Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Elizabeth became brazen and careless toward the end of her killing career. While staying in Vienna, she ordered a renowned choir singer from the Church of Holy Mary, Ilona Harczy, to perform privately for her at her apartments in the city on Augustinian Street. The girl was never seen again and witnesses claimed Elizabeth killed her when she could not sing for her, either out of fright or shyness.

  As was common in those days, the trial lasted only a day. At the end of the trial two female servants were sentenced to have their fingers torn away with hot pincers before being thrown alive into a fire. The male servant, because of his youth, was sentenced to decapitation and his body also thrown on the fire. The fourth defendant was acquitted and vanished from the record. A few months later, another of Báthory’s female servants was charged, tried, and sentenced to death.

  The case against Elizabeth Báthory herself was reviewed by a higher court five days later, on January 7, and Prince Thurzo himself testified before some twenty judges and jurors. Unlike the January 2nd lower court trial, the records of which were kept in Hungarian, the high court trial was transcribed in Latin. Thurzo and members of his raiding party described finding the still warm battered corpse of Doricza “ex flagris et torturis miserabiliter extinctam.” Depositions from thirteen witnesses were heard. It is here that a witness identified only as “the maiden Zusanna” testified that a register was discovered in Elizabeth’s chest of drawers listing her victims and that it totaled 650 names. Zusanna testified that in the four years she was in Báthory’s service, she witnessed the murder of eighty girls. The hearing was presided over by the king’s judge, and its purpose was to appear to gather sufficient evidence to sentence the countess to death, confiscate her properties, and cancel the crown’s debt to her. Thus the testimony of Zusanna might have been entirely contrived for that purpose. Báthory desperately petitioned the court to make an appearance to defend herself, but her family blocked those attempts. The high court held:

  At the very entrance to the manor house they came upon things pertinent to this case. There was a certain virgin named Doricza who had been miserably extirpated by pain and torture, two other girls were found murdered in similar agonizing ways with that very manor house in the town of Cachtice, which was under the control of the widow Nadasdy. His illustrious Highness [Prince Thurzo], witnessing this evident and ferocious tyranny, having caught the bloody, and godless woman, the widow Nadasdy, in flagranti of her crime, placed her under immediate perpetual imprisonment in Castle Cachtice…

  She remained imprisoned at Cachtice. Despite the crown’s attempt to hold a retrial of Báthory and condemn her to death, the agreement between Thurzo and Elizabeth’s family prevailed. When she attempted to challenge Thurzo’s authority, he condemned her in front of several of her relatives, saying, “You, Elizabeth, are like a wild animal. You are in the last months of your life. You do not deserve to breathe the air on Earth, nor to see the light of the Lord. You shall disappear from this world and shall never reappear in it again. The shadows will envelop you and you will find time to repent your bestial life. I condemn you, Lady of Cachtice, to lifelong imprisonment in your own castle.”

  Elizabeth Báthory was walled in in her castle apartment. The exterior windows were bricked up and only several small openings for ventilation and food gave her contact with the outside world. On August 21, 1614, one of the jailers observed the countess collapsed on the floor, dead. All mention of her name in Hungary was prohibited for the next one hundred years. The memory of her faded behind the mists of the vampire and monster legends of Transylvania until her identity was rediscovered in 1720.

  Unanswered Questions

  A number of questions remain—and oddly enough those same kinds of questions haunt several cases of high-profile convicted female serial killers dealt with in this book, including Aileen Wuornos and Nazi concentration camp monster Ilsa Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald. Were the identities of these women as serial killers constructed from social, political, or propagandistic exigencies? The attempts of the Hungarian Crown to seize Báthory’s property were evident. Moreover, Báthory was a Protestant when the Counter-Reformation and restoration of Catholic power became the priority of the Hungarian parliament. Religious sectarian politics exposed the Báthory family to all manner of hostility during that period.

  Moreover, Europe was in the throes of a witchcraft crisis, with thousands of women being accused of heretical and satanic crimes and burned at the stake or hung.

  Yet at the same time, witchcraft was not one of the charges brought against Báthory. The rumors of her bathing in virgin girls’ blood were never introduced in any of the court proceedings simply because there was no evidence nor any testimony attesting to it.

  Nonetheless, when we narrow down the charges to the murder of approximately fifty girls, there is a logical consistency to the descriptions of the offenses from many different witnesses. In the 1970s, two new archival sources were discovered in the Hungarian state archives. One source, dating from September 16, 1610—four months prior to Elizabeth’s arrest—contained thirty-four affidavits describing Elizabeth Báthory’s torture and murder of “many girls and virgins.”114 A second source, dated July 26, 1611, is from the Crown’s attempt to retry Elizabeth. In it is a massive collection of testimony from 224 witnesses attesting to the “diabolical impulses” of the countess who murdered “many innocent virgins of noble and non-noble birth.”115

  If, indeed, Elizabeth Báthory was addicted to committing sadistic acts of torture since her adolescent years, then 650 victims over a thirty-five-year period works out roughly to a “mere” 19 victims a year. It is entirely conceivable—with the power of life and death she had over her servants—that she committed that many murders. The descriptions of the alleged tortures she inflicted on her victims pathologically fit a sadistic power-control or sexual lust murderer—particularly in her choice of young female victims and her desire to bite them on the shoulders and breasts. The crimes that Báthory allegedly committed alone or with accomplices under her command are similar to some committed by female serial killers in recent decades—but most of those women are accomplices to dominant males. But not Elizabeth Báthory—in her crimes, she stands alone among female serial killers.

