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The Old-Time Bad Girls

Yes, Virginia, there have always been FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS.

By Tom BakerPublished 6 years ago 16 min read
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The undeniably lovely Victorian poisoner, Mary Ann Cotton; whom, as the song goes, was "rotten...but not forgotten."

As you all full well know, mankind is utter shit. Furthermore, this isn't a new development.

Even when he's "good," he's bad. We can beat our breasts all we want about the inhumanity and cruelty of vicious dictators and bloodthirsty tyrants overseas, for instance, but, that doesn't really erase our own crimes, misdemeanors, or wrongdoings. Does it?

Some will look back, wistfully, at a day and age when life seemed more innocent, carefree, and altogether, somehow, more romantic, more beautiful, more "good." But, was it really, truly, that way?

No. We just forget. Our mind focuses on the idyllic, rose-tinted lens provided by crumbling photographs; all the while, we ignore those ancient pics depicting public hangings, brutal factory fires; blood-spattered crime scenes. The undeniable evidence of man's ultimate rottenness, of his bestial nature; his "Will to Power," enacted, often enough, upon the possessions and against the living body of his "fellow man."

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. (A bit early for Christmas allusions? Oh well...) His obverse is a creature called Krampus, with goat horns; furry legs; fangs; curling, snake-like tongue; a passel of birch rods for whipping bad little boys and girls, and a basket on his back to transport them to Hell.

Nice.

For every "good," a bad: Every profuse human expression of piety covers a concomitant evil, usually within the same still-beating heart.

Here are a few female baddies, then, from down through the ages. We'll prove that the female of the species is just as deadly as the male. If not even worse, at times.

Locusta of Gaul (Serial Poisoner, Rome)

Locusta of Gaul, with her patron Emperor Nero, considering the poisoned anguish of Brittanicus.

Coming hot on the heels of that there Crucifixion (AD 65 or so, methinks) , the aptly named Locusta of Gaul (a locust, of course, being a pestilential plague that devours good crops, as well as the first-born son of every Egyptian household) grew up frolicking in the Italian countryside, learning the variant properties of various herbs, roots, flowers, which could cure...and which killed.

Moving on up, to the big city, as the song goes, she quickly went into business in the amoral morass of Ancient Rome, offering up her sordid services to high-paying clientele. These folks wanted, invariably, to be shut of an enemy or competitor, and Locusta was only too eager to comply with their wishes. Offering them deadly nightshade, she grew an underground reputation as a woman that, if you happened to have someone you really needed to be got rid of, could be counted on to deliver the ghastly goods.

Agrippina, the wife of Claudius, was rather eager, for instance, to have her charming boy Nero crowned as Emperor. To that end, she decided a little hubby homicide was in order. Hence, she hired Locusta, recognizing just the right woman for the job.

Claudius, a confirmed lover of mushrooms, was fed a plate of poisoned ones, and succumbed quite quickly afterwards. Nero was delighted, and, rescuing Locusta from prison, pardoned her and set her up in her own private academy, where she taught the ins and outs of plants and their medicinal and curative properties (and probably darker lessons to a few selected students).

Nero's nephew Brittanicus was a possible threat to the mad, debauched old monster. Thus, the Emperor decided to have him snuffed. Call in Locusta for the job, and the young epileptic was soon found rolling on the ground in convulsive spasms. Of course, since he already suffered seizures, no one suspected he had actually been poisoned. Again, Nero was overjoyed.

Nero was eventually arrested, denounced, condemned and died himself. Not before he had hired Locusta a final time, to poison mother Agrippina (with whom he was sometimes known to have had sex).

'Upon the death of Nero, it became incumbent upon his successor to have Locusta put down. Permanently. To that end, she was finally executed, after long bouts of torture and nastiness, as was the custom at the time. Who knows? Maybe she was fed to lions or something. The year was 69 AD.

Erszebet Bathory (Hungarian "Blood Countess")

Erszebet ("Elizabeth") Bathory: The Hungarian "Blood Countess". As you can see, she was quite a hot dish.

Having the coolest name of any Medieval vampire witch, Erszebet (Sometimes rendered "Elizabeth") Bathory had a peculiar predilection for slaughtering local wenches after prolonged torture (boiling, searing, beating, pricking, rack, boot, that sort of thing...you get the picture). A harsh, sadistic and vile woman, she was also thought to be quite beautiful. But, honey, once you hit 50, you get a bag or two around the eyes.

