Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century
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WOMEN SERIAL KILLERS
IN THE 20th CENTURY
SYLVIA PERRINI
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Copyright © 2013
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DISCLAIMER
In researching this book, I gathered material from a wide variety of resources, newspapers, academic papers, and other material both on and offline. In many cases, I have referenced actual quotes pertaining to the content throughout. To the best of my knowledge, the material contained is correct. Neither the publisher nor the author will be held liable for incorrect or factual mistakes.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
WOMEN FROM HELL
AMY ARCHER-GILLIGAN
DAGMAR OVERBYE
VERA RENCZI
BERTHA GIFFORD
DAISY LOUISA DEMELKER
LYDIA SOUTHARD
MARIE ALEXANDRIA BECKER
MARTHA MAREK
ANNA MARIE HAHN------ "
CAROLINE GRILLS
LOUISE PEETE
MARIE BESNARD
NANNIE DOSS
MARY ELIZABETH WILSON---
RHONDA BELL MARTIN
ANJETTE DONOVAN LYLES
MARIE FIKACKOVA
JANIE LOU GIBBS
VELMA BARFIELD
JUDIAS "JUDY" BUENOANO
DOROTHEA HELEN PUENTE-
ELFRIEDE BLAUENSTEINER
AILEEN WUORNUS-
DANA SUE GRAY
BEVERLY ALLITT
CONCLUSION
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
WOMEN FROM HELL
Despite centuries of horrific acts of cruelty, bloodshed and murder, women are still regarded as the gentle nurturing sex.
In Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century, as in the Women Serial killers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, I only look at profiles of women who committed their crimes without a male partner involved. In the majority of the cases, all the women committed their crimes solely on their own.
The 20th-century, like the previous centuries, has seen no end of murders by women with poison as their choice of weapon. Furthermore, just like in the previous centuries, the murders have been just as cold and calculating.
Why do women prefer to murder with poison? I’ve come to suspect three reasons:
1. It avoids physical confrontation.
2. It is cleaner than the ugly bloodied scenes of guns or knives.
3. The women serial killers believe it is a method that will allow them to get away with murder.
Those lucky few who have managed to survive an attempted murder by these women have described being poisoned as being equal to being devoured alive.
However, the 20th century has also seen murders committed by women with guns and, in the case of Dana Gray, with physical violence. Dana is a rarity among women serial killers, in both her choice of victim and her hands-on method of using her hands, a cord or rope, and an object with which to batter her victim.
Aileen Wuornos was described in the popular press as the first American woman serial killer. This is totally incorrect. American women serial killers existed long before Aileen Wuornos was even born. Yet, even after all this time, we are left with the same question: what leads a woman to commit serial murder? After much study, I’ve concluded there are several reasons:
1. The vast majority of serial murders committed by women in the 20th century, as in earlier centuries, have been committed for money and materialistic gain.
2. Other reasons include a need to overpower either someone who is abusive or someone who is physically stronger.
3. Attention seeking behavior and personality disorders such as schizophrenia, Münchausen syndrome, and Borderline Personality Disorder to name just a few.
In this book, I examine the profiles of twenty-five women serial killers, all of whom acted alone.
I have not included mothers who solely kill their own children as I believe that is a subject that deserves to be written about entirely separately.
Even leaving those specific types of Women Serial Killers aside, there are still many women who choose to commit murder again, and again, and again…
Welcome to the world of 20th century women serial killers.
AMY ARCHER-GILLIGAN
Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan, née Duggan, was born in October 1868 in Litchfield, Connecticut. Amy was the eighth child born to James Duggan and Mary Kennedy.
In 1897, Amy married James Archer and in December of 1897, they had a daughter Mary. In 1904, the Archers opened a boarding house, “Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly", in Newington, Connecticut. They soon built up a reputation as genteel caregivers for the area’s wealthy elderly providing nurturing tonics and nutritional meals, despite neither Amy nor James having any medical qualifications. It was an era when there were no regulations governing nursing homes.
The home was so successful that, within six years, they upgraded to a larger property in nearby Windsor. Shortly after the move in 1910, James Archer died. His death certificate issued by the local coroner, Dr. King, said the cause of death was kidney disease. A few weeks before James’s death, Amy had insured his life, and the day after James funeral, at which she cried profusely and was comforted by Dr. King, she visited the insurance office.
Amy’s care home rates were considered exceptionally reasonable. She would charge $7 per week or a one-time upfront fee of $1,500 for lifetime care. However for Amy’s home, with only fourteen paid beds, to remain profitable, she realized that she needed a constant supply of fresh patients.
Between 1907 and 1910, twelve of Amy’s patients had died. Given the ages of the patients, four deaths per year were not considered suspicious. However, after James’s death, that number began to rise significantly.
The increase in deaths in the summer of 1911 was partly attributed to the unprecedented heat wave that hit the northeastern United States. More than 3,000 deaths had been attributed to this natural disaster. Yet even after the heat wave had finished, the elderly patients in Amy’s home continued to die. Dr. King attributed each death to old age.
