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Thread: From crimes of passion to evil sadism: The history of Britain's female serial killers

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    From crimes of passion to evil sadism: The history of Britain's female serial killers

    By Danny Buckland
    The Sun


    FECKLESS: Joanna Dennehy stabbed three men. [SWNS]


    The sadistic murder spree of Joanna Dennehy who stabbed three men to death and tried to kill two others has opened a lurid window on to the world of women who kill.

    The shock at the 31-year old's almost joyous killings and her ability to manipulate two men into being accomplices and helping her dispose of the bodies is being viewed as another example of a corroding modern society.

    Feckless and without any real parental influence, Dennehy's lawless behaviour ratcheted out of control in a demi-monde of petty crime and alcohol.

    Dennehy, from Peterborough, who is due to be sentenced at the Old Bailey after admitting the murders, was branded a bloodthirsty killer with no remorse who was allowed by an uncaring society to drift from angelic schoolgirl to knife-wielding maniac.

    She will be sentenced just as former Royal dresser Jane Andrews is considered for a full release from her 12-year sentence for bludgeoning boyfriend Tom Cressman with a cricket bat as he lay in bed, before stabbing him to death.

    Women commit less than 10 per cent of murders but their impulse to kill is not a modern phenomenon. As long ago as the 16th century, scribes were reporting the case of a Chinese empress who delighted in dispatching male victims to become the first documented woman serial killer.

    Popular psychology dictates that women nurture and only men have the killing gene but follow the treacherous path through criminal history and the pages are drenched with the blood spilt by the ladykillers.

    Driven by love, jealousy, revenge, money or psychopathic tendencies, their atrocities rival their male counterparts.

    DOROTHEA WADDINGHAM: Hanged at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, April 16, 1936, for murdering two patients

    Dorothea was a self-titled nurse. She had no medical qualifications but a string of convictions for fraud and theft before she turned her Nottingham house into a nursing home.

    Louisa Baguley, 89, and her crippled 50-year-old daughter Ada became her first patients. The couple died six months apart but only after Ada's will, worth the equivalent of £100,000 today, had been changed to benefit Waddingham and her husband Ronald with an instruction that relatives need not be informed of Ada's death.

    The plan was going well and Ada's body was due to be cremated when the city's Medical Officer of Health became suspicious and ordered a post-mortem examination which found considerable traces of morphine in her body. Her mother's body was then exhumed and morphine was again found.

    Waddingham, 36, was sentenced to death and, despite a recommendation of mercy because she had five young children, was hanged as more than 5,000 people protested for a reprieve outside the prison walls.

    FLORENCE RANSOM: Sentenced to death for murdering her lover's wife, daughter and maid, November 12, 1940

    Florence Ransom was a respectable and attractive middle-aged woman when she began an affair with wealthy publisher Lawrence Fisher.

    Fisher left his wife Dorothy and went to live with his flame-haired lover on her farm near Bicester while Dorothy and their 19-year-old daughter Freda moved to the village of Matfield, near Tonbridge, in Kent.

    Fisher often visited his family, particularly as 1940 was the height of scares about German invasions, but the trips triggered something in Ransom and the fates of three innocent women were sealed.

    She boarded a train in Aylesbury in smart blue slacks and jacket and few people took much notice of her brown paper parcel; it contained a shotgun. Dorothy and Frieda were easily enticed into the orchard behind their cottage and then blasted to death before touching their tea and cakes. Their maid Charlotte Saunders was shot in the head as she attempted to flee.

    A lady's white leather glove was discovered at the scene and Scotland Yard had little trouble connecting Ransom to the killings.

    Ransom, who had a history of mental issues and had been a voluntary psychiatric patient, was a striking beauty but clearly disturbed.

    She was sentenced to death but soon afterwards ruled to be insane and transferred to Broadmoor.


    LOVE LETTER: Edith Thompson with Frederick Bywaters, left, and husband Percy [GETTY]


    ADA CHARD WILLIAMS: Hanged at Newgate Prison, London, March 6, 1900, for murdering a child.