To forestall this, she enlisted the aid of her oafish servants to kidnap local peasant girls, bring them back to Castle Csejethe in Hungary. (Formerly, she had lived at Castle Cachtice with husband Ferenc Nadasdy; who, having discovered his bride impregnated by another man, had this individual brutally killed. Oddly by comparison, the twisted Erszebet was rewarded for such infidelity with her very own custom torture chamber. How's that for a nuptial gift?)

Bathory chained, beat and whipped her young charges (some of them were actually girls sent to the horror castle to learn "proper etiquette." And what a lesson they got, eh?). She hung them, scalded them, burned their flesh with hot irons, and covered one in honey and let insects devour her...and on and on. A "True Vampire," she bathed in blood to keep her looks milk-white and daisy fresh.

King Matthias, round about the Good Year 1611, began to suspicion that, based on the rumors that were reaching the royal ear, something here was amiss. Sending a detachment of guards to ferret out the doings at Castle Csejethe, his henchmen happened upon hideous horrors too harrowing to...contemplate.

Erszebet and her four underlings (Snizzel, Dizzel, Pickle and Nod...no actually those weren't the names; I can't remember them offhand, and I can't find the source material taken from the book True Vampires by Sondra London, right at this point) were taken into custody. Justice, flowing freely in those happy days, found the four executed in harshest manner. But Erszebet, being of "royal blood," was spared all of that. She was, instead, walled-up ALIVE in a room of the castle, cowering in darkness, with only a small slit to pass in her trays of food. Here, she died like a wretch, a mere FOUR YEARS later. We imagine she was not quite so fresh smelling at that point.

During the ensuing years, it is said that the Soviets turned the old place into a munitions dump. It is, of course, said that the place was haunted, accursed; the horrible screams of Bathory and her victims resounding, like echoes down the hallways of time, and, and...

You don't expect that the Soviet soldiers were really bothered by that sort of thing, do you?

"The Lord was Staring at My Cleavage!"

"Kiss and Don't Tell": Catalina de los Rios y Lisperguer and luckless lover.

Such was the rather odd assertion by a rather strange woman. This woman chucked a crucifix out into the street because she thought the Jewish Carpenter full of lust at her...bust. The thing fell out in the street, sending up...dust.

Cutesy rhymes aside, the woman, Catalina de los Rios y Lisperguer was known to have a few odd flowers in her bonnet. She liked to beat and torture her slaves, when not regularly screwing them in the manner of a true debauchee straight from a Sade novel.

Sadistic beyond words, her Chilean family, who owned vast tracts of Chilean land, and farmed it under a burning Chilean sky, must have, at any rate been proud of their red-headed Chilean child. (Who was many things, red-headed included, of course, but was most certainly NOT a "red-headed STEPchild. Oh no, dear readers, she wasn't that at all.)

Her red hair, by the way, earned her the nickname La Quintrala, from a red mistletoe found in Patagonia.One supposes the hair was a forewarning to the onlooker to avoid this fiery, fiendish female.

The Inquilinos (i.e. indentured servants; slaves by any other name) who lived on the property of her family, were her favorite targets. Having no social value, these folks were little bothered about or missed.

She screwed, molested, tortured, beat, whipped, starved, murdered and generally stacked up Inquilino bodies on the old farmstead. Hauled in several times for suspicion of these things, and various other petty cruelties considered "too much" even in the middle 1600s, she always escaped justice with a gentle slap. Her own slaps were not so gentle.

She murdered her father with a poisoned chicken dinner. She tried to have a priest (was he lusting for her, too?) whacked. She made mad whoopee that ended in torture and sadistic DEATH.

1626 saw her wedding to a much older man. A few years later, she was arrested yet again, dying in prison before trial.

Her final years saw her become very religious, perhaps out of penance for flinging her lecherous crucifix out the window. Upon her death, she exhorted those gathered to say, "20,000 masses for me." That's a lot of praying, but, she most likely needed it.

"Aqua Tofana"

An image of St. Nicholas of Bari decorated and disguised the vials of poison sold by Giula Tofana and Hieronyma Spara.

Administered in four drops (the first to give the victim flu-like symptoms, the second to make him sicken and worsen, the third to hammer home his sickness, and the fourth to kill) "Acqua Tofana" was the putrid invention of Giula Tofana and Hieronyma Spara, two Italian women of Palermo who fancied themselves witches and divine helpers of women seeking to get rid of a bad husband. And many so sought.

