Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The teenage Messalina began a reign of terror as Claudius’s imperial wife. When she came to covet the beautiful gardens belonging to a prominent Roman senator, she convinced Claudius that the senator was plotting against him. The senator was forced to commit suicide and his gardens were expropriated and came into Messalina’s possession.

  Messalina took on a series of lovers, and as she tired of each, she accused them of treason or embezzlement of state funds, not only sending them to their deaths, but also their friends and any other witnesses to her indiscretions with the victims. Completely enchanted with his pretty young bride, Claudius blindly believed in Messalina’s accusations. In a seven-year period, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, Messalina murdered dozens of imperial courtiers, many of whom had managed to survive the psychopath Caligula, only to randomly perish at the urgings of Messalina, merely because they were friends of one of her illicit lovers or had witnessed some aspect of her misconduct.

  When the terrified courtiers conspired to murder both Messalina and Claudius, Messalina struck first, unleashing a murderous purge of the Roman aristocracy, confiscating more of their estates and property. Completely in control of Claudius, she not only had charge of the death lists but also sold imperial favors—citizenship, building contracts, and official appointments—to the highest bidder. Murdering anybody who dared to question her authority, Messalina built a lucrative empire of her own.

  In the meantime, Agrippina remarried and bided her time carefully, monitoring Messalina’s debauchery and swearing vengeance for the murder of her exiled sister Julia despite her own role in her death. Finally, when Messalina was twenty-two, she went too far. In a.d. 49 she held a mock marriage ceremony with a lover in a roomful of invited guests while Claudius was away. Agrippina quickly rallied Claudius’s advisors to convince the Emperor that he could not survive such a humiliation. While the participants at the wedding were put to death, Claudius vacillated as to the final fate of Messalina, until one of his advisors had her executed before the brokenhearted Claudius could commute her sentence.

  Now Agrippina made her move. She seduced the widowed Claudius and had her allies among his counselors convince him to marry her. Of course, one of the problems was that Agrippina had recently married again, but that was quickly dealt with when her husband died of a mysterious illness. The other problem was that Claudius was her uncle, but she secured a decree from the Senate authorizing her marriage with him, despite its incestuous nature.

  Agrippina was thirty-three when she triumphantly entered Rome in her ceremonial carriage—a daughter of a popular and legendary Roman commander, the sister, wife, and future mother of emperors. Agrippina wielded a cruelly poisonous authority far exceeding Messalina’s petty murderous plots. The first to die was Caligula’s last wife, who had been a rival for Claudius’s hand in marriage in the wake of Messalina’s execution. Agrippina accused her of witchcraft and evil designs on the state, and convinced Claudius to have the Senate confiscate her property and exile her where she was secretly forced to commit suicide by Agrippina’s agents.

  Agrippina then turned on her sister-in-law, Messalina’s mother, Domita Lepida, having her and all her trusted servants, aides, and allies executed or secretly murdered. Anybody remotely associated with Lepida was dismissed from the court, if not killed.

  Agrippina’s objective was to propel her young son, Nero, into power as the next emperor. To consolidate Nero’s position in the imperial court, she sought to have him marry Octavia, Claudius’s daughter by Messalina. The problem was that the child Octavia was already married, but that did not stop Agrippina. She had Octavia’s husband accused of having an incestuous affair with his sister (much like the one Agrippina had with her brother Caligula, ironically), resulting in his exile.

  As soon as Nero was engaged to Octavia, she began to urge that Claudius adopt him as his eldest son and therefore likely heir to the throne. This, of course, presented a problem because legally that would make Nero and Octavia brother and sister, again forcing the issue of incest to the surface. Agrippina resolved the issue by having Octavia adopted by another family.

  Agrippina amassed a huge pool of wealth and power, frequently riding next to Claudius in his carriage and sitting with him at tribunals. The easygoing Claudius was more concerned about the nuts and bolts of governing the Roman Empire, from the details of taxation to those of the construction of ports and aqueducts. Claudius was content to leave the issues of power, politics, and security at the court to Agrippina, who ruthlessly murdered any potential opposition to herself or the regime.

