Executed,  sentenced to die, locked away forever. These are the stories of 22 deadly women and the crimes that  made them infamous. You’re watching Inside Capital Crime. Case one, Eileene Waros.  Did you say to yourself, “I’m out of control. I’m killing people.” No. October 9th, 2002.

 Florida State Prison, Stark, Florida. She woke up that morning and refused breakfast. No last meal, just a cup of black coffee. That was all she asked for. Her name was Eileene Carol Waros. Born February 29th, 1956 in Rochester, Michigan. She entered this world on a leap day as if the calendar itself could barely make room for her.

Her teenage parents separated before she was born. Her mother abandoned her before she could walk. By the time she was a child, she was living with grandparents who, by most accounts, made her life a kind of quiet misery. She ran away at 15. She survived on the roadside. She had a son at 14, gave him up.

 She was homeless, alone, and working the highways of Florida by her early 30s. She called the stretch of road she worked her office. Between November 1989 and November 1990, seven men were found dead along those same Florida highways. All shot, all middle-aged male motorists, all found near their vehicles, some partially undressed. The weapon was a 22 caliber revolver and the pattern was unmistakable.

 Eileen told investigators each man had attacked her first. She said every killing was self-defense. She was working as a sex worker. She was alone on those roads and she insisted that each of those men had given her no choice. Investigators did not believe her. A composite sketch circulated through the media. A pawn shop seat came back with a name.

 Items belonging to her first confirmed victim, Richard Mallalerie, were traced to her. Her fingerprints surfaced at multiple scenes. In January 1991, she was arrested at a bar called The Last Resort in Port Orange, Florida. Her longtime partner, Tyia Moore, was offered immunity in exchange for cooperation. She called Eileene from a monitored phone and recorded her confession.

Eileene spoke freely. She knew what she was doing.  I love you a lot.  I don’t know whether I should keep on living or if I should.  No, Ty. Ty, listen.  Ty, listen.  What?  I will cover you cuz you are not in You’re innocent.  I know I am.  I’m not going to let you go to jail or anything. Listen, if I have to.

 She was convicted of six murders and received six death sentences. She was never tried for a seventh as that victim’s body was never recovered. For a decade, she sat on death row at Broward Correctional Institution. She wrote letters. She gave interviews. She told anyone who would listen that the state of Florida needed to hurry up.

 She didn’t want appeals. She didn’t want delays. She reportedly told authorities that if she were ever released, she would kill again. She was the 10th woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. Hi viewers, if Eileen Waros had received proper support and protection as a child and teenager, do you think her life could have turned out differently? Drop a yes or no in the comments.

 On October 9th, 2002 at Florida State Prison in Stark, lethal injection was administered at 9:47 a.m. Before the needle went in, Eileen Waros delivered her final statement. She did not apologize. She said,  “I would just like to say I’m sailing with the rock and I’ll be back  like Independence Day with Jesus.

 June 6th, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I’ll be back.  I’ll be back.” She was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m. She was 46 years old. Her ashes  were scattered in Michigan. Some people died denying everything. Eileen Waros died insisting she’d return. She didn’t. Case  two. Velma Barfield.

 November 2nd, 1984. Central Prison, Raleigh, North Carolina. She chose cheese doodles and a Coca-Cola for her last meal. Not steak.  Not a farewell feast, snack food, the kind of thing you eat on a Tuesday afternoon. That detail alone tells you something about Velma Barfield, born Margie Velma Bullard on October 29th, 1932 in Easttover, North Carolina.

 She grew up in a home she described as suffocating. She married young, had children, and quietly built a life that looked like a thousand others in rural North Carolina. But underneath it, she was coming apart. A car accident, a hyerectomy, pain that became addiction.  Prescription pills, first legally prescribed, then consumed in quantities that terrified even her.

She needed money to buy more. And she started taking it from the people  around her. Beginning in 1969 with the death of her first husband,  Thomas Burke, in a house fire and continuing through the 1970s,  a trail of people who had been close to Velma Barfield began dying.  Her second husband, Jennings Barfield, died in 1971.

Her own mother, Lily Bullard, died in 1974.  Two elderly patients she had cared for as a nurse’s aid also died. The method was always the same.  Arsenic dissolved into food or drink. Administered slowly.  She forged checks. She stole. She poisoned to cover the theft. And then she kept doing it.

 Her final victim was Stuart Taylor, a widowerower she had been dating. She  had forged checks on his account to fund her pill habit. When she feared discovery, she mixed an arsenic-based rat poison into his beer and tea. He fell sick.  She drove him to the hospital herself. He deteriorated over days and died. The autopsy found arsenic poisoning.

 Velma was arrested in May 1978. At trial,  she appeared almost indifferent when the district attorney delivered his closing argument. Velma Barfield reportedly gave him a round of applause from the stand. She was sentenced to death in December 1978. What happened next? surprised  many people.

 In prison, Velma Barfield underwent a transformation that she described as a genuine Christian conversion. She counseledled inmates. She corresponded with Billy Graham,  who publicly advocated for her clemency. She became, by nearly every account, a different person than the one who had slowly poisoned seven people. Governor Jim Hunt declined to grant clemency. He was running for Senate.

 The timing was noted by many. In the early hours of November 2nd, 1984, Velma Barfield was led to the execution chamber at Central Prison in Raleigh. She was the first woman executed in the United States since 1962, the first woman executed since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976.  She was told to count backward from 100. She got to 98.

 Her voice slurred into silence. She was pronounced dead at 2:15 a.m. Her final statement was this.  I know that everybody has gone through a lot of pain. All the families  connected and I am sorry and I want to thank everybody who has been supporting me all these six years.

  Outside the prison walls, 300 people held a candle light vigil. Inside, some of the prisoners on death row held matches up to their windows. Velma Barfield was 52 years old. She wore pink pajamas to her execution.  She had asked to be allowed that small comfort. They said yes.  Case three. Judy Buenoano. March 30th, 1998.

  Florida State Prison, Rayford, Florida. She walked shakily.  The guards had shaved her head. They’d covered it in gel to better conduct the electricity.  Gone were the painted fingernails and the fashionable dark hair. Gone was the woman who drove a Corvette around Pensacola and wore Chanel perfume and told anyone who would listen that Florida would never execute her.