Acqua Tofana was a mixture of Belladonna, lead, and arsenic. It could be mixed with food or drink. To hide the selling and purchasing of such a product, it was sold in vials disguised as perfumes with the image of St. Nicholas of Bari on them.

The pair were eventually betrayed by a client, a woman whose remorse, after feeding the potion to her late husband in a bowl of soup, was great enough to make her snitch. The pair were, of course, executed, probably after a long and torturous ordeal. Many of their clients, likewise, were also dealt with similarly.

Their final death tally was an estimated 600 MEN. The year was 1659.

Catherine Deshayes: "La Voison"

A contemporary illustration of Catherine Deshayes, a.k.a "La Voisin", presided over by the demon Asmodeus.

Coming into this world a street urchin, Catherine Deshayes lived a hard, turbulent existence in seventeenth-century France, finally rising to prominence as a fortune teller and dealer in spells and nostrums. Beginning, we might add, at around age nine.

She began, also, to manufacture nauseating, poisonous "love potions": concoctions of animal teeth, iron fillings, Spanish Fly, the bones of toads and frogs, human blood, iron shavings...

She married a man named Montvoisin, a businessman. His business, though, began to fail, and so she began to offer additional medicaments besides simply the toxic aphrodisiacs. Women who wanted husbands "taken care of" used her vast knowledge of careful, undetectable poisoning to eliminate unwanted spouses. Soon, the flashy, gaudy "La Voisin" (she is said to have held forth court in ermine-lined garments decked out with golden pictures of eagles against purple velvet!) was a wealthy woman, courting the best of Parisian society...that were seeking services of murder for hire.

Descending further down the depths, she began to perform literal Satanic ceremonies, "Black Masses" if you will, as well as the standard abortions; a badly-required service, we take it, in sixteenth-century France. Her clients were the nobles, the aristocrats of Parisian society, who, much as today, hid their evil and calumny under an odious veneer of righteousness.

Her home, said to have "subterranean reaches" by one account, must have stood atop a patchwork of catacombs; but, whatever the case, this is where the Devil was invoked freely; in true Satanic fashion, before an altar of a nude human female.

Even debauched priests joined the Deviltry and revelries, and, like something from a scene in Sade's Justine, sacrificed infants in demonic worship, to propitiate the forces of darkness. La Voisin grew wealthy and powerful with the secret knowledge of the identities of her damned clientele, some of whom reached into the inner circles of the King himself.

In furtherance of the end of procuring additional infant fodder for her own personal disposal, she opened a home for unwed mothers, oftentimes keeping the infant as her own special charge once the luckless wench was sent packing. The ill-starred infant was then offered up in sacrifice to Diabolus, Baphomet, Asmodeus and their respective demonic ilk. The throat was slit, apparently, upon the nude human altar, a piece of raw turnip substituting as the unholy Host.

Confessions to this activity were, invariably, elicited from people who had had their legs "smashed eight times" in the boots. In other words, torture, which was endemic in 1680. The confessing were fortunetellers, abortionists, an "odd crew" that practiced incest and procured their livings by hook or by crook (most frequently by crook).

Catholic priests, Abbe this, that or the other, were accused of holding forth black magic and witchcraft rituals under the direction of La Voisin, slitting babies' throats so that the blood poured over the naked bellies of nude altars, of splayed whorish women, for congregants of high society dames and their male consorts. These same women were thought to purchase the poison that La proffered.

(No less an authority than The Encyclopedia of Demonology and Witchcraft relates that a common method of administering such poison was to have a shirt soaked in it, so that blisters, pustules, boils and other unappetizing and malodorous symptoms afflicted the unsuspecting victim. Then, the "tender loving grace" of the wife would swoop in, like a veritable carrion bird, and administer further curative baths to her poor paramour. These too, poisoned; whether they were soaps or salves, it never specifies.

The result was always the dame. Death, death and more death.

One suspecting victim (a rather frightened but, we must assume, reticent man; that is, reluctant to go to the authorities) attempted to escape his unhappy fate—or maybe just gain some special perspective—by joining a monastery. Upon returning, he unaccountably let his wife complete her work. He died.

"Great God! Holy Virgin! I have Nothing to Say!"