  By a.d. 54 Claudius’s natural son, Britannicus, was twelve and approaching adulthood by Roman traditions. Claudius was now 64 years old and in fragile health, and it is believed he was considering naming Britannicus as his appointed heir as soon as Britannicus achieved adulthood. He was also apparently tiring of Agrippina’s domination and was considering divorcing her and disinheriting Nero, who by most accounts was a young lout interested only in singing and performing.

  Many Roman historians believe that Agrippina at this point killed Claudius by personally preparing his favorite dish of mushrooms and poisoning them with a dose of belladonna alkaloid from hemlock, aconite, or yew. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Claudius lost his power of speech and then fell into a temporary coma. But then Claudius awoke and vomited the contents of his stomach, whereupon Agrippina either had him fed a poisoned gruel to “revive him” or administered another dose of poison by an enema, ostensibly intended to clean his bowels of the contaminated mushrooms. Whichever it was, it worked, for Claudius died the next morning and shortly afterward Nero was appointed emperor.

  One would assume that with her own flesh and blood son as emperor, Agrippina was at the height of her power. Indeed, she was given the title of Augusta—Empress—and her portrait once again appeared on Roman coinage along with Nero’s, as it had when her brother Caligula was in power.

  One can by now easily imagine the psychology of anyone brought up as a child in these murderous imperial households. Nero was fully the product of Agrippina’s psychopathic drive for power. Nero did not first yearn for power, but wanted to be an actor or singer, but failing in that, found a dark side to his urges satisfied through the exercise of his imperial power. He raped both boys and girls and squandered huge amounts of money. Nero’s public games reached new levels of cruelty and bloodletting, and Nero targeted a new religious sect appearing in Rome—the Christians. He devised a spectacular nighttime public display of torture by having Christians covered in tar and lit as torches.

  At home, Nero displeased Agrippina by having an affair with a former slave girl, which Agrippina felt was a sign of disrespect to her and the marriage she had arranged for her son with Octavia. Then Nero exiled Pallus, a close confidant of Agrippina’s, who might have also been her lover at the time. In a classic “I made you and I can unmake you” case of power conflict, Agrippina threatened to have Nero removed and replaced by Claudius’s natural son, Britannicus. Coming from Agrippina, this was no idle threat, especially when she suddenly began to shower the hapless fourteen-year-old Britannicus with attention.

  Nero struck first. He had Britannicus poisoned and then turned on Agrippina, murdering Pallus, stripping her of all her titles, and banning her from the imperial palace. Agrippina fought back, attempting to organize a coup against Nero but it was quickly discovered. Only her fast talking and previously placed allies managed to rescue her from being exiled or put to death by her own son.

  The crazed, unhinged Agrippina now sought an old path to power—incest. She attempted to seduce Nero but was prevented by Nero’s close advisors, who warned him that the army would not tolerate such behavior. Nero then resolved to murder his mother.

  Nero apparently made three attempts to poison Agrippina, but as she was skilled in that art, he failed. Next Nero invited her for a reconciliation on an island he was vacationing on and sent for her in a boat specially designed to come apart once in
open water. Not only did Agrippina survive by swimming back to shore, but she witnessed a woman demanding to be rescued by claiming to be the “mother of the emperor” battered to death with an oar instead. Agrippina decided that the best strategy was to pretend she was not aware of her son’s attempts to murder her. She sent back a message to Nero stating that the gods had favored her during the “accidental” sinking of the vessel, and that while she was sure Nero wanted to visit her, he should wait until she recovered from the ordeal.

  Instead, as the story goes, Nero dispatched soldiers to murder her, making it look like suicide. The details are unclear, but the monstrous Agrippina died at the age of forty-four at the hands of a monster she herself had borne and raised, leaving a trail of murdered victims in her wake. Nero is reported to have carefully handled his dead mother’s corpse, limb by limb, to ensure she was truly dead.

