the shadows. This is the story of how she got there, what she built, and what remains unanswered.

Japanese Red Armyleft-wing terrorism
Sada Abe (阿部 定, Abe Sada)
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
Miyuki Ishikawa
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
Zheng Yi Sao
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
MS
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