Nearly all of history's most notorious serial killers are men, but with their feminine charms the fairer sex can be just as deadly as their male counterparts.
We tend to see men as more likely serial killers, and, according to The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, only 16 percent are female. However, there is a long history of women serial killers, though they are more likely to murder for material gain than for pleasure, and their methods are generally more covert.
As the following examples reveal, not only is the female of the species just as deadly, but they are also often far more intelligent and creative in their dreadful endeavors.
1. Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (1560-1614)
The "Blood Countess" was a noblewoman in the Kingdom of Hungary who married the Count Nadasdy and managed his estates while he was at war and after his death in 1604. Despite a reputation for helping destitute women, a local Lutheran priest implicated her in the disappearance of local girls in 1609, and decades of murder were revealed. Alongside four collaborators, Báthory had lured peasant girls and lesser ladies with a promise of work or etiquette lessons. On arrival, they were beaten, burned, frozen, and starved to death. The Countess was sentenced to solitary confinement, though she only lived 5 years in walled-up rooms in her home, Csetje Castle. Stories spread that she'd bathed in her victims' blood to maintain her beauty, though historians argue she was killed by courtly conspiracy.
2. Lavinia Fisher (1792–1820)
Lavinia Fisher and her husband John were highwaymen gang members in Charleston, South Carolina, where they ran the Six Mile Wayfarer House. They welcomed travellers before questioning, drugging, and robbing them. Depending on the account, they stabbed the men to death or dropped them into pits beneath collapsing beds. Eventually, a vigilante gang spurred local authorities to act, and the couple were hanged for robbery. As the USA's first female serial killer, Lavinia was said to have crushed men's heads with her legs and shouted at her execution, "If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me, and I'll carry it!"
3. Amelia Dyer (1837-1896)
Amelia Dyer was born in England in 1838 and trained as a nurse before becoming a 'baby farmer' wet-nurse for abandoned infants. By allowing her charges to die of starvation, Dyer was able to boost her income, but the high number of deaths led to charges and time served for neglect. She soon returned to baby farming, though her crimes were soon unearthed in the form of several hundred infants' remains. The "Reading Baby Farmer" is thus one of history's most prolific serial killers, though Dyer was tried and hanged in 1896 for only one proven murder.
4. Maria Swanenburg (1839-1915)
Maria Swanenburg was a Dutch mother of seven known as "Good Mee" for the care she provided to the sick in her poor neighborhood. However, between 1880 and 1883, she was responsible for an outbreak of arsenic poisoning. Authorities eventually caught "Good Mee" being anything but good while attempting to poison the Frankhuizen family. She had apparently started by poisoning her own parents before attempting to kill at least 102 people for their inheritances and insurance. Swanenburg was jailed for life in 1885 for the resulting deaths of 27 people and suffering of 45 who survived with health complications.
5. Jane Toppan (1857–1938)
Toppan was a Boston nurse who tested opiates on and killed patients before being dismissed for recklessness. As a private nurse, she killed her landlords, foster sister, and elderly patient Alden Davis, whose wife and daughters she also poisoned. Toppan then courted and poisoned her late sister's husband and killed his sister. In 1901, her crimes were revealed when the Davises ordered toxicology reports, and she confessed to thirty-one murders – describing the thrill of holding people as they died. She'd hoped "to kill more people – helpless people – than any other man or woman who ever lived." Toppan was found not guilty due to insanity, and "Jolly Jane" died in Taunton Insane Hospital.
