Beverey ALLITT, a nurse suffering from the mental illness Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (a desire to kill or injure to get attention), was given 13 life sentences at Nottingham crown court in 1993 after being convicted of murdering four children and attacking nine others. [ReadOn]

A typical "Black Widow," Lyda Catherine AMBROSE left a trail of five dead husbands and lovers in her quest for insurance policy payoffs. Born in 1891, nothing is known about her early life until 1917 when she killed her first fiancee in Keytesville, Missouri.[ReadOn]

Patients put at risk by culture of staff secrets A NURSE at the centre of an inquiry into the deaths of two girls and two elderly women in a hospital intensive care unit was arrested at home yesterday. Kathleen Anne Atkinson, 47, was suspended a year ago from her ‡23,000-a-year post and dismissed two months later for alleged "gross misconduct". [ReadOn]

On Oct. 26, 1965, Indianapolis police were called to a rundown house on East New York Street where they found the body of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens on a bare mattress in an upstairs bedroom. [ReadOn]

Born October 23, 1932, in Cumberland County, North Carolina, Margie Bullard would look back on her childhood as a cruel period of "permissible slavery," made worse by the attentions of a father who began molesting her at age thirteen. [ReadOn]

A sixteenth century Hungarian Countess who enjoyed bathing in blood. This deviant fawn of royalty believed that regular blood baths would halt the aging process. Estimates of the number of girls that were slaughtered in her 10 years of beauty treatments vary from 40 to as much as 600.

[Read on ]

Born in 1877, Marie Alexandrine had always been a beautiful woman; she never had any trouble attracting the men in her hometown of Liege, Belgium. When 33 years old, she wed Charles Becker, who considered himself fortunate to have won such a lovely woman. And for twenty years she was indeed a faithful wife. [ReadOn]

Bleached blonde barmaid Betty Lou Beets seemed to be very unlucky in her choice of husbands. Out of the five, four disappeared without trace and the other (number 3) left her after she planted a bullet in his back after a nasty fight. [ReadOn]

At 11-years-old, Mary bell is the youngest female killer of the Archives. A native of Newcastle, England, Mary was born in 1957. Her mother was an unwed, mentally disturbed woman who once gave the child to a stranger she met outside an abortion clinic. [ReadOn]

Lucy Quirina de Berk insisted she was innocent at her trial in The Hague for the deaths of thirteen people.  The forty-one-year-old nurse was charged with eighteen counts of murder and attempted murder at four different hospitals, and was suspected in as many as thirty cases.  [ReadOn]

Around Loudon, in France, she is remembered as the "Queen of Poisoners ," with thirteen victims charged against her name. She is a legend in the district -- for her crimes, and for the way in which she managed, finally, to cheat the executioner. [ReadOn]

The publicityseeking merry widow Elfriede "Sugar" Blauensteiner had 2 obsessions: Gambling and a vivid interest in pharmacy.
Her last victim, retired and wealthy Alois Pichler (77) answered her personal ad in 1995 - and survived the Black Widow´s care just 5 weeks. [Read on ]

Early in 1977, nurses employed at the public hospital in picturesque Wetteren, Belgium, began comparing notes on curious events in the 38-bed geriatric ward. For openers, the death rate had increased dramatically in recent months, with twenty-one patients lost in the span of a year. [ReadOn]

38 year old Mary Ann Britland suffered at Strangeways, for poisoning Mary Dixon, becoming the first woman to be hanged there. She had also poisoned her husband and daughter as she was having an affair with Mary Dixon's husband - although he was apparently completely unaware of her criminal intentions.

Dubbed "The Black Widow" for preying on her family and leaving a dead husband, boyfriend and son in her trail, Judy Buenoano was executed on Florida's temperamental Old Sparky on March 30, 1998. [ReadOn]

Ada CHARD-WILLIAMS (*1876) was hanged March 08, 1900 in London´s Newgate Prison. Thus she was the last woman to be executed here. After 1900 women were executed in women´s prison Holloway. [ReadOn]

A native of Cyprus, born in 1900, Styllou Christofi was tried, in 1925, on a charge of murdering her mother-in-law by ramming a lighted torch down the old woman's throat. She persuaded a jury of her innocence and was released, but her problems with in-laws were not at an end. In 1953, Christofi went to live with her son and his German wife of fifteen years in Hampstead, England. [ReadOn]

On May 1, 1922, police in Cleveland jailed a local woman on suspicion of poisoning her husband for the sum of $ 11,000 in life insurance. Announcing her arrest the next day, prosecutor Edward Stanton told reporters that the suspect had been married five times, divorcing her first two husbands, after which the next three died in mysterious circumstances. [ReadOn]

