The ruthless murder of scores of innocent, helpless children; the sadistic torture of
unsuspecting young women; the brutal abuse of immaciated concentration camp prisoners;
even the grisly collection of the skin of victims.
Believe it or not, each of these horrific and bloodthirsty crimes - and more besides
- were committed by a woman.
The most evil women that ever lived would give the most well-known male killers and
villains a run for their money.
1.
Queen Mary the First of England.
Mary Tudor was the Queen of England from 1553 until her death in 1558, and she was the first
woman to rule England in her own right.
Though her reign was short, it was brutal enough to earn her the ominous nickname of
Bloody Mary.
When Mary took the throne, she immediately turned her attention to reversing the religious
reforms of her father, King Henry the Eighth.
Mary, a staunch Catholic, held a burning hatred for Protestants - perhaps because her father
had split with the Catholic church and became a Protestant in the first place in order to
divorce her mother and marry the second of his 6 wives.
The heresy laws that Queen Mary enacted made it a crime to believe in a different religion
than the Queen.
At the time, heresy was commonly believed to be an infection of the body, so, to prevent
it from spreading to others, convicted heretics were not only killed, but their corpse was
utterly destroyed to ensure that no part of it remained which could be used as a religious
relic.
During her 5 year reign, Queen Mary was personally responsible for more than 300 Protestants
being burned alive at the stake, a brutal, agonizing and very public death.
2.
Aileen Wuornos Aileen Wuornos had a rough life, to say the
least.
Her father was a child molester and sociopath who was killed in prison when she was a child.
When Wuornos became pregnant at the age of 14, she dropped out of school and began working
as a prostitute along Florida’s interstate.
In late 1989 and 1990, Florida authorities discovered the bodies of 7 men strewn along
the highways, each shot to death at close range.
Investigators believed that they had a serial killer on their hands, and they finally caught
a break in the case when items belonging to 2 of the victims turned up at a local pawn
shop.
The fake names the suspect had used when pawning the goods led the police straight to their
killer, and they were shocked to discover that a woman was behind these brutal murders.
Wuornos claimed she had killed the men in self defence, but the police didn’t buy
it - Wuornos was the first American woman to fit the FBI’s profile of a serial killer,
and she was found guilty and sentenced to death for the murders.
She was executed by lethal injection in 2002, after enjoying a single cup of black coffee
for her last meal.
During her time on death row, Wuornos sold the movie rights to her life story, and the
Oscar-winning film Monster is based on her life and crimes.
3.
Amelia Dyer Amelia Dyer trained as a nurse before turning
to baby farming in 1869 after she became a widow.
Baby farming was a common practice in Victorian England - the laws at the time didn’t require
men to support their illegitimate children, so many desperate young women would pay baby
farmers like Dyer to adopt and care for their children.
Unsurprisingly, the children weren’t always given the best care and neglect and abuse
were rampant, but Amelia Dyer was in a league all her own.
Dyer initially let the children in her care die of neglect and starvation, drugging them
to stop them from crying and moaning in pain.
She was caught by the authorities, convicted of neglect and sentenced to 6 months labor,
but upon her release she quickly returned to baby farming - and this time, she had learned
her lesson.
Dyer began moving frequently and using aliases to avoid detection.
She also started murdering the children outright to turn a quicker profit, strangling them
with tape around their necks and disposing of their bodies in the River Thames.
She was finally caught when a body of a child pulled from the river with tape around its
neck was traced back to her.
Though she was only convicted of 1 murder, she likely killed anywhere from 200 to 400
children in total.
She was hanged to death in 1896.
4.
Karla Homolka Karla Homolka was a young veterinary assistant
living near Toronto, Canada when she met the charming and handsome Paul Bernardo.
The two were engaged within months of meeting each other in 1987 when Karla was just 17
years old.
Homolka’s fairy tale romance quickly unravelled - her fiance was not only a suspect in a string
of violent rapes in a nearby town, but he had also become obsessed with Karla’s 15
year old sister Tammy.
Just before Christmas in 1990, Homolka stole powerful tranquilizer drugs from the veterinary
office where she worked, drugged her sister and let Bernardo rape her.
Tammy reacted badly to the drugs, began vomiting and choking, and eventually died of asphyxiation.
Officials and her family all believed that her death was the result of intoxication,
but Bernardo knew otherwise - and he now had a taste for murder.
Over the next 2 years, the pair would stalk a number of women and brutally torture and
murder 2 other young girls before finally being caught - though they had been questioned
by police several times over the same period in connection with the rapes and Tammy’s
death.
Once in custody, Homolka told a harrowing tale of abuse and coercion at the hands of
her husband, and was given a plea deal in return for her cooperation.
Bernardo was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the maximum sentence in
Canada, while Homolka received just 12 years for manslaughter.
After the trial, new video evidence surfaced that clearly showed that Homolka was a willing
participant in the torture and murder of their victims, but by then it was too late to change
her sentence.
Homolka was released in 2005, and Canada’s most prolific female serial killer now lives
in South America with her new husband and children.
5.
