This by no means an exhaustive collection.
***
The long catalogue of her cruel and bloody deeds without a parallel even in the history of Oriental despotisms.
Proxy violence (murders by command) committed with excessive cruelty against female rival and her child as well as hundreds of others.
When a female rival appeared on the scene she had her killed and sent the body, cut into pieces, to the murdered woman's father, whom she also caused to be assassinated.
Court testimony showed that: “on some days Elizabeth had naked girls laid flat on the floor of her bedroom and tortured them so much that one could scoop up the blood by the pail afterward.” When the Countess was too ill to leave bed in order to participate in her usual pastime she demanded that a victim be brought to her and held. “Elizabeth rose up on her bed and bit the girl on the cheek. Then she turned to the girl’s shoulders, where she ripped out a piece of flesh with her teeth. After that, Elizabeth proceeded to bite the girl’s breasts.”
During Chile’s colonial period, she was noted for her extreme cruelty to her inquils(tenants), accused and tried for over 40 murders, becoming an icon of colonial abuse and oppression.
“Ridgeway seemed to kill for petty reasons and almost for the pleasure of exercising her own devious power.” [Randall Martin Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England, 2007, p. 152]
Saltykova was a Russian noble from Moscow who became notorious for torturing and killing and torturing 138 female serfs. She beat them with logs and rolling pins and reportedly mutilated their genitals.
Zwanziger’s “ admitted motive was sheer malevolent pleasure – at her trial in 1828, she confessed that the sight of her victims’ death agonies threw her into a transport of ecstacy.” [Harold Schechter,The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers]
“It amused her [Anna Zwanziger] to see the contortions of her victims.” [Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, James Russell Lowell, Henry Cabot Lodge, The North American Review, Volume 161, 1895, p. xx]
“With a fanaticism that would have made Mary Tudor proud, she came up with creative and inventive ways to eliminate any one caught practicing Christianity. They were tortured, flung from cliffs, boiled in water, poisoned, flung off cliffs or beheaded if they didn’t recant.”
By her own confession, it is evident that she revelled in the sense of power she enjoyed from the possession of this secret and murderous weapon. From the gratification it afforded her, she grew actually to love it for its own sake. When, in prison, a parcel of arsenic was placed before her, her eyes glistened with the passionate desire to possess it; and when she was about to be executed, she avowed that her death would be a happy event for mankind, as she was sure she never could have renounced the pleasure of using it. [Catherine Crowe, Light and Darkness: or, The Mysteries of Life, 1850, London: Henry Colburn, pp. 64-85]
The prisoner appeared to have been actuated by a thirst for destruction, and to have taken pleasure in witnessing the agonies of her victims.
An 1862 news clipping reports: “A woman known as the ‘She Wolf’ has been the terror of Gallicia and the neighboring provinces for the last twenty years. Always on horseback, and followed by a small number of bandits, she was at the head of all the robberies and murders committed in that part of Spain.” Josepha was noted for her predilection for torturing her victims. She was arrested after her hide-out was discovered during the search for a different criminal.
A bandit, barbarity is her chief characteristic, and the sight of blood renders her as excited as a wild beast.
Indirect quote: “She said she had a mania to destroy human life, and it was by the greatest self-denial that she could restrain herself from secretly poisoning all persons with whom she was on terms of friendship.”
The Court of Assizes of the Haute-Loire has just been engaged in the trial of a midwife of Le Puy named Julien, and her husband, a carpenter, on numerous charges of ill-treatment, and murder of infants under circumstances of the most revolting cruelty. The female prisoner accustomed to receive children of unmarried women, and which for a certain sum, varying from 200 f. to 400 f., she undertook to bring up or get place in some orphan asylum. They were then subjected by the woman to such barbarous usage that their death ensued in a very short time – in some cases by absolute starvation. These facts at length came to the knowledge of the authorities, and an outcry was made by the police. On searching a cupboard about six feet long by four feet widow, a little girl about two years old was found lying on a heap of rotten straw covered by filth; the body was one mass of putrid sores; two toes of the left foot had dropped off, and the bones of the rest could be seen exposed through the decomposing flesh. One witness, who had lodged in the house for three days, proved that the child had not been once moved all that time, and that at last it had not sufficient strength to cry out. By proper attention it has, however, now recovered.
