Criminal profiling tells us that it is very unusual for women to become serial killers, but that doesn’t mean there have never been any. In fact there have been quite a few, though they have been spread a little thinner through time. If we choose to go back, we can actually discover many women who killed well into double figures. Below are some examples of the worst female serial killers, and there outrageous crimes.
Belle Gunness
It appears that Belle didn’t take too kindly to the appearance of suitors at her door, the reason we believe this to be true is that she is thought to have killed 32 of them. Perhaps if she had not murdered both of her husbands, she would not have had to have put up with the inconvenience of gentlemen coming to call. Belle is also thought to have killed several of her children meaning about 40 murders all told. The discovery of Belles murders is total irony. She was killed by a lover she had spurned who set fire to her farm in La Porte, Indiana. The investigators of the blaze discovered the bodies that had been buried at her farm. Some say the headless body that was discovered was too small to have been Belle’s, but unmarried gentlemen all over the state breathed a sigh of relief on that day in 1908.
Delfina and Maria de Jesus Gonzalez
These sisters, who ran a prostitution house in Guanajuanto, Mexico, hold the distinction of being the country’s most notorious serial killers. The police raided the brothel in 1963 after a tipoff about forced prostitution; what they discovered was the bodies of 91 people buried on the property. Apparently the sisters’ standards were very high, and many of the bodies were those of prostitutes who were killed for “failing to please the clients”. Whether the 11 men who were killed had “failed to please the owners” is not known. How their criminal defense attorney managed to keep them from the gas chamber is still unknown to this day. What is known is that these unsavory siblings were sentenced to 40 years each, and deserved every day.
Juana Barraza
Bringing us more to the current times is the case of Juana Barazza. Barraza is thought to have started killing elderly ladies in 2005, but it could have been as early as 1990. She was finally charged with 16 murders in 2008, after some confusion about her sex and size. The reason the case was so confusing for the police was they believed they were looking for a man. Barraza was actually a 200lb wrestler so the confusion can be understood. Found guilty of 11 murders, she was sentenced to 759 years in prison. Estimates put the actual total of bodies to be between 24 and 49, though she only confessed to 4 murders. The fact that her fingerprints were found at the 11 murders she was convicted of seems to have gone totally over her head.
Never assume a woman is not as capable as a man of these terrible crimes, because history shows us that they are.
Author Bio: The author of this post, Yorrick, is a freelancer by profession and currently writes for Dribbin and Brown, criminal defence solicitors. He has keen interest in psychology and is always on the lookout for interesting happenings around the globe.
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