 She was wrong. Born Anna Louu Welty on April 4th, 1943 in Quana, Texas, she had a childhood defined by poverty and instability. She later adopted the name Judas Buenoano, a  Spanish translation she chose herself. That detail matters. She was a woman who reinvented herself repeatedly, always moving forward, always leaving something behind.

 She married Air Force Sergeant James Goodyear and had  three children. In September 1971, just 3 months after James returned from a year of service in Vietnam, he died at a naval hospital in Orlando. Doctors attributed it to cardiovascular collapse and kidney failure. Judy collected $28,000 in military life insurance benefits. No one looked twice.

  She moved to Colorado. She took up with a man named Bobby Joe Morris. He died in January 1978. She collected insurance money and moved back to Florida. Her son Michael, who had joined the US Army at 18, began experiencing unexplained neurological symptoms. His legs stopped working.

 He was fitted with heavy metal braces. In May 1980, she took him out on a canoe on the East River near Pensacola.  The canoe capsized. Michael, weighed down by his braces, drowned. He was 19. She collected more insurance money. The total insurance payout across her victims is  estimated at 240,000. Then she made a mistake.

 She began dating a businessman named John Gentry. She convinced him to take out substantial life insurance policies. She also convinced him to take  what she described as vitamin supplements. In June 1983, his car exploded in a parking lot. He survived. When investigators tested the vitamins she had been giving him.

 They contained arsenic and formaldahhide. The exumations began. James Goodyear, Bobby Joe Morris, Michael,  all found to have died from arsenic poisoning. She never confessed, not once. In 1984,  she was convicted of murdering Michael and sentenced to life in prison. In 1985, she received the death sentence for the murder of James Goodyear.

  She spent nearly 13 years on death row, insisting on her innocence. On March 30th, 1998, Judy Buenoano was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison. She was 54 years old. She became the first woman executed in Florida since 1848 and  only the third woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment.

 She left no final statement. She never said sorry, not once in all those years.  Case four, Lizzy Bordon, August 4, 1892,  Fall River, Massachusetts. No execution, no prison sentence. She walked out of that courtroom a free woman and the questions have never  stopped. The morning of August 4th, 1892, began like most mornings in the Bordon household on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts.

  Andrew Bordon, 69, a wealthy and reputedly tight-fisted businessman, had returned home from his morning errands and lay down on the parlor sofa to rest. His  wife, Abby Bordon, 64, was upstairs in the guest room. Their daughter, Lizzy, 32, and single, was somewhere in the house. The maid, Bridget Sullivan, was outside washing windows.

 What happened next happened in two separate moments, approximately 90 minutes apart. Abby Bordon was struck 19 times in the head  with a hatchet while she knelt in the upstairs guest room. She was killed first. Then Andrew Bordon was struck 10 or 11 times while he lay sleeping on the sofa. His face rendered unrecognizable. Lizzy called out to the maid.

 She  said, “Someone has killed father.” A neighbor, Adelaide Churchill, heard Lizzy clinging to the screen door and rushed over. Police were called. There was no blood on Lizzy. No sign of forced entry into the house. The doors had been triple locked. The only people home were Lizzy and Bridget.

 When asked where she had been, Lizz’s answer shifted.  She said the barn. She said the loft. She said she was looking for fishing equipment.  She had tried to purchase proic acid, a poison, at a drugstore the day before the murders. The pharmacist  refused to sell it to her. 3 days after the murders, Lizzy was seen burning a dress in the kitchen stove.

  She told a neighbor it was stained with old paint. She was arrested on August 11th, 1892.  Her trial began in June 1893 and became a national sensation. The prosecution had no witnesses to the killings and no direct physical  evidence. The jury, all male, deliberated for 90 minutes. They acquitted her.

 The verdict was celebrated by many at the time. Lizzy Bordon was a well-dressed, church-going woman of respectable standing.  The Victorian imagination could not accommodate the idea of such a woman doing such a  thing. She inherited a substantial sum after her father’s death.

 She moved into a larger house across town, which she named Mapleroft. She lived there until her death from pneumonia on June 1st, 1927. She was 66 years old. Her sister Emma, with whom she had shared the Second Street house, moved away years before Lizzie died and never reconciled with her. No one was ever charged. No one else was ever seriously investigated.

The hatchet found at the scene had a broken handle  and appeared to have been recently cleaned. It never conclusively matched the wounds. The body of Abby Bordon was found  face down. She had seen what was coming. Lizzy Bordon died in her own bed, in her own house, in her own town. Acquitted,  free. The case is still open.

 It always will be. Case  five. Myra Hindley. July 1963. October 1965. Manchester, England. Her mugsh shot became one of the most recognized photographs in British  history. a bleached blonde woman staring directly into the camera with an expression that told you nothing at all. Cold, still empty.

 That photograph would follow Myra Hindley for the rest of her life. Born July 23rd, 1942 in Manchester, England. Myra Hindley was raised partly by her grandmother after her mother struggled to cope. She was by early accounts an unremarkable young woman.  Then at 19, she met Ian Brady at work and everything changed.

 Brady was obsessed with Nazi ideology, violence, and control. He introduced Hindley to a worldview built entirely on the idea that ordinary moral rules did not apply to people like  them. She fell completely. She has since said she was under his influence. What the evidence showed was something more active than that.

  Between July 1963 and October 1965, five children and teenagers were abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered in and around Manchester.  Their bodies were buried on Saddleworth Moore, a desolate stretch of Morland east of the city. The killings would become known as the Moors murders. The victims were Pauline Reed, 16,  John Kilbride, 12, Keith Bennett, 12.

Leslie Anne Downey, 10,  Edward Evans, 17. Henley’s role was not passive.  She lured the children. She gained their trust. In at least one case, investigators found audio recordings made during the abuse of 10-year-old Leslie Anne Downey. On that recording, you can hear Hindley’s voice.

 You can hear what she said to a child who was begging for her mother. The crimes unraveled in October 1965  when David Smith, Hindley’s brother-in-law, witnessed Brady kill 17-year-old Edward Evans with an ax  in the living room of their home. Smith went to the police the next morning.

 When officers searched the house and Hindley’s car, they found a left luggage ticket tucked into the spine of her prayer book. Inside the locker at Manchester Central Station were photographs taken on the moors and a recorded tape. The tape was of Leslie Anne Downey. Hindley and Brady were tried in April 1966.  Brady was convicted of three murders.

Hindley was convicted of two murders and of harboring Brady after knowing he had killed a third victim. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.    For the rest of her life, Hindley campaigned for release. She claimed she had changed. She claimed she was a victim of Brady’s manipulation.