  Certainly the environment and circumstances of their upbringing forged the murderous careers of Agrippina and Messalina. They killed because they could, and because they learned how to by example. Murder satisfied not only their desire for power but their emotional and material needs as well. They committed constructive and expressive violence interchangeably and if they felt any remorse they left no trace in the historical record.

  Agrippina and Messalina can be considered paragons for many female rulers in subsequent history.108 Russia’s Catherine the Great and England’s Elizabeth the First both ruthlessly put down opposition by torture and murder. “Bloody Mary” Tudor had hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake in her attempt to reintroduce Catholicism into England. Between 1830 and 1860, Madagascar’s Queen Ranavalona, in a campaign to rid the island of Christianity, put missionaries and thousands of native converts to death by having them thrown from cliffs, beheaded, burned at the stake, or boiled alive in pits. Madame Mao engineered the detention and murder of hundreds of potential high-ranking opponents to her faction in “re-education camps” in China.

  But we often dismiss these imperial serial killers—motivated by political power—as artifacts of a different time. Their crimes lack the sexual dimension we associate with modern serial killers. The first female who classically fits the bill of the modern serial killer is Elizabeth Bathory—the female Dracula.

  Elizabeth Báthory—the True Story of the Blood Countess

  Everyone by now has heard the story of the seventeenth-century female vampire serial killer in Transylvania—the Blood Countess, the female Dracula—Elizabeth Báthory.

  Elizabeth was once said to be the first “real” female serial killer—one who killed for sadistic, sexual, hedonistic lust instead of political or personal power. Her victims were not her rivals but mostly peasant girls employed in her service or daughters from minor, declining aristocratic families. Elizabeth Báthory is special in that she is the only known female sexual sadistic serial killer without a dominant male partner—to this day, four hundred years later. We have never had another quite like her.

  It was said that she bathed in the blood of her adolescent servant girls in the belief that it nourished the beauty of her skin. She was accused at one point of having killed as many as 650 girls—many tortured to death in the most savage and cruel manner.

  Portraits of Countess Elizabeth from her youth show a beautiful woman with raven black hair pulled back from a high forehead, smoky, almond-shaped intelligent eyes, and sensual, pouting lips. Yet there is a cruel curve to her mouth and her face exudes a sullen petulance that betrays an underlying rage.

  Elizabeth was born in 1560 into the powerful and wealthy Báthory family in the eastern regions of the Holy Roman Empire—a fluid confederation of territories today roughly covering Hungary, Austria, the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, and other Balkan States, and parts of Germany and Poland. This included the region bordering Hungary and Romania called Transylvania (of Dracula fame, and not coincidentally as we shall see) where her branch of the Báthory family had their seat of power.

  At the age of eleven, as traditional with the aristocracy there, Elizabeth was engaged to marry when she would have turned fifteen a minor Hungarian count named Ferenc Nadasdy, five years her elder. A year before the marriage, Elizabeth became pregnant while “horse playing” with a peasant boy on her future mother-in-law’s estate. After having the child in a remote estate and giving it away to a local family, Elizabeth finally married Count Nadasdy in 1575 as scheduled.

  The marriage was a happy match, although Elizabeth’s husband was away for years at a time fighting the Turks in the south where he developed a distinguished reputation as a warrior. Together the couple lorded over a vast network of castles, country manor houses, and palaces in Prague, Vienna, and other cities. At their country estates and inside the walls of their castles they had the power of life and death over their servants and peasants. The adolescent Elizabeth developed a reputation for excessive cruelty while disciplining her female servants.

  Elizabeth used her power to torture to death in the most horrific and sadistic ways her servants, mostly peasant girls, burning their genitals with a candle; biting them to death; ripping their mouths open with her own hands; burning them with heated metal rods and rivets; beating them with whips, clubs, or iron bars; cutting and stabbing them; throwing them naked into the snow and pouring freezing water over them; pouring boiled water on them and tearing away their skin; hauling them up in suspended barrels spiked inside and rocking and rolling them while showering in their blood below; or closing them in spiked Iron Maidens like garlic in a garlic press.

