Many believe that female maniacs are a rarity, since supposedly the fair sex is less prone to violence than men. However, in history there are many women who are not inferior to them in cruelty. Nevertheless, there are indeed fewer serial killers among them than among the stronger sex. Probably because this requires planning, and women - emotional creatures and they don't like it very much. However, there are not so few of them. After reading the article, you will see that female maniacs in history are not so rare.

Bella (Belle) Sorenson Gunnes

The first woman we will talk about is Bella Sorenson Gunness. On her account, presumably 42 victims. This is a native of Norway, who moved to the US and married a businessman from Chicago. Bella Sorenson Guinness killed for money and just for fun. Some researchers believe that this woman also killed two of her daughters. She poisoned them in order to get insurance. Officially, the death of Bella's children is considered the result of an illness, however, judging by a number of signs, it could also be caused by poisoning. In addition, Bella Sorenson Guinness is suspected of burning down the family business in order to collect insurance payments. Her husband later died under very strange circumstances. Of course, his wife again received money for this. Perhaps the woman sent her husband to the next world, feeding him special "medicines". Bella subsequently became known as the "black widow".

With the proceeds from the murder of her husband, she wanted to buy a farm, but apparently she did not have enough money. Then the woman began to seduce older and middle-aged men. Bella started a love correspondence with them, got married, and then the husbands died, and the "black widow" received income. A very sophisticated business. According to rumors, 42 bodies are buried in the ground, on sites belonging to Gunness. And the woman earned about 250 thousand dollars from her "business".

However, someone put an end to the unusual "career" of this woman. Her body was found burned, Gunness's head was cut off. Although it still remains open question about whether the corpse really belonged to Belle, or whether the woman again came out dry from the water. Terrifying story, is not it? However, other most violent maniac women cause not less emotion. We will talk about one of them now.

Jane Toppan

Jane is a nurse who killed the weak, and it is known that her father was crazy, and the girl spent her childhood in an orphanage located in Boston. When Jane Toppan grew up, she became physically strong, the future criminal trained as a nurse. During the training, the teachers noticed the girl's unhealthy attraction to photographs. However, Jane managed to get an education and find a job. She began to care for patients who considered her a caring nurse. The woman was even called "jolly Jane." After some time, Toppan realized that bringing patients to the brink of death gives her sexual pleasure. She administered the drug to her victims, then trying to resuscitate them in order to repeat this operation again. Jane often went to bed with the dying. The woman must have molested them while the patients clung to life with all their might! Toppan began her career as an assassin in 1885 and continued her atrocities until she was arrested. The woman was charged with 11 murders. Jane, while in custody, gave shocking testimony. She confessed to killing 31 people. Toppan wanted to become a "record holder", a woman who committed the largest number murders. Jane was declared insane. She spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital for criminals, like many others.

Rosemary West

Our next heroine is Rosemary West. This woman, along with her husband, deceived young naive girls. They picked up future victims on the street, offered them food and housing. Rosemary had 8 children of her own. She made a living as a prostitute and was also a sadist. Her husband Fred was just as perverted. On account of this married couple- 10 murders, among the victims - own daughter Heather. In addition, Rose was found guilty of the death of Charmaine, her stepdaughter. Both Fred and Rose had difficult childhoods and were both sociopaths. Fred hinted that on their account - the death of more than 20 people!

Female maniacs, killers often acted in tandem with their husbands or lovers. You will meet one of them if you read this article to the end.

Eileen Wuornos

Eileen Wuornos is one of the most famous serial killers today. This woman worked as a prostitute, was a lesbian. She knew sin as a child: Eileen became pregnant at the age of 13. After 2 years, she was kicked out of the house. It is known that the woman committed armed robberies. In addition, she managed to marry a 70-year-old elderly man, who later complained that his wife was beating him. Arrests, drunken brawls, and so on helped the old man sue Wuornos to be banned from approaching him.

The woman entered into a lesbian relationship. Her chosen one was a girl named Tyria. In order to feed herself and her, Eileen began to engage in prostitution. She killed 8 clients. Eileen, shortly before her death, swore that she had committed the first murder in self-defense. Unlike many other female killers, Wuornos was not afraid of the sight of blood. She killed her victims with pistol shots. By the way, in 2003 the movie "Monster" was released with Charlize Theron as Eileen. The actress received Golden Globe and Oscar awards for this role.