    Ada and her husband William were part of a wave of "baby farmers" who took illegitimate or unwanted babies and sold them.

    Their gruesome trade saw infants used as a commodity and treated little better than stock.

    Ada, 24, from Barnes in South-west London, was convicted of the murder of 21-month-old Selina Ellen Jones.

    She had used a false name and address in a newspaper advertisement and been paid £3 (equivalent to £216 today) to adopt the child by Selina's mother.

    The jury heard the child's body was found tied up with distinctive Fishermen's Bends knots on the tidal banks of the Thames at Battersea. She had been strangled.

    When police traced the crime back to the Williams' home they discovered similar knots used around the house. She denied the murder but admitted buying and selling children for profit.
    Williams was suspected of other child murders but no further action was taken and she became the last woman to be hanged at Newgate Prison.

    EDITH THOMPSON: Hanged at Holloway Prison, London, January 9, 1923, for murdering her husband

    Edith Graydon rose from humble beginnings to become chief buyer for a fabric firm and made regular trips to Paris.

    She married shipping clerk Percy Thompson and lived happily until the couple met Frederick Bywaters, a dashing merchant seaman who became their lodger.

    Percy quickly rumbled the subsequent affair, threw Bywaters out of their home in Ilford, Essex, and struck his wife several times in a furious row.

    On October 3, 1922, the Thompsons attended a performance at the Criterion Theatre in London's Piccadilly Circus. On their way home, 32-year-old Percy was attacked and stabbed.

    Bywaters was arrested and detectives found 60 love letters from 28-year-old Edith that were used to link her to the murder. In one she admitted crushing a lightbulb and mixing it into her husband's mashed potato, along with poison in his dinner.

    She denied murder but her flirtatious and contradictory performance in the witness box sealed her fate despite Bywaters repeatedly stating that she had nothing to do with the attack.

    The pair were hanged simultaneously at 9am in prisons less than a mile apart.

    MYRA HINDLEY: Sentenced to life May 6, 1966, for five child murders, died in prison in 2002.

    No image personifies evil in the British psyche so much as Myra Hindley's chilling photograph taken after the grisliest saga in British crime was uncovered.

    Hindley and her partner Ian Brady snatched children off the streets, tortured them and recorded their dying cries before concealing their bodies in graves on the windswept moors North-east of Manchester.

    The couple's killing spree lasted two years before Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law David Smith reported them to the police after witnessing one of the murders. At least four of the victims were sexually abused.

    Hindley was branded the Most Evil Woman In Britain at their dramatic trial in 1966 and successive appeals against her sentence were rejected.

    Hindley, who died in prison aged 60, refused to help police find two missing bodies on the moors until 20 years after the killings when she was controversially released for days to help police scour Saddleworth.

    Greater Manchester Police later found the body of the first victim, 16-year-old Pauline Reade, but 12-year-old Keith Bennett's body was never found.


    POISONER: Mary Elizabeth Wilson [GETTY]


    Commuted to life, she was released after nine years Elizabeth Jones was a waitress in a teashop during the Second World War. The 18-year-old fantasised about becoming a striptease artist and "doing something exciting". She found the man to fulfil her dreams in US soldier Karl Hulten.

    The 22-year-old deserter boasted of being a Chicago gangster and took the teenager on a whirlwind six days which saw them knock over and kill a nurse as she cycled along a country lane, throw a hitchhiker into a river to almost drown and murder taxi driver George Heath in Staines.

    The couple stole £8 from him and spent it at the races the next day before being caught by police who traced 34-year-old Heath's stolen car to Fulham where they were hiding.

    Hulten, who also attacked a woman in the street to steal her fur coat for Jones, had a stolen gun when arrested. He denied murder but Jones, from Neath, confessed. Both were found guilty.

    Swedish-born Hulten was hanged at London's Pentonville Prison on March 8, 1945 but Jones was reprieved two days before she was due to face the hangman. She was released, aged 27, in 1954. A film loosely based on the case, Chicago Joe And The Showgirl starring Kiefer Sutherland and Emily Lloyd, was released in 1990.

