Serial killers are evil enigmas of society that we cannot help but be intrigued by. What is it about these creatures that make us want to know everything we can about them? Is it all of those gruesome facts that we wish we could forget? Is it the ghastly images that makes us confront the uncomfortable fact that monsters don’t just exist in stories? Is it the unsettling realization that we may have more in common with these abnormal individuals than we would care to admit? The worldwide sensation that started with Jack the Ripper’s ability to evade capture has since disgusted society for centuries. Whether it is human’s macabre attraction to the deviant or the unsettling realization that anyone at any time could be a serial killer hiding in plain sight we just can’t seem to know enough, but are we really learning how vastly diverse killers are? Where this fascination stems from may be unknown, but what is apparent is the image of what we think we should be afraid of. Whether it is hidden by masks like the distinctive face paint John Wayne Gacy used to fool his neighbors (and future victims) or the blank stare of simplicity Ed Gein had that seemed to fool any suspects, the assumed image of a serial killer in American culture is that of a white middle-aged male. But is this an accurate picture of evil? This presumed image is supported by statistics, as sixty percent of serial killers fit that description and of all the known serial killers in the world over ninety-two percent are male, but what about the other percentage? What this assumed image does is make humanity overlook the existence of women who kill while making that phenomenon even more improbable in the minds of the public. People tend to look at the creepy loner next door or the angry narcissus who views their partners as objects when looking for evil but what about the outwardly normal mother who works hard to raise her children or the sweet nurse who devoted her life to providing care for those in need? The most frightening fact about serial killers is that they come in all ethnicities, work in every profession, live in all areas and can be any gender. Even though they are a rarity amongst rarities as they are a minute percent of an already small fraction of people, they still are out there and are just as lethal as their male counterparts. Male serial killers have always gotten attention while female ones tend not to be as famous and that is an oversight that is just as dangerous as these women are themselves. We cannot begin to understand these enigmas if we do not learn about them first. On this list there are femme fatales, black widows, women who aided men in their crimes and women who preyed on children; all of which span the wide variety of female killers while not even beginning to scratch the surface of this diverse topic.
Not all murderers kill for complicated or hard to fathom reasons, some do it for pure and simple profit. This was true of Dorothea Puente; an elderly career criminal who would steal the pension checks of her tenants before ultimately killing them. Her past was very unique and had a lot of tragic moments that would instill within her a capacity to do whatever was necessary to survive. She was born January ninth 1929 in Redlands California as the daughter of two cotton pickers. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight years old and her mother died a year later in a tragic motorcycle accident. Dorothea went to live in an orphanage until she moved in with relatives. She would marry Fred McFaul, a solider returning from World War Two at the tender age of sixteen. The couple would have two daughters, one of which she sent to live with relatives and the other would be put up for adoption. When Dorothea became pregnant for the third time she was unable to carry the baby to its due date and Fred would leave her because of the disappointment he felt in his wife. To avoid fake sympathy and to help her cope with the abandonment by her husband, she would tell everyone that he had died after suffering a severe heart attack. It was around this time she began forging checks, a practice that would land her in prison. Once released from jail, she became pregnant again and would place that child up for adoption as well.
In 1952, she would marry Axel Johanson, their marriage was turbulent to say the least but they would last for a surprising fourteen years. Eight years into the marriage she was arrested and sentenced to ninety days in prison for owning and managing a brothel, and her career of crime would start. After being released she would end up back in jail for another ninety days for vagrancy. Once that sentence was completed she would begin work as a nurse’s aide and manager of a boarding house. In 1966 she divorced Axel and married Roberto Puente, a man who was nineteen years younger than her. The marriage to Axel would last only two years. In 1976 she would marry Pedro Montalvo, this marriage would only last a few months as he was a violent alcoholic. Soon after the divorce the newly single Dorothea would begin talking to older men and stealing their pension money. As with her first endeavor into forgery she would be caught and found guilty, this time it was for thirty-four counts of treasury fraud. While on probation, an old friend and former business partner sixty-one year old Ruth Monroe would move in. Ruth died shortly after of an overdose of codeine and paracetamol. Dorothea would explain that her roommate was extremely depressed about her late husband and simply could no longer live with the emptiness. The police believed the seemingly sweet elderly woman and Ruth’s death would be labeled as a suicide.
Police would return just weeks later in response to allegations of thievery. Seventy-four year old Malcolm McKenzie told police that she drugged him and stole his money, she would be found guilty and sentenced to five years in jail. While serving her sentence, she began writing seventy-seven year old retiree Everson Gilmouth. Dorothea served three years of her sentence and moved in with Everson after her release. The two became so close that opened a joint banking account and they began to plan a wedding. In November of 1985 she hired Ismael Florez to install paneling for her building, she paid him eight hundred dollars and a pickup truck that she claimed belonged to her boyfriend who no longer needed it. In addition to the paneling, she had him build her a box (six feet by three feet by two feet) for her books and other various items she wanted to place in storage. On the way to the storage unit she had him pull over and dump the box into the river. The box would be discovered by a fisherman on January first of the next year. Police would open the box to discover the decomposing body of an elderly man; it would take authorities three years to identify who he was. Within those three years, she collected his pension checks and wrote letters to his family members so no one would suspect he was dead. To further add to her income, she would collect the mail including checks of her tenants and disturbed what was essentially an allowance of their own money. Authorities would catch on and demand she stop interfering with their mail.
Everyone around her knew she was a thief, but suspicions of more deadly criminal activity would be raised as one of the men she would pay to do odd jobs around her building disappeared. He was a homeless man known only as chief, and she hired him to complete physical tasks like digging holes in the basement and covering them with concreate days later. On November eleventh 1988, police came to the boarding house to question her about the disappearance of one of her tenants, Alvaro Montoya. While they were questioning her they discovered the body of seventy-eight year old Leona Carpenter and another eight bodies. Dorothea was officially charged with nine murders. The prosecution argued that she would drug her victims with sleeping pills to make them unconscious so she could strangle them easier and after they were dead she would take as much of their money as she could get. To get rid of the bodies she would pay people like chief to bury them in various places. The jury deliberated for a little over a month before finding her guilty of three murders; she would receive two life sentences as they simply could not bring themselves to give her the death penalty. The entire time she would spend behind bars she would maintain her innocence and claim they all died of “natural causes”. Dorothea died on March twenty-seventh 2011 of natural causes at the age of eighty-two. Her story would inspire books and even an episode of the popular television show Deadly Women. Dorothea would also use her fame and elderly demeanor to get a book of recipes entitled Cooking with a Serial Killer published.
Like so many women throughout history who kill, Lydia chose poison as her means of choice to take the lives of her husbands and unsuspecting children. Her deplorable actions are almost incomprehensible for “normal” people to fathom. As little as eight people and as high as twelve would die by her hands and after her arrest she would claim she put all of them “out of their misery”. Lydia was born in 1824 in Burlington New Jersey, a small suburb of Philadelphia, and her childhood gave almost no reason for people to suspect that she would in fact turn out to be a monster. There is very little in her past that was different from any other child, except she was tragically orphaned at the age of nine and had to live with her uncle. As a teenager, she was a very beautiful and over all a very well-adjusted young woman. Sherman would meet her first husband at the local Methodist church while doing volunteer work. His name was Edward Struck and he was in fact “struck” by her beauty. The pair were very miss matched as he was twenty years her senior and the father of six children, but they overlooked these facts and were married. The couple seemed to have a relatively functional relationship up until the time his career changed his life. Edward was a police officer and one day while on the job he failed to respond to a disturbance at the local mall. Many people think he intentionally failed to respond out of fear, but there is no evidence to support this claim. This failure to act would cause him to be distant from his wife and to start drinking heavily. The alcohol abuse was intolerable for Lydia who chose to add arsenic to one of his many drinks. In later interviews she would say that she poisoned him to “put him out of the way, as he would never be any good again”.
Sadly Edward’s murder was just the beginning of her depravity; next to suffer were her six step children. Lydia would kill three at a time, and then after getting a job as a nurse months later she would kill the remanding three one by one. They all died by means of ingesting rat poison and afterwards she collected insurance money for their untimely deaths. What may be hard for people today to understand is how no one found six dead children odd and she went unsuspected, well the simplest reason is at this time in history infant mortality rates were very high so children dying was not unusual. Her next husband Dennis Hurlburt was a very wealthy farmer whose estate was valued at 30,000 dollars which is worth roughly 500,000 dollars in today’s market. The two were married in 1868 and by 1870 he was dead and she went through all of the estate money she received. In April of that year, she got a job as a maid for a widower Horatio Sherman and his two children. Horatio had an infant son and a fourteen year old daughter that he entrusted Lydia to provide care for. The two grew very close and were soon married. It was not too long before her old habits resurfaced and she poisoned his two children with arsenic. In both cases the children came down with an illness beforehand and Lydia viewed them as weak and chose to take them out of their misery. The son came down with a crippling disease and the daughter simply had a common cold, but that seemed to be all the motivation Lydia needed. Horatio was grief ridden and turned to alcohol to help him numb the pain of losing his two children so suddenly. On May twelfth 1871, while in a drunken state, Horatio would be killed after ingesting a cup of hot chocolate mixed with rat poison. Unlike any of the previous murders there is some slight evidence that this may have been an accident and he may have unintentionally placed the poison in his drink. Lydia would argue that she kept the household poison next to the hot chocolate mix and because he was intoxicated (and had been that entire week) he could not tell the difference. Given her track record and the fact that he said to her that he wished his son would no longer be in pain directly before the murder makes most doubt this story. Fortunately his doctor would find the death odd and ordered a second and third autopsy and they found poison in his system. With this new evidence police ordered that the Sherman children and her ex-husband Hurlburt’s bodies be exhumed. With all of this overwhelming evidence Lydia confessed to all the murders.
Lydia was found guilty of second degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. She managed to escape jail on June fifth 1877 but was caught soon after while trying to use a second fake name while checking into a motel. She died of cancer on May sixteenth 1878 at the age of fifty one. With the amount of victims she had, Lydia Sherman was one of the most (for lack of a better word) successful murders, male or female, of the nineteenth century. She created a legacy of cold hearted crimes that to this very day sickened the world.
