13 Famous Female Serial Killers and What the Courts Decided

The most famous female serial killers include Aileen Wuornos, Myra Hindley, Rose West, Belle Gunness, Jane Toppan, and Nannie Doss. Their cases cover two centuries and three countries. Below are the 13 names that show up on almost every list, with what a court actually decided in each case. Three of them were never convicted of murder at all: Lizzie Borden was acquitted, Belle Gunness was never tried, and Jane Toppan was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Older versions of this page repeated numbers that the records do not support, such as 40 bodies on the Gunness farm and 70 confessed killings for Toppan. We checked each case against dated news reports and court records. The sources are listed at the end of the page.

If you are here because of Investigation Discovery's Unmasking a Monster: Aileen Wuornos, which premieres September 30, 2026, or Netflix's Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the shop has an Aileen Wuornos collection of shirts, hoodies, socks, and a mug. Collectors can also read our article on murderabilia.

What the courts decided

13 famous female killers and the court result in each case

Name	Where and when	Court result
Aileen Wuornos	Florida, 1989 to 1990	Convicted of 6 murders: 1 jury verdict and 5 pleas. Executed October 9, 2002.
Lizzie Borden	Fall River, Massachusetts, 1892	Acquitted by a jury on June 20, 1893.
Belle Gunness	La Porte, Indiana, up to 1908	Never tried. Whether she died in the 1908 fire is still unknown.
Myra Hindley	Near Manchester, England, 1963 to 1965	Convicted of 2 murders on May 6, 1966. Life in prison. Later admitted 2 more.
Jane Toppan	Massachusetts, before 1902	Not guilty by reason of insanity, June 1902. Confessed to 31 killings.
Juana Barraza	Mexico City, until 2006	Sentenced to 759 years in 2008. Reports give 11 or 16 murders.
Rose West	Gloucester, England	Convicted of 10 murders on November 22, 1995. Life in prison.
Amelia Dyer	Reading, England, 1896	Convicted of murder. Hanged June 10, 1896.
Joanna Dennehy	Cambridgeshire and Hereford, England, 2013	Pleaded guilty to 3 murders and 2 attempted murders. Whole life order, 2014.
Dorothea Puente	Sacramento, California, 1980s	Convicted of 3 murders in 1993. Jurors deadlocked on 6 more.
Nannie Doss	Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1954	Pleaded guilty to 1 murder, May 17, 1955. Life in prison.
Judy Buenoano	Florida, 1971 to 1983	Convicted of 2 murders and 1 attempted murder. Executed March 30, 1998.
Amy Archer-Gilligan	Windsor, Connecticut, 1910s	Convicted of 1 murder in 1917. Connecticut's top court ordered a new trial in 1918.

Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Wuornos was convicted of murdering six men in Florida in 1989 and 1990. A jury convicted her of the first, the killing of Richard Mallory, in January 1992. She pleaded guilty or no contest to the other five. A seventh man, Peter Siems, disappeared in 1990. His body has never been found, and she was never charged in his case.

Wuornos told police that the men had attacked her and that she shot them in self-defense. She later changed that story more than once. Florida executed her by lethal injection on October 9, 2002, after she asked to drop her appeals. Her last words are on our page of Aileen Wuornos quotes, each with its date and source. She also had a child at 15. Our article on Aileen Wuornos's son covers the baby she was made to give up.

The 2003 film Monster made her the most famous woman on this list. Netflix's Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story also brings her into its story, even though, as What's on Netflix pointed out on September 18, 2026, there is no direct link between Borden and Wuornos.

Lizzie Borden

"Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty one." The rhyme is wrong on almost every count. On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were killed with a hatchet in their house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Abby was Lizzie's stepmother, not her mother. Andrew was hit 10 or 11 times and Abby 18 times, according to the Guardian's 2016 look at the case and the atrocious crimes Lizzie was charged with.

Police arrested Lizzie, then 32, on August 11, 1892. Her trial started on June 5, 1893. On June 20, 1893, a jury of 12 men acquitted her of both murders. No one else was ever charged. She stayed in Fall River, moved to a house she called Maplecroft, and died on June 1, 1927, at 66. For the trial, her life after it, and what Netflix's Monster changed, read the Lizzie Borden true story.