 In 1987, she confessed to the full five murders. In 1987, Pauline Reed’s body was finally recovered on the Moore after Brady and Hendley’s confessions. Keith Bennett’s body was never found. Keith  Bennett’s mother, Winnie Johnson, spent the rest of her life searching for her son. She died in 2012 without ever finding him.

 The location of Keith Bennett’s remains died with Ian Brady in 2017. Myra Hindley died in prison of respiratory failure on November 16th, 2002. She was 60 years old. She had  served 36 years. She never left. Every application for parole was rejected.  The home secretary eventually designated her sentence as a whole life tariff.

 Britain called her the most evil woman in the country.  Keith Bennett has still never been found. Case six, Rosemary West,  25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, England. A police officer once described the smell before he even opened the door. It took 3 months to excavate the property at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.

 When investigators finished, nine bodies had been recovered from the cellar and garden. Three more had been found elsewhere.  12 victims in total, including two of the West’s own children. Rosemary Pauline West was born November 29th, 1953 in Devon, England into a household controlled by a mentally ill father who subjected the family to a rigid and frightening domestic order.

 She met Frederick West when she was 15.  He was 24. Already a convicted thief, already a man with a dark and specific set of desires. She moved in with him. She helped care for his children from a previous relationship and then she became something else entirely. The partnership between Fred and Rose West was built on shared violence.

 Together  they targeted young women, often hitchhikers or runaways, people who had no one watching out for them. They would be brought to Cromwell  Street. The seller had been converted. What happened there was methodical and prolonged. The details described in court testimony reduced hardened investigators to silence.

  The victim’s bodies were dismembered. Bones were found missing, fingers, toes,  kneecaps removed, investigators believed, as trophies. Among the confirmed victims of Rosemary West were Charmaine West, her own step-daughter,  just eight years old, murdered while Fred was in prison for unrelated crimes,  and Heather West, her own biological daughter, murdered in 1987 at  age 16, buried under the patio.

For years, the West children were told as a dark family joke  that if they misbehaved, they would end up like Heather under the garden. The family said it so many times that eventually someone outside the house heard it. In 1994, a social worker raised concerns.  Police began investigating.

 When they finally excavated the garden and the seller,  the investigation expanded outward to other properties. Fred West was arrested and charged with 12 murders in January 1995. Before he could stand trial, he hanged himself in his prison cell.  Rose West stood trial alone in October 1995. She denied everything.

 She said she knew nothing. On each count, as the charges were read, her response was always the same.  I’m innocent. The jury convicted her on all 10 counts of murder. The judge sentenced her to life in prison and recommended she never be released. She was given what is known in England as a whole life tariff, one of only a small number of women in British history to receive that designation.

 As of 2026, Rosemary West remains incarcerated at New Hall Prison in West Yorkshire. She is in her early 70s. There is no possibility of parole. 25 Cromwell Street was demolished. In  its place, the local council built a walkway. Nothing marks the spot. Nothing is named for it.  The families of the victims were told the site would never be used to memorialize the killers.

 Some of the victims families said that wasn’t enough,  that nothing would ever be enough. They were right. Here is a number that does not get discussed enough.  Of the thousands of people currently on death row in the United States, fewer than 2% are  women. 2%. Yet the cases of women who kill are frequently among the most methodical, the most prolonged, and the most personal in criminal history.

They rarely kill strangers. They kill the people who trust them most, the patients in their care,  the children in their homes, the men in their beds. They use access. They use proximity.  They use the fact that no one is looking. And that is what makes the next case so difficult to look away from.

 Case 7, Bell Gunnness,  1884 to 1908, Leaport, Indiana. She placed advertisements in Norwegian language newspapers across the Midwest. The wording was warm, practical.  She was a widow, she wrote. She owned a farm in Indiana. She was looking for a serious man with financial means, a man willing to invest in a future together.

She asked interested men to come in person and to bring their savings. They  came. They did not leave. Born Brinhild Paul’sdaughter Stersth on November 11th, 1859  in Selbu, Norway, Bel Gunnness was the youngest of eight  children from a poor farming family. She immigrated to the United States in 1881,  arriving in Chicago with nothing.

 She married a fellow Norwegian, Mad Sorenson, 3 years later. Their shop burned down. The insurance paid. Their house caught fire. The insurance paid again.  Mads died in 1900 on the only day covered by two overlapping life insurance policies. Belle collected the payout and moved  to a farm outside Leaport, Indiana.

 She married Peter Gunnness in 1902. He died the following year reportedly after a meat grinder fell from a shelf and struck him in the head. The inquest jury was skeptical. Belle was not charged. She collected the insurance.  Then she turned to the newspapers. The men who answered her advertisements  came from across the Midwest and beyond.

They sold their farms.  They withdrew their savings. They told almost no one where they were going because Belle’s letters instructed them not to. Bring the money, she wrote. Tell no one. It is safer that way. When Andrew Hegeline arrived in January 1908, he made one error. He told his brother in South Dakota where he was going.

 When his brother could not reach him,  he wrote to the Leaport County Sheriff. On April 28th, 1908, Belle Gunnness’s farmhouse burned to the ground. In the ashes, investigators found the bodies of her three children and the headless remains of a woman assumed to be Belle herself, but the body was shorter and  lighter than any description of Belle on record.

 She was known to be nearly 6  ft tall and well over 200 lb. The excavation of the property revealed something no one had prepared for.  At least 11 bodies were found buried on the farm, dismembered, packed into flower sacks, and buried in the pig pen. Most were men who had answered her advertisements.  Among the identified remains, was Andrew Hegline.

 Ray Lamfair, a hired hand she had recently fired, was charged with arson  and acquitted of murder before his death in prison from tuberculosis in 1909. He reportedly told a minister that Belle had escaped, that she had placed a stranger’s body in the farmhouse to serve as her own. Bel Gunnness was never found. She was never tried. She was never executed.

  Investigators received reported sightings of her for decades afterward.  None were ever confirmed. She is believed to have killed at least 14 confirmed victims. Some historians put the true number between 25 and 40. She is the only woman on this list who may have gotten away.  In the history of American criminal justice, fewer than 60 women have been executed since  the country’s founding.