Andrea Yates

Maniacs of the world, women and men, often suffer from mental disorders. And Andrea Yates probably suffered from schizophrenia. Although she was not officially diagnosed with this diagnosis, the presence of a serious mental disorder in a woman is obvious. Andrea killed 5 of her children by drowning them all in a bathtub. Rusty, her domineering husband, wanted to have many children, while his wife had constant depression which even went as far as suicide attempts. Additional psychological load associated with the upbringing of children, proved fatal.

Her husband knew that Andrea had problems with his head (although he later blamed psychiatrists for everything that happened), so he usually asked someone to stay with the children and with his wife during his absence. But one day the woman was left alone. She took advantage of this to drown her children. Rusty said that he wanted to leave his wife alone for a while so that she would not get too used to helping others. It took Andrea an hour to kill all five children in turn. Then the woman called the rescue service and told about what she had done.

Andrea considered that for her and for the children there would be the best way out their death. The fact is that the woman was a religious fanatic. She called her children "unrighteous" and believed that her own sins would not allow them to grow up as worthy Christians.

Beverly Ellitt

The story of the next woman, Beverly Ellitt, also involves the murder of children. She was nicknamed "the angel of death". The woman was a registered nurse. She killed children by injecting them with insulin or to cause cardiac arrest. In total, this woman has 4 committed murders and 9 more attempts. Moreover, all 13 attempts to kill children occurred in a very short time, within two weeks! The oldest victim, Beverly, was 5 years old, and the youngest was less than two months old. The psychiatrists who studied the woman's case concluded that she suffered from a very unusual mental disorder- Munchausen's syndrome. Her motive for killing and hurting others is to draw attention to herself. Ellitt liked to pretend to be seriously ill as a child. Beverly was sent to a hospital for the criminally insane. The woman was given 13 life sentences. Relatives of the children she killed threaten to kill her if the woman is ever released.

Karla Homolka

Our next heroine is Karla Homolka from Canada, a beautiful blonde who loved Paul Bernardo, a serial killer known as the "Scarborough Rapist". Feelings for a lover inspired to help him in his crimes. Together they committed the kidnapping, rape and murder of 3 young women. And one of them was Carla's sister! The niece begged Homolka to let her go, and she took pity, and even gave her relative a teddy bear. Carla, after her arrest, made a deal with the authorities in order to mitigate the punishment - she spoke about the murders that her husband committed. Paul, however, assured that it was she who killed everyone. The videos found show that at least this woman was not a victim who was forced by her husband to commit criminal acts.

Susan Smith

Susan Smith, unlike many other female killers, was not mentally ill. AT of sound mind she killed two sons, Alex and Michael. The woman tried to make herself mentally ill, assuring that she committed the murders for religious reasons. However, the facts show otherwise. Tom, the woman's lover, left her shortly before the tragedy. After that, Smith brought her children to the river, took off the handbrake of the car and pushed it into the water. The woman stood and watched as the car with her two children plunged into the water, and then called the police and reported that some black man had committed this crime.

Susan claimed that her stepfather raped her as a child. Having matured, the girl began to dream of ideal love, while at the same time experiencing the need for regular sex. Behind bars, she managed to sleep with two guards. One of them gave Susan syphilis.

Diana Downes

As you can see, many female maniacs killed their children. Our next heroine, Diana Downes, is no exception. When Lew, her lover, told her that children were not part of his plans, the woman decided ... to kill her children! Diana had 3 children from a previous marriage - Danny, Cheryl and Christie. In order to get rid of them, she took the children to a desert area. Here, a woman murdered Cheryl, her 7-year-old daughter, in cold blood. She also shot at Danny and Christy, but they managed to survive, although 3-year-old Danny was paralyzed from the waist down, Christy was also partially paralyzed. The latter was able to testify and told the court what her mother had done.