“Pittsburg’s arch murderess slew her victims for the pleasure of seeing them die. She planned her work with deadly patience, and thought no labor too hard that brought to her the chance of seeing some unsuspecting man, woman or child, writing in the horrible agony of dissolution, brought about by the poison she had administered. There was not the slightest motive of gain or animosity in any of her murders. She killed them, and admitted so at the last, simply for the love of taking life, and of seeing suffering. She was an expert in administering the poison, her skill no doubt being gained by her long practice, and she graduated her doses so as to cause her helpless victims the greatest and most protracted suffering. Their deaths were always, it is said by persons who remember, of a most horrible character, enough to move a heart of stone.”
“She confessed having murdered nine infants, entrusted to her to nurse. Her baby farming consisted in drowning the little darlings in a basin of water, then cutting them up into morsels in her lap, and burying the remains in her kitchen under the stairs, or in the water-closet. All this she confessed with a savage glee, describing the process in full court, and in the presence of the skeletons of seven of her massacred innocents.”
She was a clever woman with a highly nervous and excitable organization, and she seems to have no other motive for her crimes than a morbid love of the excitement of murder and a grim delight in witnessing the sufferings of her victims.
Arrested at age 15. Two or three children, a dog, two cats, six or eight birds, and some gold fish, had all fallen victims to her unnatural propensity for destruction before her crime was discovered. One little boy, aged eleven years, testified that one night he awoke by feeling something hurting him, and upon looking up found this delectable young woman, who lived as a servant in the same house, stooping over him with one hand on his mouth, and the other tightly grasping his throat.
Like others of her breed, she was a confirmed predator, addicted to cruelty and death. Making other people die -- and deriving sadistic delight from their torments -- was a pleasure she couldn’t easily do without. (H. Schechter)
Cotton: The court documents from her murder trial suggest an element of real sadism at work. Mary Ann’s neighbour Jane Hedley was one of those who witnessed the excruciating death of Nattrass. Under oath, she told Durham Crown Court: ‘I was very friendly with The Prisoner, I assisted … during the time of the illness. I saw him have fits, he was very twisted up and seemed in great agony. He twisted his toes and his hands and worked them all ways. He drew his legs quite up.’ She describes how he ‘threw himself about’ and how his murderess – presumably in the guise of caring for him – was obliged to restrain him with force. It is clear from Jane Hedley’s account that, by this stage at least, Mary Ann had the confidence to kill right under the noses of the doctors. It is hard not to believe that there was some element of enjoyment at the control she exercised – that she was, in other words, a psychopath. I believe she would have enjoyed holding down Nattrass as he died writhing in agony. [David Wilson (Professor Of Criminology At Birmingham University), “She poisoned 21 people including her own mother, children and husbands. So why has no-one heard of Britain’s FIRST serial killer, Mary Ann Cotton?” Mail Online, Feb. 5, 2012]
Marguerite Léris had a vile disposition and fought constantly with her neighbors. She verbally and physically violent towards her husband and other family members. She had had brutalized her daughter, Marguerite, daily since childhood, once so wounding the child so badly that she was permanently scarred. On one occasion she once pulled out hair and part of the skin of the child’s scalp. She hated her daughter so much that she once asked her husband to take the girl out to the woods and leave her to die. She was likewise violent towards her grandson, Jean-David, who, like little Marguerite, was left scarred by her attacks.
She “laughed aloud at the torments of her victims on her sick beds, this woman could not be responsible for her acts.”
“It is now believed that Mrs. Nason also poisoned her late husband, and that she did some of her crimes simply from love of poisoning.”