 The last woman put to death before Velma Barfield in 1984 was Barbara Graham  in 1955. Between 1962 and 1984, not a single woman was executed anywhere in the United States.  In that same period, serial killers operated with careers that stretched across years and decades. Some in hospitals, some in nursing homes, some in homes where children slept.

 and they were never suspected in part because no one believed a woman was capable. That assumption cost a great many people their lives. Case  8, Jane Toppen, 1895 to 1901, Massachusetts.  They called her Jolly Jane. She was cheerful at work. She laughed easily. She organized staff socials.  Patients requested her by name.

Physicians recommended her to families who needed a nurse in the home. She had  a gift, everyone said, for making people feel at ease. She was also murdering them. Born Anora Kelly on March 31st, 1854  in Boston, Massachusetts to Irish immigrant parents,  Jane Topan’s early life was defined by loss.

 Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was very young. Her father, known in the neighborhood as Peter the Crack, abandoned her and her  sister at an orphanage when Jane was around 8 years old. She was taken in by a family named Topan  as an indentured servant and eventually adopted their name.

 She trained as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital.  She proved capable enough to be liked and trusted, though something about her behavior around patients made certain supervisors uneasy.  She was discharged from nurse training twice. The reasons were never publicly formalized.  She transitioned to private nursing where there was far less oversight. There  she thrived.

Between 1895 and 1901, working across Massachusetts,  Tophen poisoned patients by alternating doses of morphine and atropene, drugs with opposing physiological effects. The combination made deaths look  natural and confounded any physician who examined the body after the  fact.

 She would bring the patient to the edge, watch them fail, and then revive them.  She told investigators later that she derived a specific and deeply disturbing pleasure from the act. She described lying in bed next to dying patients. She described watching their eyes. In the summer of 1901, she nursed the Davis family at their summer home in Cat Amed on Cape Cod.

 Within weeks, Alden Davis and two of his daughters, Mary Gibbs and Genevieve Gordon, were dead.  A third family member became ill. When relatives insisted on toxicology testing, morphine was found. Bodies were exumed. Other cases were reopened. Toppin was arrested on October 29th, 1901. in  custody.

 She was forthcoming in a way that disturbed everyone who spoke with her. She told investigators her ambition had been to kill more helpless people than any man or woman who had ever lived. She confessed  to 31 murders in detail. She later suggested the true number could be 100 or more, including people whose names she could not recall.

At trial in 1902, she was found not guilty by a reason of insanity  and committed to Taton State Hospital for life. Near the end of her life suffering from dementia, she reportedly told one of her nurses, “Daryi, you and I could have such  fun.” Jane Toppen died at Taton State Hospital on August 17th, 1938. She was 84 years old.

She had never spent a single day in a prison  cell. She lived out her final decades inside the very institution where she had been condemned.  The confirmed victim count was 12. She herself claimed 31. The real number may never be known. Case  9, Nanny Doss, 1927 to 1954.  Alabama, Oklahoma.

 She was giggling when they arrested her. She was still giggling when they interrogated her when investigators asked her how she had killed her fifth husband, Samuel  Doss. She described stirring arsenic into his evening coffee, and watching him drink it with apparent cheerfulness, as though she were describing a favorite recipe.

 The press gave her a nickname, the giggling granny. She seemed to like it. Born Nancy Hazel on November 4th, 1905 in Blue Mountain, Alabama, Nanny Doss grew up on a farm where her father kept strict and  suffocating control over the family. She suffered a traumatic head injury on a train as a young girl and reported headaches and blackouts for years afterward.

 The one comfort she found in childhood was romance magazines, stories of passion,  perfect love, and husbands who came home with flowers. She spent the rest of her life chasing that fiction.  She first married at 16 and had four daughters. That marriage dissolved. The next man was worse. She moved on.

Between 1927 and 1954, across multiple states and under several surnames,  Nanny Doss dissolved arsenic into food and coffee and prune cake and served it to four husbands, her mother, a sister, two of her children, a grandson, and a mother-in-law. The total confirmed victim count was 11. Most of her husbands had pre-existing health problems, which absorbed any suspicion a doctor might have had.

 The fifth husband,  Samuel Doss, a church-going Nazarene minister from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the one who ended it. Not because he noticed anything, because his doctor did.  Doss had spent a month in hospital after a first poisoning attempt, recovered,  came home, and was killed that same evening.

 His physician was troubled enough by the sudden relapse to request an autopsy before the burial. What he found was, in his  words, enough arsenic to kill several men. Nanny was arrested and brought in for questioning. During the interrogation while investigators laid out evidence of deaths spanning  decades, she giggled.

 She answered in full sentences. She said her conscience was clear. under continued questioning and reportedly in exchange for being allowed to keep a romance magazine. She confessed to killing four of her husbands. On May 17th, 1955, Nanny Doss pleaded guilty and was sentenced  to life in prison for the murder of Samuel Doss.

 The judge later explained he was not willing to set a  precedent by executing a woman. She was never prosecuted for the other murders. She died of leukemia at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on June 2nd, 1965.  She was 59 years old. She died in the hospital ward, not in a courtroom, not in an execution chamber.  At sentencing, she reportedly appeared thrilled at the prospect of prison.

 It was the most stability she had known. Case  10. Janine Jones, 1977 to 1982,  Texas. The babies kept dying. No one could explain why. Healthy infants would suddenly stop breathing. Some survived, many did not. And wherever it happened, Janine Jones seemed to be nearby. Born July 13th, 1950 in Texas,  she was adopted as an infant.

 Friends and co-workers described her as attention-seeking. a woman who craved  praise and who seemed happiest when she was the center of a crisis.  She became a licensed vocational nurse and found work caring for children. At Baker County Hospital in San Antonio, co-workers noticed something strange.

 Whenever Jones was on duty, medical emergencies increased.  Babies who had been stable suddenly stopped breathing. Some recovered, others died. Doctors initially blamed bad luck, then coincidence, then something far darker. Investigators eventually discovered that several children had been injected with drugs they never needed, including succinyl choline,  a powerful muscle relaxant, and Heperin, an anti-coagulant.

 The victims ranged from newborns  to toddlers. Authorities linked Jones directly to at least two murders and numerous injuries, though investigators later suspected the true number of victims could be much higher, possibly dozens. Hospital administrators, fearful of lawsuits and public panic, quietly allowed Jones to resign instead of alerting authorities immediately.

