Amelia Dyer
In the 1800s, Amelia Dyer made a living as a “baby farmer.” Parents with unwanted children would drop their kids off at her home and pay her a small fee to adopt them. In exchange, she promised, she’d take good care of their kids.
Instead, Dyer discarded the children, made them overdose on opioids, and hid their bodies. It took 30 horrifying years before anybody figured out her crimes. By the time she was caught, Dyer had murdered an estimated 400 children.
Karla Homolka
Gwen Graham And Cathy Wood
Aileen Wuornos
Lavinia Fisher
America’s first female serial killer was Lavinia Fisher. Between 1818 and 1819, she and her husband John made their living by luring people into their homes and murdering them.
Legend has it that Lavinia would feed their visitors poisoned tea and invite them to lie down when they didn’t feel well. Then, while they rested, her husband John would stab them to death and rob them blind.
Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova
Darya Saltykova, an 18th-century Russian noblewoman, would brutally beat and torture the young girls who worked for her so badly that more than 100 of them died at her hands. Their families cried out for justice, but because they were just peasants and Saltykova was connected with royalty, it took years before anyone even bothered to look into it.
When they finally checked her home, they found 138 of the serfs under her care had died, all under suspicious and brutal circumstances.
Mary Bell
Mary Bell was only 10-years-old when she killed for the first time. She lured a four-year-old boy into an abandoned home and then strangled him to death with her bare hands.
After getting away with his first murder, Bell teamed up with a friend named Norma Bell to kill again. The pair attacked a three-year-old this time; cutting his flesh with scissors, mutilating his penis, and carving an “M” for “Mary” into his stomach.
Myra Hindley
Gesche Gottfried
Rosemary West
Fred and Rosemary West‘s murder spree started when Rosemary lost her temper with her eight-year-old stepdaughter and beat her to death, hiding the body under the family’s porch. After getting her first taste of murder, she developed a taste for sadism.
Afterward, Rosemary started luring women into the house so that she and her husband, Fred, could rape and murder them. They didn’t stop with strangers, either as the pair sexually abused their own children, as well.
Elizabeth Bathory
Elizabeth Bathory has been called the most prolific female killer of all time. This isn’t a wild claim because, between 1585 and 1609, she tortured and murdered an estimated 600 people.
At first, Bathory only murdered peasants, luring them in by hiring them as serving girls in her castle and then beating and torturing them to death. When she started to realize that she was getting away with it, though, she started to lure in some of the lesser gentry, as well.
She’d burn, starve, and mutilate the girls under her care. She’d scald them with tongs, cover them in honey and ants, and even bite the flesh off of their faces before giving them the mercy of death.Wikimedia Commons
Dorothea Puente
Dorothea Puente was known as the “Death House Landlady.” During the 1980s, she would invite tenants to move into her boarding house and would end up giving them a place to rest underneath her backyard.
Puente would load up her tenants up pills and drugs until they overdosed, then suffocate them while they were unconscious and bury them out back. By the time she was caught, Puente had already killed at least nine people.
Leonarda Cianciulli
The so-called “Soap-Maker of Correggio” didn’t just murder three women. She served them to three of her friends.
When Leonarda Cianciulli’s son went off to war, she became convinced that the only way to keep him safe was through sacrifice. And so she lured a woman into her home, drugged her, hacked her body into pieces, and used her remains to make soap and teacakes — which she then served to her friends.
Helene Jegado
Juana Barraza
Between 1998 and 2006, Barraza killed an estimated 40 elderly women. She would trick them into thinking that she was going to help them sign up for welfare programs, and then either bludgeon or strangle them to death. She later explained that she killed the women because they reminded her of her mother.
Genene Jones
She’d killed them, as Jones would later tell the police, because she thought the hospital needed a pediatric intensive care unit and, apparently, that was worth the lives of 46 babies.
Miyuki Ishikawa
While working in a maternity hospital, she became convinced that some of the babies of the poor would be better off if they were never born at all. She started deliberately neglecting children and letting them die, often with the parents’ support. She’d quote them a fee to murder their babies, then tell them how much more it would cost if they tried to raise them alive.
Despite having massacred more than 100 children, Ishikawa was only given four years in prison.
Wikimedia Commons
