Killer Women

Worth a look: recaps the murderous acts of many notable killer women through the ages - a solid reference guide or platform for further investigation.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Apr 30, 2026

 

Nigel Cawthorne, Killer Women: Chilling, Dark and Gripping True Crime Stories of Women Who Kill (London: Quercus Editions Limited, 2018)

The fascination with women who kill has a long history and shows no sign of abating. Nigel Cawthorne’s informative, punchy, book demonstrates why, showcasing the murderous actions of fifty such women. His exhibits span hundreds of years – from ‘The Bloody Countess’ Elizabeth Báthory in the sixteenth century, who – mind-bogglingly – tortured and killed some 650 girls, to Russia’s Tamara Samsonova who murdered, dismembered and partially consumed several victims over two decades from the 1990s. As the case histories that book-end the collection illustrate, Cawthorne takes us on a trip through time as well as all around the globe, bringing in Western and Eastern Europe, the US and Australia, supplemented by the odd one from Mexico (Juana Barraza, who preyed on vulnerable old women) and Phoolan Devi (India’s ‘Bandit Queen’ of movie fame). 

Cawthorne’s rollcall of shame gives some vital insight into the huge range of motives behind female killers. First, we have the Black Widow genre, in which I am most interested because of the murder of my father in a plot inspired by his then wife, Jean Daddow). Black Widows kill partners or family members principally for financial gain. In the seventeenth century, Catherine Montvoisin would brew potions to give to ladies who wanted to dispose of their husbands, calling them ‘inheritance potions’ (p13). In Victorian England, Mary Ann Cotton killed one husband after another to get her hands on their life insurance. Martha Needle in Australia and, much later, the notable Stacey Castor in the US acted on that same motive.

Second, the book reports on Angels of Death, caregivers who murder those (usually children, the sick and elderly) they are supposed to be nurturing, caring for, or protecting. In this category the standouts from Cawthorne’s book are the 1990s cases of Beverley Allitt and Kristen Gilbert, from England and the US respectively. They followed the Austrian Angels of Death who operated in the previous decade – Maria Gruber, Irine Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer and Waltraud Wagner. They are said to have killed possibly hundreds of the elderly and inform in a Vienna hospital, simply because they found them annoying (p176). 

The third category of female killer included in the collection is the Revenge Killer. Famously captured in the figure of Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) in the 1930s, the category includes Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, for shooting her abusive lover David Blakely in 1950s London. Mission-oriented killers, who position themselves as latter-day ‘martyrs’, ridding the world of perceived evils, are fewer and further between in the book, although Phoolan Devi embodies this category. The ‘Bandit Queen’ took revenge on upper-caste men in India, after she was married off at 11 years old, abused by her husband and his second wife, gang-raped by the police, and then had her lover killed. She went on a vengeful killing spree with her gang in the 1980s, was finally arrested and tried, but  was then released in 1994. She went on to be a prominent politician, speaking up for the poor and oppressed in India (p169). She was, seemingly for this very reason,  assassinated in 2001. Devi’s case forms the most readable and insightful chapters, albeit it is also one of the shortest, because it gives so much material on the background motivations that drove Devi to go on her killing spree. 

Cawthorne does not, unfortunately, have too much space to give the motives of female killers too much airtime in the book. He does, though, delve into some of the women’s childhood and other formative experiences, to useful effect. As with many of the criminals in the book, Devi’s childhood – such as it was – was characterised by intense violence, abuse and neglect. We cannot use such experiences to justify killing sprees in later life in any simple way, but they have to be considered an important component in any explanation of what influences people to turn to such violence. Indeed, in the UK, Ellis’s case instigated the introduction, in 1957, of the defence of ‘diminished responsibility’, which can be put to a murder trial jury as possible grounds for explaining a defendant’s inability to exercise judgement or self-control in committing a murder. The jury can, of course, accept or reject any such defence as it deems appropriate. Accounting for traumatic experiences in earlier life, the book also provides a stark reminder that violence can breed violence through complex processes of cross-generational transmission. Tackling the psychological and emotional effects of such abuses as early remains, it seems to this reviewer, the best way of helping reduce incidences of violence and related criminality in later life. 

A few tragic cases aside, for many of the women covered in the book one can have no sympathy, because their hideous crimes are not connected to any such negative formative experiences. Cawthorne shows that some of them in fact took a form of sadistic pleasure and/or sexual gratification in killing (Irina Gaidamachuk). For the poisonous Black Widows, it was all about murder for greed and financial gain (Marie Becker combined the two). For yet others on show it was about power, control, jealousy, or revenge. In a tiny minority of cases, insanity or different forms of psychosis appear to have been in play. In almost all the cases, hindsight reveals that the perpetrators could have been stopped earlier had they been reported, or had those doing the reporting being properly listened to by the authorities or others in positions of influence. In several (killings in hospitals, for example), patterns or under-explained deaths were not picked up on quick enough, with the authorities having difficult questions to answer about their role in enabling or turning a blind eye to multiple murders on their premises over periods of sometimes years. As the Thirlwall Inquiry into the controversial UK case of neonatal nurse Lucy Letby amply shows, those questions remain extremely pertinent today.   

Overall, then, Cawthorne’s book is a ‘quick and dirty’, but nonetheless enjoyable, trot through the history of female killers across time and space. It introduces readers to myriad types of killer women and is best seen as an overview of the ‘usual suspects’, combined with the coverage of less familiar killers in the genre. It does not attempt to build a general theory of why women kill, leaving the case histories to material to speak for themselves. However, it is a solid read and helpful reference point for one’s further exploration of this fascinating and unnerving subject.   

 

Photos: author's own.