 That delay may have cost additional lives. In 1984, she was convicted in the murder of 15-month-old Chelsea Mlelen and sentenced to 99 years in prison. She received an additional 60-year sentence  for injuring another child. For decades, Texas law contained a loophole that could have allowed her release. Public outrage followed. The law was changed.

Additional charges were later filed, ensuring that Janine Jones would remain behind bars. As of 2026,  she remains incarcerated. She is 75 years old, and many families believe the full number of children she killed will never be known. The babies trusted her, their parents trusted her, and for years, so did everyone else.

 Case 11, Beverly Alllet, 1991. Grantham and Casten Hospital, Lincolnure,  England. Between February and April 1991, four children died on Ward 4 of Grantham and Castan Hospital in Lincolnshire, England. Nine others suffered  severe and unexplained medical crises during the same period.

 Some sustained permanent brain damage.  The ward was a children’s ward. The patients were infants and young children. The nurse on duty during nearly every incident was Beverly Gail Alllet.  Born October 4th, 1968 in Corby Glenn, Lincolnshire,  Alllet had a history throughout her teens and early 20s of unexplained medical episodes of her own.

 She sought treatment repeatedly  for ailments doctors could not verify or substantiate. She underwent multiple surgeries with no clear clinical need. She spent significant time in hospital settings, first as a patient, then eventually as  a nurse. Psychiatrists later identified her as suffering from Munchhousen syndrome and Munchhousen syndrome by proxy, conditions defined by fabricating or inducing illness in oneself and in those under one’s care.

  She passed her nursing exams on the second attempt and was hired at Granthm and Castan Hospital in early  1991. The only applicant available for the position at the time. Within weeks of beginning work on Ward 4, children began dying. The first was 7-week old Liam Taylor. He suffered a sudden and unexplained cardiac arrest and died.

Then came 11-year-old Timothy Hardwick.  Then Kaye Desmond, then Becky Phillips, just  two months old. She died suddenly at home after being discharged from the ward. Her twin sister Katie survived but was left with brain damage, partial paralysis,  and persistent medical complications.

 Paul Crarampton, Bradley  Gibson, Henry Chan, Jonathan Jobson, and 15-month-old Clare Pek, who died in April 1991  after two sudden cardiac arrests during her single admission. After Clare PC’s death, a police investigation was launched.  Toxicology testing revealed abnormally high levels of insulin and potassium.

  Alllet had administered injections of insulin and air, substances that are nearly impossible to detect once the body begins to break down. In May 1993, Beverly Alllet was convicted of four murders, three attempted murders,  and six counts of causing grievous bodily harm. She was sentenced to 13 concurrent life sentences and ordered to be detained indefinitely at Rampton Secure Hospital under the Mental Health Act.

 She remains there to this day, too dangerous to be transferred  to a standard prison. She was 23 years old when she killed her last victim. Claire Pec’s parents sat in that courtroom and listened to every detail.  They never once looked away. Case 12, Christine Falling, 1980 to 1982. Perry and Blunttown, Florida. The parents trusted her completely.

  She was known around the neighborhood as a reliable babysitter. Young, available, willing to sit for almost anyone.  Parents in Perry, Florida, and later in Bluntstown, left their children in her care and went to work without a second thought. Born Christine Leverne Slaughter on March 12th, 1963 in Perry, Florida.

 She  entered the world to a father 65 years old and a mother just 16.  The family was impoverished, unstable, and largely indifferent to her.  She suffered from epilepsy. She required daily medication to control seizures. She was in and out of foster homes and children’s refues before she was a teenager.

  As a child, she strangled cats and dropped them from heights. She said she was testing whether they truly had nine lives.  She was 17 years old when she killed her first child on February 28th, 1980. 2-year-old Cassidy Johnson, nicknamed Muffin, was left in Christine’s care, in Blunttown, Florida. The child was found unresponsive.

Christine told the family she had simply stopped breathing.  The death was ruled sudden infant death syndrome. 4 months later, 4-year-old Jeffrey Davis and his  2-year-old cousin Joseph Spring died within 3 days of each other, both in Christine’s care. Their deaths were attributed to heart inflammation.

 A third child, 8-month-old Jennifer Daniels, died later that year. A 4-week old infant named Travis Coleman died in Christine’s arms in July 1982 after what appeared to be an immunization related incident. He was the one who broke open the pattern.  When authorities finally confronted Christine Falling, she did not deny anything.

  She explained that she had heard voices telling her to kill the baby. She said she suffocated the children with blankets and pillows. In December 1982, she pleaded guilty to three counts of firstdegree murder. Cassidy Johnson, Jennifer Daniels, and Travis  Coleman. She also confessed to three other killings, including an elderly man in her care, for which she was not separately prosecuted.

  In exchange for her plea, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. She received three concurrent life sentences.  At her parole hearing in 2017, prosecutors told the review board she was the babysitter from hell and deserved no mercy.  The request for parole was rejected. As of 2026, Christine Falling remains incarcerated at Lel Correctional Institution  in Ocala, Florida.

She has been behind bars for over 40 years. She  was 17 when she killed Cassidy Johnson. Cassidy was two.  By the midentth century, courts in the United States still operated under an unspoken assumption. Women who killed were aberrations,  and aberrations deserved mercy. Judges declined to execute women  partly out of societal squeamishness and partly because the women in front of them, often grandmotherly,  soft-spoken, church-going, did not look like killers. That perception protected

some of the most calculated murderers in American history  from the death penalty. What follows are cases where the justice system corrected that assumption and cases where it never did.  Case 13, Blanch Taylor Moore, 1966 to 1989,  Alamance County, North Carolina.

 She was known at church as a devoted and generous woman.  She made banana pudding from scratch. She brought it to her boyfriend’s hospital bedside while he was too sick to feed  himself. She sat with him and spooned it into his mouth. The pudding was laced with arsenic. Born Blanch Kaiser on February 17th, 1933 in Concord, North Carolina, Blanch grew up as one of seven children under a self-styled preacher father who eventually abandoned the family for a younger woman.

 She married James Taylor in the early 1950s and built a quiet domestic life in Alamance County.  James Taylor died in 1971. Blanch collected on his life insurance. Her father, PD Kaiser, died of what was recorded as natural causes. Her mother-in-law, Isa Taylor, also died. Then her boyfriend, Raymond Reed, became gradually and mysteriously ill beginning in 1986.