In 1913, Amy met and married a rich widower, Michael Gilligan. Soon after the wedding, he changed his will leaving his entire estate to Amy. On the 20th of February in 1914, Michael died after eating one of Amy’s special nutritional dinners. Dr. King gave the cause of death as “natural causes.”
Many of Amy’s patients had no relatives to keep an eye out for them, but one resident, Franklin Andrews, an apparently healthy man, had a sister, Nellie Pierce, who regularly visited him. When he died unexpectedly on May 29, 1914, Nellie became suspicious. The cause of her brother’s death, according to Dr. King was a gastric ulcer. Going through her brother’s papers, Nellie noted that Franklin had just signed an agreement allowing Amy to withdraw a large amount of money. Nellie began watching the obituary column in the local paper and began to feel evermore alarmed by the number of deaths occurring at the home.
Nellie, as her suspicions grew, went to the district attorney’s office and reported her findings. The District Attorney checked the death certificates and seemed satisfied that everything was in order.
Nellie then went to see a journalist at the Hartford Courant and relayed her suspicions to him. He promised to in
vestigate.
The reporter discovered that there had been forty-eight deaths at the home over a five-year period and that shortly before each death, the elderly patient had signed over to Amy large sums of money. Dr. Howard King had signed the death certificates in each case as due to natural causes. The journalist, by consulting with other physicians around Connecticut, learned that an average death toll in a small establishment as Amy’s would be eight to ten over a five-year period, not forty-eight.
The reporter wrote up his story on May 9, 1916, and entitled it “The Murder Factory”.
The story forced the police to investigate. Armed with a search warrant, they raided “Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly.” In the clinic’s storerooms, the police found large amounts of bottled arsenic. Amy explained that they were to keep the rats under control. The police did not believe her and requested the local judge for permission to exhume some of the patient’s bodies as well as that of Amy’s last husband, Michael Gilligan. Altogether, five bodies were exhumed, and all were found to have died either by arsenic or strychnine poisoning.
Amy Archer-Gilligan
Amy was arrested and charged with five counts of murder. Her trial took place in Hartford, Connecticut in June of 1917. Amy pleaded not guilty. On June 18, 1917, a jury found her guilty. The judge sentenced her to death. Amy appealed and was granted a new trial in 1919 in which she pleaded insanity. Amy’s daughter, Mary, testified that her mother was a morphine addict. In this trial, the jury found Amy guilty of second-degree murder, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
It soon became obvious to prison authorities by Amy’s behavior that she was insane, and she was moved to an insane asylum. She died in 1928, at the age of 59 at the Connecticut state insane asylum.
DAGMAR OVERBYE
And Her Kitchen Stove
Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye was born on April 23rd 1887 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dagmar began running a service offering to find homes for illegitimate babies in 1915. For this service, she charged mothers a one-time fee.
However, Dagmar did not make any attempt to find homes for these babies. Once they were in her care, she simply disposed of them by either strangling them or drowning them. She disposed of the corpses in her kitchen stove.
Her crimes were discovered when a young unmarried mother, Karoline Aagesen, placed an advertisement in the newspaper in July of 1920 looking for a family to adopt her new-born daughter. The advertisement was answered by Dagmar who said she would find a loving home for the baby girl. With a heavy heart, Karoline handed over her baby and two hundred Kroner ($34.88) to Dagmar.
The following day, Karoline visited Dagmar to ask for her daughter back. Dagmar told her that she could not recall the address of the family where she had placed the baby. The heart-broken Karoline reported the incident to the police. The police went to Dagmar’s apartment in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district on Englhavevej.
On searching the apartment, the police discovered baby clothes and charred bones and a baby’s skull in the kitchen stove. In the attic of the apartment, more baby bones and skulls were discovered. Dagmar was arrested.
Dagmar under questioning confessed to killing sixteen babies. At her trial, which became one of the most talked about in Denmark’s history, she was convicted of nine murders.
Dagmar was sentenced to death, but this was later changed to life imprisonment. Dagmar died in prison on May 6, 1929, at the age of forty-two.
The trial caused the laws on childcare in Denmark to be changed.
Although only convicted of nine murders, the authorities believed the number could have been closer to thirty; this number included Dagmar’s own baby.
VERA RENCZI
Obsession
Vera Renczi entered the world to a well off family in Bucharest, Romania in 1903. When Vera was ten years old, the family moved to Berkerekul, a small provincial town in the northeast of the former Yugoslavia.
Many years later, Vera’s childhood friends described her as being overly jealous and extremely possessive. There is a story of Vera as a child having poisoned her dog. When questioned by her father as to why she had poisoned it, she explained that she had heard her father saying that he was giving the dog away as it made too much noise with its barking. And she continued:
“Because I do not want my dog to belong to anybody else. When he leaves me he leaves this world”.
Vera grew into a stunningly beautiful young woman and amazed men with her grace and beauty. By the time she was fifteen, she had engaged in numerable affairs, many with men considerably older than herself. It was as if she had an almost pathological desire for constant male companionship.
