Dangerous Women

Just as there are psychotic serial killer men, there are also psychotic serial killer women. That's gender equality for you. Most of the time you don't really hear about women serial killers just because there aren't as many compared to the men serial killers. The women serial killers can be just as creepy as the men, or sometimes even more so. Some of them are just downright insane.

The list of female serial killers range from murderous nurses to torturous slave owners. Many may not think of females to be as sadistic as the men, but trust me some are even worse. Most of the common women serial killers just use poison not their victims and do it for personal/financial gain. It's not common for women serial killers to kill for sexual purposes because that is more common for men. Not that it is impossible for women to do the same, it is just not as likely.

One example of the usual female serial killer is being a trained nurse and using poison to kill patients.  Well, that is exactly what Jane Toppan did. Born in 1857, Toppan was a nurse and worked at Cambridge Hospital who experimented on her patients just for her own pleasure. She used poison on her patients and experimentation quickly resulted in murder. She claimed that watching a patient die gave her sexual satisfaction. (Again, not common in female serial killers.) She later killed others, including her landlords and her sister. Topaz went to trial when a family member of one of her victims asked for a toxicology report. She was not found guilty though due to "insanity" and was sent to an insane hospital. She later died in 1938.

The next women serial killer is one that is over the top inhuman. She goes by the name of Leonarda Cianciulli. This women did not murder as many as other serial killers, but what she did to them was horrifying enough to put her at the top of the list of "11 Terrifying Female Serial Killers You've Never Heard Of". Cianciulli killed three women in between 1939 and 1940. She lured the woman into her shop, drugged them, then killed them with an axe. Once she killed them, she disposed of the bodies by using them to make soaps and teacakes. Yes you red that right, soaps and teacakes.

She wrote a memoir and described her first murder in a book called An Embittered Soul's Confessions. "I threw the [body] pieces into a pot, added seven kilos of caustic soda, ... , and stirred the whole mixture until the pieces dissolved in a thick, dark mush... As for the the blood in the basin, I waited until it had coagulated, dried it in the oven, ground it and mixed it with flour, sugar, chocolate, milk, and eggs, as well as a bit of margarine, kneading all the ingredients together. I made lots of crunchy tea cakes and served them to the ladies who came to visit, though Giuseppe and I also ate them." So technically, she basically ate the corpses that she killed, but first turned them into soap and teacakes.

Whether they are poisoning patients or turning people into soap, women serial killers are just as gruesome as the men. They are not as common, but they sure aren't any less horrifying.

Citation: Heaney, Katie. "11 Terrifying Female Serial Killers You've Never Heard Of." BuzzFeed. N.p., 15 July 2014. Web. 10 May 2016.