He lost weight. He  developed neurological symptoms. He suffered bouts of severe sickness that came and went. Doctors initially diagnosed him with Gillon Baret syndrome.  He deteriorated for months. Raymond Reed died in January 1988. Blanch had already moved on. She began a relationship with a pastor  named Reverend Dwight Moore.

 A divorce she had met on Easter Sunday at their church. They married in April 1989. They returned from their honeymoon on a Monday. On Wednesday, Reverend Moore collapsed after eating a chicken sandwich. He was rushed to the University of North Carolina hospital where physicians ran tests that  stunned them.

 His blood contained arsenic at levels 20 times the lethal dose. He somehow survived. Blanch was arrested on July 18th, 1989.  Exumations followed. Raymond Reed, James Taylor, her father, her mother-in-law. Hair samples from all of them showed elevated arsenic levels. A jury convicted her in November 1990. She was  sentenced to death.

 Blanch Taylor Moore has remained on North Carolina’s death row since November 1990.  She turned 93 years old in February 2026. She is the oldest person currently on death row in the United States.  North Carolina has not carried out an execution since 2006. She is almost certainly going to die in her cell, not by lethal injection.

 The reverend she poisoned  survived. He later spoke publicly about his ordeal. He said he still could not fully understand how a woman could do  that to someone she was supposed to love. Case 14, Martha Beck, March 8th, 1951, Singh Prison, Austining, New York. She said her story was a love story.  In her final statement to the press, delivered from the death house at Sing Singh Prison, Martha Juel Beck wrote, “My story is a love story, but only those tortured by love can know what I mean.” Then  she sat down in the

electric chair. Born Martha Jules Seabbrook on May 6th,  1920 in Milton, Florida. Beck described a childhood defined by isolation. She was mocked throughout school. She struggled to find connection.  She became a nurse. She worked. She wrote to a lonely hearts club.

 And she answered a personal ad placed by a man named Raymond Fernandez.  He was supposed to be her next victimizer. Instead, they fell in love.  She appeared at his door with her two children. He told her to get rid of them. She left them at the Salvation Army. She  moved in. She became his partner.

 Over the next 2 years, Beck posed as Fernandez’s sister while he courted lonely widows. She watched, she assisted, she stood by. And when Raymon developed feelings for other women, Martha Beck became dangerously jealous. Then came murder and more murder. In 1949, they killed Janet Fay.  Then Delphine Downing and Deline’s 2-year-old daughter, Reel.

 A suspicious neighbor called police. Fernandez confessed. Both were convicted and  sentenced to death. On the night of March 8th, 1951, Fernandez was executed first. Two hours before her own execution, he sent her a note.  I would like to yell to the world the love I feel for you.

 Martha Beck told a nurse she was happy to die, knowing he loved her.  She was executed shortly before midnight. She was 30 years old. Her final words still hold a particular kind of darkness because she genuinely believed what she said. It was a love story for her. That was the most disturbing part of all.  Case 15. Louise Pete, April 11th, 1947, San Quentin State Prison, California.

 She walked into murder twice, served prison time once, walked free, and murdered again. Born Lefi Louise Preslar on September 20th, 1880 in Bienville, Louisiana to a prosperous newspaper family, Louise Pete received an expensive private education and was expelled from school before she finished.

 She moved through multiple cities, multiple men, and multiple names.  Her first husband, Henry Bosley, whom she married in 1903, committed suicide after finding her with another man. Her second husband, Harry Ferro, married her in 1913 and committed suicide that same year  after discovering her infidelities. Neither death was investigated seriously.

 In 1915, she married Richard Pete. They had a  daughter. Louise had already moved on. In 1920, she was renting a room from a wealthy mining engineer named Jacob  Denton in Los Angeles. He disappeared. She told authorities he had gone away on business.    She continued to rent his home and cash his accounts.

 When Denton’s friends grew suspicious,  investigators found his body buried in the basement. Louise was arrested. She was convicted of first-degree murder in February 1921 and sentenced to life in prison. She served 18 years.  She was parrolled in April 1939, having convinced parole officials she was a reformed woman.

 The women who had helped secure her release, one of them named Emily Dwight Laam, died not long after Pete’s release. Her death was attributed to natural causes. Pete went to work as a housekeeper for an elderly couple, Arthur and Margaret Logan. Margaret Logan, the very woman who had written letters supporting Pete’s parole,  disappeared in 1944.

 Pete forged her signature on checks. She forged letters to parole authorities and married a man named Lee Bordon Judson that same year. When investigators finally searched the property, they found Margaret Logan’s body buried in the garden. Pete was convicted of first-degree murder for the second time in May 1945. She was sentenced  to death.

 Her husband Judson, who was acquitted of any involvement, committed suicide  the day after the verdict. On April 11th, 1947, Louise Pete was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin State  Prison. She was 66 years old. She was the second woman executed in California’s gas chamber.  She had murdered her way through three decades.

 Two murder convictions and one parole. No remorse documented on record, no confession, no explanation. She died  as she had lived without accounting for any of it. Case 16, Leonardo Chianuli, 1939 to 1940.  Correio Reio Amelia, Italy. She made soap from their bodies. She  made cakes from their blood and she served both to her neighbors.

 Born on April 14th, 1894 in Montella in southern Italy. Leonardo came into the world under circumstances she described as cursed from the very beginning. Her mother had been married against her will and Leonardo believed she was never truly wanted. She attempted suicide twice before adulthood.

 She married a registry clerk named Raphael Pensardi against her family’s wishes and her mother, she later claimed, placed a curse on the union.  Whether the curse was real or not, what followed her marriage was catastrophic. She had 17 pregnancies. Three ended in miscarriage. 10 of her children died before reaching adulthood.

 The four who survived became by every account the center of her world. Her entire existence organized itself around their protection. When her son Jeppe was called up to serve in the Italian military in 1939 as World War II gathered momentum, Leonardo became consumed by a belief that he would die. She had consulted fortune tellers throughout her life.

 She believed she had been told that all her children would die before her. She decided she had to act. She settled on human sacrifice. Her first victim was Fina Seti, a local woman who came to Leonardo in search of a husband. Leonardo told her she had found a match in the city of Pola. She convinced Si to tell no one, to write postcards and letters to family in advance so no one would ask questions.  Then she killed her.

She dismembered the body, dissolved it in costic soda, and used the rendered material to make soap.    She mixed the blood into flour, sugar, and chocolate, then baked cakes and  served them. The second victim was a widow named Francesca Savei. The third, Virginia Kashipo, a former opera singer, about whom Leonardo later told the court with unsettling specificity that she was really sweet.

