Female Serial Murderers

The Satin Strangler is getting a lot of press lately.  And why not?  She’s been seducing and killing at a Ted Bundy pace.  Makes me tingle all over.  How about you?

In response to countless reader requests, here are some of the most notorious female serial killers in history.  They are few in number, but juicy in body count.

Erzebet Bathory: The Hungarian “Blood Countess” who killed as many as 650 victims in the 1600’s is the mother of all female serial killers, and her record is unlikely to be broken.  We are running a two-for-one sale on her Mug Shot Mugs this week.

Belle Gunness: The belle of the ball killed more than 20 men and all of her children in the 1800’s.  She disposed of some husbands and burned down her own homes, all for the insurance money.  Never one to give up on a hobby, she began luring suitors through a newspaper advertisement, killing them, and burying their bodies on her farm.

Mary Ann Cotton: This Mary Mary Quite Contrary had a bad habit of dropping arsenic into her pots of soup.  She killed 20 people in England, including her own children, and collected their insurance money.  She was hanged in 1873.

Nannie Doss: The "Giggling Granny” killed 11 people in the early 1900’s.  Victims included her two sisters, her mother, a grandson, a nephew and four husbands.  After running out of guests for family reunions, she was convicted in 1955 and died in prison.  Look for her smiling face in our on-line t-shirt store.

Rosemary West: This English serial killer was convicted of 10 murders committed with her husband Fred in 1995.  Several bodies, including that of their daughter Heather, were found buried on their property.  How romantic that they shared the same hobby in an era where half of all marriages end in divorce.

Marybeth Tinning: She was a nurse’s aid sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after strangling 9 of her own children and bringing them to the hospital, faking a deadly genetic disease.  The doctors and the police finally caught on, but she will forever remain one of our website reader favorites.

Dorothea Puente: As a not-so-frail old lady, she killed elderly disabled people in her boarding house, and then forged and robbed their benefit checks.  In 1988 she was sentenced to serve two life terms for the murders of at least 9 people.

Aileen Wuornos: This prostitute was put to death by lethal injection in 1992 for the shooting of 7 male victims in Florida.  Her body count wasn’t much to write home about, but she was later immortalized when played by actress Charlisse Theron in the film Monster.  The other esteemed women on our list should have been so lucky.

The Satin Strangler: Little is known about this sexy lady, except for the growing trail of more than 15 victims from Atlanta up to New York City.  She leaves no calling card.  No taunts for the police.  No leads at all.  Just strangled male victims.  She seems more in control than her lady predecessors.  Is she smarter, or just lucky?  Either way, there’s no doubt that she’s a different breed of female serial killer.  Finally we have a hot and steamy MO to warm up to.  Like her victims, we are lured in closer to her, perhaps too close.   But that’s probably no surprise, since we’re all a little Crazy 4 Crazies.

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Serial Killer Bedtime Stories: Michael Swango

Michael Swango, the star of tonight's serial killer bedtime story, makes Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest look like Florence Nightingale.

Authorities suspect Michael Swango, 43, may have poisoned and killed as many as 60 patients under his care over the past 10 years when he worked in Ohio, Quincy, Massachusetts, Virginia, South Dakota, New York and Zimbabwe. In all these places the affable doctor had been suspected in a number of deaths and sudden illnesses. Although he was never charged in connection with any, he was either fired or left his respective jobs while under a cloud of suspicion.

Authorities became aware of alleged career as an "Angel of Death" in 1984 when he worked in Quincy, Illinois, as a paramedic. As with others in his line of mayhem, many of his co-workers complained that they became ill every time he brought them food or drinks such as doughnuts, cool drinks or iced tea. When one of his colleagues found ant poison mixed with sugar among Swango's belongings, police went to search his home.

There they found "how-to" books on homemade weapons and mass destruction as well as books on the occult, several guns, bottles with different concentrations of ant poison, a range of insecticides and rodent killers; and castor beans, from which the almost untraceable poison, ricin, can be obtained. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to five-years' jail for aggravated battery because none of his colleagues had died from the poisonings. "I don't think he intended to kill them," said Judge Dennis Cashman. "I think he wanted to take them to the edge of death. They were like a lab experiment."

While he was serving his sentence, investigators combed the Ohio State University Hospital in Columbus, where Swango had been a medical intern. Nurses told investigators that they had become suspicious because he was seen in several patients' rooms right before they died unexpectedly. "I do not think the evidence was clear one way or the other. I am glad he is not here," said Ohio State University's Larry Carey.

Swango was paroled in 1987 after serving two-and-a-half years of his five-year sentence. Curiously, after leaving prison he continued his career in the health care business with increasingly lethal results. He hopped from job to job and was fired at least three times after he was suspected of wrongdoing or someone learned about his past.

In the early 1990s Swango landed a job at a State University of New York hospital. There, Federal of Bureau Investigation agents investigated 147 patients Swango treated and died. Autopsies were performed on several former patients, but the results were inconclusive. By 1993 -- as police started piecing together his poisonous path -- he disappeared to re-emerge in Zimbabwe. There he worked at a rural hospital where he was suspended after five patients under his care died in suspicious circumstances.

After his suspension he travelled to South Africa, the modern mecca for serial killings, where he contacted Saudi Arabian health authorities, who offered him a job. Finally in July, 1997, Swango was arrested when he re-entered the United States to pick up a visa en route to his job as a physician in Saudi Arabia. Though he has been arrested for relatively minor fraud charges and illegally prescribing narcotics to patients, authorities hope to uncover enough evidence to expose him as a viscous serial killer.

Sweet dreams, and may you forever remain Crazy 4 Crazies.