Serial killers are undoubtedly one of our darkest fascinations. With countless TV shows, books, and movies out there revolving around them, it's no secret that serial killers are compelling. However, what a lot of people might not know is that there are many terrifying female serial killers out there - some with astronomically high body counts.
Many of these women have killed their husbands and children. Some committed horrible acts for monetary gain, and others for sexual thrills. Some, when put in positions of authority, or in the position of being caregivers, abused their positions and took the lives of vulnerable people. Some killed the sick, the elderly, and even babies. Take a look at some of history's most disturbed female serial killers below - then check out this list for even more depraved women.
Known as "The Blood Countess" and alleged by some to be a vampire or the origin of certain vampire legends, Countess Elizabeth Bathory was famous for torturing and murdering servant girls and peasants in her Hungarian castle. To keep her happy, her husband allegedly built her a torture chamber where she took the lives of countless young women. With the help of her husband and other servants and companions, she would kidnap peasant girls from neighboring villages and trap them in her castle, where she would sometimes bite chunks out of their bodies, push pins and needles under their fingernails, and drink their blood in the reported belief that it would keep her young. In one case (according to several sources), she even forced a girl to cook and eat part of her own flesh.
As Bathory was a well-connected countess, her crimes were ignored for years. After her husband's passing, her violence only escalated, becoming increasingly sadistic. When Bathory eventually turned her attention from the poor of Hungary to young noblewomen, the king intervened. She and her accomplices were put on trial and convicted of 80 counts of murder in 1611. Bathory was locked in a room in a castle until she perished in 1614.
Vera Renczi was a wealthy and beautiful Romanian woman born in 1903 who killed her husbands and lovers, keeping them in coffins in her basement. After she suspected her first husband of cheating, she poisoned him with arsenic and told everyone that he abandoned her. In truth, his body was in a zinc-lined coffin in her basement. A similar thing happened to her second husband and then to her many boyfriends.
Eventually, police discovered 32 male victims - each laying in a coffin in the basement. Renczi confessed to offing both of her husbands, her son, and the other men (some place her total number at 35). She was given life imprisonment.
The details of Renczi's life and crimes are somewhat contested. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it couldn't be proven that she had murdered 35 people.
In 1984, she was convicted of the murder of Chelsea McClellan and then convicted for the attempted murder of Rolando Santos. She is linked to up to 60 other child murders and was sentenced to life in prison.
Jane Toppan, known as "Jolly Jane," was born in 1857. While working as a nurse, she took the lives of at least 31 patients in the late 1800s. She had a tragic and impoverished childhood under the care of her alcoholic father after her mother passed. As young children, she and her sisters were taken away from their father and sent to the Boston Female Asylum until they were adopted. As an in-demand nurse at several hospitals, she earned a good living but did terrifying things to those under her care.
Toppan would bring patients in and out of consciousness, and end them with morphine or atropine either by accident or because it pleased her. She later said that being in bed with people in their last moments turned her on; however, at the time, no one suspected anything due to her sunny disposition. She killed dozens of people while bustling around smiling, including an entire family that she was sent to take care of. Based on the autopsy of one of these bodies, she was caught as a poisoner in 1901. She confessed to killing between 31 and 100 people, but was declared insane and sent to an insane asylum, where she persished in 1938.
In the 1960s, Myra Hindley and her boyfriend Ian Brady raped and murdered five young people in England. Brady concocted violent and terrifying crimes, which Hindley, who later claimed to be totally under his control, helped to carry out. After witnessing Brady hack up 17-year-old Edward Evans with an ax, Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith ran to the police. He told them what he'd seen, and also that Brady had said that more victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor.
In 1966, the pair was tried and sentenced to life in prison. Hindley then severed all contact with Brady and began a life-long quest to regain her freedom. Of course, no one was ever letting her out of jail, and she passed in 2002.
Julia Fazekas was known in the town of Nagyrev, Hungary, for performing illegal abortions in the early 1910s. Once WWI started, the men were sent off to fight and the town was overrun by POW camps. Reportedly, many of the women began affairs with foreign soldiers. When their husbands returned, so the story goes, many of these women no longer wanted to be married to them. As divorce and abortion were both forbidden in Hungary, Fazekas solved the problem by selling these women poison to feed to their husbands or other people they wanted to get rid of.
Nagyrev became known as the "murder district" by the 1920s, with at least 50 women considered known poisoners. While the actual numbers of casualties are unknown, sources including The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers claim that around 300 people perished due to Fazekas and her wares before authorities put a stop to it.