The most common type of female killer is one that is usually referred to as a “black widow” as she kills her husband(s). This title is very appropriate for Nancy Hazel, or as she is more commonly known Nannie Doss. She was a woman who from early age read romance novels and fantasized about a perfect man. This search for a dream would be a nightmare for four of her five husbands.
Nancy was born on November fourth 1904 in the small town of Blue Mountain Alabama. Her childhood was not easy as her abusive alcoholic father would constantly take her out of school to help support the family. This instability caused her to become depressed at a very early age. When she was seven, things got even worse as she suffered a terrible accident. A train she was traveling on stopped suddenly causing her to violently bang her head against a steel pole. The accident would give her chronic headaches, make her black out for periods at a time and make the depression she already suffered from even worse. As an adult she would blame her murders on this unornate accident. As a teenager her father would make his daughters dress “modestly” to avoid getting molested by boys, sadly these measures failed to keep any of them safe. It was around this time she started reading her mother’s romance novels and began to dream of her perfect husband. At the tender of sixteen, and after only four months of dating, she would marry Charlie Braggs. Braggs was far from a dream husband; he was an alcoholic who constantly cheated on her. This treatment would cause her to drink and smoke heavily. Despite their marital problems, between 1923 and 1927 the couple had four daughters. Tragedy would strike the family as the two middle girls died suddenly of what most people thought was simple food poisoning. Braggs felt that his wife was to blame so he took his eldest girl Melvina and left. A year later the daughter would return but Charlie would not; for the rest of his life he lived in fear of Nancy.
After the divorce Nancy turned to a lonely hearts service to find another husband. The search would bring her Robert Franklin Harrelson; a man who presented himself to be everything she dreamed of. They began their romance innocently enough by sending each other tokens of affection through the mail. He would send beautiful poetry and in return she sent him delicious baked goods. Doss quickly became overjoyed thinking she found the man of her dreams and the two were married. Sadly he was not the sensitive starry-eyed romantic he claimed to be. Harrelson was in fact an alcoholic with a criminal record for assault. The night Japan surrendered from World War Two, Robert began to drink heavily to celebrate. That night he raped his wife, and that was Nancy’s breaking point. She found a jug of corn whiskey and laced it with rat poisoning. In total the marriage lasted sixteen years.
It was not long after Harrelson was buried that Nancy’s pregnant daughter Melvina went into labor. Nancy joined the rest of the family at the hospital and waited for her second grandson to be born. Exhausted from the difficult childbirth, the new mother took a well-deserved nap. Once Melvina woke from her rest she started to recall waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her mother stab the newborn baby with a large hat pin. After asking everyone if they saw anything, the doctor informed her that the child was indeed dead but they could not figure out why he had died. The stress of losing the child caused problems in Mevina’s marriage and she left her husband. Newly single Melvina started dating a solider that Nancy did not approve of. This caused terrible fights between the two. After a particularly big fight, Nancy strangled Melvina’s eldest son Robert. The death would be ruled asphyxiation by unknown causes and Doss would receive five hundred dollars from a life insurance policy she took out on both her grandchildren months earlier.
As soon as the insurance money dried up Nancy returned to the lonely hearts service. This time she met Arlie Lanning, and after only three days the two were married. Just like her previous husbands he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. Late one evening he died in his sleep of what was reported to be heart failure. Soon after Arlie’s death, the couple’s house burned down. There is no evidence she was to blame, but most people believe she was the arsonist. Just like after her grandchildren’s deaths, she received life insurance money after Lanning died. After the fire she poisoned her mother in law and decided to move in with her ill disabled sister. It was not long before she poisoned her sister too. Nancy joined the Diamond Circle Club in hopes to find another husband. It was not long before she married her fourth husband Richard Morton. Doss moved her mother into the newlywed’s home and three months later he too died of food poisoning.
Nancy’s fifth husband, Samuel Doss, was nothing like the other men she had been married to. He was a church going man who did not drink or cheat. The only problem with Samuel was he did not approve of how many times his wife had been married or her affection for cheap romance novels. After three months of marriage he was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with a severe digestive tract infection. After he was released, Nancy took him home and finished the job hoping to collect the two life insurance policies she took out on him. Fortunately, a suspicious doctor ordered an extensive autopsy and discovered large amounts of arsenic in his system. Nancy was arrested and soon confessed to the crime as well as the murders of her other husbands, mother, sister, grandson Robert (but not the new born baby) and mother in law. News of the merciless murders gained Nancy a lot of popularity in the press. The world was fascinated by her story but was also taken back by her overly happy demeanor, thus earning her the nickname “The Grinning Grandma”. The prosecution did not push for the death penalty since she was a woman so she instead received a life sentence. Nancy died in an Oklahoma prison at the age of fifty-nine from leukemia.
A perfect storm is a cliché term that has been used repeatedly to describe the phenomena when two people meet and complement each other’s darkest desires. Sadly in this case the cliché is accurate. When a seventeen year old Karla Homolka met the handsome (six year) older Paul Bernardo, a perfect storm of deviant lust occurred that would soon sicken the world. Their tainted love would mean savage rape, brutal torture and premature death to several young innocent girls including Karla’s own sister. These very incomprehensible actions were committed by a couple who to outsiders looking in had it all they were young, in love, intelligent, wealthy, successful and very attractive. The world would learn however, all of that beauty hid an ugly secret.
Karla was born May fourth 1970 in the small Canadian town of St. Catherines, a beautiful metropolis that is nicknamed the “Golden City”. She grew up in a traditional household with virtually no childhood trauma. There is nothing other than a few aggressive and dark character traits that would indicate to anyone just how dangerous she would be as an adult. As a young child Karla was very dominant, bossy and intelligent; she wanted to be a detective and like so many girls her age spent much of her free time reading Nancy Drew books. As a pre-teenager, all of the things she had going for her started to slip and it seemed like boys were the only thing that mattered to her. In high school her grades started to go down but she always managed to have a boyfriend. Karla even started a club (the EDC the Exclusive Diamond Club) where the goal was for the members to find “suitable” wealthy attractive men to marry. When Karla was sixteen, her ambition to be married would motivate her to run away from home to Kansas to live with her boyfriend. Things between the two did not work out and she returned home after only two weeks. When she returned she was rather macabre and started to act out in odd ways like passing off cuts on her arms at suicide attempts, writing threating and rather scary messages in people’s yearbooks and becoming interested in true crime stories just to name a few. Karla did have a light side; she worked at a pet store and even wanted to become a veterinarian. It was her pet store job that would facilitate her meeting Paul Bernardo. Karla was in Scarborough (where Bernardo lived) at a pet store convention and the two would meet at the hotel’s restaurant. The two seemed drawn to each other and hit it off immediately to the point where within an hour they were in Karla’s hotel room having sex. This chance meeting would be a turning point in her life. What is puzzling is how, almost instantly, Karla became so submissive to him and was willing to change completely for a man she barely knew. Bernardo was also a unique person in some aspects as during the relationship he would instigate fights with Karla’s male friends. This aggression and willingness to fight other males is rare in serial killers as they tend to back down from other men. With these facts and so many more, it is easy for us looking back to see that these two were going to be unlike any other serial killer couple.
There were many signs of Paul’s taste for deviant sexual behavior evident from the very beginning of their relationship. Bernardo controlled all aspects of the couple sex life and Karla was more than happy to indulge him in every one of his perversions. This would include physically abusing her (choking, hitting etc.), degrading her (making her masturbate with wine bottle, an action that he would force on many other girls he raped) making her recite scripted phrases (a trait that is common in many rapists) and forcing her into acts she was not comfortable with (he wanted to have anal sex with her as he received very little pleasure from vaginal intercourse, which is a trait of {heterosexual} men that indicates he may rape women in the future). The worst perversion, that should have scared her away, was when he would combine their sex life with his blossoming obsession for Karla’s younger sister Tammy. He would demand they have sex in Tammy’s room as often as they could, he would have Karla act like her sister while being dressed in Tammy’s clothes and even have Karla answer to the name Tammy during sex. He became so obsessed with her that he demanded Karla assist him in taking the fifteen year old’s virginity. Homolka objected at first, but her fear of losing him eventually changed her mind. During her trial, Karla would claim she believed he would do it with or without her help so she decided to assist him so Tammy would be drugged and not remember it as opposed to being taken off the street and forced to live with that horrific memory the rest of her life. Whether you believe that Karla was acting in her little sisters’ best interest or not, it is hard to argue with Homolka’s logic. It was December twenty-forth 1990, when Karla stopped objecting and decided to give her beloved Paul a “Christmas present”, the drugged body and innocence of her sister Tammy. Since she was working at a veterinarian’s office at the time she had access to various drugs but unfortunately she did not have the knowledge of how to properly use them and that ignorance would cost Tammy her life. Paul was joining the Homolka family for the holiday that night and after their parents went to bed, Karla invited her sister to stay up and watch a movie with them. After Tammy agreed Karla gave the teen drinks laced with heavy animal tranquilizers and it would not be long before the young girl passed out. Once she was unconscious Karla placed a rag drenched in Halcion (a powerful muscle relaxer) to keep Tammy asleep while she and Bernardo could take turns raping the unsuspecting girl. Before too long they realized that Tammy was no longer breathing, they quickly moved her into the next room got her dressed and called an ambulance. Tammy was pronounced dead and we know now that she died from choking on her own vomit. The Authorities did not question the odd story of why the couple moved the girl from one room to the other (they said it was for better lighting even though both rooms were equally bright) or the fact that the victim had a big red mark all around her mouth and nose (which they were told were rug burns from when the couple moved the body) to them it was just a simple accidental tragedy that required no further investigation. On the surface the death of Tammy looks like an accidental overdose, but many people suspect that Karla intentionally gave her young sister too much because she was jealous of how much attention Paul gave her. Since the day of her sister’s death, Karla has denied these rumors.