  Perhaps as many as 650 girls and young women were murdered over a thirty-five-year period—and at least between 37 and 51 in the last decade before Elizabeth’s arrest in 1610 at the age of fifty, when she started killing not only peasant girls, but girls of noble birth as well. This led to her downfall.

  When her castle was raided during the Christmas holidays of 1610, it was said mutilated corpses of girls were found strewn in the courtyard and in the basement of the tower. When the arresting party burst into her chambers, according to legend, she was found sitting on a stool chewing on the mutilated dying body of a girl prostrate before her. The Hungarian authorities ordered that Elizabeth be walled-in for the rest of her life in a castle apartment with only a small open port for food. After four years she died at the age of fifty-four, her legendary cruel beauty still preserved. The true story of Elizabeth Báthory, however, is slightly more complicated, but horrific nonetheless in its details.

  Báthory’s Place in the History of Serial Murder

  There has been no female serial killer like Elizabeth Báthory because—depending upon what you believe about her—she was either a hedonist lust killer harvesting blood in which to bathe or a highly sadistic power-control freak who loved to torture young women. There have been lots of female serial killers like that, especially recently, but almost all with dominant male partners taking the lead. Not Elizabeth. She started on her own with her husband away at war, learned additional battlefield torture techniques from him when he was home visiting and—after his death in 1604—commanded a retinue of servant accomplices comprised of strong old hags and a manservant, who would lure peasant girls into the household service of the countess where they would be killed. Hundreds of girls vanished like that over the years.

  Elizabeth also stands on the historical time line as a premodern serial killer. Her predecessor was Gilles de Rais—“Bluebeard”—the aristocrat in France who was executed in 1440 for the torture murder and necrophile rape of hundreds of male children, also lured by his servant accomplices into his household service.109 Elizabeth stands at the halfway point between the medieval world of aristocrat serial killers and the industrial modernity of Jack the Ripper, who ushered in a new age of serial killers in 1888. Between Gilles de Rais in 1440 and Jack the Ripper in 1888, we have no serial killers of any significant endurance in the public consciousness or imagination—except for Elizabeth Báthory.

  The primary difference between Báthory’s era and that of Ja
ck the Ripper is significant. Báthory came from an entirely different civilization—the ancient agrarian world where most people were illiterate and lived isolated in the countryside. Jack the Ripper belonged to the Industrial Age, where people lived in urban centers and read cheap, mechanically printed mass media. It is no coincidence that Jack the Ripper grew to fame in London, the newspaper publishing capital of the world at the time. Our knowledge of the existence of serial killers has as much to do with literacy, cheap paper, and high-speed printing technology as it does with any criminological, psychopathological, or social phenomena.

  We actually came very close to never having heard of Elizabeth Báthory because her trial was held in secret in a remote Slovakian town in 1611 and her powerful family immediately sealed its records. There were no newspapers, pamphlets, or broadsides to report on it. None of the ruling families wanted the details of the horrendous charges against their relative released to public scrutiny—nor did they want Elizabeth’s estates confiscated by the crown or the crown’s debts to her family cancelled. Elizabeth was not even allowed to appear at the trial. Instead of a public execution, she was walled-in alive, in a room in one of her remote castles. Her servants and accomplices took her place on the executioner’s block while the countess herself survived in anonymity in her bricked-in apartment until the summer of 1615 when she was discovered dead on the floor.

  While her family divided Elizabeth’s property among themselves after her death, the details of her crimes and trial vanished from the public record. The indictments, trial transcripts, and judgments were hidden away in closed archives. Her name was forgotten. Only legends and folktales of a blood-drinking female vampire circulated in the Transylvanian mountains until they were picked up two centuries later by authors like Bram Stoker and given a new life in the form of Dracula—inspired by another Transylvanian despot, Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes or Dracul (to whom Elizabeth was actually remotely related through marriage).