    MARGARET ALLEN: Hanged at Strangeways Prison, Manchester, January 12, 1949, for beating a neighbour to death with a hammer.

    Allen, the 20th of 22 children, led a bizarre life as a lesbian in a Lancashire village in post-war Britain, dressing as a man and insisting on being called Bill.

    The 42-year-old battered eccentric Nancy Chadwick to death with the pointed end of a hammer. "Bill" then boasted in the pub that she had been the last person to see Chadwick alive making the detective work relatively simple. She said of the murder: "I was in a funny mood."

    The jury took just 15 minutes to find her guilty. A petition to commute the death penalty received only 162 signatures and she became the first woman hanged in Britain for 12 years when she was dispatched by executioner Albert Pierrepoint.

    MARY ELIZABETH WILSON: Sentenced to death on March 29, 1958, for poisoning three husbands and a lodger commuted to life, she died four years later in Holloway Prison

    Dubbed The Merry Widow of Windy Nook, Wilson worked her way through three husbands and a lodger in 26 months, collecting inheritances from each of the hapless men. She became so blase about the procedure that she did not even bother going to her final victim's funeral.

    The 66-year-old, from Jarrow, joked to guests at her fourth wedding reception to save some cakes for the groom's funeral and asked the funeral director for a group discount because she was such a good customer.

    Gossip had so intensified that police were finally moved to investigate. Her last two husbands were exhumed and their bodies were found to contain high levels of phosphorus. The other two bodies were later exhumed and the same poison found.

    The victims were a chimney sweep, a builder, a retired estate agent and a retired engineer. Ernest Wilson and Oliver Leonard (husbands two and three) survived less than two weeks of marriage before their deaths.


    SEX TANGLE: Sheila Garvie heads to court. [GETTY]


    The murder sparked a sensational trial where a shocked public heard stories of wife-swapping and group sex at a rural cottage as the tangled affairs of Max and Sheila Garvie were laid bare.

    Handsome and rich Max, his wife and three children appeared to have an idyllic life at their farm near Laurencekirk but he became hooked on visiting nudist colonies and indulging in orgies. He planted screens of trees near the farmhouse so that guests could frolic naked and villagers started calling the farmhouse Kinky Cottage.

    Max embarked on a series of affairs and encouraged the younger brother of one lover, a policeman's wife with whom he had sex while flying his light aircraft, to bed his 33-year-old wife whom he branded frigid.

    Garvie, who detested the sex games, fell in love with the man, Brian Tevendale, and the pair began to resent Max's manipulative behaviour. They turned to murder after Max attacked his wife.

    One night Garvie opened the door to 22-year old Tevendale, and handed him a rifle with which he shot Max through the head. His body was wrapped in a sheet and dumped in a tunnel near Lauriston Castle, overlooking the Firth of Forth, and was only found when Garvie's mother told the police that her daughter had confessed that Tevendale had killed her husband.

    The 10-day trial at Aberdeen High Court heard details of sex parties, infidelities and jealousy. Garvie and Tevendale were jailed for life. Both were released in 1978.

    Tevendale ran a pub before his death in 2003. Garvie remarried twice.

    HEATHER ARNOLD: Sentenced to life on April 16, 1987, for the murder of a colleague's wife and baby daughter

    Teacher Paul Sutcliffe returned home from work to find the bodies of his 39-year-old wife Jeanne and eight-month-old daughter Heidi with their throats cut.

    Murder squad detectives posed as dustmen as they believed the killer would try to get rid of the murder weapon, an axe, in household rubbish. The ploy worked when 50-year-old Heather Arnold, a fellow maths teacher at Kingsdown Comprehensive School in Warminster, discarded the charred pieces of an axe handle.

    Arnold confessed to the killings but on the advice of her solicitor withdrew her statement. She told Bristol Crown Court she had found the axe in her garage. Forensic experts found flakes of paint from the axe on Jeanne Sutcliffe's body and in Arnold's car.