  She was arrested in 1940 after the sister of her third victim reported the woman’s disappearance to police.  At her trial in Reio Amelia in 1946, Leonarda did not attempt to hide what she had done. She corrected the prosecutor’s account on several factual points. She insisted the sacrifices had kept her son safe.

 She was sentenced to 30 years in prison and 3 years in a criminal asylum. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the asylum on October  15th, 1970. She was 76 years old. Her pot, her axe, and her other instruments were donated to Italy’s criminology museum in Rome. They remain on display today. Visitors can look inside the vat she used  and imagine what happened there.

 Most people leave quickly. Case 17. Enriqueeta Marti. February 27th, 1912. Barcelona, Spain. The children of Barcelona’s poorest neighborhoods were disappearing. Nobody in authority was looking very hard. At the turn of the 20th century, Barcelona’s Raval district was one of the most densely populated urban zones in Europe.

 It was also one of the poorest. Children from impoverished families went  missing with a frequency that drew little official attention. Because in 1912, a missing child from Elraval was not considered a crisis. It was considered a fact of city life.  Enriqueeta Marti Repz was born around 1868 in San Felu de Leo Bragat, a town outside Barcelona.

 She moved to the city as a young woman and worked first as a servant and nanny before moving into prostitution. She married a painter named Juan Puh Hollowo in 1895. The marriage was turbulent. They separated,  reconciled, and separated again. They had no children of their own for approximately 20 years, operating across multiple apartments in Barcelona under different identities, and Ricetta Marti targeted children from the city’s most vulnerable communities.

 She approached families living in poverty. She appeared at charitable institutions. She waited near church doorways. By day, she posed as a beggar, sometimes bringing children along with her as part of the act. At night, she operated differently. She ran a network that supplied children to wealthy clients.

  She also claimed to manufacture medicinal potions, ointments, and remedies, which she sold to Barcelona’s upper classes. According to investigators, the ingredients used in those preparations came from the children she abducted. She maintained account books listing wealthy clients by name. On February 10th, 1912,  she kidnapped her final victim, a young girl named Terasita Guard Congost.

 12 days later, a neighbor named Claudia Elas glimpsed a child matching Teracita’s description through a basement window. She reported what she saw. On February 27th, 1912, police led by Chief Inspector Reebot raided the apartment. They found Teracittita alive. They also found another surviving girl, Angelita.

 Angelita  described witnessing the killing of a boy named Papito on the kitchen table. Just days before the raid, human remains were recovered.  Bloodstained children’s clothing was found. Forensic experts determined the remains represented at least 12 children. The full number was never established. The public reaction in Barcelona was unlike anything the city had seen.

 Crowds surrounded the prison. Newspapers published daily. There were calls for immediate execution,  but Enriqueta Marty never stood trial. She was held at Raina Amalia Prison while prosecutors  built their case. On May 12th, 1913, 15 months after her arrest, she was beaten to death by fellow inmates.

 No trial, no verdict, no sentence.  The prison itself has since been demolished. The children she took from El Raval have no monument.  Case 18. Dorothia Poente 1982 to 1988 1426F Street Sacramento California. She  baked tamales for the neighbors. She tended rose beds in the front garden.

 She dressed in floral prints and wore her white hair neatly set. She handed out food at the local church in the backyard of her Victorian boarding house on F Street.  The bodies of her tenants lay buried in shallow graves beneath the soil. Born Dorothia Helen Gray on January 9th, 1929 in Redlands, California, Puente endured a chaotic early life marked by poverty, a string of failed marriages, and years of small-scale fraud.

 By the time she opened her boarding house in the early 1980s, she had already served time in prison for drugging and robbing elderly men in her care. As a condition of her release, she had  been explicitly ordered not to handle government checks or work with elderly people. She immediately did both.

 Her boarding house at 1426F Street  accepted the most vulnerable residents Sacramento had to offer. The elderly, the disabled, alcoholics, and mentally ill adults who had nowhere else to go. Poente positioned herself as their caretaker, their advocate, their grandmother figure. She read their mail, managed  their social security checks, paid them small stipens, and kept the rest, telling them it was for expenses.

When a tenant became too sick, too suspicious,  or simply too difficult, they died. She laced their food with prescription medication. She hired handymen to dig in the yard and remove soil and debris. Neighbors noticed the smell.  They said nothing. Between 1982 and 1988, at least nine people died in her care.

 Seven bodies were found buried in her yard. An  eighth, her boyfriend, Iverson Gilmouth, was found inside a wooden box floating in the Sacramento River. A  ninth, her business partner, Ruth Monroe, died of a drug overdose, initially ruled a suicide.  The investigation began in November 1988. A social worker reported a missing tenant named Alvaro Mononttoya. Police came to the house.

They began digging. As the first body emerged from the soil, Dorothia Poente asked  a detective if she could walk to a nearby hotel to wait. He said yes. She walked  to a bus station instead. She fled to Los Angeles, sat at a bar, and introduced herself to a stranger.

 The stranger recognized her face from the news and called police. She was arrested 4 days later. At trial in 1993, the jury convicted her of three murders and deadlocked on six others. She was sentenced to two life terms without the possibility of parole. From  prison, she gave interviews insisting her borders had been well cared for.

 She even had a cookbook published, cooking with a serial killer. She maintained her innocence until she died of natural causes at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowilla  on March 27th, 2011. She was 82 years old. She never confessed, not once. The house on F Street still  stands. People pay to tour it. Case 19.

 Garcela Blanco, 1970s to 1980s. Medí Colombia and Miami, Florida. She named her youngest son, Michael Corleó, after the character from The Godfather. That tells you almost everything you need to know about how Grisel de Blanco saw herself. Born Griselda Blanco Restreo on February 15th, 1943 in Cartahena, Colombia.

 She grew up in poverty in Medí. Some accounts suggest she was involved in criminal activity as early as age 11. By adulthood, she had been married three times, had four sons, and built something no woman in the history of the cocaine trade had built before, an empire. In the 1970s,  Griselle Delanco became one of the first Colombians to establish large-scale cocaine trafficking routes into the United States.

 She operated primarily out of Miami, flooding the city with product and eliminating anyone who stood in her way. Investigators estimate she was directly connected to at least 40 murders, though some estimates are much higher.  She was suspected of ordering the deaths of her second and third husbands, among many others.