After Tammy’s death, Karla feared her dream wedding would be cancelled so she went into over drive to make Paul happy. Just three weeks after the tragedy, the couple would make a tape of themselves having sex in which Karla is dressed like Tammy. One of the creepiest and most disturbing moments in the video is when she rubs a rose down the chest and genitals of Bernardo and proceeds to tell him that tomorrow they are going to “place this flower on Tammy’s grave because it touched him in his most private areas”. What is unique about this tape, besides the insight it gives us into Karla psychosis, is that unlike every other video they would make this one was Karla’s idea. This video also proved the lengths she would go to make her “king” happy. On June seventh, 1991 Karla furthered her attempts to keep Paul happy when she brought home a fifteen year old friend of hers for them to rape. They used the same drugs as they did with Tammy and fortunately the girl known only as “Jane Doe” would survive and not remember the attack. After the rape of Jane Paul supposedly hit Karla claiming he was angry that it went so smoothly and Tammy’s did not. Sadly even with a willing accomplice to help him find victims, Bernardo dark lust would no longer be satisfied by rape. While out looking for a victim he came across fourteen year old Leslie Mahaffy and he became fascinated with her. On the evening of June fourteenth 1991, the young school girl was distraught from a classmate’s untimely death and decided to break curfew to be with her friends. When she returned home she realized she did not have her key and decided to go back to the friend’s house rather than wake up her parents. On the way she ran into Bernardo who told her he was breaking into houses in the neighborhood (to which the girl replied “cool”) and then offered the girl a cigarette, she accepted and followed him to his car. While the two were talking Paul quickly lunged at her and pushed her into the car and drove away. He brought the girl home to Karla and the two spent the next twenty-four hours torturing and raping the poor girl before they finally killed her. Paul proceeded to cut her body into pieces to encase them in concreate blocks. After the cement dried, he dumped the blocks into a nearby Lake. During their trial both Homolka and Bernardo denied killing the girl and both claimed the other one did it. All things considered they both make a compelling argument. On June 29th 1991, they had their Fairy tale wedding complete with horse drawn carriage as planned at Niagara Falls. It would be close to a year before the duo would strike. On April 16th 1992, they abducted fifteen year old Kristen French. They parked their car next to French’s Catholic high school and waited for her. Once Kristen was visible, Karla pulled out a map and asked her for directions. Kristen, with no fear, walked over and proceeded to help the lost couple. Paul then came from behind and pushed the unsuspecting teen into the back seat of the car. They spent the next three days videotaping themselves raping and torturing their victim. What is unique about the tapes of Kristen’s ordeal is there is a scene where she and Karla candidly pick out perfume for a contest Paul was having to see which one smelled better (the prize for winning this contest was not being sodomized by Bernardo, and even though Kristen won she was still brutalized). In this scene, the teen seems oddly at peace with the people holding her against her will and it almost seems like she and Karla are friends. This scene shows the maturity of Kristen and her attempt to cooperate with her captures to stay alive. The couple wanted to dump Kristen’s body on Leslie Mahaffy’s grave but could not find it, so they instead dumped it in a ditch.
Being the willing accomplice for Paul was not enough to spare her from his cruelty. Throughout their relationship he beat and raped her like he did so many other women. On January 5th 1993, he beat Karla with a policemen’s flashlight; a weapon equivalent to a police baton. The beating was so severe she decided to leave him. She escaped to her parents’ house who then proceed to send her to Toronto to live with relatives. Karla felt like this was the time to start her life over again without Paul, and she even started to date other men. Paul would make a video claiming to miss his wife and threatened to kill himself if she did not return. It was during this time police renewed their interest in the Scarborough rapes, and decided to go through the DNA samples they had on file; one of which belonged to Paul Bernardo. Bernardo fit the description of the rapist and was questioned; he willingly gave police a sample figuring he would not be caught. It took twenty six months but the police finally found the man responsible for twenty-three rapes that occurred from May 4, 1987 to May 26, 1990. Unfortunately there was not enough evidence to make an arrest so they placed him under twenty-four hour surveillance hoping to find something they could use. After observing him, police began to suspect he was responsible for the unsolved murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. On April 17th 1993 after they felt like they had the evidence they needed they arrested Paul Bernardo. Karla quickly confessed to her family. Police spent seventy-two days searching every inch of Bernardo’s home and came up with nothing to connect him to the murders. With the lack of evidence and fearing that Paul would walk for the murders, police struck a deal with Homolka. The deal was, in turn for her damming testimony she would receive a reduced sentence for her roles in the crimes. After the deal was made, Bernardo’s lawyer submitted the tapes the couple made, showing Karla to be more involved in the crimes then she initially lead on. The deal the cops made with Karla would forever be known as “The Deal with the Devil”. Paul would receive life in jail without the possibility of parole for all of his crimes and Karla would receive the (in many people’s opinion too light) sentence of twelve years with the possibility of parole in four. Kara would be denied parole as she was deemed likely to reoffend and served her complete sentence. While in jail she earned a degree in Psychology and struck up a romance with a fellow prisoner in jail for killing his girlfriend. She was released from prison on July 4th 2005 and moved to Montreal. Since being released she has given birth to a baby boy. In 2014 it is rumored she was romantically involved with then suspected serial killer Luka Magnotta. There is not enough conclusive evidence to prove that they were a couple, but given Karla’s tendency to date killers it does seem likely.
Since the crimes have occurred, they have been the subject of many books and documentary’s. In 2004, filmmakers took on the difficult task of telling the rather unbelievable and none the less horrific story of Karla and Paul’s crimes. The story would be told from Karla’s perspective and would paint her as one of Paul’s victims. In the movie, Laura Prepon’s portrayal showed Karla being victimized, beaten, blackmailed and overall love sick for Misha Collins Bernardo. If one is not familiar with the facts of the case, they would get the impression that Karla either suffered from severe Stockholm syndrome (where a captured person begins to sympathize with the person keeping them captive) or was afraid to leave her abusive sadistic husband because he might tell her family that she was responsible for her little sisters death. The movie did get a lot of the facts correct, but in my personal opinion made the viewer sorry or sympathetic for Homolka.
Paul Bernardo is a very textbook criminal. He had a troubled childhood, he was controlling and demanding in his relationships, he was very narcissistic and had a “god” complex, he could be charming when he needed to be, he enjoyed inflicting pain on others and was a person who was disinterested in having sex what most would describe as traditional ways. With all of these facts that we know now it is no surprise that a person like this would ended up raping and killing people; what is surprising is why someone like Karla would end up doing these things. Karla is a lot of things, but for sake of clarity we’re going to say she is an enigma at the very least. Most people that knew her described her as domineering and assertive so why did she becoming the willing subservient partner to Paul Bernardo? The answer may be as difficult for most understand as it raises more questions than answers. Karla is a person who overall was vacant (this was the term used by author Peter Vronsky in his book: Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters), which made her easily susceptible to someone with Bernardo’s unique “charms”. She was able to be whatever he needed all while not stopping him. This in no way makes her any less guilty or any less accountable for her actions, but it is a fact that attempts to explain the unthinkable.
Finding someone who encourages you to fulfill your hidden desires can be one of the best motivators a person could have, but what if those dreams turn into nightmares for untold amounts of people? This was certainly the case with young Myra Hindley, who let her love of a “bad boy” unleash a monster onto several unsuspecting children while devastating so many families. Esther Myra Hindley was born on July twenty-third 1942 in Manchester England, and for the most part was a normal well-adjusted girl. Those that knew her said she was an average student who loved animals, playing with the other children and dressing up by wearing brightly colored lipstick. Her upbringing was very typical with one exception; she was sent to live with a relative when she was four years old. Her parents felt their household became “too crowded” after the birth of their second daughter, so they sent Myra away to live with her grandmother. This was not a drastically difficult adjustment for her to make as her grandmother lived very close to her biological parents so she was able to go between the two households easily. The biggest downside with this arrangement was her grandmother gave the child full run of the household which made her rather spoiled. At the age of fifteen her promising life was changed in a tragic way that would bring her into an era of darkness that foreshadowed what she would become as an adult. As a teenager she took on a guardian role in the life of a thirteen year old boy. One day she declined an offer to go swimming and the boy, who was underdeveloped in many ways, tragically drowned. She was devastated by the loss and for months after the accident walked around in a zombie like state only breaking the trance to raise money to buy flowers for his grave. Neighbors saw an immediate change in the once happy girls’ demeanor saying when she asked them for money she pressured them into donating by acting like they were personally responsible for the tragedy.
After years of self-loathing it seemed like she had finally gotten over the boy’s death by living a “clean” and sexless life. At nineteen Myra took a job as a typist at a chemical company where she met the devilishly handsome Ian Brady. Myra became obsessed with his “bad boy” aloofness and would go home and write about him in her diary as she was too shy to talk to him. It would take seven months for her to muster the courage to speak to him and almost a full year since meeting him to accept his offer to go out on a date. After Brady jumped that hurtle, she gave herself completely to him becoming more of a slave than girlfriend. She gave up both her religion and virginity to Brady whose tone was all it took to make her believe everything he said. It would not be too long before the couple started to engage in deviant sexual behavior that ranged from posing for pornographic pictures to wearing Nazi hoods during intercourse. Outside of the bedroom, Myra also took on a darker demeanor by wearing all black neo-Nazi style clothing and dying her hair platinum blonde to resemble Eva Braun. We now know that Brady insisted on these peculiar changes as he was an avid supporter of the Nazi party.
All of the changes Myra went through were superficial but that would change roughly a year and a half into their relationship as he gained another unusual obsession. Brady became infatuated with both the story of two college students who killed a fourteen year old boy and wanting to commit the perfect murder. On July twelfth 1963 they tried to do just that. Their first victim was sixteen year old Pauline Reade and her young life would be ended while walking home from a school dance. Myra approached the girl and lured her into a van by asking for help to look for a lost expensive glove. Pauline knew Myra’s younger sister and agreed to go with her to the moors to help. [The Moors are a windy grassy wasteland located on the outside of Manchester England] After they arrived Brady sexually assaulted the girl and slit her throat twice before strangling her with a silk cord. Brady gave strict instructions to watch the dying girl until he came back with a shovel to bury the body. On their way home the couple saw Pauline’s mother out looking for her daughter and they offered to help with the search. Shortly after the murder Hindley was seen wearing and continuously playing with the silk cord it in public, a sign of how much she truly enjoyed killing the teenager. Pauline’s body would not be found until 1987, almost twenty years after they were caught. When Hindley was arrested she maintained her innocence claiming she stayed in the van and did not know what Brady was doing. She would stick with this story all the way until 1990 when she finally confessed to partaking in the rape.
