Most of the killers in this archive took nothing. The motive, where anyone can name one, is something that does not convert into money. Twelve entries are different. In each, somebody insured a person who then died, and the sum involved was usually small.
Eleven of the twelve are women. That is the sharpest gender split of any pattern in this roster, and it is worth being careful about what it means, because the obvious reading is the wrong one.
It is not that women kill for money and men do not. It is that this particular method, insure a relative, poison them slowly, collect, requires proximity, patience and access to the household, and it was for a long time one of the few ways a woman could obtain money that the law recognized as hers.
Look at who the victims are. Anna Cunningham poisoned her husband and four of her children with arsenic in Indiana between 1918 and 1922. Anjette Lyles poisoned two husbands, her mother-in-law and her nine-year-old daughter in Macon, Georgia. Martha Marek poisoned her husband, her infant daughter, an elderly relative and a lodger with thallium in Vienna in the 1930s. Diana Lumbrera's children died one after another, each death recorded as natural until the last.
These are not strangers. They are the people the killer lived with, and in most cases the only people she was in a position to insure.
Mary Ann Britland's case makes the mechanism plain. She worked in a Manchester cotton mill and sold insurance policies door to door, which is how she came to hold policies on her own family. The job put the instrument in her hands.
Catherine Flannagan and her sister Margaret Higgins ran a Liverpool lodging house and took out burial insurance on the people who lodged there. Burial insurance was a working-class institution, designed so that a family could avoid a pauper's funeral, and it paid out on exactly the people a landlady had daily access to.
Two of the twelve were never tried, and both belong here with that stated rather than left out.
Belle Gunness's first husband died in 1900 on the single day two of his life insurance policies overlapped, and the payout bought a farm outside La Porte, Indiana. That is the largest sum in this group by a wide margin, and it is still only a farm. She was never tried for anything. A headless female body was found in the fire that ended the case in 1908 and has never been positively identified, and whether she died there has never been settled.
Miyoko Sumida is the modern version and the most systematic: six deaths in Amagasaki over eight years, most of them members of families she had taken control of, with their insurance and pension money going to her. She hanged herself at the Hyogo detention center in December 2012, before trial, so nothing against her was tested in court.
The amounts are the part that stays with you. Robin Lee Row set fire to her family's home in Boise in 1992, killing her husband and two children, for insurance money. Judy Buenoano collected on three policies. Rhonda Bell Martin confessed and gave insurance money as part of her motive, having killed six people including her mother, two husbands and three of her own children.
Only one man is in this group on the same terms. Sukhwinder Dhillon, a used car dealer in Hamilton, Ontario, poisoned his wife and his business partner with strychnine to collect on their life insurance. His entry sits among eleven women and does not look out of place, which is itself informative: the method does not require anything a man lacks.
What the twelve have in common is not greed in any dramatic sense. It is a small, legal financial instrument, available to ordinary people, that pays out on the death of somebody you live with. The insurance industry has known about this since the nineteenth century, which is why the burial policies the Flannagan sisters used were eventually reformed.
The other thing they share is that almost every one of these deaths was initially recorded as natural. Lumbrera buried four children before anyone examined a body. That is not a coincidence either. A motive that depends on collecting a payout depends absolutely on the death looking ordinary.