The Top 10 Lists

 

10. Lizzie Borden

A New England spinster who was the central figure in the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts in the United States. The murders, subsequent trial, and following trial by media became a cause célèbre. The fame of the incident has endured in American pop culture and criminology. Although Lizzie Borden was acquitted, no one else was ever arrested or tried, and she has remained notorious in American folklore. Dispute over the identity of the killer or killers continues to this day.

 

9. Myra Hindley

The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered on the moor in 1987, over 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but as of 2009 it remains undiscovered.

 

The police were initially aware of only three killings—those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey, and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

Described by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but she was never released. She died in 2002, aged 60. Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985, since when he has been confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital. He has made it clear that he never wants to be released, and has repeatedly asked to be allowed to die.

 

8. Rosemary West

English serial killer, now an inmate at HMP Low Newton, Brasside, Durham, after being convicted of 10 murders in 1995. Her husband Fred, who committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial, is believed to have collaborated with her in the torture and murder of at least 10 young women, many at the couple's home in Gloucester, England.

 

Fred West is known to have carried out 12 murders, but Rosemary had no involvement in the first two, as she had not met Fred at the time.

 

The crimes for which Rosemary West was convicted occurred mainly between April 1973 and August 1978. She murdered Charmaine West, the daughter of Fred's previous wife Rena, in June 1971, and buried her in their previous home of 25 Midland Road, Gloucester whilst Fred West was serving a prison sentence for petty theft. One of the bodies found at 25 Cromwell Street was that of their daughter, Heather, who was murdered in June 1987 at the age of 16, after being abused by Rosemary while Fred raped her. The Wests told friends and concerned parties that Heather had gone away to work at a holiday village.

 

In August 1992 Fred West was arrested after being accused of raping his 13-year-old daughter three times, and Rosemary West was arrested for child cruelty. This case against them collapsed in June 1993 when their daughter refused to testify in court. All of the Wests' children were removed from their custody to foster homes. This case brought to light the disappearance of Heather West, who had not been seen since 1987, and triggered the major investigation that followed.

 

7. Queen Mary I

Queen of England and Queen of Ireland from 19 July 1553 until her death. She was the eldest daughter of Henry VIII and only surviving child of Catherine of Aragon. As the fourth crowned monarch of the Tudor dynasty, she is remembered for restoring England to Roman Catholicism after succeeding her short-lived half brother, Edward VI, to the English throne. In the process, she had almost 300 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian Persecutions, earning her the sobriquet of "Bloody Mary". Her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism was reversed by her successor and half-sister, Elizabeth I.

Insurrections broke out across the country when she insisted on marrying Philip, with whom she was in love. The Duke of Suffolk once again proclaimed that his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, was queen. In support of Elizabeth, Thomas Wyatt led a force from Kent that was not defeated until he had arrived at London. After the rebellions were crushed, the Duke of Suffolk, his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, and her husband were convicted of high treason and executed. Elizabeth, though protesting her innocence in the Wyatt affair, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months, then was put under house arrest at Woodstock Palace.

 

As Queen, Mary was very concerned about heresy and the English church. She had always rejected the break with Rome instituted by her father and the establishment of Protestantism by Edward VI. She had England reconcile with Rome and Reginald Cardinal Pole, the son of her governess the Countess of Salisbury (who was beheaded for treason by Mary's father Henry VIII) and once considered a suitor, became Archbishop of Canterbury; Mary had his predecessor Thomas Cranmer burned at the stake. Mary came to rely greatly on Pole for advice.

 

Edward's religious laws were abolished by Mary's first Parliament in the Statute of Repeal Act (1553). Church doctrine was restored to the form it had taken in the 1539 Six Articles.

Mary also persuaded Parliament to repeal the Protestant religious laws passed by Henry VIII. Getting their agreement took several years, and she had to make a major concession: tens of thousands of acres of monastery lands confiscated under Henry were not to be returned because the new landowners created by this distribution were very influential. This was approved by the Papacy in 1554. The Revival of the Heresy Acts were also passed in 1554.

 

Numerous Protestant leaders were executed (typically by burning) in the Marian Persecutions. Many rich Protestants chose exile, and around 800 left the country. The first to die were John Rogers (4 February 1555), Laurence Saunders (8 February 1555), Rowland Taylor (9 February 1555), and John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester (9 February 1555). The persecution lasted for almost four years. It is not known exactly how many died. John Foxe estimates in his Book of Martyrs that 274 were executed for their faith. The Marian persecutions are commemorated especially by bonfires in the town of Lewes in Sussex: there is a prominent martyrs' memorial outside St John's church at Stratford, London, to those Protestants burnt in Essex, and others in Christchurch Park Ipswich and the abbey grounds, Bury St Edmunds, to those executed in East and West Suffolk respectively.