When Vera was nineteen, she fell in love with a Bucharest businessman, Karl Schick, who was many years her senior. They married and bought a large house on the outskirts of Berkerekul. They had a son together named Lorenzo. To all neighbors, friends and relatives, Vera appeared as a loving, caring, and affectionate wife. However, while Karl was out at work, Vera imagined him having endless affairs with other women. Her suspicions were invalid and unfounded but to Vera they were frighteningly real. Unable to bear these thoughts, one night in a jealous fit, she added arsenic to Karl’s dinner wine.
Vera told her friends, neighbors, and relatives that Karl had left her. Although they found it odd, they had no reason to disbelieve her. After a year, she announced to her friends, neighbors, and relatives that she had heard that Karl had died in a "traffic accident”.
Vera then met Joseph Renczi, who was nearer her own age than her previous husband. Joseph was an extremely handsome Serbian businessman. They married, and it was not long before Vera was once again plagued by the suspicion that her new husband was involved in extramarital affairs. Unable to stand the thought of ‘her Joseph’ in the arms of another woman, she added arsenic to his dinner wine. Once again, she told friends and relatives that he had deserted her. A year later, she claimed he had sent her a letter saying he would never return.
Vera never remarried but reverted to her previous lifestyle of having a series of lovers. Some of the affairs would be with married men and were carried out clandestinely and others openly. The lovers she took were from all walks of life but were mainly youngish men from out of town.
In the town, she became known as the “Mysterious Huntress”. In the evenings, she would wander into the town and frequent the restaurants and bars on the prowl for a young lover. Some of the men would be seen to stay with her for a few weeks, some less. Inevitably, she would always tell her acquaintances that they had deserted her.
If Vera felt or detected the tiniest suspicion of infidelity, which she inescapably did, the men would receive a glass of Vera’s special dinner wine.
Vera’s downfall came about by her affair in 1925 with a local married Serbian banker, Milorad. His wife had become suspicious and one night followed her husband to Vera’s house. When Milorad did not return home, the wife went to Vera's house and confronted her. Vera denied knowing Milorad. Mrs. Milorad reported his disappearance and her last sighting of him at Vera’s to the police.
The police, meanwhile, were being inundated with enquiries of men who had disappeared and were last seen and heard of as visiting Berkerekul. They decided that a visit to the wealthy widow’s home was in order.
They uncovered more than was expected. In Vera’s large wine cellar, they discovered thirty-two unburied zinc coffins, all neatly placed around the walls. Each coffin held a male corpse, and each was neatly labeled with a name and the age of the victim. In the centre of the cellar was a rocking chair. In Vera’s bedroom, the police found enough arsenic to kill a hundred men.
Vera’s Chateau
Vera Renczi was taken into custody. In front of a stern-faced magistrate, she made a full confession of having poisoned her two husbands and ten-year-old son, as well as all the other young men.
When asked why she had killed her husbands and all the other young men, the extent of her jealousy was revealed. She confessed to
knowing that they were all or would in the future be unfaithful. She explained that she was unable to endure the thought of any of them ever holding another woman in their arms after holding her and for that reason they were safer in her cellar.
When questioned as to why she had killed her son, she replied that he had accidentally discovered the coffins in her wine cellar. And that he, too, would one day have grown into a man and held another woman in his arms.
When asked about the rocking chair, she said that she liked to sit and talk to her men knowing she had their undivided attention.
Beautiful Vera Renczi was found guilty on thirty-five counts of murder and remained the rest of her days in prison. In prison, Vera imagined all those she had murdered surrounded her, and the guards would hear her speak to them for hours. Vera died of a brain hemorrhage shortly before the Second World War.
BERTHA GIFFORD
The Angel of Death
Bertha Alice Williams Graham Gifford was born in Grubville, Missouri in 1872. Her parents were early pioneers in eastern Missouri. Bertha’s mother, Matilda Caroline Lee, married her father, William Poindexter Williams, on January 1st of 1859, in Jefferson County, Missouri. They had ten children, but two died in early infancy leaving six boys and two girls. The Williams family was known as one of the area’s most respectable families. The family was a regular attendee at the local fundamentalist church, the Church of God.
Bertha grew up to be an extraordinarily beautiful woman with dark hair and a dark complexion. As a young woman, she loved to dance and was courted by many. In 1894, when Bertha was twenty-two, she married Henry Graham in Hillsboro, Jefferson County, Missouri. They managed a small boarding house on the edge of Hillsboro town and had a daughter together. The marriage, over time, became an unhappy one, and there were rumors that William was seeing a girl on the sly. When Bertha was thirty and still extremely beautiful, she met Eugene Gifford, a handsome, friendly farmer and carpenter, seven years her junior. When they met, Eugene was betrothed to another girl. Shortly after meeting Eugene, Henry Graham became ill and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Bertha nursed him conscientiously, never leaving his bedside. Although Henry was physically strong, he developed what doctors called complications, and he died at the age of 34 suffering from violent, excruciating, stomach cramps.