Famous women serial killers america

Jane Toppan , a nurse with a private practice, racked up dozens of victims between and her capture in While in police custody, she admitted to being aroused by the act of killing and was eventually found to be insane and not guilty of her crimes. Nannie Doss was a black widow who went through five husbands before being caught and confessing to the murders of four of her husbands, her mother-in-law, her sister, her grandson, and her own mother.

In order to gain access to life insurance money, nursing home proprietor Amy Archer-Gilligan murdered at least five people by poisoning them.

This included her second husband, Michael Gilligan. As for the others, they all lived in her nursing home. She may have killed more people, but that is still unconfirmed. For her crimes , Archer-Gilligan was initially sentenced to death, but ended up in a mental asylum instead. West, along with her husband, was convicted of murdering 10 young women between and Known as the Angel of Death , Gilbert was responsible for three first-degree murders, one second-degree murder, and two additional attempted murders when she was a nurse.

In 59 days, Allitt's killing spree became one of the most notorious in British history. She was convicted of murdering four children, attempting to murder three other children, and causing grievous bodily harm to six more.

She used insulin and other methods to murder these children, who were as young as seven weeks. Marybeth Tinning is responsible for the deaths of as many as eight of her children, all before their fifth birthdays. The killings, which occurred between , were carried out by smothering the children with a pillow.

Tinning was eventually sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. Tinning was granted parole in Overbye murdered as many as 25 children , including her own, during a seven-year killing spree from to She was working as a caretaker at the time, caring for children born outside of wedlock. Born in Norway in , Belle Gunness emigrated to the US, where her husband and several children died under mysterious circumstances.

Several of Gunness's wealthy suitors went missing, and after a fire engulfed her home, authorities found the charred remains of her children and a headless corpse, which was not thought to be that of Gunness. She was officially declared missing in One of the most brutal killers in history, the Russian noble was responsible for torturing and killing over of her serfs, mostly women and young girls.

Homolka wasn't a killer in a mastermind kind of way. Instead, she helped her husband Paul murder and rape at least three women, including her sister. She struck a plea bargain with prosecutors and went to jail on the lesser charge of manslaughter in A prominent figure within the New Orleans social scene, LaLaurie was responsible for the deaths of her Black slaves, who were bound and tortured at her home in Police discovered them when her house on Royal St.

LaLaurie fled to Paris , where she lived the remainder of her life. While she was only convicted on two counts of murder , she was nonetheless executed by hanging. Ballesteros killed her two daughters and her husband , with the first daughter dying in She murdered her other daughter and husband in If that wasn't enough, she attempted to kill her son, as well. Along with her husband David, Catherine Birnie killed four women in the s. The crimes became known as the Moorhouse murders.

Jones, a former pediatric nurse, killed a number of infants and children in her care. While only one murder has been confirmed, the actual number could be as high as She used injections of several drugs to cause the kids to fall gravely ill, and she'd save them to gain praise. The first female serial killer in the US , Lavinia Fisher teamed up with her husband to murder men staying in their Charleston, SC, hotel.

They would then collect whatever cash and goods the guests had on them. A black widow from South Africa , Daisy de Melker married and killed two plumbers to collect their inheritance. Some time into her marriage to a third plumber, she poisoned and killed her son, bringing suspicion from one of the dead men's brothers. Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house for the elderly in Sacramento, CA, for years in the s before it was discovered that she was skimming money from her boarders' benefit checks and burying them in her backyard when they died from what she claimed to be natural causes.

Puente was convicted of killing her tenants and received a life sentence. She died in prison in at age They both worked as nurse's aides at the Alpine Manor nursing home, where they smothered the elderly patients in An Austrian-born black widow , Elfriede Blauensteiner poisoned her victims to collect their inheritance.

She systematically cashed their Social Security checks, and anyone who complained was murdered and buried in her yard. After her trial in , Puente was sentenced to life imprisonment. Bertha Gifford October — August 20, was a farmwife in rural Catawissa, Missouri during the early s who was accused of murdering 17 members of the local community.

Born: October Like many female serial killers, Gifford appeared to be gentle woman who cared for her sick relatives and neighbors. Although she stood trial in , she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to spend her days at Missouri State Hospital, where she died in Cynthia Coffman 4.

Cynthia Coffman. Cynthia Coffman born January 19, is an American woman convicted in the deaths of four women in California. She was convicted along with her boyfriend, James Marlow. Coffman admits to committing the murders, but insists she suffered from battered-woman syndrome. She was sentenced to death and is sitting on death row in California. Born: January 19, age 53 , St. Louis, Missouri, United States. After a failed marriage, Cynthia started seeing criminal James Marlow shortly after his release from jail.

The two married and began using methamphetamine and committing a series of violent crimes together.

From October to November , the couple worked together to kill four women. One of their victims, who had been kidnapped from an urban shopping mall, was found naked and strangled to death with signs of sexual assault.

Cynthia and James were arrested soon after their fourth kill. In July , the two were put on trial, and were then sentenced to death in , making Cynthia the first woman to receive the death penalty in California since In , however, she was convicted of another murder and given life in prison.