Ludmila Spesivtseva

Our list so far consists only of foreign names. But there are also Russian female killers. One of them is Lyudmila Yakovlevna Spesivtseva. Although she herself did not kill, she actively helped the cannibal Alexander Spesivtsev, her crazy son, do it. For some time, an elderly maniac woman worked as an assistant to a blind lawyer in court. She often brought home photographs dead people and showed them to Alexander. Is it any wonder that he grew up mentally ill, turned into a sociopath? Alexander ended up in a mental hospital, but after a while he was released. He returned to his mother and soon began to kill, and the woman not only did not interfere with him, but even began to help! Lyudmila lured girls to the cannibal, carried the remains of the victims out of the house. One of the victims managed to live long enough to testify (the exhausted child died after a while). The camera forever recorded the horrific words of the girl, who said that Lyudmila fed her and the other captives with the meat of their murdered friend! It is also assumed, although not officially confirmed, that she cooked the meat of the victims and sold it in the market. A family of maniacs killed at least 20 people. However, there are probably even more victims - photographs of minors were found in the Spesivtsevs' apartment, as well as clothes that could belong to 82 people! There is an assumption that not only Lyudmila helped Alexander, but also his sister.

Saltykova Daria Nikolaevna

It turns out that female maniacs in Russia are not a new phenomenon. born in 1730 and died in 1801. The Russian landowner Saltychikha (Daria received such a nickname) went down in history as a sadist and murderer of several dozen serfs subject to her. By the decision of Empress Catherine II and the Senate, she was stripped of her title pillar noblewoman. The woman was sentenced to life imprisonment and placed in a monastery prison, where she died at the age of 71. At the age of 26, Daria became a widow, having received about 600 peasants at her disposal. The investigator in her case, on the basis of Saltykova's house books, compiled a list of 138 serfs, whose fate had to be clarified. 50 people, according to the records, "died of illness", 72 were "missing", and another 16 were considered "gone on the run" or "left to her husband." According to the testimonies of the peasants, 75 people, mainly girls and women, were killed in the villages and the estate of the landowner. Saltykova spent 33 years in prison and died in 1801. She was buried with all her relatives in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, the tombstone has been preserved.

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer

Another example from history is Amelia Elizabeth Dyer. This woman was born in 1837 and executed in 1896. A criminal from England is considered the most massive child murderer in history. At the age of 24, in 1861, the girl married George Thomas, who was 59 years old at the time of the wedding. It is known that the groom during the marriage slowed down 10 years, and the bride added, so that the age difference between them was not so frightening. She committed her crimes in and was by occupation a baby farmer. This woman was hanged for one murder, but she is believed to be responsible for the deaths of other children, numbering perhaps over four hundred.

Dyer's trial began on May 22, 1896. The death sentence was carried out at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896. Last words Amelia were: "I have nothing to say."

Killer women, as you can see, are not such a rare occurrence. Who is to blame for this? Are they just themselves? Probably, our society itself is unhealthy if so many socially dangerous elements continue to appear in it. In no way justifying the criminals themselves, it should be noted that famous female maniacs are phenomena that make you think about a lot.

the most violent women killers in human history

It is believed that the most cruel people These are men, but unfortunately women are no less cruel.
This article shows only the most famous representatives of the "weaker sex". But there remains too much cruelty, which is hushed up.

Violent female killers

The Marquise de Brainvilliers, with the help of poison, got rid of her entire family. She was helped in this by the captain of the cavalry, and part-time alchemist, Godin de Sainte-Croix. It was said that she poisoned her loved ones and poor people whom she helped under the guise of charity in Parisian hospitals. The alchemist betrayed his beloved, and he himself died, presumably all from the same poison.

Delfina and Maria Gonzalez ran a brothel where girls of "easy virtue" were hired with the help of advertisements. prostitutes who could no longer work different reasons they killed. The sisters did not disdain to get rid of clients who exposed large sums. More than 90 bodies were found. Delphine and Maria were assisted by two more sisters, Carmen and Maria Luisa. All the sisters were sentenced to forty years in prison.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
"Red Countess" or "Bloody Lady" is considered one of the most bloodthirsty women in history. She was capricious and did not hide her love for cruelty and sadism. She killed and bathed in the blood of the most beautiful girls that she could find. But this was not the most cruel thing that Elizabeth did ... The Countess showed sadistic sexuality to the already barely living bodies of her victims. The servants said that she really enjoyed the smell of burning flesh. No one has been able to find out the number of victims of the "Red Countess"

Faith Renzi.
Born in 1903 in a wealthy Hungarian family. Vera was married twice and twice her husbands "abandoned" her, she assured all her relatives and friends of this. She had many lovers. She was not whimsical in her choice of men, rich and poor, single and married. This is what ruined her. One day, the wife of one of the missing lovers called the police and pointed to Vera's house. 32 coffins with decomposing bodies were found in the cellar. The worst thing is that, according to Vera, she liked the company of her unfaithful dead lovers. Also, according to Vera, her son Lorenzo, from his first marriage, died because of greed, because, having learned about the coffins in their house, he began to blackmail his mother.