    The court heard how she had become obsessed with Paul Sutcliffe after her marriage broke up. The jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was later committed to Broadmoor Hospital.

    RUTH ELLIS: Hanged at Holloway Prison on July 13, 1955, for shooting her lover Nightclub hostess and manager

    Ruth Ellis became a cause celebre as the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

    The 28-year-old's execution sparked outrage with 50,000 people signing a petition for her reprieve. Peroxide blonde Ellis had been convicted of shooting her abusive 25-year-old racing driver lover David Blakely outside the Magdala Tavern in north London, above, three months after he caused her to miscarry by punching her in the stomach.

    She fired five shots at him from a .38 Smith & Wesson and stood by his stricken body, making no attempt to flee.

    Ellis, a mother of two, had a troubled life and had also been a prostitute. Her plight and the crime of passion element started to shift public opinion against the death penalty.

    Judge Cecil Havers (grandfather of actor Nigel Havers) told the jury that the fact Blakely had regularly beaten her had no relevance to her defence and they took just 30 minutes to return the guilty verdict.

    Novelist Raymond Chandler, who was living in London at the time, described the judgment as "medieval savagery". He wrote: "I have been tormented for a week at the idea that a highly civilised people should put a rope round the neck of Ruth Ellis and drop her through a trap and break her neck. This was a crime of passion under considerable provocation. No other country in the world would hang this woman."


    Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. [GETTY]


    LINDA CALVEY: Jailed for life on November 12, 1991, for murdering her lover, released in 2008

    Career criminal Linda Calvey became known as the Black Widow for shooting her lover Ronald Cook after a hitman backed out of the £10,000 contract killing.

    Calvey, a model for Lynda La Plante's gangster drama Widows, shot him at point blank range as he knelt before her. Her past is intertwined with East London's criminal underworld and one detective said: "Every man she has ever been involved with is either in prison or dead."

    Calvey, whose first husband was shot dead by police, had been Cook's lover for several years before he was jailed for the Brink's-Mat bullion robbery. She had other lovers while he was inside, spent part of his criminal fortune and was expecting a violent showdown once he found out.

    Callous Calvey decided to get her retaliation in first and hired lover Daniel Reece to kill him when she picked him up from prison. Reece lost his nerve but Calvey calmly took the shotgun and did the job.

    It cost her 18 years of freedom.

    She married Reece, also jailed for life, while in prison but it didn't last. Calvey, now 66, was released in 2008 and has remarried.

    BEVERLEY ALLITT: Sentenced to life imprisonment on May 28, 1993, for killing four children and attempting to murder nine others

    Hospital staff struggled to explain the deaths of four children aged two months to 11 years in less than two months at the Grantham and Kesteven Hosptial, Lincolnshire.

    The first casualty, eight-week-old Liam Taylor, was admitted to Ward 4 with what seemed a mild chest infection but he died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart condition. The deaths and other unexplained child comas over a 59-day period in 1991 had only one common factor: 23-year-old nurse Beverley Allitt had cared for all of them.

    The four children were murdered by injections of high doses of insulin and one, Paul Crampton, had 43,147 milliunits of insulin in his blood, one of the highest concentrations ever found in a victim.

    Crucial pages in the hospital logbook had been ripped out and the public began to fear a killer was stalking hospital wards. Police focused on Allitt and the missing logbook pages were discovered at her home. She was charged with four murders, 11 attempted murders and 11 counts of causing grievous bodily harm.

    She was branded the Angel Of Death and psychiatrists concluded that she was suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, a mental condition where sufferers do harm to become the centre of attention.

    She denied the charges but was found guilty and ordered to be held in Rampton High Security Psychiatric Hospital.

    The judge at Nottingham Crown Court ruled that she must serve 30 years before being considered for parole.

