Your parents might have told you that monsters don't exist, but serial killers sure do. These
real-life monsters prey on all types of people, and they're not limited to one particular gender.
With that in mind, let's take a look at the most notorious female serial killers of all time.
Nannie Doss was known by nicknames like "the Jolly Black Widow" and "the Giggling Granny."
Her killing spree began in the 1920s and lasted all the way until 1954.
Born in Alabama as Nancy Hazle, she didn't have a great start in life, as she grew up with a man who
was more dictator than father. In fact, he forbade her to even speak to a boy until she turned 21,
so it's hardly surprising that she married a man within five months of meeting him.
That marriage quickly went downhill. Nannie and Charley Braggs had three children in three years,
a time controlled by a manipulative mother-in-law and an abusive, constantly drunk husband. After
the birth of their fourth child, the two middle children died. The official
cause was food poisoning, but Braggs suspected actual poison and took off with their eldest.
In 1943, Doss' newborn granddaughter died mysteriously, and her daughter swore that
she saw her mother stab the baby with a hatpin, though there was never proof. More children and
grandchildren died under mysterious circumstances, and it wasn't until Doss' fifth husband died that
an autopsy was ordered. It turned out that he had a stomach full of arsenic. Doss' estimated
total death toll was 11. She died of leukemia in 1965 in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
The term "baby farmer" might sound like a terrible thing, but it actually wasn't that bad.
It was simply a person who would take in and care for the unwanted children of others. Alas,
many of these early foster care babies died of neglect and abuse. And then there was Amelia Dyer.
Dyer was born in a small English town in 1837, and according to family members,
she was never quite the same after she contracted typhus as a child.
She was violent, and it wasn't long before she became estranged from her family. She
trained as a midwife and a nurse, eventually running a boarding house for pregnant women.
Many people paid for her assistance with the delivery and then left their babies in her care.
On March 30, 1896, a package was fished out of the Thames River. Inside was the body of
a baby girl who'd been strangled with a piece of white tape. The packaging that the baby had
been wrapped in contained some vital clues, including stamps and an address. That pointed
authorities in the direction of Dyer, who was already known for having a suspicious number
of babies die while in her care. She was arrested and hanged, after killing upwards of 300 children.
Life in Japan was difficult in the years following World War II. That was a time that
a midwife named Miyuki Ishikawa decided to take it upon herself to make peoples' lives easier.
Ishikawa worked at a maternity hospital, where she was responsible for the deaths of between
103 and 169 children. Women would give birth, couples would be in a bad financial situation,
and Ishikawa would convince them that it would be cheaper to pay her and her
doctor colleague a decent sum of money rather than take their children home to raise them.
False death certificates were drawn up, and nobody was any the wiser until January 12,
1948. That was when two police officers discovered the remains of five children.
The investigation that followed only led to 70 more bodies. During the trial, the defense
argued that the parents were to blame, as they were the ones who'd abandoned their children.
That line of reasoning actually received support from a significant section of the public. Ishikawa
was handed an eight-year jail sentence, though she ended up appealing to get that cut in half.
Leonarda Cianciulli was born in southern Italy in 1894.
She was well-liked and popular, but she was also incredibly superstitious. At the heart
of her superstition was a fortune teller's prophecy that all of her children would die.
And that almost turned out to be true. Of her 17 pregnancies, she had three miscarriages,
and only four of her children survived. She became convinced that sacrificing others in
a black magic ritual would help preserve her remaining children, so she did just that.
Cianciulli used her position as a shopkeeper and various tall tales to lure her victims in. Once
they were in her shop, she drugged them and then killed them with the help of a trusty ax. She got
rid of some of the body parts by mixing them with a caustic soda and then dumping the buckets of
the remains into the septic tank. And it gets even more macabre. She took her last victim,
boiled that pot an extra long time, added some cologne, and then, as she revealed in her memoir,
"I was able to make some most acceptable creamy soap. I gave bars to neighbors
and acquaintances. That woman was really sweet."
Nursing homes are full of horror stories, and it's been that way from the beginning.
One of the first American nursing homes was the Archer Home for Elderly and Indigent Persons,
situated in the picturesque town of Windsor, Connecticut. It was founded by John and Amy
Archer in 1907, but when John died in 1910, Amy was left with a child and a stack of bills.
Worse still, 48 people died between 1911 and 1916. And not all of those deaths
were due to natural causes. Amy Archer remarried in 1913, and by February 1914,
her new husband was dead, and he'd conveniently left her with a new will and his entire estate.
Residents' family members were getting suspicious as early as 1914.
They went to the Hartford Courant, and when reporters started digging,
they discovered that the causes of the deaths were almost always stomach-related.
Once autopsies were done and arsenic was found in their systems, it became clear what was going on.
Archer, now known as Amy Archer-Gilligan, was found guilty. Her original sentence of
hanging was reduced to life in prison. She killed somewhere between 24 and 48 people,
and she ultimately died at the age of 88 in the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane.