Borden is on this list because nearly every list includes her, not because a court found she killed anyone. Two killings on one morning, followed by an acquittal, does not make someone a serial killer.

Belle Gunness

Belle Gunness came to the United States from Norway in 1881, when she was 22. She settled in Chicago and married Mads Sorenson, who died in 1900. She used his life insurance to buy a farm near La Porte, Indiana, and married a widower named Peter Gunness. That December, Peter died when a sausage grinder fell from a shelf and hit his head. The coroner looked into it and cleared her.

She then placed ads looking for a husband and wrote to the men who answered. One of them, a South Dakota farmer named Andrew Helgelien, came to La Porte and was not heard from again. On April 28, 1908, the farmhouse burned. In the basement, firemen found the bodies of three children and an adult woman whose head was missing.

Helgelien's brother came looking for him. Digging in the pig pen, searchers found Andrew's remains, and then body after body in shallow graves around the farm, according to Lucas Reilly's 2018 account in Mental Floss. Most could not be identified. Mental Floss puts the total at "at least 20 people." On May 19, 1908, a dentist identified dental bridges found in the ashes as hers, and the authorities said the headless woman was Gunness. By then, sightings of her had been reported across the country. Whether she died in the fire has never been settled.

Gunness was never tried. Her former farmhand, Ray Lamphere, was tried instead. The jury acquitted him of murder but convicted him of arson. He died of tuberculosis after about a year in prison. Before he died, he reportedly told a pastor that he had seen Andrew Helgelien's murder.

Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley and her partner, Ian Brady, were tried together at Chester Assizes for the so-called Moors murders. On May 6, 1966, Hindley, then 23, was convicted of murdering Edward Evans, 17, and Lesley Ann Downey, 10. She received two concurrent life sentences. The jury found her not guilty of murdering John Kilbride, 12, the BBC reported. Brady was convicted of all three murders.

Years later, Hindley admitted killing two more children, Keith Bennett, 12, and Pauline Reade, 16. She helped police find Pauline's body on Saddleworth Moor. Keith's body has never been found. Hindley died in hospital in November 2002, at 60. The inquest found the cause was bronchial pneumonia due to heart problems. Older versions of this page said a brain aneurysm. According to the Guardian, the order that she should die in prison came from a home secretary, not from a judge.

Jane Toppan

Jane Toppan grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and trained as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital starting in 1885, where patients called her "Jolly Jane," according to Jennifer Myers in the Lowell Sun in 2011. She was arrested in 1901, after four members of one family, the Davises, died in the summer of 1901 while she was staying with them on Cape Cod.

Her trial on June 23, 1902 lasted eight hours. The jury deliberated for 27 minutes and found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she was committed to Taunton State Hospital for life. She had confessed to her lawyer that she killed 31 people. The Indianapolis Journal's headline two days later read: "Jane Toppan's Crimes: Confessed to Killing Thirty-one Human Beings." She later said the number might be as high as 100. Older versions of this page said about 70.

Because of the insanity verdict, no court ever convicted Toppan of murder. She stayed at Taunton for 36 years and died there in August 1938, at 81. She has the highest confessed count of any woman on this list.

Juana Barraza

In Mexico City, police spent years hunting a killer the press called the Mataviejitas, or Little Old Lady Killer. Elderly women who lived alone were being strangled in their homes. In January 2006, Juana Barraza was arrested after she was seen hurrying away from the house of her last victim. She wrestled on the amateur circuit under the name the Lady of Silence.

Prosecutors said she gained her victims' trust by carrying their shopping bags or asking for cleaning work, or by pretending to be a nurse or social worker. She strangled them with phone cables, tights, or a stethoscope, the Guardian reported. In March 2008 she was sentenced to 759 years in prison. The reports disagree on the count. The Guardian said she was sentenced for killing 16 women. The BBC said the convictions covered at least 11 murders, and that she may have been responsible for up to 40 deaths. She confessed to only one killing, the last.

Rose West

Rose West and her husband, Fred, were arrested in February 1994 during an investigation into the disappearance of their daughter Heather. Nine bodies were dug up from under their house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. One more was found under their previous home, and two more in fields near Much Marcle in Herefordshire. Fred was charged with 12 murders but killed himself in his prison cell in January 1995, before his trial.