The couple would strike again four months later taking the life of twelve year old John Kilbride on November twenty-third 1963. They offered the young boy a ride home and a glass of sherry in exchange for his assistance with looking for a lost glove. Just like Pauline Reade, they sexually assaulted him before slitting his throat and strangling him with a small cord possibly a shoelace. On June sixteenth 1964 the two picked up twelve year old Keith Bennett while he was walking home from his grandmother’s house. Myra asked the boy for help loading boxes into her pickup truck; a request he granted. Once the boxes were loaded she pushed Bennett into the truck and took him to the Moor’s for Brady to sexually assault and strangle. His body would be buried in the Moor’s as well. December twenty-sixth of that year the two went to a fairground looking for another victim. They found ten year old Lesley Ann Downey and quickly decided to approach the girl by asking for help loading boxes into their car and unloading the boxes at home. Once they all made it home they undressed and gagged the unsuspecting girl before forcing her to pose for pictures. Right after the pictures were taken Lesley was raped and strangled and her body was also buried at the Moor’s.
In early October of 1965 Myra’s seventeen year old brother in law David Smith came to the couple complaining about his finical situation claiming he had no more money. To help with Smith’s money problems Brady suggested that he help them rob and kill someone. On October sixth 1965 Brady invited seventeen year old Edward Evans over for a drink. Once the two guys started drinking, Myra went over to Smith’s house to ask his mother for a hair dressing appointment. After learning his mother was not home, she offered him a drink in exchange for walking her home as she claimed to be afraid to walk alone in the dark. Smith walked her home and waited in the kitchen for his drink of sprite mixed liquor. While he was waiting he heard Myra yell for help, he rushed into the living room and saw Brady beating Evans with an axe. Smith tried to stop the murder but it was already too late, Evans was dead after receiving fourteen blows to the head. The three helped clean up the crime scene and wrapped the boy’s body in a plastic sheet and drug it upstairs to take to the Moor’s in the morning. Smith agreed to come back and dispose of the body and went home at around three in the morning. After telling his wife what happened, Smith walked to a local phone booth and called the police. Superintendent Bob Talbot arrived at their household and after finding the wrapped up body arrested Ian Brady for suspicion of murder. They searched for other evidence and found a notebook with a list of names written it, one of which was that of a missing child John Kilbride, a couple of pictures of children mixed with some of Myra “innocently” posing at the Moors and a book with a luggage ticket in it. The ticket was for two suitcases located at Manchester grand station. This was invaluable evidence as one of those suitcases contained cassette tapes and pictures that would be crucial in putting the two monsters away. The pictures were of Myra crouched over Kilbride’s grave and of a terrified naked and gagged Lesley Ann Downey in various pornographic positions. The tapes seemed innocent enough at first since they mainly contained popular music, but after listening to them one can hear (for an entire thirteen minutes) a young girl screaming and pleading for her life. The little girl on the tape would be identified by her mother as Lesly Ann Downey. All of the pictures that were taken at the Moors would later be used to find the bodies of the victims. On October eleventh Myra was arrested and charged as an accessary for the murders.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were charged with the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Lesley Ann Downey on October twenty-first 1965. In addition to the murders, Myra was charged with harboring and maintaining a criminal. Their trial would start on April twenty-seventh 1966, which quickly gained the attention of the press. They would be dubbed The Moors Murderers in the newspapers and she would be called The Most Evil Woman in Britain by many reporters. They both pleaded not guilty to all charges. During the trial Brady would confess to killing Edward Evans, claim he left the house after the pictures of Lesley Ann Downey were taken and testified that he had no idea what happened to John Kilbride. The jury would not believe their stories and found them both guilty of all three murders. In May of 1966, they were sentenced to three life sentences and Myra (despite the fact she was deemed criminally insane) would receive an additional seven years for her supplementary crimes. The two would continue their macabre romance for seven and a half years until she started to paint herself as a victim. She started saying he drugged and beat her into submission and went as far as to threaten her entire family if she did not help him kill. In 1986 Myra Hindley would finally stop maintaining her innocence and confessed to her involvement in all five murders. This long awaited revelation gave the world many unknown details of the case. Sadly this would not help one family as Keith Bennett’s body would never be found. Myra died of respiratory heart failure on November fifteenth 2002 at the age of sixty.
Perhaps the most stereotypical killer on this list, the angel of death “Jolly” Jane Toppan is almost a textbook case of everything that a female killer is. By using poison to kill, she was able to physically separate herself from her victims; most of which were older ill patients she was supposed to be providing care for. Both of these are traits that are common in most female killers as they tend to not get close to their victims and prey on those weaker then themselves. In all, she took the lives of thirty-one unsuspecting people who entrusted her with their health.
Jane was born Honora A. Kelly, and was adopted into a family that immediately did not accept her. She was given the name Jane Toppan at the age of five and was taught to deny her Irish heritage by telling people she was Italian instead. Although these methods were intentionally intended to keep her safe as Americans were not kind to the Irish at this time in history, they instead separated her from the rest of her new family and caused her to hate her parents and siblings. Jane, like so many serial killers had a childhood that nurtured cruelty; there was the early breaking of bonds between her and her mother, the trauma of being adopted by people who did not accept her or show affection, there was a history of mental illness in her biological family, she had a tendency to live outside the realm of reality by constantly fantasizing and telling lies and finally she had an overall sense of personal shame and disempowerment that she wanted to take out on the innocent. She got that chance to do just that as she grew up to pursue a career in nursing.
While in nursing school she started exhibiting some rather odd behavior that distanced herself from her fellow classmates; most notable was her overly happy demeanor. Her always exceedingly joyful attitude did not sit well with the other students earning her the nickname “Jolly Jane”. If that was not bad enough, she also had a bad habit of lying to everyone. Jane would tell false exaggerated stories that made her seem very important as well as false stories about her fellow classmates which got some of them kicked out of school. These actions, as well as being accused of being a petty thief, gained her a terrible reputation at the school. In spite all of the negative behavior Jane excelled at her school work many thought; in reality she was changing her patient’s charts to reflect worsening conditions and was administering more medication than was needed to treat the ailment. This was the time when she started perfecting her dark craft by toying with different doses; a method that let her crimes go undetected as doctors could not find a pattern in the seemingly mysterious deaths. With all of the self-created problems she had at school Jane felt it would be best to transfer schools, sadly she ended up doing the same thing at her new school. Jane would be caught forging patient records and be kicked out of that school as well.
With the love of killing too strong to not continue, she decided to become a private nurse. Once again she was professionally successful; she earned a lot more money than the average nurse and had several patients all over the northeast. Even though she was making more money than other women at the time, several times more in fact, Jane went into debt with one of her employers; owing the Davis family over five hundred dollars. She quickly decided to kill all four members one by one instead of paying off the debt. Once the Davis family was gone, Jane moved back into her family home to care for her ill sister. She moved in with the intention of killing her and marrying her brother in law, who would later refuse the advances. Out of all of the deaths she committed she wanted this one to be slow so she could enjoy it longer. She confessed to cuddling and groping her sister saying “I held her in my arms and waited with delight as she grasped her life out”. The fact that all of the members of the Davis family died so quickly, only weeks apart from each other, made police pay close attention to Jane and all of the deaths that surrounded her. They ordered autopsies on the entire family finding large amounts of arsenic. Jane would be arrested on October 29, 1901 and formally charged with the murder of Minnie Gibbs, the married daughter of the Davis family. After her arrest police found something very interesting about her textbooks, the pages on poisons and morphine were visually used more than any other section. It seemed like justice was going to be served, but the funeral home admitted to using arsenic during the embalming process. Fortunately the prosecution found that there were lethal amounts of morphine and atropine in their system, as well as other victims. With that discovery she was placed on trial for the murder. Jane would be found not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to a mental hospital on June 24, 1902 at the age of forty-eight. She died there thirty-six years later at the age of eighty-four. During her time there Jane acted like a model patient; except for the few times to tried to invite the nurses to “get some morphine” so they could go out into the ward and “have a lot of fun seeing them die”.
We now know the method she used to kill; she would inject her victims with morphine which caused them to sink into a coma, and then she would revive them with doses of atropine. Atropine is a medication that would cause her victims to have seizures, increased heart rates, hallucinations and lose of all muscle control. There was one victim that survived an encounter with the angel of death, thirty six year old Amelia Phinney. While under Janes care for a uterine ulcer, she recalls one night when Jane came into her room and gave her a drink that caused her lips to go numb. After drinking what was in the glass, she felt Jane crawl into bed next to her begin cuddling with her, stroking her hair and kissing her forehead all while staring deep into her eyes. Once Jane offered another drink Amelia refused, then immediately Jane jumped out of bed as someone was approaching. Amelia assumed she dreamed the whole encounter and would not tell anyone about her close brush with death until Jane was arrested years later. When she was asked about her motives she replied that killing gave her sexual satisfaction. She admitted that she enjoyed watching her patients die from morphine over dose; she especially liked watching their eyes grow bigger from the medication as well as seeing them taking their last breath. This pattern became what she described as “a habit of life” which caused her “delirious enjoyment”. During the rest of her startling bone chilling confession where she admitted to killing thirty-one people, she said “there is no use for keeping old people alive”.
One of the most infamous killers in American history was not technically a murderer at all; he is Charles Manson, and the crimes he is responsible for were not done by his own hands but were carried out by a loyal group of lost-souled runaway hippie women (and men). These women believed in his skewed version of “free love”, they believed in his free drug use policies, they believed in the so called “family” he offered them and they even believed in the crazy theory of an inevitable massive race war that he said was coming but never did. This tendency to buy into in whatever Manson was selling would lead them to commit some of the most heinous murders in history. The murders committed by Charles Manson’s “family” became ingrained in the American psyche and later its popular culture as his face and story were everywhere turning this media staple into an “antihero”. The entire story is so atrocious and has so many unbelievable aspects; on the surface it almost doesn’t seem plausible. From start to finish there are so many connections to various celebrities that one is left amazed; if nothing else this story proves that truth is truly stranger than fiction. Charlie’s childhood incubated his later adult insanity that all of the world would see. With all of the signs of how unstable he was, the real question is not why did Manson make these kids kill but why would so many young people (with their whole lives a head of them) choose to leave their lives and the comforts of modern society to follow a crazed failed musician out into the desert of California? The simplest answer is they all were searching for guidance and a place to belong, which is what Manson gave them. He used drugs, music, fear and love to brainwash them into believing he had all of the answers to every one of their questions. To explore this a bit further one most take into account that most of the Manson girls grew up with similar stories as most of them came from either broken homes filled with people who did not understand them. This commonalty would be the thread that would connect all of these girls together and horrifyingly enough would be what tied them to a monster. All of these factors facilitated death and put an abrupt end to the “era of love”.