 

6. Beverly Allitt

Dubbed the Angel of Death, is an English serial killer who murdered four children and injured five others while working as a State Enrolled Nurse (SEN), on the children's ward of Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire. Her main method of murder was to inject the child with potassium chloride (to cause cardiac arrest), or with insulin (to induce lethal hypoglycemia).

She was sentenced to life imprisonment at her trial in 1993 and is currently being held at Rampton Secure Hospital.

 

5. Belle Gunness

One of America's most prolific known female serial killers.

 

At 5'8" (173 cm) and over 200 lb (91 kg), she was a physically strong woman. She may have killed both of her husbands and all of her children (on different occasions), but she is known to have killed most of her suitors, boyfriends, and her two daughters, Myrtle and Lucy. Her apparent motives involved collecting life insurance benefits. Reports estimate that she killed more than 40 people over several decades.

 

4. Ilse Koch

The wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the concentration camps Buchenwald from 1937 to 1941 and Majdanek from 1941 to 1943. She was one of the first prominent Nazis to be tried by the US military.

 

After the trial was remitted under worldwide media attention, survivor accounts of her as a Satanic figure resulted in other authors describing her abuse of prisoners as 'sadistic'; a shadow image as "concentration camp murderess" transfixed itself to post-war German society. She was accused of taking souvenirs from the skin of murdered inmates with distinctive tattoos. She was known as "The Witch of Buchenwald" ("Die Hexe von Buchenwald") by the inmates because of her sadistic cruelty and lasciviousness toward prisoners. She is also called in English "The Beast of Buchenwald" and "The Bitch of Buchenwald."

 

3. Mary Ann Cotton

Mary Ann Robson was born in the small English village of Low Moorsley, County Durham in what is now the City of Sunderland in October 1832. Her childhood was an unhappy one. Her parents were both younger than 20 when they married. Her father Michael, a miner, barely managed to keep his family fed; he was ardently religious, a fierce disciplinarian with Mary Ann and her younger brother Robert, and active in the Methodist church’s choir.

 

When Mary Ann was eight, her parents moved the family to the County Durham village of Murton, where she went to a new school and found it difficult to make friends. Soon after the move her father fell 150 feet (46 m) to his death down a mine shaft at Murton Colliery.

 

When Mary Ann was 14, her mother remarried. Mary Ann did not like her new stepfather, Robert Stott, but she liked the things his better wages could buy. At the age of 16 she could not stand the discipline of her stepfather any longer, so she moved out to become a nurse at Edward Potter's home in the nearby village of South Hetton. She served there for three years and then returned to her mother's home and trained as a dressmaker. About this time she met a colliery labourer called William Mowbray.

 

2. Irma Grese

Grese was among the 44 people accused of war crimes at the Belsen Trial. She was tried over the first period of the trials (September 17 to November 17, 1945) and was represented by Major L. Cranfield.

The trials were conducted under British military law in Lüneburg, and the charges derived from the Geneva Convention of 1929 regarding the treatment of prisoners. The accusations against her centred on her ill-treatment and murder of those imprisoned at the camps, including setting dogs on inmates, shootings and sadistic beatings with a whip.

 

Survivors provided detailed testimony of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses in which Grese engaged during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They testified to acts of sadism, beatings and arbitrary shootings of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and allegedly half-starved dogs, and to her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. After a fifty-three day trial, Grese was sentenced to hang.

 

Grese was reported to have habitually worn heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. Witnesses testified that she used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp's inmates and enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. They also claimed that she beat some women to death and whipped others using a plaited whip.

 

1. Elizabeth Bathory

A countess from the renowned Báthory family. She is possibly the most prolific female serial killer in history and is remembered as the "Blood Countess" and as the "Bloody Lady of Čachtice", after the castle near Trencsén (today Trenčín) in the Kingdom of Hungary, (today's Slovakia), where she spent most of her adult life.

 

After her husband's death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and young women, with one witness attributing to them over 600 victims, though the number for which she was convicted was 80. In 1610, she was imprisoned in the Csejte Castle, where she remained bricked in a set of rooms until her death four years later.

 

The case has led to legendary accounts of the Countess bathing in the blood of virgins in order to retain her youth and subsequently also to comparisons with Vlad III the Impaler of Wallachia, on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based, and to modern nicknames of the Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.

 

Source: Wiki