Rose went on trial alone. In taped police interviews, Fred had claimed he was the only killer. The jury rejected that. On November 22, 1995, after a 31-day trial, she was convicted of murdering 10 young women and girls, including her 16-year-old daughter, her 8-year-old stepdaughter, and her husband's pregnant lover. Justice Charles Mantell sentenced her to life and told her she should never be released. The BBC called her Britain's most prolific female serial killer.

Amelia Dyer

Amelia Dyer was a Victorian "baby farmer." Unmarried mothers paid her to take their babies and find them homes. After her husband died in 1869, she charged between 10 and 80 pounds a child, and she took in babies in towns across Britain from Plymouth to Liverpool, the BBC reported in 2017. Most of the babies left with her were killed within days.

On March 30, 1896, a parcel weighted with a brick was pulled from the River Thames in Reading. Inside was the body of a baby girl, Helena Fry, with white tape tied around her neck. Clues on the wrapping led police to Dyer. When the river was dredged, six more babies were found with the same tape. Dyer confessed and was hanged at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896. The BBC says she is believed to have killed hundreds of babies.

Joanna Dennehy

On November 18, 2013, Joanna Dennehy, 31, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to murdering three men: Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, Kevin Lee, 48, and John Chapman, 56. All three had been stabbed. Their bodies were found in ditches in Cambridgeshire. She also pleaded guilty to trying to murder two other men. The Guardian reported that she stabbed them at random in Hereford as they walked their dogs.

In February 2014, the judge gave her a whole life order and called her "a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer." According to the Guardian, she was the first woman in Britain told by a judge that she would die in prison. Hindley and West received their whole life terms from a home secretary instead. Older versions of this page said she was one of two living women serving a life sentence in Britain. That was never true.

Dorothea Puente

Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house a few blocks from the California Capitol in Sacramento. In 1988, a social worker looking for a missing, mentally disabled tenant became suspicious. Police dug up seven bodies around the house. Two more, including a former boyfriend found in a box in the Sacramento River, turned up later.

Prosecutors said she drugged her tenants and cashed their Social Security checks. She was tried for nine murders. After a five-month trial, jurors deadlocked in 1993 on six of the charges. She was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, and sentenced to life without parole. She died in prison in Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, at 82, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Nannie Doss

In 1954, a doctor at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa grew puzzled by the death of a patient named Sam Doss. His wife, Nannie, confessed that she had put rat poison in a bowl of prunes she served him. She had met him through a lonely hearts club. As her trial was about to begin on May 17, 1955, she pleaded guilty. Judge Elmer Adams sentenced her to life. He said it would "be poor precedent" to make her the first woman sentenced to death in Oklahoma.

Investigators suspected her in the deaths of three earlier husbands in North Carolina, Alabama, and Kansas. She told them she had poisoned her second husband, Frank Harrelson, in 1945. No charges were filed for the North Carolina and Alabama deaths. A murder charge was filed in Emporia, Kansas, in the death of her fourth husband, Richard Morton. She was also suspected of poisoning her mother and some of her children. Doss died of leukemia on June 2, 1965, in prison, according to Gene Curtis in the Tulsa World.

Judy Buenoano

Nobody suspected Judy Buenoano until 1983, when her fiance, John Gentry, survived a bomb in his car in Pensacola. Investigators then learned that "Buenoano" is Spanish for "Goodyear," and that she had been married to Air Force Sgt. James Goodyear, who died in 1971. They exhumed his body and found lethal amounts of arsenic.

She was sentenced to death for poisoning Goodyear. She got a life sentence for the murder of her son, Michael, who drowned in 1980. Prosecutors said arsenic had left him paralyzed and that she rolled the canoe they were in, so the braces on his arms and legs pulled him under. She got 12 years for the attempted murder of Gentry. A former boyfriend, Bobby Joe Morris, died after being poisoned in Trinidad, Colorado, in 1977, but she was never charged in his death. Florida executed her in the electric chair on March 30, 1998. CBS News reported she was the first woman executed in Florida since 1848.