To accurately tell the story of the Manson family girls and to better understand the crimes they committed, one has to first look at Charlie and his horrific past. Charlie Manson was born “No Name” Maddox on November 12, 1934. His mother, sixteen year old Kathleen Maddox, gave him the name Charles Miles Maddox a few weeks later. Kathleen, who was a teenage prostitute, was constantly involved with a lot of different men but eventually got married to a man who gave her son the last name of Manson. After their divorce, it is widely documented that his mother put her pleasures ahead of her son. She enjoyed alcohol and men so much she often traded him for them, sometimes literally as she once traded him for a pitcher of beer and later put him in a boy’s home at the request of a boyfriend who did not trust the deviant child. He spent his childhood going in between boys’ homes and juvenile correctional facilities until he was eighteen and was eventually kicked out of the system. The “freedom” he received as an adult would be taken away as he became a career criminal and spent years in and out of jail. While in prison Alvin “creepy” Karpis, who was a member of the infamous Ma Barker gang, taught Charlie how to play the guitar. Upon his release he would use this talent to meet women in the very popular Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco California. Manson being the intelligent manipulative criminal he was decided to take advantage of the huge cultural shift that was happening there. It was an epicenter for the free love movement during a time dubbed the “summer of love”; a movement that he and his family would later be credited with ending. Haight Ashbury was a place filled with hope and dreamers which was so unique that all different types of people congregated to it. In his travels he met a lot of lost souls who chose to follow him, especially young beautiful impressionable women.
The first woman to follow Manson was a young woman named Mary Theresa Brunners, and the Manson family would start in her apartment. Mary was raised in a catholic home and attended catholic school as a child. She grew up to study history in college and was working as a librarian when she met Charlie. The two became instant friends and she even allowed him to move in and stay on her couch. After moving in he started to bring over women to have threesomes with him and Mary. It was not too long before Mary would have a child with Manson that would be raised by the collection of outcasts in the desert. We now know that a lot of the women that came over to that apartment would never leave Manson. Mary would partake in the family’s very first murder and stay loyal to Charlie throughout everything, even at the expense of her child.
One of the women who never left was the fiercely loyal Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. Like so many of the family members, Lynette was kicked out of her home as a teenager and was looking for a father figure to fill the void left by her actual disapproving father. Fromme’s father was very controlling and despite the fact that she was a very intelligent student (getting mainly B+’s and A-‘s) still heavily criticized her. Tensions came to head and he kicked her out at age seventeen. The distraught teen grabbed only her books and headed to the beach, where she met Charlie. He walked up to the crying girl and asked if she wanted to come with him to San Francisco, where May Brunner lived. She quickly joined him and the three would end up living together and having numerous threesomes, where for the first time in her life Lynette felt beautiful. Fromme speaks very fondly about Charlie, saying that he played a wise father role in her life. Since she was not a part of any family murders, Lynette wanted to prove her loyalty to Manson by pulling an outrageous stunt the world could not ignore. In September 1975 she loaded a .45 semiautomatic handgun and rushed at President Gerald Ford. She made it within two feet of the president before being subdued by the secret service. Lynette would spend the rest of her life in jail for the failed assassination attempt.
Susan Atkins (who Charlie renamed Sadie) was perhaps the coldest member of the family as she was especially savage when she killed her victims, more so than any other member. This is not surprising as there were signs of her lack of empathy at a very early age, especially considering she lost her mother to cancer and was indifferent about it. She later claimed that she hated her alcoholic parents, who payed more attention to her brothers than her. Her parent’s alcohol problems became so severe that authorities tried to take the children away to no avail. There were some positive aspects to Atkins childhood however as she was a religious girl who sang in her church’s choir, a girl scout and did well in school. Sadly all that promise was wasted when she left home at age eighteen and began to commit crimes. Her adult years were composed of numerous bad choices cumulating when she was arrested for car theft while working as a topless dancer. Things however got unforeseeably worse for her when she started dabbling with Satanism, which caused her to do things like take L.S.D while lying in a coffin among a lot of other very odd behavior. The extremely troubled young woman would meet Charlie at a party and quickly became entranced by his music. She ended up following Charlie and joining the so called family. Susan would have a baby boy to an unknown male member of the family named Zo Zo Ze Ze Zadfrack, who was delivered by Manson himself. Atkins would play a critical and downright evil part in Gary Hinman’s murder as she stabbed him repeatedly closed the wounds with dental floss just to keep him alive to torture him further. This torture lasted for three days before she decided to finally kill him. Atkins and Mary Brunner held a pillow on Hinmans face until he finally suffocated. The women wrote “political piggy” on the wall in his blood to make the murder look like a black panther hit, this was a precursor to “Helter Skelter”.
Linda Kesabian had one of the most textbook troubled childhoods that would lead her into the path of evil. Her parents divorced and remarried while she was young and her father would walk out just to return and abuse her. Relations with her step father were not any better as he favored his biological children and even admitted to hating his step daughter causing her to have severe father issues. While in high school she was a cheerleader and an athlete as well as a girl who would have sex with numerous boys in public, so it is not really all that surprising that she would drop out of school at the age of sixteen. After leaving school she would get married then divorced and even faster married again. It was during her second marriage when her friends would introduce her to Manson who invited her to spend the day at Spahn Ranch. She became so entranced with him she went home stole close to five thousand dollars from her husband and moved onto the ranch. Interestingly enough she was present on the day of the Tate murder, but would not partake in any slayings. We know that she was high on an unknown substance (which may be how he got her to go at all) and when she saw Patricia Krenwinkel kill Abagail Foldgers she ran back to the car and waited to go “home”. Linda would receive immunity for her damming testimony against the family and would stay out of jail. In her later years it seemed like she became super religious but sadly that was not the case, she got arrested in 1996 with her daughter Tanya for having drugs and would spend a year in jail.
Leslie Van Houten like so many Manson members came from a broken home as her parents divorced when she was a young teenager. The divorce caused her to search for approval and acceptance especially from men. Her childhood had a lot of positive aspects; she was raised in a Presbyterian home described by many as very religious, she was a campfire girl, a very good student and was even chosen homecoming queen. Sadly trouble seemed to always be present in her life, her father was an alcoholic and during high school she experimented with drugs (mainly weed) and had an abortion. After high school she attempted to turn things around for herself and even graduated from business school, but once again trouble would find her. This time it was from her steady boyfriend who introduced her to Manson. Charlie did not take to her easily and tried to pass her on to Tex Watson. In addition to that, he also did not give her a nickname like he did to all the other women and did not include her in the Tate Murders causing her to feel insecure and desperate for his affection. Leslie finally had enough of being ignored and demanded she be included in the next crime so she could prove her loyalty to Charlie. Manson entered the LaBianca home before anyone else and tied up the owners for his henchmen. Leslie held a pillow over Rosemary’s face while Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed her. After the murders, Van Houten wrote the word “witchy” on the wall in Rosemary’s blood an act that finally earned her a nickname; Lu Lu. For her role in the murders, she received the death penalty but that would be suspended and converted to life in prison. While in jail, like so many others, she has claimed to find religion.
Patricia Krenwinkel, nicknamed Big Patty as well she was a very big and hairy woman, is one of the most interesting women in the family as there were little signs of evil in her past. She was a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher described by others as a calm and overall happy person, so the question is why would someone as light as her get involved with someone as dark as Manson? The answer is surprisingly simple as he made her feel beautiful for the first time in her life causing her to believe in everything else he said. After her arrest she spoke fondly about her sexual experiences with Charlie, saying he was the first man to ever make love to her with the lights on. Sadly this acceptance would be all she needed to commit unspeakable horror. She would go on to play a pivotal role in the Manson crimes as she would stab Abigail Foldgers twenty eight times (whose last words were “Stop I’m already dead) and stab Rosemary LaBianca in the stomach with a tuning fork which she sadistically “pinged” to watch it vibrate within the abdomen of her victim.
Interestingly in his travels, Manson would not only meet impressionable women, he would meet famed musician Dennis Wilson who is the drummer of the legendary band the Beach Boys. Wilson would be the one to introduce Manson to Patricia Krenwinkel. Dennis was said to be in awe of the women who followed Charlie, so much so he let Manson and his so called family stay at his house. Manson and Wilson played music together while the family took advantage of their new surroundings. In total, the family would do around one hundred-thousand dollars of damage before Wilson’s manager kicked them out. After being kicked out, the family moved onto an old western movie set named Spahn Ranch where they performed odd jobs for the owner to stay there. Some of these odd jobs for the women included having sex with the elderly and partially blind owner, George Spahn, in an attempt to make him happy and to distract him from all the illegal activity that occurred there. Their days at Spahn were spent having sex with one another, doing many drugs (especially the mind altering drug known as L.S.D, which many people say Manson used in order to control the minds of the young people who lived with him) and stealing various items to make ends meet. They were eventually kicked out of there too, so in November of 1968, Charlie moved all sixteen members of his family to Myers Ranch. Unlike the previous “loving” environment of Spahn ranch their time at Myers ranch was spent preparing for the apocalypse. The only break they received from their military style training was when they worked on music. They spent a lot of time preparing an album to play for record producer Terry Melcher (son of famed actress/singer Doris Day). Melcher agreed to visit the ranch and listen to what they created but never did. During this time, Manson learned that the Beach Boys covered one of his songs entitled Cease to Exist and renamed it Never Learned Not to Love; the song was released as one of the tracks on the bands 20/20 album. The band gave Manson no song writing credits or money for his work. An enraged Manson would confront Wilson, who essentially said I do not owe you royalties as you destroyed my home. It was here when Manson started to become very angry and paranoid and preach about an appending race war. The war Manson preached was one where blacks and whites would fight and the white race would lose and become subservient to the black race. Manson felt that black people were too stupid to know what to do with all the power they were to gain and that his family could infiltrate and rule the world. To prepare for this war, Manson told one of the few men Tex Watson to make money. Tex would do just that by defrauding local drug dealer Bernard Crowe. Crowe would not accept this and threatened to kill the entire family. Manson was afraid that Crowe was a member of the Black Panthers and feared that there would be retaliation and felt the death would be the beginning of the race war he called Helter Skelter.
