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