Cindy COLLIER und Shirley WOLF were 15 and 14 years old, when they startet prowling condominiums in California in 1983. They knocked at doors of randomly chosen victims, to gain admittance under a pretext. An elderly woman opened and chatted with them unsuspectingly, while the two girls planned to steal the lady´s car.[ReadOn]

Some people collect stamps; others postcards. Bordello Madame Eva Coo collected insurance policies on her friends, colleagues and employees. One employee in particular, Harry Wright, a slow witted handyman had been taken under Eva's wing when his mother died at her request. [ReadOn]

A mother, wife and nursemaid, Mary Anne COTTON had all the credentials for a respectable place in Victorian society. Beneath her caring exterior, however, she was a cold, calculating serial killer.[ReadOn]

Also known as Jimmie Knorr. A mother of five, Theresa/Jimmie was in the habit of killing her daughters once they reached puberty. She first shot her oldest daughter, but the poor girl survived. After a few weeks, Theresa tried to remove the bullet by herself. The amateur surgery left the hapless girl near death. [ReadOn]

The defendant was a 21 year old mother of four, convicted of murdering her first two by drowning them in the bathtub at her home on Rhonda Drive and Riddle Street in Jeffersonville. The drownings were committed at different times, 1 1/2 years apart, when each victim was approximately 14 months old. [ReadOn]

Minnie Dean has the dubious honor of being the only woman to be legally hanged in New Zealand.
Christened Williamina Dean, she was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847. She married and had two daughters. What happened to her daughters is unknown. In 1868 she emigrated to New Zealand and lived in Southland with an old woman she called Granny Kelly. [ReadOn]

During her trial in 1955, the press tagged 50 year-old Nannie DOSS "The Giggling Granny". Despite her amiable demeanour, DOSS´ crimes were no laughing matter. She was found to have killed four husbands in four states; Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas and Oklahoma - where she was finally convicted for murder.[ReadOn]

A self-styled witch, who made her living through the sale of charms and potions, Enriqueta was arrested by police in Barcelona, during March of 1912, on charges of abducting local children. Her most recent victim , a young girl named Angelita, was rescued alive from the witch's lair, appalling police with a tale of murder and cannibalism . [ReadOn]

A solid family background and religious training did not spare the second wife of Texas rancher J.D. Etheridge from pangs of jealousy. When they were married in the spring of 1912, she thought the wealthy widower admired her for herself. It soon became apparent though, that he was more concerned with finding someone who would cook his meals and clean his Iarge Bosque County home, northwest of Waco. [ReadOn]

Christine Falling was born at Perry, Florida, on March 12, 1963, the second child of a 65-year-old father and his 16-year-old wife. Reared in poverty, obese and dull-witted, she required regular doses of medication to control her epileptic seizures. [ReadOn]

55 year old hanged at Kirkdale prison, Liverpool by Bartholomew Binns, side by side with her sister, Margaret Higgins. Flanagan and Higgins were both convicted of the poisoning of 44 year old Higgin's husband, Thomas, for his life insurance. [ReadOn]

Kristen Gilbert, 33, worked on Ward C of the Veteran's Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts.  When she was there, it seemed that too many patients died from cardiac arrest.  In 1996, three nurses came forward to report their fear that there was a killer among them. [ReadOn]

Amy and James Archer opened Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly in 1901 in Newington, Connecticut, and quickly earned a reputation as genteel caretakers of New England's wealthy aged. Although neither Amy's or James' qualifications bespoke a background in medicine, their establishment offered the right therapies and tonics to keep its senior patients happy and comfortable. [ReadOn]

These two deadly sisters ran the bordello from hell in Guanajuato, Mexico. They recruited their prostitutes through help wanted adds and killed them when they stopped pleasing the clientele. Sometimes they even killed the johns who showed up to the brothel with big wads of cash.
After too many unexplained disappearances the cops raided the premises where they found the bodies of eleven males, eighty females, and several fetuses - obviously from illegal abortions.

It was in Walker, Michigan in 1987 where a pair of lesbians made death a sexual game.  Gwendolyn Gail Graham, 23, and Catherine May Wood, 24, worked together at the Alpine Manor Nursing Home.  Graham was a nurse's aide and Wood was her immediate superior.  Wood had divorced and gained an enormous amount of weight, so she was hungry for a friend.  When she met Graham, they immediately hit it off and soon became lovers. [ReadOn]

America's first "black widow" of the 20th century was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset, on November 11, 1859, in the fishing hamlet of Selbu, on Norway's west coast. The daughter of an unsuccessful merchant, Brynhild immigrated to the United States in 1881; three years later, she settled in Chicago. [ReadOn]

The first woman to die in Ohio's electric chair , Anna Hahn was a German native, born in 1906, who immigrated to Cincinnati at age 21. There, she married a young telephone operator, briefly managing a bakery in Cincinnati's German district before she tired of the hours and set her sights on easy money. [ReadOn]