The first documented Manson family murder occurred on July 25th 1969 when Bobby Beausolei (who was the boyfriend of Leslie Van Houten), Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins killed Gary Hindman for money. Manson would bring the family over to Hindman’s house and slice his ear with a sword before giving out final instructions. As mentioned earlier, Hindman was suffocated to death by Brunner and Atkins. On August 6 1969, Beausolei was arrested for driving Hindman’s car, but no other connections to the family would be made for months to come.
The next documented Mason family murder(s) occurred on August 8th 1969, and would go on and scare the world for decades. Manson gave strict orders to Tex Watson to take Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to Terry Melchers house and destroy everyone in it as brutally as they could. The group went to the house located at 10050 Cielo drive around midnight to carry on Manson’s wishes. After parking the car at the bottom of the hill and walking up to the house, Tex got into a fight with a man who was just walking down the street. Tex shot the unassuming pedestrian Steven Parent five times. Steven’s last words were “please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything”. The group continued their given mission not knowing was Melcher was not even in that house that they were about to enter. The mansion was instead being rented by up and coming actress Sharon Tate who was the wife of famous director Roman Polanski (director of the classic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby). Tate invited her former boyfriend famed hair stylist Jay Sebring, Wojciean Frykowski and heiress Abigail Foldgers (of the famous coffee company) to stay over and keep her company as Roman was away working. After entering the house, the family gathered everyone there and tied them up in the living room. Watson then stabbed Sebring seven times after he complained about being tied by the neck to a very pregnant Sharon Tate (she was eight months pregnant). Frykowski escaped being tied up and almost made it out of the house before Tex hit him with his gun, stabbed him fifty one times total and shot him two times. During the violent murder Watson claimed that he “was the devil and was there to do the devils work”. Foldgers would also escape the house making it out onto the pool area, but her fate was just as gruesome as Frykowski’s. She was stabbed twenty eight times by Pat Krenwinkel. Atkins and Tex Watson then stabbed Tate sixteen times. It is said that she begged to live long enough to deliver her baby, saying “Please let me go. All I wat to do is have my baby”. Her plea was responded to by Atkins, who said “I have no mercy for you”. A fact that makes these murders more chilling is that both Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate were hung from the rafters of the home before being stabbed to death. Before leaving they carried out a very weird demand of Manson to “leave something witchy” behind, Atkins would grab a towel and write the word “Pig” on the wall in Tate’s blood. We now know while in jail, Atkins would brag about the crime while in jail retelling the story to anyone who would listen. She also bragged about licking Tate’s blood off of her fingers.
The final documented Manson family murder would occur only two days later on August 10th 1969; this time is was the home of supermarket owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and their fates were just as ghastly. Manson entered the home with a gun around ten o clock and told the couple that this would be just be a harmless robbery and that if they cooperated with the intruders they would survive the encounter. This false sense of security allowed him to tie up the couple with electrical extension cords for his disciples who would enter the home close to a half hour later. Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten stabbed thirty eight year old Rosemary a terrifying forty one times and forty four year old Leno twelve times with a knife and fourteen times with a serving fork; which would be left in his stomach which had the word “War” carved in it. The words “Death to Pigs” and “Rise” were written on the walls and “Helter Skelter” was written on the refrigerator door; all of which were in Leno’s blood.
Sharon Tate’s murder was big news as her husband just finished filming now iconic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, which centered on Satanism. Despite all of the press and all of the similarities (the overall brutality of both crimes, the signature words left in blood on the walls and the fact that they happened in close neighborhoods just a day apart) police did not connect the crimes. The ranch would be raided days after the LaBianca murder and most of the members would be arrested; but not for homicide, but for stolen car parts. Within hours they were all released and Manson’s “God complex” would be fed as he felt he would get away with slaughter. Fortunately some of the girls would brag about the crimes while in jail, police caught on and justice would be served. The trial of the Manson family would go down as one of if the most bizarre spectacles in history. Even though he was in jail, Manson would exercise his control over his women and orchestrate weird stunts for them to do while the world was watching. These stunts included the women all shaving their heads, singing his songs in haunting unison outside the courthouse and even having them crawl on their hands and knees for blocks. Justice and peace would come to the victims’ families as all the family members responsible would be sentenced to jail, but the story would not end. With the shockingly ferocious nature of the crimes and eerily (for lack of a better word) charismatic Manson these events will never be forgotten. Elements of the story, various parole hearings and elements of Manson’s life continue to come up in the news, reminding everyone of the events that ended the love generation. The house at Cielo drive would be bought and turned into a recording studio by famed musician Trent Reznor of the rock band Nine Inch Nails. He named the studio Pig (in references to the cryptic words written in Sharon Tate’s blood) and recorded two of his bands albums as well as the debut album of “shock rocker” Marilyn Manson before eventually selling the property. In 1996 the house would be demolished. Manson would make world news in 2014 as his engagement to Elaine "Star" Burton ended. We now know that she wrote Manson and maintained his innocence for years just to get him to marry her so she could gain control of his body after he died. With all the bizarre details it is hard to imagine that the world would ever forget the name Manson, but it is really the actions of a few lost women that the world should remember. Without them he would have been another angry failed musician and many people would have lived.
Before Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and even before Norman Bates, there was arguably the first icon of horror; the seductively terrifying Count Dracula. Little do most people know he was largely based on a woman; her name was Elizabeth Bathory, and her heinous crimes are the stuff that nightmares are made of. Now known as the Blood Countess, Elizabeth may have been responsible for the deaths of over six hundred women (highest estimations is six hundred and fifty). She is said to be the first “real” female serial killer who killed for sadistic and sexual pleasure instead of power, material gain or revenge. Another thing that makes her unique is she did not have a more dominant male counterpart as many female killers tend to have; she acted on her own accord for the love of inflecting pain on people. Without question she is the most sadistic serial killer on the list, and perhaps of all time; male or female. She took immense joy in causing her servants unimaginable amounts of pain that would lead to their death. Her torture methods included severe beatings with various objects like whips or iron bars, burning their genitals and other various body parts with candles or red hot pokers before serving the burnt body parts as food, biting at their faces and ripping at their flesh with her bare hands, dumping boiling water on their heads, forcing them to go into the snow naked and pouring freezing cold water on them, covering their bodies in honey and forcing them to sit naked on anthills to be bitten by fire ants and finally placing them into various devices like the iron maiden (which is similar to a garlic press). After the relentless savage beatings, and their untimely deaths, Elizabeth would bathe in the blood of her unfortunate victims. She believed that bathing and drinking the blood of virgin peasants would keep her young as it would nourish the beauty of her faire skin. This is how she got to be known as a female vampire.
Elizabeth was born in 1560, as a member of the powerful Bathory family who ruled the Eastern region of the Holy Roman Empire; which is modern day Hungry, Austria, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia and all of the Balkan states which included Hungary and the famed homeland of the fictitious count Transylvania. She was related, by marriage, to the famed prince of Wallachia Vlad the third, who was almost as cruel as she was. Vlad was a member of the House of Drăculești, and is now more commonly known by the name Vlad the impaler. Vlad earned that nickname for his brutal method of killing victims by impaling them on stakes. Stories are told about him invading areas, roasting children and feeding them to their mothers and cutting off the breasts of women and forcing their husbands to eat them. After that cruel forced cannibalism he would have them all impaled and would burn their village to the ground. Legend has it that there were over twenty thousand impaled corpses outside of the capital alone and that he impaled between forty-thousand to one hundred-thousand people all together. He was the other inspiration of count Dracula, a name which roughly translates to devil or dragon.
At the young age of eleven Elizabeth was engaged to marry Hungarian count Ferehc Nadasy when she turned fifteen. This arrangement was almost cancelled as she became pregnant at fourteen. She claimed it happened after she was “horse-playing” with a peasant boy. Elizabeth gave up that child after it was born and married the count as scheduled. The two had a happy marriage with a network of castles, country manor houses and what we today would consider vacation homes in Prague, Vienna and other cities. More importantly than all the wealth was the power of life and death that they had over all of their servants and all of the peasants that lived within the walls of their castles. This was a wealth that the two loved to take advantage of. The count shared Elizabeth’s love of torturing people, and it is said that he even taught her a few methods to enact on the unfortunate. The count would be away on military campaigns during the time most of the murders occurred, so we know that he was not forcing or encouraging her to kill. Elizabeth would kill over a thirty-five year period until she was arrested in 1610, at the age of fifty. Her insatiable bloodlust would cause her to extend her search from peasant virgins to girls of noble birth; this was a move that got her caught. Her castle was raided during the Christmas holiday where they found her chewing on the mutilated dying body of an unknown female. Hungarian authorities ordered that she be walled in a castle apartment with only a port for food and a mirror on the wall so she could watch herself age. She died four years later with her cruel beauty preserved.
Transcripts of her trial disappeared and her legend essentially died when she did; with the exception of folklore and myths. Fortunately they were found in 1720, and her name was reintroduced to the public. In 1796, Michael Wagener would be the first to publicize the stories of her bathing in blood. In addition to all of the books, movies and documentaries directly related to her life and crimes, Elizabeth’s story has influenced popular culture in several other ways. Bram Stoker wrote the macabre masterpiece Dracula in 1897; whose main character was largely inspired by Elizabeth, and has gone on to appear in several movies and television shows She was the inspiration for the villain in the 2006 movie Stay Alive, the “bloodbath” scene in 2007’s Hostel 2 (where a woman pays to lay in a bathtub and have a young girl hung upside in front of her so she can slit her throat and bathe in her blood) and finally there is the character of Scarlet who debuted in 2011 as a fighter in the ninth installment of the famed Mortal Kombat video game series (the character of Scarlet kills her opponents and bathes in their blood in various ways). With the level of depravity her crimes reached, it is no wonder that Elizabeth Bathory continues to fascinate and scare people to this day.
