2 cases tagged “female criminal”
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.
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.