Such were the tortured imprecations of "La Voisin" Deshayes as ahe was having the wedges hammered into her legs by her torturers. One sincerely hopes they taught her the love and penitence of Christ while they were so doing. Her death, by burning, on February 22nd, 1680 (she went defiantly to the stake, protesting her innocence, denying witchcraft, and at the same time calling down her curse on the heads of the future generations of her persecutors), did not, in point of fact, end the work of Special Investigator Reynie, nor the "Chambre Ardente" (a mad tribunal wherein the judges, like something from Pit and the Pendulum, sat black-robed and faceless, in a candle-lit room draped in black) which had been established by Louis the fourteenth himself. Lords and ladies, gallants and society women were all implicated in devilish wrongdoing: abortion, poisoning, black masses in dark and lonely caverns, orgiastic rites of blasphemy performed in grotesque inversion of the pious sacraments of Holy Church.

Those that doubt or scoff at the contention proffered by modern conspiracy theorists that Satanism is practiced by shadowy cabals of "global elites" in pederastic pizza parlors and other places, should consider that many of those lords and ladies arrested were close to the King, including Louis's former mistress, Madame Montespan, accused of attempting to poison Louis himself. Justine's older sister Juliette would, most certainly, have been proud.

The final tally was 304 arrested, 104 sentenced, 36 executed (we must assume by burning at the stake after excruciating, exquisite torture) 38 banished or enslaved; maybe another 30 acquitted.

Not a single aristocrat, though, was convicted. As for the priests implicated—I cannot say.

Now, because this is not, exclusively, an article focusing on Catherine Deshayes, let's close this.

The Rotten Round-Up

We suppose we could give honorary mentions to historical "Killer Babes" such as the wonderfully-named poisoner CORDELIA BOTKIN (she mailed arsenic-laced chocolates to women who, in a more innocent age, thought nothing of consuming mysterious food delivered by mail. Upon eating them, six were sickened, and two succumbed. Cordelia died at San Quentin in 1910); also, MARY ANN COTTON, another poisoner, a serial killer, according to whose famous jumprope ditty, she is "rotten, rotten," but, most certainly, "dead and not forgotten." Mary Ann was convicted of killing her stepson, but was suspected of offing 11 of her 13 children, as well as several husbands; all by arsenic. She was hanged at Durham County Jail, in England in 1873.

A Russian woman of noble extraction, DARYA SALTYKOVA, was, seemingly a late-born Erszebet Bathory, or perhaps reborn, as she was known to, in her towering rage at servants, underlings, and young women she believed to be amorous competitors, hold forth on an estate wherein she practiced torture, sadism and murder most foul. A gloomy, sullen woman, whose devotion to the church and charity on its behalf were, nonetheless, well-attested to, she was driven to a satanic fury by the infidelity of Nikolay Tyutchev. In retaliation, she killed an estimated 136 people, beating, scalding, freezing, starving them...it was all the same to her.

At first, complaints of her fell on deaf ears. Catherine the Great, though, in order to show her lack of impartiality to the ruling class (Russians, it is a little known fact, have long been concerned over issues of so-called "class." They followed the teachings of some fellow called Marx for a short time, believe it or not.), had the mad heiress imprisoned, pending an investigation.

Convicted on all counts, refusing the offer of penance by visiting priests (she seemed to be operating under the delusion she had done nothing wrong, and would be allowed to return home, to torture and kill her servants and peasants once more.), she was imprisoned in darkness, walled-in alive (Russia, shockingly enough, did NOT have the death penalty at this time), with only nuns to bring her food by candlelight as she crouched in the gloom, slowly growing even more insane, DECADE AFTER DECADE.

She died in 1801.

We conclude this little...essay, with ENREQUITA MARTI, chiefly because we like her photograph. Born in 1868, in a small Spanish town, she went to Barcelona to work as a nanny at an early age. She soon became, of all things, a procuress and a dealer in witchcraft spells and goods.

Claiming to be able to cure tuberculosis, among other ailments, she used the flesh and bones of kidnapped and murdered children in her incantations. These remains were later discovered in her Barcelona lair.

She also operated an impromptu brothel. An all-around good citizen of Barcelona she was, most certainly, NOT ever to be declared.

She was beat to death in prison in 1912.

An Interesting Forehead, No?

Procuress, black magician and child killer: Enriqueta Marti, was killed by fellow inmates awaiting trial.

Now, in the words of one of our favorite historical people—the tragic, deformed Joseph Merrick, (who most certainly would have enjoyed cozying up, if he could have, to a few of the women in the above profiles, regardless of their loathsome villainy)—I shall "bid my kind readers adieu!"

(Else this damn article go on "'till Hell freezes over with the boiling blood of Bathory." Or, whatever.)

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About the Creator

Tom Baker

Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

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