Elizabeth Bathory Elizabeth Bathory was born in Hungary in 1560
into a prominent family of nobles.
She married and became a Countess at the age of 15, and she would soon become infamous
across the country for her rumored love of torture and murder.
According to Guinness World Records, Bathory was the world’s most prolific female serial
killer, and her gruesome activities would lead many to consider her one of the first
vampires in recorded history.
Bathory was rumored to have a specially built torture chamber in her castle, and was accused
of mutilating and murdering up to 650 women between 1585 and 1610.
Some of her favorite methods of torture included jamming pins and needles under the nails of
her victims, and smearing women’s naked bodies with honey before tying them up and
letting them be attacked by bees and ants.
After her husband died in the early 1600s, Bathory’s bloodlust apparently got much
worse - she was said to have bitten chunks of flesh off of her living victims, and even
forced some of her victims to cook and eat their own flesh.
Bathory was also rumored to have bathed in - and possibly drank - the blood of her victims,
believing it would keep her youthful.
Her crimes were widely known but largely ignored due to her family’s influence - that is,
until she grew tired of killing peasants and began searching for victims among the daughters
of the nobility.
At that point, the King stepped in and had her arrested and tried for 80 counts of murder.
She escaped execution, but was confined to a single dark room of the castle, where she
survived for 3 years before her death in 1614.
6.
Beverley Allitt Beverley Allitt was working as a pediatric
nurse in Lincolnshire, England in the early 1990s when she committed a string of horrific
crimes that earned her the sinister moniker “The Angel of Death”.
Over the course of 59 days in February and March 1991, Allitt attacked 13 children in
her care, ranging in age from just 2 months up to 11 years old.
When it was available, she would inject the children with large doses of insulin or potassium
to cause cardiac arrest, but if she was unable to secure the drugs, she would resort to smothering
the children with a pillow.
In all, Allitt murdered 4 children and seriously injured 5 others before she was caught.
Hospital staff, suspicious about the unusual number of cardiac deaths in such a short period
in the children’s ward, called in the police, who discovered that Allitt was the only nurse
on duty during each incident.
She was convicted and sentenced to 13 concurrent life sentences, and her judge recommended
that she serve at least 40 years before being eligible for parole - one of the longest recommended
sentences by a trial judge.
Her motives have never been fully explained, though some believe that she suffers from
the controversial psychiatric disorder Munchausen by proxy.
7.
Irma Grese The female guards at Nazi concentration camps
may be less well known than their male counterparts, but they were no less evil.
At least 10 percent of all guards were women, and the worst among them was Irma Grese, known
as the Beautiful Beast of Belsen.
Grese worked as a guard at two of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen.
By the end of her first year at Auschwitz she had risen to the rank of Senior Supervisor
and was the second highest ranking female in the camp, in charge of 30,000 female Jewish
prisoners.
Grese was well known for her brutality and cruelty, and for the heavy boots she wore
and the pistol she carried at all times to facilitate her vicious abuse.
Grese clearly enjoyed inflicting emotional and physical torture on her prisoners, and
her ruthlessness was characterised by her regular sadistic beatings of prisoners with
a special braided whip and her frequent arbitrary shootings of prisoners.
Grese enjoyed personally selecting prisoners for the gas chamber, and she was well known
for setting her trained and half-starved dogs to viciously attack prisoners.
Being a woman did not make her immune to justice - at the end of the war, Grese was sentenced
to death for her crimes alonside her male colleagues, after being convicted of murder
and crimes and atrocities against the laws of humanity.
8.
Ilse Koch The Nazis were so evil that it should come
as no surprise that 2 of the most evil women who ever lived were among their ranks.
Isle Koch, known as the Witch of Buchenwald, was the wife of Karl Koch, the commandant
of the horrific concentration camp Buchenwald from 1937 to 1941.
Koch, drunk on her husband’s absolute power, indulged her sadistic tendencies at the expense
of the prisoners.
The Kochs were known to eat and drink to their hearts’ content, and even built an elaborate
fitness facility using money stolen from the camp’s budget.
They frequently held lavish parties and were even rumored to have hosted orgies for the
camp’s SS officers.
Koch revelled in forcing the weak and emaciated prisoners to endure physically exhausting
activities for her amusement, and she was infamous for the gruesome souvenirs that she
collected - she would reportedly order that prisoners with “interesting” tattoos be
murdered, and that their tattooed skin be turned into artifacts like lampshades and
gloves.
Koch was promoted to Chief Overseer of the female guards at Buchenwald before her husband
was accused of stealing from the SS in 1941.
He was executed by the SS in 1945, and Koch herself would be arrested and tried for her
crimes at Buchenwald in 1947.
She was sentenced life in prison, and committed suicide by hanging at Aichach’s women’s
prison in 1967.
True evil is clearly not just the exclusive purview of men.
Throughout history, some of the most horrific and sadistic crimes have been committed by
the most evil women that ever lived.
If you thought this video was fascinating, be sure and check out our other videos, like
this one called “America’s Most Evil Serial Killer - John Wayne Gacy”, or perhaps you’ll
like this other video instead.