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS IN THE PREINDUSTRIAL AGE

  Between the era of Agrippina and Elizabeth Báthory and the industrial age of Jack the Ripper, there were occasional reports of female serial killers. In Scotland, in the Galloway region, somewhere between 1560 and 1610, Sawney Beane and his family of cave-dwelling cannibals are said to have killed and eaten thousands of travelers over a forty-five-year period. His family, the product of incest consisting of eight sons and six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters, fed on human flesh, which was found by soldiers pickled and smoked in the caves. They were all put to death in Leith without standing trial. The historic authenticity of this episode, however, has not been resolved with any finality, as no contemporary documentation for the event has been identified.116

  In Naples, Italy, between 1670 and 1719, a woman known only as La Tofania is believed to have been complicit in the murder of possibly as many as 600 male victims through her sale of a poison known as “aqua tofania.” She distributed the product free of charge to wives wishing to secretly murder their husbands. The vials of poison were labeled “Manna of St. Nicholas of Bari,” a name given to a legendary oil said to have dropped from the tomb of St. Nicholas, and had the power of curing many diseases.117 Tofania’s motive was attributed to her hate of men and she is said to have encouraged her clients to use small amounts of her potion in order to prolong the victims’ suffering. Tofania was seventy years old when authorities in Naples, overwhelmed with so many deaths of married men, finally traced the vials to her. Warned of her impending arrest, Tofania attempted to take refuge in a convent, but was dragged out by force, much to the consternation of church authorities. She was put to torture, confessed to hundreds of murders, and was strangled in 1723
. Her corpse was then thrown back over the wall into the convent where she had sought refuge.

  In France between 1664 and 1672, the aristocratic Marie de Brinvilliers was reported to have poisoned fifty or more victims. Prior to murdering her father, who opposed her marriage, and then her two brothers to seize an inheritance, Marie experimented with poisons concocted by her lover in hospital charity wards, where she began volunteering to care for patients. She carefully observed the effects of her poison on the patients, adjusting the doses accordingly. Marie was discovered and became a fugitive until she was captured in 1676 and beheaded in Paris.

  THE RISE OF THE MODERN FEMALE SERIAL KILLER

  In the two hundred years that followed the life and death of Elizabeth Báthory the world radically changed in a way it had not in all the previous centuries. The decision by landowners to fence in their rural land and the dawn of the Industrial Age in the mid-1700s uprooted millions of people from the countryside. In a period of several decades, they were rapidly forced into cities to seek work.

  In the past, the presence of the poor in cities was a seasonal phenomenon—people would migrate to where the work was, often remaining in the countryside during the summer and autumn. But with factories, masses of the impoverished permanently settled in squalid, densely populated industrial city tenements.

  In the past, the destitute found help in country parishes from family, church charities, and other small community aid. City churches could not deal with the masses of anonymous poor funnelling in and now trapped in decrepit, overcrowded city quarters cut off from all family or community support. There was no state welfare, soup kitchens, or health or disability insurance. An injury, a small miscalculation in income and expenses, the loss of a job, or an illness could all condemn a person and their dependent family to a precipitous fall into abject destitution and death from starvation or exposure. Making things worse, throughout the 1700s the manufacture and distribution of cheap gin created an epidemic of a crack cocaine–like addiction, destroying lives and families and driving many into deeper degradation.

  Women were extra vulnerable in these times. It would not be until the nineteenth century that females began to find opportunities to work as laborers in factories and clothing mills, as clerks in department stores, and eventually in secretarial positions. Before then, women either hawked wares and produce on the street as in medieval times or they found work as domestic servants in the homes of the rapidly swelling middle-class, which was profiting enormously from the process of industrialization.

  Domestic female work, however, was strictly disciplined. Young women, often country girls who left their families behind to seek employment in the city, slaved seven days a week as household servants in exchange for meager room and board. The slightest misstep and the girl would find herself thrown out into the street with no references and with no place to go. A pregnancy for a domestic servant was often tantamount to a death sentence for both mother and child: She would be immediately fired for disreputable behavior, expelled from her lodgings with no hope of finding other employment or any place to go for help. Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, dead babies were routinely found in city streets, alleys, and empty lots. So prevalent was the murder of infants by destitute mothers that in England laws were introduced prohibiting “the concealment of birth” with a penalty of death by hanging if the child died.

  Public executions for even the most minor property crimes further brutalized industrial societies through the 1700s and up until the early 1800s. Literally thousands of women found themselves with no means of support except through theft, at the risk of hanging, or through street prostitution, at the risk of murder and disease. It was precisely these desperately destitute lower-class prostitutes that Jack the Ripper would come to victimize in 1888, in the same way today that some serial killers victimize drug-addicted street hookers.