Eileen Wuornos.
Eileen was the child of two underage teenagers whom she never saw. According to some reports, it is alleged that at the age of 13 she gave birth to her own grandfather, for which she was driven away from home. But it has not been proven that it was the grandfather who raped the granddaughter, it was only Eileen's statement.
She broke the law, not caring about remorse, did not shun anything. Once she married an elderly man, but this marriage did not last long - because of Eileen's addiction to violence.
As a result, she switched to women, one of them was Tyra. To support her mistress, Eileen was engaged in prostitution and once "accidentally" killed a client. There were already eight such "accidents" at the time of detention.

Nurse Jane Toppan, nicknamed "Jolly Jane". Mentally unstable, she was still able to find patients who liked her.
Jane was sexually delighted with seeing patients who were between life and death. 31 murders were proven, but Jane spent the rest of her life in a madhouse.

Schizophrenic Andrea Yates claimed that the voice of an angel convinced her that she was a sinner and children could not grow up to be honest people.
She found the best way out of the situation in drowning her own five young children in the bathtub.

Violence - who is to blame?

Now on the Internet there are a lot of articles, various arguments about rape. Everyone was divided into two camps: some believe that the victim is always to blame, others blame the rapist for everything.

We will not really understand here, and there is no point. After all, if you look at least a little, then the victim may actually be not guilty, even despite the fact that she was dressed and how she behaved. After all, not every prostitute can be raped, and, as you know, they do not decorously decorate their bodies with rags.
Basically, it's all about educating a person. A person who is free in his thoughts and views will not go to rape and kill, he simply has nothing to do. It originally included moral qualities. And the victim, good manners, will not walk alone at night, and will not dress too vulgarly to attract attention.

Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova

Oddly enough, but the fair sex is capable of cruelty, and they show aggression not for their own protection, but for pleasure. Who are they - the most cruel women of history? This will be discussed further.

The first place in such a strange and bloody rating is occupied by Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, who had the nickname "Saltychikha". Years of life 1730 - 1801. Daria was widowed early, she was only 26 years old, and about 600 peasant souls already entered into her undivided possession. Seven years of life of those who depended on Saltychikha were filled with horrors, pain and humiliation. She mocked people with particular cruelty and sadism: they poured boiling water over people, flogged them, starved them, drove them naked into the cold, burned their hair on their heads. Daria killed about 139 people, and most of those killed were women, young and old.

Daria's Conclusion

It is not clear what pushed the young girl to such terrible murders. Daria was from the family of a pillar nobleman, who was related to noble people. AT love relationships even the grandfather of the poet Tyutchev was with the girl. True, he took another as his wife, for which he was almost killed by Saltychikha.

The atrocities of Daria Saltykova ended when Catherine II ascended the throne. The ruler used the Saltychikha case as a show trial. Daria was sentenced to death penalty, but then it was replaced by imprisonment in a monastery prison.

Another very cruel lady can be called Antonina Makarovna Makarov. Truth, real name Tony - Panfilov. The school teacher, writing down the children in a journal, confused the girl's middle name with her last name, and so became Antonina Makarova. Years of a woman's life 1921-1979.

Tonya Makarova

At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War Tonya Makarova was 19 years old. She went to the front as a nurse. Antonina miraculously managed to stay alive after the Vyazemsky operation. The girl was captured by the Germans, was able to escape. After long wanderings through the forest, she again fell into the hands of the enemies. As a result, Makarova becomes the executioner of the Lokotovsky district. She will shoot from the machine gun "Maxim" about 1500 Soviet partisans, citing fear for his life. The Germans did not want to "dirty their hands" and decided that a Soviet girl would shoot the partisans.

Partisans and the Red Army captured Lokot in September 1943. But Makarova managed to avoid capture. The fact is that in the summer of 1943 Tonya was sent to the rear hospital of the Germans to be treated for venereal diseases. Later, Makarova ends up in Königsberg, where she takes out a fake nurse's ID and gets a job already in a Soviet hospital.

A veteran of the war, a resident of the Byelorussian SSR, Viktor Ginzburg, is admitted to the hospital where Antonina works. The girl marries him and changes her last name. As soon as the war ended, the young people left for Lepel, Victor's homeland.