1891 –
Mila–
Požarevac, Serbia
A female brigand named Mila is being tried for some of her crimes at Posezarez [Požarevac], Servia. She has been for a number of years a terror to the people of that region, and her crimes and cruelties far exceed those of ordinary brigands in Turkey and Servia. Mila is accused of fourteen murders and numerous robberies, and a peculiarly unfeminine feature of her deeds of blood was that she horribly mutilated her victims. In audacity and cruelty she had no equal among outlaws. She is not good-looking and has a nose like a hawk.
She sexually tortured and murdered 3 orphan girls.
A recent telegram from London states that some shocking revelations have been made in connection with baby-farming at Warasdin, a town 36 miles from Agram, the capital of Croatia (Austria). Several miscreants had been arrested, who, it was ascertained, systematically practised shocking cruelties on children in order to produce various kinds of deformity for the purpose of exciting sympathy of the public. In some cases it was discovered that children were purposely crippled so that they might accompany beggars on their rounds. Children were found whose legs and arms had been deliberately broken while others had had their eyes gouged out so as to make them blind. One unfortunate child was found with its body bent double, and kept in that position by being placed between boards tightly screwed together. Various horrible implements of torture intended to be used for producing deformity in children were also brought to light.
No one could have guessed that during her tenure at a Massachusetts hospital the amiable “Jolly Jane” was morbidly obsessed with autopsies, or that she conducted her own after-hours experiments on patients, deriving sexual satisfaction in their slow, agonizing deaths from poison. (Harold Schechter, Fatal)
The evidence showed that all the husbands were healthy young men when they married. Each in succession suddenly lost his health, complained of terrible pains in all his limbs, violent headaches, loss of appetite and growing weakness. The wife administered arsenic to each of the victims in small quantities, mixing it in meat, soup and various dishes. She watched them one after another literally sinking into the grave, and their sufferings left her unmoved. She calculated how long the poison would take to complete its fatal work, and all four husbands died about a year after she began administering the poison. … Several experts entrusted with the task of examining the prisoner’s mental condition came to the conclusion that she murdered her husbands from sheer delight in homicide.
She got her kicks from strangling children, including her own. Chivalrous lawyers and doctors, with big reputations, protected her from conviction twice, which allowed her to go on murdering children.
Rendell brutally abused Morris’ children, once beating Annie so brutally that she could not walk. Arresting officer Inspector Harry Mann said “she delighted in seeing her victims writhe in agony, and from it derived sexual satisfaction.”
It is said 300 persons have been slain by the “sacrifice sect” within the last six years. “I am the axe woman of the sacrifice sect,” She shouted from her prisoner’s stand, where she is guarded by three deputies. “I killed them all, men, women and babies, and I hugged the babies to my breast. But I am not guilty of murder.”
Enriqueta kidnapped children, provided them to pedophiles and murdered them, making their bloood into “elixirs.” She forced a young girl to eat portions of the body of another child she had witnessed the murder of.
“She killed her first husband,” said Gaudensia, “for spending his money in grog-shops, and because she heard he was mixing with another woman.
“That unfortunate man came home one night, slightly under the influence. She tore his clothes off him, and tied him up. Then she criss-crossed him with the thin side of a razor, and rubbed salt in the wounds.
“She turned him loose, naked, to hop around with pain. She drove a red-hot poker through his skull, which seemed to be carrying it quite far enough. She ended by tying him to his donkey and starting him back for the grog-shop where the other woman could usually be found. She couldn’t read or write so that her method of sending word that she was through with him.
The only motive which the French police now hold in the mysterious poisoning of six persons by Antoinette Scierri, a nurse, is that she liked to see her victims’ death struggles. Although small sums of money were taken in several instances, it is believed that this was not the basic death motive. The nurse made wreaths for the graves of her victims and showed tender care during their last moments.
An avowed predatory misandrist who sought out men, mostly married ones, to seduce and then murder 12 of them.