When most people think of infamous serial killers there are certain names that undoubtedly come to mind: Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer even Jack the Ripper (just to name a few), but there is usually one female face amongst the macabre mass of murderers; Aileen Wuornos. With her cold as ice crimes and extremely intimidating domineer, Aileen ranks right next to any man in terms of callousness and overall brutality. After her arrest, Aileen became a media celebrity as her story was all over the news and on the minds of most Americans. People were entranced not by just the story itself but really the notion that a woman could be as emotionless as Wuornos. Most female killers do not get close to their victims when they kill and most women either tend to use poison or have someone else do it for them, but Aileen (as the world would see) was very different. Unlike the vast number of female killers she shot her victims at pointblank range, getting as close to them as possible. If that was not enough to separate her from the others, she also went where most women would fear, back alleys and along the side of dark highways to find victims. Her case would also start a debate over how women who claim to be defending themselves were treated in the court system. There would be hundreds of websites, many books/documentaries/movies and even an opera written about her and her infamous crimes. All of these factors and so many more make Aileen unique amongst female killers.
Aileen’s childhood was filled with many unfortunate events that would lead her to becoming the monster she would be as an adult. Aileen was left in the care of her grandparents as her mother left when she was only four years old and her father committed suicide while in jail for raping a seven year old boy. Her grandparents were abusive to all of their children, but were especially tough on her as she was not their child. Childhood friends of hers tell stories of their extremely cruel parenting like not allowing her to have Christmas presents, forcing her to eat unfinished food right out of the garbage and even forcing her to watch them drown a kitten she was not supposed to have. In addition to all of the mental abuse, there was also a lot of physical abuse inflected on her during childhood; which included excessive beatings with belts and other various household items in front of her friends. As horrible as the mental and physical abuse was, the most damaging would be the (alleged) sexual abuse inflected on her by her grandfather. As an adult Aileen would claim that her grandfather raped her from the time she moved into his house up until when he eventually kicked her out. This is a claim that is supported by the fact that she started having sex for cigarettes at the very young age of eleven years old. Since she was a known prostitute, the kids at school started calling her “cigarette pig”, further fueling her well known hair-trigger temper. As she got older her problems escalated, especially her drinking and various drug use. Not surprisingly she became pregnant at fourteen (allegedly she was impregnated by her grandfather) and was forced to live in a home for unwed mothers until the baby was born and put up for adoption. A year later her grandmother died, which many psychologists say was the last connection to consequences and love she had. Aileen would end up getting kicked out of her childhood home and turned to prostitution full time and living in the woods to survive. It was during this time she got married to a much older man who acted like he loved her a lot. A month later, Aileen claims he beat her and the marriage was annulled.
After the end of her marriage she would move in with another man; the result would be virtually the same. Shortly after moving in, she was arrested for robbing a convenience store while intoxicated. This was an act of desperation and a horribly misguided attempt to get his attention. Once she was released from jail she broke up with that man and came out as being a gay woman. With the feeling of liberation that revelation gave her, she also felt comfortable sharing dark fantasies of wanting to kill men and go on a “Bonnie and Clyde” style crime spree. In 1986 Aileen started dating Tyria “Ty” Moore, which became the longest relationship she ever had. Despite all of the visible differences, the two would stay together for four and a half years. Many who knew the couple said Ty enjoyed being dominated by the louder older Lee (as Tyria called her). The two would live in and out of cheap motel rooms and apartments as they did not have much money. Tyria worked as a maid and Aileen continued to make money as a hooker. The relationship had problems from the start as Aileen was extremely possessive and controlling over Ty. The two would have many fights because Ty was a person who liked to go out and have company where as Aileen wanted to stay at home with just them. As the relationship went on Aileen would gain weight and show signs of drug abuse and personal hygiene neglect which gave her a very rough look. By not looking like a typical attractive prostitute, her client list was limited to those who wanted cheap dirty sex, which would bring her in contact with some dangerous people.
On November 30th 1989, Aileen would go out for looking for business like she usually did, but that day would be very different. On that day, Aileen came home with a Cadillac that she claimed she borrowed from a friend to help them move. To Tyria this was a plausible story, so she did not question it. The next day she moved all of their belongings and returned the car to her friend and confessed to Ty that she “killed a guy (today)” and left his body in the woods. Surprisingly, Ty had very little reaction and asked no questions. The body would be found a few days later on December 13th and was identified as fifty-one year old appliance repair shop owner Richard Mallory. The autopsy would show he was shot four times with a .22 caliber handgun. Aileen would later claim during her confession that Mallory acted like he intended to rape her, a story that would be changed, disputed and highly criticized. Six months later, on May 19th 1990, Aileen killed forty-three year old David Spears. What is interesting about this murder is David was very different from her first victim. Spears was a responsible family man who was on the way to his daughter’s graduation party. His body would be found badly decomposed with at least nine bullet wounds and six .22 caliber slugs in it; two of which were fired into his back. Aileen would later claim during her confession that the two meet up, had some beers and were “screwing around” when Spears became violent. While acting in her defense she reached in her bag got her gun and shot him while yelling “what the hell you think you’re doing’ dude…I’m going to kill you, cause you were trying to do whatever you could with me.” Once Spears was dead, she drove off in his truck and took all of the cash he had on him which was intended to be a graduation gift for his daughter. With all of the evidence collected including the overall good nature of David Spears, Aileen’s story of drinking and fooling around does not make a lot of sense. A mere two weeks later, Aileen killed forty-six year old Charles Carskaddon. During her confession she claimed that while the two were negotiating a price for sex she found his gun and assumed he was going to kill her, so she shot him before he could shoot her. All of the evidence however points to her becoming a pretty skillful killer as well as someone who was gaining a thirst for blood. Aileen would keep Charles’s car for two days before finally abandoning it. Only a week would pass before she killed again; this time it would be sixty-five year old preacher Peter Siems. Aileen would later claim during her confession that he too was trying to rape her. Just like in her other previous crimes she decided to take the victims vehicle, this time it was used to go on a joyride with her girlfriend for the fourth of July. During this holiday trip Aileen became so drunk Tyria had to drive. This would be a decision that would jeopardize the killing spree as Ty crashed the car into a ditch between some houses. When the home owners came out to check what had happened, the couple ran away. The police would get descriptions of the two women who abandoned the wrecked car as well as its rightful owner. Sketches of the duo were made and given to the local media and a handprint of Aileen’s was found in the car. Fifty year old Eugene “Troy” Burress would be Aileen’s next victim. She claimed that the two agreed on a price for sex and “out of nowhere” he threw down a ten dollar bill and said he was going to rape her, which caused her to shoot him in the chest and in the back. On September 11th 1990 Aileen murdered former Alabama police officer Dick Humphreys, who she claimed was trying to rape her as well. Humphreys was shot seven times total, one of which was in the back of the head. During an autopsy an interesting discovery was made that discredits Aileen’s claim of rape, they found a mark on his back that could be made if the barrel of a handgun was pressed very hard against his side. She would not kill again for roughly another two months on November 17, 1999. His name was Walter Jeno and during her confession Aileen told a similar story but with a very unique twist. She claimed that the sixty year old truck driver agreed to help her out by giving her money for sex, but once she was naked he flashed a badge and said she would be arrested if she did not do it for free. This sudden change of plans caused an argument and she pulled out her gun, at the sight of her weapon he ran for his life and she shot him in the back. The shot made him fall to the ground giving her time to walk up and shoot him executioner style in the back of the head. After killing him, Aileen stole the gold ring with diamonds he was wearing right off of his hand.
With a lot of parallel murders occurring within the same county, police began to see a distinctive pattern occurring within them, officers noticed that all of the victims were shot in the torso with the same caliber weapon. These were similarities too unique to ignore. Furthermore, they started to suspect a female shooter was responsible due to the fact that the murderer shot their victims in the chest. This was thought because shooting in the upper body was a sign indicative of a female shooter because women generally tend to not to aim for the head. The suspicion of a female killer was essentially confirmed after the Fourth of July car crash, only now they thought it all had been the work of a team. In the autumn of 1990 the police went on local television to make the statement that they were looking for two female killers and then they released the couples sketch. Once the sketches were released public, Tyria broke up with Aileen and moved back home to Ohio. The two knew they had reason to worry, what they did not know was that police placed them both on extreme surveillance and were waiting for the right time to move in. Aileen would be arrested during in Daytona Beach while attending a huge party at her favorite bar “The Last Resort” and Tyria would be picked up while visiting relatives in Pennsylvania. While in custody Tyria would be offered complete immunity if she could prove that she was not present during the murders. Over the next few days the two talked on the phone and Tyria attempted to get Aileen admit to killing all of those men and that she had nothing to do with it. During the calls, Aileen did not say much that could help the police as she basically spent the time trying to reassure Tyria that she would not go to jail and that it was all in self-defense. In these phone conversations it becomes apparent that Aileen killed in order to provide for Tyria. A week after her arrest, on January 16, 1991 Aileen made a three hour long video confessing to the murder of Mallory in self-defense. In that video she tells a very convincing story filled with facts that were not only plausible but contained intimate details about Mallory that were confirmed by those who knew him. She painted a picture of a guy who was so shy that would not take off his pants, which was an act that made her believe he was going to rape her What is interesting is during her trial she told a very different more violent story of a very brutal attack and actual rape. This new story stirred up a lot of emotions as well as a debate of was she really responsible for any of her crimes. What people seemed to overlook is that this was completely different than what she originally told police and that Aileen had no proof whatsoever to confirm her story. Many extreme feminists argue that Aileen was not given a fair trial since information of Mallory’s past, (especially his criminal record of having been arrested for breaking into a home and attempting to rape the woman who lived there) was not presented to the jury, facts some argue could have impacted a jury’s final verdict. These claims would be arrested and disputed later as Mallory lived close to thirty years without any other criminal offense.
