From 1896 to 1908, Belle Gunness killed between 16 and 49 people, including her stepdaughter, hired hands, lovers and husbands. When her homestead mysteriously burned in 1908, officials unearthed the bodies of 10 men and two women. Gunness escaped.
SINISTER SISTER
"Sister Amy" Gilligan charged new patients $1,000 upon entry into the Archer Home for Elderly and Indigent Persons in Windsor, Connecticut, and then promptly dispatched them with arsenic, often tricking them into leaving her their insurance money. Arrested in 1916, Gilligan may have killed as many as 40 people in her care.
ANGEL MAKERS
Between 1911 and 1929, the Hungarian towns of Nagyrev and Tiszakurt saw the deaths of more than 100 people at the hands of women, led by village midwife Susanna Fazekas. She would boil flypaper and distribute the resulting poison to the women. Thirty-four women were put on trial; 18 went to prison; eight were executed. Fazekas killed herself with poison.
BRUTAL BROTHEL
For 10 years, sisters Delfine and Maria Gonzales ran a brothel on a ranch in central Mexico, torturing girls who resisted and killing those who fell ill, tried to run away or lost their looks. When police raided the ranch in 1964, the bodies of some 80 women were found buried, along with countless babies and 11 male migrant workers.
SMOTHERLOVE
Over 13 years, Marybeth Tining killed nine of her own children while authorities held that the deaths were natural. "I smothered them each with a pillow," she said later, "because I'm not a good mother." In 1987, she was sentenced to 20 years to life, her husband still believing she was innocent.
ANGEL OF DEATH
Waltraud Wagner used lethal injections, strangulation or drowning to kill between 49 and 300 elderly patients in an Austrian hospital in the mid-1980s. Wagner's motive, as one of her three conspirators put it: "The ones who got on my nerves were dispatched directly to a free bed with the good Lord." All four were sent to prison.
--Sarah Blustain
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Karla Faye Tucker in Gatesville, Texas, was convicted of the 1983 killings of a Houston man and woman with a pickax. Hers was the first execution of a woman in Texas since 1863.
PHOTO (COLOR): Right: Susan Smith is led into a Union County, South Carolina, courtroom Jan. 16, 1995, for her arraignment on two counts of murder. Smith, convicted of drowning her own sons in 1994, may also face the death penalty.
Barry Yeoman is a freelance writer in Durham, North Carolina. His work has appeared in the Nation, New Woman and the Webzine Salon. Sarah Blustain
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