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