She remains on death row to this day. Martha Ann Johnson 4. Martha Ann Johnson. Martha Ann Johnson also known as Martha Ann Bowen born is an American serial killer from Georgia convicted of smothering to death three of her children between and Born: age 59— Martha was convicted of smothering her three children to death between and Investigators determined that the death of each child preceded seven to 10 days of marital problems between Martha and her then-husband Earl Bowen. Martha claims that she did it to punish her husband after getting into confrontations with him, and the murders were grisly in nature.

Martha killed her month-old son James in , her three-month-old daughter Tabitha in , her month-old son Earl Wayne in , and her year-old daughter Jenny in Earl Wayne was found to have ingested rat poison, while Martha killed two of her other children by rolling her pound body on top of them as they slept. She confessed to murdering two of them in , but denied that she had anything to do with the death of the others.

She later retracted her confession in , but was convicted of first-degree murder for three of her four kids and was sentenced to death. Martha is currently housed at Pulaski State Prison in Georgia. Gwendolyn Graham born August 6, and Cathy Wood born March 7, are American serial killers convicted of killing five elderly women in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan in the s. They committed their crimes in the Alpine Manor nursing home, where they both worked as nurse's aides.

Born: August 6, age 51 Graham , March 7, age 53 Wood. Criminal penalty: Life imprisonment Graham , 20 — 40 years imprisonment Wood. In the mids, the two women — like so many of the women on our list — were employed as nurses in a nursing home. In a deviation from the stereotypical norm, the two women murdered the elderly for sexual pleasure. Although they bragged about the murders to their coworkers, no one believed them.

In , Wood reached a plea-bargain for a reduced sentence, while Graham was found guilty of five murders and sentenced to five life sentences.

Wood was sentenced to years and is incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida. Amy Archer-Gilligan. She systematically murdered at least five people by poison; one was her second husband, Michael Gilligan, and the rest were residents of her nursing home.

It is possible that she was involved in more deaths; authorities found 48 deaths total from her nursing homes. She also is suspected of killing neighbors and friends with food or candy she had prepared.

Klimek was found guilty and died in jail in Katherine Knight worked in a slaughterhouse in Australia before she decided to put her skills to use killing and skinning her boyfriend , John Price, in , according to The Guardian. By the time police found what was left of his body, some of his body parts had been prepared to serve to Price's children with vegetables and gravy, and his head appeared to be cooking in a pot for a stew. She was sentenced to life without parole in for the stabbing death of her husband and is still serving time.

Mary Ann Cotton is thought to be the first serial killer to terrorize England. She is suspected of poisoning at least 20 people, including multiple husbands and 11 of her children, among others. She was only convicted of one killing — that of her stepson Charles Edward Cotton — who authorities say died from arsenic poison. Cotton never admitted to any of the murders but was hanged for her crimes in Stacey Castor is another woman who used poison to kill, but she did one thing differently — she tried to blame her daughter for it, according to Syracuse.

After her second husband died of antifreeze poisoning in , she also tried to kill her daughter with a mix of medications. To cover her tracks, she wrote a suicide note from her daughter in which "her daughter" confessed to killing both Castor's first and second husbands. Her daughter survived the ordeal, and Castor was arrested and convicted on charges of first-degree and attempted murder. In she was found dead in her cell of apparent heart disease. In Rita Gluzman was convicted and sentenced to death for killing and dismembering her husband, a renowned cancer researcher, according to The New York Times.

She murdered him with an ax, reportedly after he said he was leaving her for another woman. Gluzman recruited her cousin to help, and the cousin later confessed to helping cut up the body while she cleaned up the blood. They were caught when a police officer saw her cousin trying to dump the body in the Passaic River. Stella Nickell was inspired by the Chicago Tylenol murders , in which someone added cyanide to Tylenol and put them back on store shelves, and decided that was the best way to kill her husband, according to PBS.

She put cyanide in Excedrin capsules , which her husband took. After his death, she put more of the Excedrin cyanide mixture on store shelves, in an attempt to frame her husband's death as an accident, and therefore get her an insurance payout.

Her plan didn't work, and she was convicted of his murder, as well as that of a local woman who bought some of the tampered-with medication and died. Nickell will be up for parole in Amy Archer-Gilligan was a prominent member of the Windsor, Connecticut, community where she also ran a home for the elderly in the early s. Such a facility is expected to have patient deaths, but the residents began noticing that an unusually high number of people seemed to die while staying there: From the years of to , 60 residents died.

An investigation was launched and authorities discovered that she had murdered people by using arsenic or strychnine.

Archer-Gilligan was arrested and indicted for poisoning five people. At the discretion of the state's attorney , however, she was tried for only one of the murders.

She was sentenced to life in prison in and eventually transferred to a mental hospital. She died in at the age of World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. She received a four-year sentence. This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now. Sign up for InsideHook to get our best content delivered to your inbox every weekday. And awesome.

Popular at InsideHook. Chicago Los Angeles New York. The Goods Deals Subscribe Account. By Rebecca Gibian. Jane Toppan at the age of tweny-four. She was a nurse who went on a killing spree that started with her family friends and by the end had thirty-one victims.

Her method was poison through injection and upon confessing, was declared insane and committed. Female Serial Killers Getty Images. Nannie Doss, confessed rat poison slayer of four of her five husbands. Tulsa, Oklahoma: Mrs. Nannie Lanning Morton Doss. Getty Images. More Like This.