Hassen, once a famous dancer became a madame for prostitutes, kidnapped, tortured and serially murdered many young women (as well as boys). She was discovered to be a serial killer following the discovery of dismembered body parts of one of her victims. She fed human flesh to her cats. She was convicted and sentenced to death, but due to her powerful political connections she was freed to continue her criminal career. Convicted of new crimes she was sentenced to only 15 years in prison.
Felícitas Sánchez Aguillón or Sánchez Neyra (1890 - June 16, 1941) was a Mexican nurse, midwife, baby farmer and serial killer, active during the 1930s in Mexico City, who killed babies in her care. It is estimated that Felícitasmurdered children in numbers ranging from between 40 and neatly a hundred. Her victims were aged from newborn to three years old. Typically she would poison or strangle the children, according to some reports sometimes she would dismember a child while still living.
Guard at Ravensbruück concentration camp. According to witness testimony she whipped several women to death and in other instances killed women by stomping on them with her steel-studded jackboots, earning her the nickname “The Stomping Mare.” B. was not “just following orders,” rather she was acting to serve her personal sadistic pleasure.
National Socialist Party SS member, Average number of victims, 30 a day, motivated by “sport.” She murdered female inmates in the concentration camp by ordering them to venture into forbidden zones where they would be shot by guards under strict orders to kill all trespassers. G. was not “just following orders,” rather she was acting to serve her personal sadistic pleasure.
177 murders attributed to the cult. “The Calendarists first hit the news columns back in 1950 when their convent’s mother superior, Miriam Soulakiotis (a former factory worker), was arrested on 23 charges that included murder, fraud, embezzlement, abduction and assault. Miss Soulakiotis became known as “The Woman Rasputin.” Sentenced to 16 years, she died in prison in 1954 at the age of 71. The Woman Rasputin preached and practiced religious beatings for her followers as the only means of obtaining salvation. She also duped many of her new recruits into signing over their property to her name since she convinced them this was the best way to get into heaven. Prosecutor Papakarius reported that the abbess amassed a fortune of some $150,000 by embezzling the dowries of Greek women who joined their convent.”
During Tann’s tenure as head of the organization she founded, Tennessee Children’s Home Society, in Memphis, the region had the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. Her practice was to rid herself of those babies put in her charge she deemed unsaleable by leaving them unattended out in the sun until they broiled to death. She and her lover and male sexual deviants she employed would beat and torture children for the perverse sexual thrill of it.
According to one surviving victim, Georgia and her companion would hit the children “on the scalp so no one could see the bruises.” Favored forms of child torture at the Home included tying a rope around a child’s wrists and hang it up on a coat rack and dangling a child from a rope down the laundry chute.
1969 – Susan Atkins (Charles Manson “Family”) – Los Angeles, California
savagely murdered at least 9 persons (and perhaps more than 20 in total), including a pregnant woman
“Wow. What a trip! I thought, ‘To taste death, and yet give life.’ Have you ever tasted blood? It’s warm and sticky and nice.” (V, 400)
“They didn’t even look like people... I didn’t relate to Sharon Tate as being anything but a store mannequin... [Tate] sounded just like an IBM machine... She kept begging and pleading and pleading and begging [for the life of her unborn child], and I got sick of listening to her, so I stabbed her.”
A cellmate testified at trial that Mrs. Wittenmyer told her about poisoning her two husbands. “She said she was going to go through life finding men with money and poisoning them, using the lonely hearts club ads. She said that she enjoyed to see them in pain from the poison,” testified Barbara Quaranto, 46, who was convicted in Chattanooga in the shooting death of her 73-year-old husband. Canadian rancher Henry Joneson said he sent 12 letters and a $1,150 check to Mrs. Wittenmyer before learning last week that the address she had given him was the prison and not the retreat she had told him it was. The Tomahawk, Alberta, man said he answered Mrs. Wittenmyer’s ad in [an] agricultural publication in April that read: “Widow wishes to start new life – will relocate.” When Mrs. Wittenmyer telephoned him after her second poisoning conviction, Johnson said he told her,” … I found out everything and goodbye.” She committed suicide in jail awaiting trial.