Ultimately Aileen would be found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death. She spent her last remaining years on Florida’s death row, gradually losing all sense of reality. While in prison she made numerous complaints that her mind was being tortured, that her food was being poisoned, that her cell had mold in all while living in fear of being raped. She believed that these were all methods being inflicted on her to make her commit suicide instead of being executed. Inhumane living conditions would not be her only claims of a conspiracy being implemented against her, she believed that the government knew that she was the one killing all those men and they simply let her continue “cleaning up the streets” while letting the story get bigger and more sensational. On the surface this theory seems outrageous, but we have to consider just how many people profited in some way from her case. In addition to all the books, movies and documentaries made about her; three police officers and former lover Tyria Moore negotiated movie deals before Aileen even went to trial, her attorney charged outrageous sums of money for interviews (none of that money would ever go to Aileen as it is illegal for someone to profit from ones crimes) and in one of the most bizarre things to even happen during a serial murder trial Aileen was legally adopted by a “Christian” woman who claims she saw Aileen on the news and fell in love with her. During her final interview for documentary filmmaker Nick Bloomfield, Aileen summed up her belief of a giant conspiracy against her saying "You sabotaged my ass! Society, and the cops, and the system! A raped woman got executed, and was used for books and movies and shit!” Bloomfield made two movies about her and unlike other very critical filmmakers, he tried to paint her in a real light and tell parts of her story that went previously untold. Although nothing will ever make murder acceptable, they do make you feel empathy for her given her difficult life, poor treatment in society and the ultimate betrayal by her only true love (as Tyria helped get her sentenced to death). We will never fully know if she was raped, but we do know her life from the very beginning was tragic and she unleased her pain on the world. Aileen’s sad and troubled life would come to an end on October 9, 2002 by means of lethal injection; giving her and the victims’ families some much needed peace. Her infamous last words were, "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus June 6. Like the movie, big mother ship and all. I'll be back." Aileen’s ashes were sent to Michigan and spread under a tree.
Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty one. This popular rhyme, which was originally a children’s jump rope game, may not be historically accurate, but it does serve as a testament to the legacy of the heinous double murder that occurred in Fall River in 1892. It is also an example of how popular the story became, especially its prime suspect. Since the news of the crime broke, the world has been captivated by suspected, and in the eyes of most assumed, murderess Lizzie Borden.
Elizabeth Andrew Borden was born on July 19th, 1860 in the small town of Fall River Massachusetts. She had one sister who was nine years older, Emma Lenora Borden. Lizzie was a very active member of her church, working as both a Sunday school teacher for recent immigrants and as the treasurer of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Her father Andrew Jackson Borden earned his fortune as a manufacturer of various products and later in his life was the president of a bank. He became a very wealthy man whose estate was worth over seven million dollars in today’s market. Despite the vast wealth he accumulated, Andrew Borden was known to be extremely frugal. He made his family live in a small house (in the poorer part of town) without electricity or indoor plumbing. Andrew’s miserly ways would make the relationship with his daughter’s very strained, especially spinster Lizzie who was known for having a taste for expensive things. Being deprived of material possessions by her father was one of the reasons Lizzie was a petty thief. She was accused of robbing a dress maker and suspected of robbing her father, both were crimes that he would over look. Lizzie’s mother, Sarah Morse died when Lizzie was just two years old. Andrew Borden later married Abby Gray, who would become Lizzie’s stepmother and first suspected victim. Abby and her stepdaughter did not get along as Lizzie accused her of being a gold-digger. The tension between them would come to a head when Andrew purchased property for members of Abby’s family and when Lizzie discovered a soon to be revised will that did not include her or her sister.
Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered on Thursday August 4th 1892. The couple received multiple blows to the head with a hatchet or an axe. Abby was murdered first in an upstairs bedroom. She received eighteen blows, thirteen of which were delivered with enough strength to break her skull. Andrew was murdered hours later in the family room. He suffered eleven blows, four of which were strong enough to break his skull. The skulls were struck with such force that doctors could not tell the difference between the two victims. Andrew Borden was dead at the age of 70, Abby at the age of 64. Andrew Borden’s body was discovered at 11:10 A.M. by Lizzie who then cried out to the families live-in maid Bridget Sullivan, who the family called by the name of their former maid Maggie, “Maggie come down quick! Father’s dead! Somebody came in and killed him!” Sullivan responded quickly and by 11:45 A.M. the house was filled with policemen, neighbors, reporters and a medical examiner who performed the two autopsies in the family’s dining room. When Lizzie was questioned about her whereabouts when the crime occurred, she claimed to be in the family’s barn getting an iron and eating pears. Many did not believe this for two reasons; first there were no footprints found in the barn and secondly, it was one of the hottest days of that year with temperatures reaching one- hundred degrees which would make it impossible for someone to be outside for a long period of time. Police were baffled by the lack of evidence on the Borden property, so they shifted the focus of their investigation to interviewing members of the community. The strongest lead they found was many testified that days before the murders they witnessed Lizzie at the pharmacy trying to buy prosaic acid, a very strong poison. She claimed that she needed it to clean a stole; she would later claim that she needed it to kill bugs. Despite the fact that pharmacist, Eli Bence, claimed that he could not sell it to her without a prescription, members of the Borden family, (especially Abby) became ill and went to the doctor showing signs of poisoning. With this suspicious behavior surfacing police started to look at the previously unthinkable suspect, Lizzie. When they interviewed the Borden’s neighbor Alice Russell, they received testimony of even more suspicious behavior. Russell claimed that she had witnessed Lizzie burning a blue dress just three days after the murders. When confronted with the allegation, she admitted to burning the dress but claimed it was stained with paint and was no longer useful. One neighbor claimed that during conversations with her Lizzie would talk of being scared that something was going to happen to her father. With all of the circumstantial evidence found Lizzie would be officially charged with the crime. Lizzie would plead not guilty and spend the next year in jail waiting for her trial.
The trial was the media event of its time, with reporters from several national newspapers in attendance. The country became obsessed with the case looking daily for any news. Her defense team would attempt to build a case of reasonable doubt. They produced witnesses that claimed they saw a stranger lurking around the property and used her demeanor and gender to bolster their case. The defense tried everything they could to drive home the point that she was incapable of doing something like this and that it was nearly impossible for one person to commit two murders without getting blood on them. They would reiterate that Lizzie was examined by the police who found no traces of blood on her body, dress, stockings or shoes. The prosecution would answer that by claiming that Lizzie took off her clothes snuck behind her sleeping father and committed the crime in the nude. They would make casts of skulls (taken the day of the funeral) to prove that the handle less hatchet found in the barn was the murder weapon. They would also provide a motive for the crimes addressing Andrew Borden’s new will that would leave the bulk of his estate to Abby instead of his daughters. Finally they produced a witness, a matron at the jail where Lizzie was being held, who claimed she overheard a conversation between the two sisters and heard Lizzie say “Emma, you have given me away haven’t you”. Others would speculate years later that Lizzie and her father had an incestuous relationship. The incest rumor was supported by the facts that Lizzie was not allowed to marry, she gave her father her class ring which he wore daily and the family’s house was literally divided in half with passage ways which provided Andrew with access to his daughter without his wife’s knowledge. This theory explains the brutal and personal nature of the murders, as victims of prolonged sexual crimes are prone to violent outbursts against their attackers and those who do nothing to stop it.
On June 20th 1893, after only ninety minutes of deliberation, the jury found Lizzie not guilty. The verdict was not exactly unexpected as most of the incriminating evidence was deemed inadmissible and the evidence that was allowed was hearsay; but mainly it was the general consensus of people that an upper class, respectable Christian woman could never commit such a heinous act of double murder. After she was released, Lizzie would invite the jury over to her house for a party where she was photographed with all the members of the jury that just moments earlier debated on her guilt. Lizzie and Emma would move out of their small house to a mansion in the rich part of town that was commonly referred to as “The Hill”. They bought a huge estate they named Maplecroft, which was next door to the richest family in Boston. She would change her name to Lizbeth and start her life over as a socialite, spending her time having parties or partaking in Boston nightlife. She started a lesbian relationship with actress Nance O’Neil who used Lizzie’s money to fund her expensive lifestyle and unsuccessful career. This change would cause several fights with Emma, who would eventually move out and never speak to her sister again. Emma Borden would never marry and spent the rest of her life alone. Even though she was found not guilty, the community shunned Lizzie for the rest of her life.
Lizzie Borden died on June 1st 1927, and Emma died just nine days later. Lizzie would leave the bulk of her estate to an animal shelter. The infamous Borden house where the murders occurred has since been converted to a bed and breakfast where you can take guided tours and shop for souvenirs that range from T-shirts to pencils and even hatchet key chains with “Lizzie” inscribed on it. It is also a popular stop for paranormal enthusiasts as it has been a common site for supernatural activity. The Borden case has fascinated America for over a hundred years and is a very big part of American popular culture. It has inspired many books, movies, plays, musicals, an opera and even a ballet. It would be known as one of the first prominent murder cases in United States history as well as one of the most debated murder cases ever.
All of our Serial Killer Magazines and books are massive, perfect bound editions. These are not the kind of flimsy magazines or tiny paperback novels that you are accustomed to. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels.
We are happy to say that the Serial Killer Trading Cards are back! This 90 card set features the artwork of 15 noted true crime artists and will come with a numbered, signed certificate of authenticity for each set. get yours now before they are gone forever.
SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE is an official release of the talented artists and writers at SerialKillerCalendar.com. It is chock full of artwork, rare documents, FBI files and in depth articles regarding serial murder. It is also packed with unusual trivia, exclusive interviews with the both killers and experts in the field and more information that any other resource available to date. Although the magazine takes this subject very seriously and in no way attempts to glorify the crimes describe in it, it also provides a unique collection of rare treats (including mini biographical comics, crossword puzzles and trivia quizzes). This is truly a one of a kind collectors item for anyone interested in the macabre world of true crime, prison art or the strange world of murderabelia.
All of our Serial Killer books are massive, 8.5" x 11" perfect bound editions. These are not the kind of tiny paperback novels that you are accustomed to. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels.
We are now looking for artists, writers and interviewers to take part in the world famous Serial Killer Magazine. If you are interested in joining our team, contact us at MADHATTERDESIGN@GMAIL.COM