Death penalty in 20 years

Due to the fact that Antonina was mistakenly recorded by Makarova, the KGB authorities could not get on her trail. The case helped. Brother Tony in 1976 filled out a questionnaire for traveling abroad, and the real name of the girl “surfaced”. In the summer of 1978, Antonina Makarova was arrested and convicted as a war criminal. She was sentenced to death. It is worth saying that this is the only case in which the main defendant was a female punisher.

When it comes to serial killers, what usually comes to mind is male characters and few can name even a few known female killers. Some of them killed for love, some for money, but most of them were distinguished by unprecedented cruelty, and even madness. Curiously, some of them were subsequently released from punishment.

Elizabeth Bathory

Have you ever heard the phrase "bath in the blood of virgins"? We owe the appearance of this phrase to Countess Elizabeth Bathory. It is assumed that she managed to kill about 650 servants and other young women living nearby. She had at her disposal a special torture chamber built for her by her husband.

Belle Gunness

Belle immigrated from Norway to the United States, where she killed her husband to pay insurance. After that, she began to invite lonely wealthy men to visit her farm. After a fire in 1908, more than forty carelessly hidden graves were discovered on the farm.

Dagmar Overby

Amelia Dyer

AT Victorian England so-called baby farming was practiced, when an orphanage took unwanted children for a small fee and found foster families for them. Amelia Dyer was also engaged in such activities. However she didn't care about looking for babies new family but simply killed them. During interrogation, she told the police: "You can tell mine by the ribbon around their necks." Hanged in 1869.

Ilsa Koch

Ilsa joined Nazi party in 1932 and earned the nickname "Buchenwald Bitch" in a concentration camp where her husband Karl Otto Koch worked as commandant. Ilse liked household items made from the skin of prisoners, she especially preferred lampshades made from tattooed skin. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.

Delphine and Maria de Jesus Gonzalez

These sisters kidnapped girls in the 1950s and 1960s, who were then forced to work in a brothel in central Mexico City. When girls fell ill or became unattractive due to the violent use of drugs, they were killed. The sisters also killed some wealthy clients and babies. Delfina died while serving her sentence, and Maria, after serving several years, was released and disappeared in an unknown direction.

Jane Toppan

Toppan worked as a nurse in New England. She gave patients injections of morphine until they died. During the investigation, she stated that her goal was "to kill more people – helpless people– than any other man or woman that ever lived,” confessing to more than a hundred murders.

Ottilia "Tillie" Klimek

Ottilie Klimek, a Chicago resident, was a fortune teller and had a habit of telling her husbands or neighbors that they were destined to die soon, after which she killed them. Her first husband died of "heart problems" in 1914, and it was only after the death of her third husband and several neighbors that by 1921 the police began to suspect something was wrong.

Juana Barras

Before becoming a killer, Juana Barrasa was engaged in wrestling under the pseudonym "The Silent Lady". When her wrestling career was no longer profitable, Juana began to pretend to be a nurse, hiring and robbing old people. Once a robbery victim laughed at Juana, and since then a bloody revelry has begun. She was accused of 30 murders, but it is possible that in fact there were at least 48 victims.

Janine Ann Jones

Jones worked as a pediatric nurse in Texas and got into the habit of giving children injections of various drugs to show off how deftly she saves them. She was charged with the death of two babies, but her conscience can be up to 60. She was sentenced to a 99-year term in 1985, but in 2018 she may be released due to overcrowding in Texas prisons.

Leonarda Cianciulli

In the 1930s and 1940s, Leonarda Cianciulli killed three women and made soap from their remains and cupcakes for tea from their blood. She believed that human sacrifice could protect her children. Being arrested, she did not express much regret and even directed the investigation, clarifying the details.

Gertrud Baniszewski

In 1965, Baniszewski incited her own and neighborhood children to the continued abuse and subsequent murder of a 16-year-old girl, Sylvia Likens, who had been left in her care. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but petitioned for release in 1985. Claimed that God had forgiven her, and that she managed to find peace in her soul. She died of cancer five years later.

Eileen Wuornos

Eileen worked as a prostitute in Florida in the late 1980s. She robbed her clients, shot at them and took their cars. AT total committed seven murders, becoming the first woman to appear on the FBI reports as Serial killer. She was executed by injection in 2002. Just a year after the execution, the film Monster, based on the story of Wuornos, was released.