Do you think serial killers can only be men? Well, you are wrong, pal! Here you can check out the 10 Most Famous Female Serial killers.
Although male serial murderers receive greater attention, they do not have a monopoly in the field. Female Serial Killers are far less prevalent than their male counterparts, yet history is filled with them. Some of the Stone-cold ladies who committed terrible killings are among the most well-known examples of serial killers.
Top 10 Most Famous Female Serial Killers
In this article, we’ve put together the 10 most famous women serial killers of all time.
1. Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos is one of the most well-known names in modern true crime. Aileen was a sex worker who was found guilty of killing six men between 1989 and 1990. Wuornos, who was found guilty, claimed that the acts were committed in self-defense after the men raped or battered her, however, she later denied that claim.
Aileen was condemned to death and died in 2002 from a lethal injection. Her story became well-known in pop culture after it was adapted into the film Monster, in which Charlize Theron played the killer.
2. Amelia Dyer
Amelia Dyer began her career as a nurse and midwife before becoming a baby farmer and serial killer. She was active in the mid-to-late 1800s in the United Kingdom.
In the Victorian era, baby farming was a successful business. ‘Carers’ would adopt abandoned children under the guise of looking after them for a fee, but in reality abuse and murder them.
Dyer began by taking in unwanted newborns for a fee. Dyer had intended to starve and mistreat the child to death at first. However, she soon shifted her focus to faster killings, which allowed her to generate even more money. Dyer dodged the authorities for years.
She pleaded guilty to only one murder, but based on timeframes and years of activity, she most likely killed 200-400 children. In 1896, she was hanged.
3. Amy Archer Gilligan
In the early 1900s, Amy managed a nursing home in Connecticut. Authorities learned that at least 48 people died while she was caring for them and that many of the patients had chosen her as the beneficiary of their insurance policies.
Gilligan murdered her many victims with arsenic, yet she was only charged with one homicide. She was sentenced to prison in 1917, although she was later sent to a mental institution. At the age of 89, she died in 1962.
The case received a lot of attention at the time, and it was used as inspiration for the play Arsenic and Old Lace, which was eventually made into a film. Some have even suggested that hers was the country’s first for-profit nursing facility.
4. Belle Gunness
Belle Gunness, also known as the Mistress of Murder Farms, was a ruthless murderer who is suspected of killing over 40 people across Illinois and Indiana, including her husbands and children. Countless suitors are thought to have been persuaded and subsequently slain by the ruthless killer. A decapitated body was discovered in her burning residence and was assumed to be hers.
5. Dorothea Puente
Puente’s killing spree began in 1982, when she began renting out her apartment in Sacramento, California. She was known as the Death House Landlady.
Puente would take in old folks and occasionally drug addicts, sleep them off, and then suffocate them or poison them. She’d cash their social security checks and keep the money after that.
After a local handicapped man went missing, police were notified of the residence. Puente was charged with nine charges after they discovered seven dead on the premises.
She was given a life sentence, but she died at the Central California Women’s Facility at the age of 82.
6. Juana Barraza
She was nicknamed “La Mataviejitas,” or “the Old Lady Killer,” and was sentenced to 759 years in prison for 11 charges of murder. They discovered numerous elderly women strangled in Mexico City in the early 2000s and discovered they were Juana’s victims.
She pretended to be a government employee and knocked on their doors. Barraza would assault and strangle her victims with phone lines or garments once she had acquired their trust.
Her acts, according to experts, were the result of her drunken mother, who sold her to a man for three beers. She was molested by the same man when she was just 13 years old.
7. Judy Buenoano
Known as the Black Widow, Judy was a ruthless serial killer who murdered her husband, son, and lover for over 12 years.
Buenoano married her husband, James Goodyear, in 1963. Buenoano slowly placed arsenic into Goodyear’s meals for the following eight years, until the poison wore him down. Buenoano was able to obtain a hefty insurance settlement after he died in 1971.
She met a new boyfriend, Bobby Morris, the next year. Morris began to exhibit the same symptoms as Goodyear after taking out a succession of life insurance policies on him. He suffered the same fate in 1977.
The wicked woman finally performed the same thing to her kid, Michael, in 1980. She drowned her partly disabled kid. In 1998, she was condemned to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair, becoming the first woman to be executed in the state in 150 years.
8. K.D. Kempamma
This was the first case of serial killing by a woman in modern India, and it shook the country. In 1999, she committed her first murder, the first in a series of poisonings. She would deceive naive temple visitors by informing them about a specific puja she knew how to do that would solve their problems.
She would tell women to meet her in a deserted location, decked up in all their beautiful jewelry, and then offer them cyanide-laced food or drink. She would seize the victims’ jewelry and flee when they died of poisoning. In 2008, Kempamma was caught. In 2021, a Kannada film based on her deadly exploits, “Cyanide Mallika,” was released.
9. Myra Hindley
During the 1960s, Myra killed five children in England with her partner, Ian Brady. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley abducted and murdered five children or teens between 1963 and 1965, stabbing or strangling them and dumping their remains on the Manchester moors. The killers would return to the graveyards regularly to pose for pictures. The victims might also have been raped by these two killers.
In 1966, they went on trial and pleaded not guilty to three of the five killings. Brady was found guilty of three murders and Hindley of two murders, and both were sentenced to life in prison.
10. Phoolan Devi
Phoolan Devi, nicknamed “The Bandit Queen” in the film of the same name, provides an intriguing example of serial killings. She decided to get vengeance on the people who had harmed her by murdering them. This includes her ex-husband, who mistreated her daily.
Following that, the Behmai episode occurred, in which Phoolan Devi rounded up the Behmai village’s upper-caste Thakur males. She lined them up and commanded her gang to open fire on them in one of the most heinous atrocities ever committed. The aim was to teach a lesson to the Thakur goons who had kidnapped and murdered her partner and mistreated her.
She eventually surrendered in 1983 and was assassinated in 2001 in retaliation for the men killed in the Behmai episode. The oppressed castes hailed her as a revolutionary, seeing her as a symbol of vengeance.
Final Words
Female serial killers are commonly referred to as “silent” killers since they do not butcher or torture their victims. In half of all cases, poison and suffocation are favored over obvious blades and weapons. They also kill at home or at work, which receives less attention than men’s wild, far-flung killing sprees.
This was the list of the Top 10 most infamous female serial killers. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