Those who knew Gesche Gottfried called her the "Angel of Bremen," because as far as the
townsfolk knew, she'd faced indescribable hardship. She lost parents, children,
husbands, partners, and friends. But through it all, she nursed them through their illnesses.
It's believed that Gottfried suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
People with this condition cause real or imagined illnesses in those closest to them
so that they can care for them. Gottfried's weapon of choice was a rat poison called
"mouse butter," a spreadable fat laced with arsenic. She started by killing her first
husband and her kids, and then she moved on to neighbors, a landlady, and a maid.
Gottfried was caught when one of her intended victims got suspicious
enough to have a doctor examine the food that she'd prepared for him.
She was arrested and beheaded in 1831, the last person to be publicly executed in Bremen.
Anyone visiting the city can still see its lasting tribute to her: a spit stone in the town
square. It's reserved for Germany's most reviled criminals for passersby to express their disgust.
"That one touched the ground! That one touched the ground!"
On April 28, 1908, Belle Gunness' farmhouse burned down. Despite the best efforts of
a farmhand named Joe Maxson, the fire consumed Gunness and her three children.
But investigators were immediately suspicious, as Gunness' body was missing a head. A former
farmhand named Ray was arrested in connection to the incident. But it wasn't long before
another man named Asle Helgelien showed up at the sheriff's office looking for his brother, who'd
met Gunness through a lonely hearts column, left home to move in with her, and then disappeared.
Helgelien helped search the property after the fire and started to leave
before a nagging feeling pulled him back. When he spoke to Maxson and
learned about a recently dug hog lot, he asked authorities to start digging.
He recognized the first half-rotted face that they uncovered as his brother's.
Authorities pulled so many body parts out of the ground that they eventually stopped counting.
The corpses were unidentifiable, contained traces of strychnine,
and had been partially destroyed with the help of quicklime. It's believed
that Gunness killed over 40 people. The head of the body from the fire was never found,
so even amid questions of whether or not it was actually Gunness, the farmhand was
found guilty of arson and died in prison. What happened to Gunness is anyone's guess.
In 2017, a nurse named Genene Jones was indicted on murder charges. The victim was two-year-old
Rosemary Vega, who had died on September 16, 1981. This indictment came on the heels of another one,
for the death of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer. Jones had been working at the
pediatric intensive care unit in a Texas medical center. When she was brought up on these charges,
she was already serving a 99-year sentence for the 1984 death of a 15-month-old girl.
Jones first went on trial in the 80s, and even decades later,
authorities aren't sure how many children she killed, but they believe that it's as high as
60. She injected children under her care with toxic levels of various substances,
sometimes in the same room as concerned parents watching over.
Tracking down victims proved difficult, as many of the hospital records had since been destroyed.
But when prosecutors reopened the case in 2017, they made it clear they were out for justice,
and since there was no statute of limitations on murder cases in Texas, they could keep digging.
The impending possibility of Jones' release from jail kickstarted the additional investigation,
and in 2020, she pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence.
"For her to decide on her watch who lived and who died is nothing short of evil."
In 1908, Dr. Linda Hazzard wrote and self-published a book called Fasting
for the Cure of Disease. She advocated the idea that in order to be truly healthy,
you needed to let the digestive system rest through periods of fasting that
would last for days. She had no real formal training and no medical degree,
but she was still an officially licensed "fasting specialist" in Washington state.
She opened the Hazzard's Institute of Natural Therapies, which attracted a wide
range of patients. The treatments were harsh. In addition to required fasting, there were enemas
that lasted for hours and so-called "massages" that patients reported were more like beatings.
Authorities were alerted to what was going on when the family and friends of sisters Claire
and Dorothea Williamson became concerned after not hearing from the girls after they set off
for the institute. Hazzard was arrested, and it was estimated that her medical "treatments" had
killed at least 12 people. She served only two years in prison before being released,
setting up another school in New Zealand, and finally dying from prolonged fasting of her own.
Helene Jegado is officially connected to only three murders, but it's thought that the number
of her victims could run into the 30s. She was executed in 1852 after decades of killing.
Part of the reason she got away with it for so long was that her method of choice, poisoning,
could be easily covered up during cholera outbreaks.
Her methods were simple: she posed as a domestic servant and then poisoned those who employed her.
And it wasn't just her employers. She also killed her sister, and when she returned to
her hometown to bury her, she killed her aunt and two others while she was there.
Jegado also regularly stole from those whom she worked for, but in 1841,
she seemed to have a change of heart. She dumped her supply of arsenic, and it was
another eight years before she started killing again. After moving on to another employer,
she came to the end of her reign of terror. After a very suspicious outburst in which
she proclaimed her innocence, some of the bodies she'd left behind her were exhumed.
Arsenic was found, and she ended up at the guillotine, where she was executed in 1852.
"'Guillotine'? Sounds French."
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