History’s most notorious female serial killers revealed… and the chilling reasons why they turned to murder
Among the group of notorious killers are caregivers who slaughtered dozens of infants, bored housewives and twisted lovers who made up one half of a murderous couple
MYRA Hindley, Rosemary West and Aileen Wuornos - these women are considered some of the most evil people to ever walk the Earth.
This is because they are all members of a small but notorious group - that of the female serial killer.
Among this group are caregivers who slaughtered dozens of infants helping usher in laws on medical abortions and bored housewives who knocked off their husbands.
Others such as Hindley and West are the twisted lovers who made up one half of a murdering couple.
Following the news that notorious Canadian killer Karla Homolka is now free and helping volunteer at a primary school, we take a look below at some of history's worst female serial killers.
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Nannie Doss
Nannie Doss was an American serial killer who killed 11 people over several decades beginning in the 1920s.
Nicknamed the "giggling nannie" because of her cheery grin, she confessed to her crime wave after being caught in 1954.
In all, she used arsenic to knock off four husbands, her mum, a mother-in-law, her two sisters, two of her children and a grandson and a nephew.
According to , she stirred the poison into stewed prunes, coffee and moonshine which she then gave to her victims.
She was caught after killing husband number five, who survived her first poisoning attempt, recovered, and then was struck down a second time and died.
A physician, suspecting foul play, convinced Doss to allow him to perform an autopsy - where he discovered an industrial-scale amount of arsenic in his body.
Cops then arrested her, she admitted the crimes and was handed down a life sentence.
A fan of "True Romance" magazines, she told investigators she kept knocking off husbands in a bid to find the perfect soulmate.
She told cops: "That’s about it. I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life."
Karla Homolka
Canadian serial killer Karla Homolka was jailed along with her then husband Paul Bernardo over the slayings of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, and her sister Tammy.
Born in Ontario, Canada on May 4, 1970, she helped Bernardo rape and murder the three teenagers.
The twisted couple were arrested in 1993 and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison later that year for her role in the slayings.
She pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of French and Mahaffey. Homolka wasn’t charged over the death of her sister but her sentence took the incident into account.
She was released from prison in 2005 after completing her plea deal sentence dubbed by the press as a "deal with the devil".
Today she lives in Montreal, where she has been spotted taking her children to school and reportedly volunteering on school field trips.
Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos, whose life was dramatised in the Hollywood film Monster starring Charlize Theron, killed seven men between November 1989 and November 1990.
The sex worker shot all of them point blank range, claiming it was done in self defence after each one had either raped her, or tried to rape her.
Born in 1956 in Rochester, Michigan, Wuornos' father committed suicide while in prison for child molestation, and she was put into the care of her grandparents, who were said to be violent and alcoholic.
Once she reached adulthood, she lived a life on the streets and eventually turned to prostitution, picking up and killing trucker clients traversing the Florida highways.
She was eventually tracked down after her fingerprints - which were already on record due to previous convictions - were found in the crashed truck of a missing man Peter Siems.
This led cops to another six slayings, which she said were carried out in self defence, but she later recanted this and admitted she slaughtered the men so she could rob them and leave no witnesses.
reported her as showing little regret in the months before he execution in 2002. She said: "I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too.
"There's no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again. I have hate crawling through my system."
Juana Barraza
Juana Barraza is a Mexican former professional wrestler who was dubbed "The Little Old Lady Killer" for slaughtering between 42 and 48 women in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Born in rural Hidalgo, her mother was reportedly an alcoholic who handed her over to a man who raped her as a child in exchange for three beers.
Juana would gain entry to elderly women's homes by pretending to be a nurse or social worker, then strangle them with cords or stockings found inside their houses.
According to , she stole religious artifacts from her victims' homes, such as crosses, crucifixes and bibles.
She was eventually caught leaving a victim's home after police had spent years chasing what they believed was a transvestite killer. Barraza was jailed for a total of 759 years.
Jane Toppan
Nurse Jane Toppan, who operated in Massachusetts in the late 1800s, was nicknamed the Angel of Death for having killed at least 31 patients.
According to the , she injected patients with morphine until they died and boasted that her life goal was to "have killed more people - helpless people - than any other man or woman who ever lived".
She was born in 1857 to an alcoholic father who many in the community believed to be a "crackpot". When she was just six, he abandoned her and her sister when he handed them over to an orphanage and disappeared.
It's claimed Toppan derived a "sexual thrill" from watching her patients die, and she would climb into bed with them as she experimented with morphine doses and the effect this had on their nervous system.
She was eventually snared when members of a family she was friendly with stayed with her - and they started dropping dead.
She was found insane and sentenced to life in prison, where she died in 1938 aged 84.
Myra Hindley
Myra Hindley was one half of the couple responsible for the Moors Murders, which rank among the most notorious crimes committed in modern-day Britain.
Hindley, along with her boyfriend Ian Brady, slaughtered and sexually abused five children they had convinced to get into their vehicle.
Three of the youngsters' bodies were dumped in graves on Saddleworth Moor, while the fourth, Keith Bennett, is believed to lie nearby but it has never been located.
At the time of her arrest, she was labelled "the most evil woman in Britain". She died in hospital in 2002 having spent years claiming she was reformed and blaming Brady for the killings.
Rosemary West
Like her compatriot Myra Hindley, Rosemary West ranks among the most vile and notorious female killers in Britain.
She too was part of a killing duo, and helped her husband Fred West torture and murder at least nine young women between 1973 and 1987.
These were mostly carried out at the couple's Gloucester "house of horrors" home, where many of the bodies were buried.
Her father was a violent alcoholic who sexually abused her, and at she fell under the spell of a then 28-year-old Fred when she was just 15.
The pair's brutal rape and murder spree ended when cops realised their daughter Heather West (whom the couple had killed at age 16) had not been seen for six years. The following investigation uncovered the bodies buried in their backyard.
She continued to profess her innocence, but evidence showed she was a willing partner in both the abuse and the horrific killings.
Miyuki Ishikawa
Japanese midwife Miyuki Ishikawa still ranks as Japan's worst serial killer after she killed an estimated 103 infants throughout the 1940s.
Her killings occurred while she worked in hospital after patients, often struggling financially, were found to be unable to care for their newborns.
Most of the children died of neglect. Despite other midwives being aware of what she was doing, she wasn't stopped until cops found the bodies of five babies.
Born in 1897, she claimed the mothers who abandoned the children were responsible for their deaths.
Incredibly, she was sentenced to only eight years in prison - and then had this HALVED on appeal. Her reign of terror is now believed to be the reason Japan ushered in legal abortion laws.
Dagmar Overbye
Like many of her fellow female serial killers, Denmark's Dagmar Overbye's 25 victims were all children - including one of her own.
She was a child carer who looked after babies born outside of marriage. Although her lawyer claimed her abuse as a child was to blame, she was sentenced to death.
According to , between 1913 - 1920, she killed 25 youngsters by drowning, strangulation or burning them alive in her masonry fire.
Her sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment and she died in jail in 1929 at the age of 42.
Beverley Allitt
Beverley Allitt was another child killer - she too was a nurse who murdered her victims by giving them large doses of insulin.
Operating from a hospital in Lincolnshire, Britain, she murdered four children, attempted to murder another three and caused GBH to six more.
She was dubbed the "Angel of Death" after the children's deaths occurred under her care in 1991. Two years later, authorities suspicious of the high number of cardiac arrests among patients in her ward had snared her and she was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in jail.
reported she suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy - an illness in which a caregiver exaggerates or induces health problems among those in their care to engender sympathy from others.
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