 She invented the motorcycle assassination. Gunmen on motorcycles pulling up quietly, firing and vanishing into traffic. It became the signature method of the Miami drug wars. Bodies appeared in shopping mall parking lots, hotel lobbies, and public streets. Bystanders died, children died. She oversaw all of it from behind a curtain of logistics and deniability.

 The DEA arrested her on February 17th, 1985. She was convicted of federal drug trafficking  charges and sentenced to 15 years. A later murder conviction added 20 years, served concurrently. She spent nearly two decades in American prisons. In 1998, she pleaded guilty to three murders in exchange for a reduced sentence.

 In 2004, she was released and deported to Colombia. Back in Medelene, by most  accounts, she tried to live quietly. She was in her 60s. Her health was failing. Three of her sons had already been killed in drugrelated violence. On September 3rd, 2012, she walked out of a butcher shop on 29th Street in Medelene.  A man on a motorcycle pulled up and shot her twice in the head.

 She was 69 years old. The method she had invented killed her.  A filmmaker who documented her life later said, “This is classic live by the sword, die by the sword.” Or in  her case, “Live by the motorcycle assassin, die by the motorcycle assassin.” No one was ever charged with her murder. The case remains unsolved.

 Case 20. Dana Sue Gray, February to March 1994, Riverside County, California. She went shopping immediately afterward. Every  time, every victim, she took the credit cards, drove to the stores, and spent candles, antiques, clothes. She described a compulsion she couldn’t  explain, a need that overrode everything else, including the women she had just left dying behind her.

 Born Dana Sue Armbrust on December 6th, 1957 in Newport Beach, California, Gray trained as a nurse and worked for years in labor and delivery at Inland Valley Regional Medical Center in Riverside County. She married, accumulated  significant debt, filed for bankruptcy, and in November 1993 was fired from her hospital position for stealing opioid medications.

  By February 1994, she was desperate. Her first confirmed victim was  86-year-old Norma Davis, killed on February 14th, 1994 in Lake Elsenor. Davis  was strangled with a telephone cord in her home. Gray took her credit cards and went directly to the shops. In early March, she killed June Roberts, a  57-year-old antiques dealer.

 She strangled her with a phone cord at her shop in Canyon Lake.  Days later, she killed 66-year-old Dora BBE at her home, beating and strangling her. She took their cards and went shopping again. On March 10th, she  attacked 57-year-old Darinda Hawkins at an antique store in Lake Elsenor, strangling her with a telephone cord and leaving her for dead.

 Darinda Hawkins did not die. She survived.  She called police and gave a description. Investigators ran the credit card activity.    Surveillance footage from retail stores showed the same woman store after store within hours of each murder.  They identified Dana Sue Gray. She was arrested on March 16th, 1994 at her residence while preparing dinner.

 Inside her home, investigators found property belonging to multiple victims. In September 1998, faced  with the possibility of the death penalty, Gray pleaded guilty to the murders of June Roberts and Dora BBE and the attempted murder of Darinda Hawkins.  As part of the deal, she was not prosecuted for the murder of Norma Davis.

  She was sentenced to life in prison without parole on October 16th, 1998.  Her attorney said she never admitted guilt and was never convicted by a jury. He said those things meant something to her. As of 2026,  Dana Sue Gray remains incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowilla. She is 68 years old.

 In a 2024 interview, she was advocating for the rights of female  prisoners. Darinda Hawkins survived and told police exactly who did it. That detail alone is why Dana Sue Gray will never walk free. Case 22, Vicky Don Jackson, December 2000. February 2001. Noona General Hospital, Nona, Texas. Nothing about Noona General Hospital should have produced a body count like that.

 It was  a small community hospital in a rural Texas town of about 3,000 people. The patients were mostly elderly, admitted for manageable conditions.  Under normal circumstances, the hospital expected between 5 and 10 deaths a year. Between December 2000 and February 2001, nearly two dozen people died.

 All of the deaths occurred on a single shift. All involved patients who had been stable before the shift began. And all happened while one particular nurse was on duty. Her name was Vicky Dawn Jackson, born Vicky Dawn Carson, on February 13th, 1966 in Montigue County, Texas.  Jackson had worked as a certified vocational nurse since 1989, moving through several hospitals and nursing homes before arriving at Nakona General in late 2000.

She was regarded as competent, trusted, reliable. She cared for patients who required a higher level of attention.  In February 2001, the hospital pharmacist reported that at least 10 vials of macurium were  missing, a powerful muscle paralyzing drug used to temporarily stop breathing during intubation.

 The drug had not been charted. There was no medical reason for it to appear in those patients. Exumations began. Bodies were dug up from cemeteries across Texas and Oklahoma. Toxicology testing found myurium again and again  and again. One of the confirmed victims was the grandfather of Jackson’s third husband.

 She had administered his injection personally. An FBI agent who worked the case later testified that the victims shared something in common. They needed more care. They asked for things. They demanded attention. He  said that seemed to make her angry. Jackson was arrested on July 16th, 2002 while working at a grocery store deli in Bowie, Texas, making sandwiches.

 She was indicted on 10 counts of murder and charged with the attempted murder of an 11th patient who survived. In October 2006, Vicky Dawn Jackson entered a nocontest plea to capital murder. She was 40 years old. Her attorney explained that she refused to go to trial because her adult daughter was on the state’s witness list.

 He said she could not allow that. She was sentenced to life in prison. She never admitted guilt, not in  court, not publicly, not on record. Prosecutors had not sought the death penalty. As  of 2026, Vicky Dawn Jackson remains incarcerated at the Christina Melton Crane unit in Gatesville, Texas.

 She is 60 years old, 10 confirmed victims, possibly 20 or more elderly patients in a small hospital. People who thought they were getting better. They trusted a nurse.    That trust was the last thing most of them ever felt. 22 women, 22 stories. Some were executed. Some sit on death row today waiting.

 Some died in prison, still insisting they had done nothing wrong. Some are alive right now in a cell, in an institution, behind a locked door somewhere. Women who made choices that ended lives, destroyed  families, and left wounds that never fully closed. The victims in these cases were husbands and  children and patients and neighbors.

 People who believed they were safe. People who extended trust to someone near them and never had the chance to take it  back. That is what these cases share. Across every decade, every country, every method, not the violence, the betrayal. Remember the names of the people who were taken, not just the women who took them. You’ve  been watching Inside Capital Crime.