  THE BIRTH OF MASS MEDIA AND TRUE-CRIME LITERATURE

  In England, the tone for the despair and brutality of these times was set by the expanding new phenomena of mass media in the form of print. Lurid true crime was one of the first popular genres marketed to the growing newly literate masses. In the 1700s, cheap pamphlets and folded broadsides, illustrated with woodcuts, featured sensationalistic reports of murders and recent executions. The Police Gazette in England began publishing in 1772, while in the U.S. the National Police Gazette was founded in 1845.

  It is estimated that by 1830 probably between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working class could read. This fed a rapid expansion of mechanically printed media dedicated to true crime.118 The 1840s brought the introduction of the popular Sunday newspaper, and the abolition of the Stamp Act in 1855 and the paper duty in 1861 brought the cost of newspapers down to one penny first, and to a halfpenny by 1868.

  This literature was as intricately focused on the lurid details of murder as true-crime literature and TV are today. As the British publication Punch pointed out in a tongue-in-cheek manner in 1849:

  Upon the apprehension of a criminal, we notoriously spare no pains to furnish the nation with his complete biography; employing literary gentlemen, of elegant education and profound knowledge of human nature, to examine his birthplace and parish register, to visit his parents, brothers, uncles, and aunts, to procure intelligence of his early school days, diseases which he has passed through, infantile (and more mature) traits of character, etc. We employ artists of eminence to sketch his likeness as he appears at the police court, or views of the farm-house or back kitchen where he has perpetrated the atrocious deed. We entertain intelligence within the prison wall with the male and female turnkeys, gaolers, and other authorities, by whose information we are enabled to describe every act and deed of the prisoner, the state of his health, sleep and digestion, the changes in his appearance, his conversation, his dress and linen, the letters he writes and the meals he takes…119

  Although Punch uses the masculine pronoun, nineteenth-century true-crime reporting focused on women as often as men—in fact, female criminals were of a particular interest to the public as their crimes represented such a dramatic contradiction of the feminine ideal of the period. When, in 1849, Maria Manning and her husband, Frederick, were put on trial and executed for the murder of Maria’s former lover, the trial was reported in special daily printed reports—the Court TV of the period. According to Judith Knelman, a historian of nineteenth-century British true-crime press, one publisher’s sales of those reports reached a circulation of an astonishing 2.5 million readers—more than ten percent of England’s total population at the time.120

  By the time Jack the Ripper made his appearance in 1888, the press was primed for and experienced in its coverage of horrendous crimes. Jack the Ripper is often celebrated as the “first” serial killer. He is at least the first to become famous as a certain urban predatory type targeting strangers. But the real fear of serial killers in the nineteenth century unfolded several decades before Jack the Ripper and focused on the female killers who were using poison to kill victims.

  The press reports of serial murder by women using arsenic were so alarming that the British parliament urgently enacted special laws to deal with what appeared to be a crisis—very much like the “serial killer epidemic” in the U.S. in the early 1980s to which an alleged disappearance of thousands of children every year was attributed.121

  Accounts of female serial killers begin to crop up in true-crime literature in the early part of the nineteenth century but from the 1840s onward the accounts began to increase in frequency.

  Jane Scott

  Twenty-one-year-old Jane Scott is probably one of the earliest known nineteenth-century female serial killers. Sentenced to death in 1828 for the poisoning murder of her mother, she was also accused of having killed her father, her own illegitimate four-year-old son, and an eighteen-month-old niece out of revenge after a quarrel with her sister. The motive for murdering her parents was that she was getting married and wanted their furniture.

  Jane Sco
tt probably typifies the early nineteenth-century female serial killer in that she killed for meager material gain and to relieve herself of the financial burden of her child. The murder of her niece in revenge is more unusual. Greed and desperation were the primary motives of female killers at that time. Desperation sometimes led to parents killing one or more of their children to ensure that enough was available for the remaining children. With no compulsory schooling, the disappearance of children at the hands of their own parents was not be particularly noticed nor did it alarm the community. Single mothers were especially in desperate straits.

  BURIAL INSURANCE AND THE RISE OF FEMALE SERIAL MURDER

  With the 1840s, something new began to happen. One way that the working classes responded to the absence of state welfare, health or life insurance, was to pay into various private mutual aid, welfare, and medical insurance associations. Such insurance schemes also existed for funerals and were called “burial clubs.” Subscribers paid small weekly fees and when they died the burial club would pay for their funerals. These payouts would be made, of course, to the nearest surviving relatives. Death from disease and accidents was common in the nineteenth century and the scheme was meant to protect families from bearing the cost of a funeral, which many could not afford. But there was a loophole: If death occurred soon after enrollment in the club, then the amount paid out by the club for the funeral would far exceed the amount paid in dues. Burial clubs charged up to seven pence every three months and paid out as much as ten pounds on a death, depending upon the size of a club. The best of working class funeral services cost only half that amount—a tidy profit to take home.