When you think about the worst killers in history, you typically don’t think about females murdering. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take much for a female killer to become famous. Women are the mothers and nurturers of humanity so it’s shocking when you hear about a creature who can give life, turns to taking lives.​​ 

#1 Lizzie Borden​​ was so famous that a memorable rhyme was made about her, possibly to teach children how to count to forty-one.​​ 

“Lizzie Borden took an axe

Gave her mother forty whacks

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.”

Lizzie was very involved in church activities​​ but it turns out that Sunday School didn’t protect her from her own rage. After her dad killed her pet​​ pigeons in his barn with a hatchet, she used that same technique on her parents.​​ She​​ gained infamy after being tried and acquitted for the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. The case was a famous case throughout the United States.

#2​​ Dagmar Overbye​​ was working as​​ a professional child caretaker. She provided a place where unwed mothers could drop off their infants to be adopted​​ although they had to pay a fee for the infant to be accepted.​​ It was discovered that she had murdered between 9-25 of​​ her own charges. She strangled them, drowned them or burned them to death in her masonry heater. The corpses were either cremated, buried or hidden in the loft.​​ I guess she thought it was easy to dispose of because newborns are so small.

 

#3 Aileen Carol Wuornos​​ was an American serial killer was also known as the​​ The Florida Highway Killer. She​​ killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 by shooting them at point-blank range. She claimed that each time she killed a man it was because they had tried to rape her, even though she is a prostitute. But in this video below made just before her execution, you can see that she blamed the police for her becoming a killer. She said they used her to kill off bad people.

#4​​ Susan Smith​​ got big in the news when she claimed to have been carjacked by a black man who drove away with her car with her children inside. A nationwide search ensued until a week and half later, she confessed to a horrifying crime. She was in a relationship with a man who didn’t want children ​​ so to make him happy she thought it would be a good idea to just dispose of her kids by rolling her car into the lake with her kids inside. ​​ What a selfish monster!

#5​​ Miyuki Ishikawa​​ was also known as the​​ ‘Demon Midwife’. She encouraged parents to pay her for killing a child they couldn’t pay for. She enlisted the help of the Dr. to draw up false death certificates and her husband to go​​ around asking the parents for large sums of money, telling them that it would be cheaper to pay them instead of raising the child.​​ Through neglect, Miyuki killed somewhere between 103 and 169 infants.​​ ​​ 

#6​​ Dorothea Puente​​ the​​ ‘boarding house killer’​​ was a cold and calculating grandma and​​ convicted American serial killer​​ in my hometown. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered her elderly and mentally disabled boarder before cashing their Social Security checks.​​ She just buried her tenants in her backyard like it was any other day.

#7 Elizabeth Báthory​​ was so famous that she was the lady who inspired much of the lore on vampires.​​ Countess Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian noblewoman and serial who owned land in the Kingdom of Hungary and Transylvania. She became obsessed with her looked and was convinced that bathing in the blood of young maidens. Her obsession allowed her to come up with new ways to squeeze the fresh young blood out of the girls she had kidnapped and murdered. The ‘iron maiden’ was a contraption made to bleed the victim and reserve the blood in a container below.​​