    DENA THOMPSON: Sentenced to life on December 14, 2003, for poisoning her husband's curry

    Three-times married Thompson was cleared in 2000 of attempting to murder her third husband Richard Thompson with a baseball bat during a sex session after the jury believed she had acted in self-defence. But then detectives decided to dig deeper into her past and the sudden death of her second husband Julian Webb (above).

    They pieced together the workings of a consummate conwoman who had variously claimed she was dying from cancer, had won the lottery, had signed a lucrative contract with the Disney Corporation, was being hunted by the Mafia for money and had a wealthy benefactor willing to bankroll her and any partner's new life in America.

    A procession of men fell for her slick storylines and she relieved them of an estimated £500,000.

    Webb was healthy when they married (bigamously on her part) but within three years he was dead after Thompson, from Devon, ground up antidepressants into his beloved spicy curry, which masked the drugs' bitter taste. He died on his 31st birthday at their home in Yapton, West Sussex.

    Scheming Thompson continued conning men, one Bulgarian boyfriend is still missing, and was jailed for three years on 15 counts of deception after being acquitted of attempting to murder Thompson.

    Sussex Police and Webb's mother Rosemary were determined to find the truth and the investigation led to Webb's body being exhumed and the poisoning revealed.

    After the case Detective Chief Inspector Martyn Underhill, of Sussex Police, said: "This woman is every man's nightmare. For a decade she has targeted men sexually, financially and physically. The men of Britain can sleep safe tonight knowing she has been taken off the streets."

    Thompson, now 52, is not expected to be released until 2019.

    HEATHER STEPHENSON-SNELL: Sentenced to life September 20, 2004, for shooting a man while wearing a Scream mask

    Heather Stephenson-Snell, a 46-yearold psychotherapist, vowed revenge on her former boyfriend when he started dating a new love. She turned up at their flat with a sawn-off shotgun concealed beneath a cape and wearing an orange Halloween mask intent on killing Adrian Sinclair's partner Diane Lomax.

    However the murderous mission took a tragic twist when neighbour Bob Wilkie, a 43-year-old taxi driver, complained about the noise at 1.30am outside their homes in Radcliffe, Manchester.
    Stephenson-Snell shot the former commando in the stomach as he tried to remove her mask to reveal her identity. She fled but was picked up by alert police officers in a routine traffic stop.

    A two-week trial at Manchester Crown Court heard that Stephenson-Snell abandoned respectability after dark to become a cocaine-snorting biker obsessed with guns and knives which she kept in the garage of her York home.

    She denied murdering Wilkie and the attempted murder of Lomax but was convicted with an order to serve a minimum of 22 years.

    JANE ANDREWS: Sentenced to life on May 16, 2001, for murdering her boyfriend, she is about to be released

    Jane Andrews had a fairytale lifestyle as a dresser for Sarah Ferguson, who was then married to Prince Andrew, moving in wealthy circles and becoming "Fergie's" close friend.
    Often photographed at the Duchess of York's side in near matching elegant outfits, she became a confidante and travelled abroad on Royal engagements.

    When the divorcee was sacked as part of cost-cutting by the Royal Household, the cracks began to appear in her life. She became depressed but started dating millionaire Tom Cressman, a vintage car dealer, who provided a route back to society life.

    They had a tempestuous love affair punctuated by kinky sex, bondage and huge rows, according to evidence. Andrews, who thought 39-year-old Cressman was about to end their relationship after refusing to marry her, stripped naked one night to avoid staining her clothes and attacked him with a cricket bat as he slept at their home in Fulham, south-west London. She then stabbed him in the chest twice.

    After the killing, she sent text messages to friends asking if they knew Cressman's whereabouts in an attempt to throw police off her trail.

    Andrews disappeared but was later found unconscious in a lay-by near Liskeard, Cornwall, having taken 40 headache pills in an apparent suicide attempt. She was interrogated and charged with murder.

    Dressed in black for every day of her Old Bailey trial, the 33-year-old told the court that she was trapped in an abusive relationship, was regularly subjected to violence and had just snapped one night.