11-year-old girl who murdered two boys, 5 and 4, plus several previous attempted murders; “I like to hurt people.”
1980 – Carol Bundy (couple) – Bundy, Carol Mary & Douglas Daniel Clark – Los Angeles, California
Carol Bundy assisted her pervert husband in kidnapping, tourturing and raping young womewn. “Caterine Birnie, the unloved child who rarely smiled, had become a young woman who enjoyed watching other women being killed.” [Carol Anne Davis, Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers, Allison & Bisby, London, 2001, P. 111]
On September 10, 1978, Rhonda Scheffler (age 17) and Kippi Vaught (age 16) were shopping at Country Club Plaza in Sacramento County when Charlene enticed them into their van. Gerald and Charlene raped and further sexually abused the two victims throughout the night in rural Placer County. Evidence showed that Charlene bit the breasts of one victim; and Gerald, the other. The next day, the Gallegos drove back to Sacramento County, where Gerald made Rhonda and Kippi get out of the van and walk across a field to a ditch. He hit the girls with a tire iron and shot them in the head with a 25-caliber pistol. As Gerald was walking back to the van, he saw one of the victims (later revealed to be Kippi Vaught) move; the bullet had only grazed her skull. He returned and shot her three more times in the head, killing her.
Charlene would later tell a cellmate how ecstatic she felt during this kidnap-rape.
With her husband tortured, raped and murdered, by injecting drain cleaner into their blood, an estimated 15 young women.
1985 – Rosemary West – Gloucester, England
With her husband Frederick as her crime partner, Rosemary West she murdered, tortured and sexually abused 10 females aged 8 through 27, including her own daughter and step-daughter.
1986 – Catherine Birnie – Willagee, W. A., Australia
With her husband, David, she murdered 4 women; their fifth escaped, leading to the criminals’ apprehension.
A forensic psychologist’s interview with an unnamed female serial killer offers a rare glimpse into the sadistic obsessions of a repeat murderess.
Pervert, raped and murdered young women, including her own sister
1996 – Michelle Martin – Marcinelle near Charleroi (Hainaut), Belgium
With Marc Dutroux, murdered 6 teenage girls after raping and torturing them. This is the most complicated serial killer case in history, involving a large number of mysterious deaths of witnesses, police and others associated with the case during the course of the investigation as well as political intrigue at the highest levels of the Belgian government.
In mid-90′s Belgium, six young girls were raped and tortured by a wealthy antisocial man named Marc Dutroux. He kept them in the basement of one of his seven homes; his wife, Michelle Martin was aware of her husband’s activities. Two of the victims, 17-year-old An Marchal and 19-year-old Eefje Lambrecks, were drugged and buried alive. Two more, Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, both 8, were starved to death. Dutroux, before going to jail for car theft, gave Martin instructions to feed them, which she disregarded. Another two, Sabine Dardenne, then 12, and Laetitia Delhez, then 14, survived. Both girls testified against Dutroux at his 2004 trial, helping to put him away for life. Another accomplice, Michel Lelièvre, was sentenced to 25 years, and the wife, Martin, to 30. [Nastacia Leshchinskaya, “Survivor Protests Release of Serial Killer’s Ex-Wife & Accomplice,” Crime Library, August 20, 2012]
A qualified dentist, were involved in the spate of ruthless serial killings, Viktoria Tarverdiyeva, 25, and her 13-year-old daughter Anastasiya
This 31-year-old Englishwoman told her friend, “I want my fun. I need you to get my fun.” This fun consisted of finding a male stranger to stab in the heart. Ms. Dennehy was able to, over a period of several weeks, to engage in this form of amusement on five occasions, resulting in three deaths.
