USA

40 cases from USA

Cases from USA

Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini
closedConvictedContemporary

Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini

Convicted: Sherri Louise Graeff-Papini

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

kidnapping hoaxfalse report
Ghislaine Maxwell
verdict reachedConvictedContemporary

Ghislaine Maxwell

Convicted: Ghislaine Maxwell

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

sex traffickingchild abuse
Jodi Ann Arias
appealedConvictedContemporary

Jodi Arias

Convicted: Jodi Ann Arias

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

Jodi AriasTravis Alexander
Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)
closedConvictedHistorical

Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)

Convicted: Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)

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

insider tradingwhite-collar crime
Karen A. Read
verdict reachedAcquittedContemporary

Karen A. Read

Subject: Karen A. Read

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

Karen ReadJohn O'Keefe
Sara Jane Moore
closedConvictedHistorical

Sara Jane Moore

Convicted: Sara Jane Moore

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

presidential assassination attemptGerald Ford
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
Valerie Jean Solanas
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
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
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
Lynette Alice 'Squeaky' Fromme
closedConvictedHistorical

Lynette Alice 'Squeaky' Fromme

Convicted: Lynette Alice 'Squeaky' Fromme

Lynette Alice 'Squeaky' Fromme was a member of the Manson Family, a cult led by Charles Manson. Although she was not directly involved in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, her criminal legacy stems from a separate incident. In 1975, Fromme attempted to assassinate US President Gerald Ford. The assassination attempt was unsuccessful, and she was consequently sentenced to life in prison. She was paroled in 2009 after serving approximately 34 years. She also published a book about her life in 2018.

assassinationManson Family
Karla Faye Tucker
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
Doris Marie Payne
closedConvictedHistorical

Doris Marie Payne

Convicted: Doris Marie Payne

She was 86 years old, wearing an electronic ankle monitor from her previous arrest, and she was shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise from a Walmart near Atlanta. That is the last chapter, so far, in the seven-decade criminal career of Doris Marie Payne, a woman who once walked out of a Monte Carlo Cartier boutique with a half-million-dollar diamond hidden in the seam of her girdle. Born in the coal-scarred poverty of Slab Fork, West Virginia, in 1930, Payne became the most prolific jewel thief in American history: over $2 million stolen, 32 aliases, nine passports, ten Social Security numbers, and an FBI file reportedly six feet long. She wore designer clothes into the finest jewelry stores in Paris, Rome, Geneva, and Tokyo, charmed the clerks with a smile, and walked out richer. Judges called her "the Terminator." Interpol tracked her for decades. She expressed no remorse, ever. Now approaching 95, she lives as a free woman in Atlanta. A documentary about her life won an Audience Award at Tribeca. Halle Berry is reportedly attached to play her in a biopic. And through it all, Doris Payne has remained exactly what she always was: the best-dressed thief in the room.

jewel thiefserial thief
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
Pamela Ann Smart
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
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
Patricia Campbell Hearst
closedConvictedHistorical

Patty Hearst

Convicted: Patricia Campbell Hearst

The grainy black-and-white surveillance image from April 15, 1974 remains one of the most startling photographs in American criminal history: Patricia Campbell Hearst, granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, standing inside a San Francisco bank with an assault rifle, a beret on her head and a new name on her lips. She called herself Tania. Seventy days earlier, she had been a nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore, engaged to be married, asleep in her Berkeley apartment when armed radicals dragged her screaming into the night. What happened during 57 days of blindfolded captivity in a closet, and what it produced in a young woman's mind, became the defining psychological mystery of the 1970s. Was she a victim coerced beyond the breaking point, or a willing revolutionary who found the cause intoxicating? A jury took less than two weeks to convict her. Jimmy Carter freed her. Bill Clinton pardoned her. Fifty years later, no one has fully agreed on who Patty Hearst really is. She weighed 87 pounds at her arrest. At booking, she listed her occupation as 'Urban Guerrilla.' The case that followed would rewrite how Americans understood the human mind under captivity, introduce a new term into the cultural vocabulary, and raise questions about identity, coercion, and justice that no verdict has ever put to rest.

kidnappingSLA
Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano
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
Arizona Donnie Clark Barker (Kate 'Ma' Barker)
closedAccusedHistorical

Arizona Donnie Clark Barker (Kate 'Ma' Barker)

Accused: Arizona Donnie Clark Barker (Kate 'Ma' Barker)

On the morning of January 16, 1935, fourteen FBI agents surrounded a lakeside cottage in Ocklawaha, Florida, and opened fire on a sixty-one-year-old grandmother. The gun battle lasted nearly six hours. When it ended, Kate 'Ma' Barker lay dead from a single bullet to the head, a Thompson submachine gun at her feet. J. Edgar Hoover would declare her 'the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.' There was just one problem: she had never been arrested. Not once. Not ever. Her surviving criminal associates were blunt about it. Alvin Karpis, the actual architect of the Barker-Karpis Gang's operations, put it plainly: she 'couldn't plan breakfast.' So who was the real Ma Barker? A ruthless criminal mastermind? A devoted mother who looked the other way? Or a convenient legend, constructed by a powerful federal agency that needed to justify killing an old woman in a Florida cottage? The truth is stranger, darker, and far more human than any of those answers.

Ma BarkerBarker-Karpis Gang
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
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
Onie Virginia Hill
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
Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)
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
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
Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss
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
Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan
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
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
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
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
Andrea Pia Yates
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
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
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
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
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
Aileen Carol Wuornos (née Pittman)
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
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
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
Dorothea Helen Puente
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
Susan Leigh Smith
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
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