    She was convicted by a majority verdict after 11 hours and 44 minutes deliberation with the late Recorder of London, Judge Michael Hyam saying: "In killing the man you loved you ended his life and ruined your own. It is evident that you made your attack upon him when you were consumed with anger and bitterness. Nothing could justify what you did."

    Andrews absconded from an open prison in 2009 and spent two days at a hotel but her minimum tariff of 12 years has been completed and she is due for release.

    ROSE WEST: Jailed for life at Winchester Crown Court on November 22, 1995 for 10 murders, Rose West, now 60, is Britain's most prolific female serial killer

    She and husband Fred lived in a den of depravity at their home in Cromwell Road, Gloucester, later to be dubbed the House Of Horrors.

    She was convicted of murdering 10 girls/young women including her own daughter Heather and Fred's stepdaughter. The couple targeted drifters and lodgers at their home and forced them into sex sessions before strangling or stabbing them.

    They were then buried under the patio by builder Fred, who committed suicide in prison while on remand.

    TRACIE ANDREWS: Jailed for life on July 29, 1997, for the road-rage murder of her fiance

    Barmaid and would-be model Andrews launched a frenzied knife assault on her boyfriend Lee Harvey as they were driving to their flat. She appeared at a press conference saying a man with "staring eyes" had attacked the couple on a country road.

    Harvey, 25, died from 42 stab wounds and 27-year-old Andrews took an overdose after her dramatic public appearance.

    No witnesses to the "road rage attack" could be found and Andrews was put on trial still protesting her innocence. The court heard that volatile Andrews had regularly attacked Harvey during their two-year relationship. She was found guilty of murder and sentenced to a minimum 14-year term. She later admitted the killing.

    Andrews, who had £5,000 worth of facial plastic surgery while in jail, changed her name to Tia Carter when she was released in 2012.

    http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/...Margaret-Allen
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    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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    Serial killer slit her own throat in prison suicide pact with lover

    By Richard Moriarty
    The Sun

    Serial killer Joanna Dennehy is believed to have tried to kill herself in jail after apparently making a grisly suicide pact with her prison girlfriend.

    Dennehy, 35, is understood to have been found with her throat slit, while her lover had cut her wrists.

    A source told The Sun: “When the guards found them they were entwined on the floor, which was covered in blood.”

    “They think they need splitting up now to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

    The pair were rushed to the hospital, where their injuries were treated.

    They were then returned to HMP Bronzefield prison in Surrey, England.

    But once back inside, Dennehy launched a second suicide attempt — which again failed.

    She is now believed to be being cared for by medics.

    A prison spokesman said he could not comment on individual prisoners.

    Dennehy is one of only two female prisoners serving a life sentence in the UK.

    She stabbed three men to death over a 10-day period in March 2013, before knifing two others.

    Branded “pure evil” by criminology experts, Dennehy said she committed the murders because it was “moreish and fun.” (“Moreish” is British slang for an agreeable experience that you want more of.)

    Her victims’ bodies were found in ditches.

    The first was Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, a Polish national whom she had met a few days earlier.

    She convinced him to meet up, implying that they would have sex.

    Instead, she stabbed him in the heart and dumped his body. The following week, 56-year-old Falklands war veteran John Chapman was knifed to death by Dennehy.

    Later that day, she murdered her landlord and lover Kevin Lee, 48.

    His body — dressed in a black sequin dress — was found the following day with stab wounds in the neck and chest.

    It was reported that Dennehy had wanted to kill nine men in total, to be like killers Bonnie and Clyde.

    She was caught two days after going on the run when police launched a triple murder probe.

    In court, Justice Spencer told her: “Although you pleaded guilty, you’ve made it quite clear you have no remorse.”

    “You are a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer.”

    The Sun revealed last year that Dennehy has bragged she had killed a fourth person.

    She said this victim was also a man, but at the time the Ministry of Justice said they had found “no evidence” to support her boasts.

    https://nypost.com/2018/08/17/female...ct-with-lover/
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