Amy Archer-Gilligan

Amy Archer-Gilligan ran a home for elderly people in Windsor, Connecticut. So many residents died there that their relatives went to the police. In 1917 a jury convicted her of murdering one resident, Franklin R. Andrews. In 1918, Connecticut's highest court threw out that conviction and ordered a new trial. The opinion is State v. Gilligan, 92 Conn. 526.

Later accounts say a second jury convicted her again in 1919 and that she was sentenced to life, then moved to a state mental hospital, where she died in 1962. We could not find a dated source for the retrial that we could check. Older versions of this page said authorities found 48 deaths "from her activities." She was tried for one.

Female serial killer FAQ

Who was the most prolific female serial killer?

No record settles it. Among the women on this list, Jane Toppan has the highest confessed count, 31, but she was found insane and never convicted. Rose West has the most murder convictions, 10, and the BBC called her Britain's most prolific female serial killer in 1995. Older versions of this page named Aileen Wuornos, who was convicted of six.

Who was the first female serial killer in the United States?

Lavinia Fisher, a South Carolina serial killer said to have poisoned guests at an inn near Charleston in the early 1800s, often gets that title. The records do not back it up. Legends of America says she and her husband, John, were never charged with murder. They were hanged in Charleston on February 18, 1820, and highway robbery was still a hanging offense at the time.

Was Lizzie Borden a serial killer?

No. She was charged with killing her father and stepmother on the same morning in 1892, and a jury acquitted her on June 20, 1893.

Which women on this list were executed?

Three. Amelia Dyer was hanged in 1896. Judy Buenoano died in Florida's electric chair in 1998. Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

For the men, read about the most famous male serial killers. Then browse our serial killer t-shirts.

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Sources

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• Hurst, Ashley. "The True History Behind 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story': What's Real And What's Fiction." What's on Netflix, September 18, 2026. whats-on-netflix.com.
• Hughes, Sarah. "'She gave her mother 40 whacks': the lasting fascination with Lizzie Borden." The Guardian, December 4, 2016. theguardian.com.
• Davis, Paul. "After acquittal, life still tough for Borden." Daily Republic, July 1, 2013. dailyrepublic.com.
• Reilly, Lucas. "Corpses in the Pig Pen: The Tale of Indiana's Most Notorious Serial Killer." Mental Floss, November 26, 2018. mentalfloss.com.
• "1966: Moors murderers jailed for life." BBC On This Day, May 6, 1966. bbc.co.uk.
• "Inquest tribute to Hindley's victims." BBC News, November 18, 2002. bbc.co.uk.
• "Jane Toppan's Crimes: Confessed to Killing Thirty-one Human Beings." Indianapolis Journal, June 25, 1902, via Hoosier State Chronicles. newspapers.library.in.gov.
• Myers, Jennifer. "For 10 years, 'Jolly Jane' poured her poison." Lowell Sun, November 2, 2011. web.archive.org.
• Tuckman, Jo. "Little Old Lady Killer handed 759 years in a Mexican prison." The Guardian, April 1, 2008. theguardian.com.
• "Life for Mexico's Old Lady Killer." BBC News, April 1, 2008. bbc.co.uk.
• "1995: Life sentence for Rosemary West." BBC On This Day, November 22, 1995. bbc.co.uk.
• Lee, Sarah. "Amelia Dyer: The Victorian nurse who strangled babies." BBC News, June 3, 2017. bbc.co.uk.
• "Peterborough ditch deaths: Joanna Dennehy pleads guilty." BBC News, November 18, 2013. bbc.co.uk.
• Dodd, Vikram. "Joanna Dennehy: serial killer becomes first woman told by judge to die in jail." The Guardian, February 28, 2014. theguardian.com.
• Connell, Rich. "Dorothea Puente dies at 82; boarding house operator who killed tenants." Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2011. latimes.com.
• Curtis, Gene. "Only in Oklahoma: Black widow enjoyed the limelight." Tulsa World, October 27, 2007. tulsaworld.com.
• "Florida Executes 'Black Widow'." CBS News, March 30, 1998. cbsnews.com.
• State v. Gilligan, 92 Conn. 526 (1918). books.google.com.
• Alexander, Kathy. "Lavinia Fisher: First Female Serial Killer." Legends of America, updated March 2026. legendsofamerica.com.