The topic of “careers in widowhood,” has a long, weird, violent and richly instructive, if not sufficiently advertised, history. Since disposable males, by definition, don’t matter, the history of serial Black Widows and the males they habitually dispose of has, we should not be surprised, not attracted any sustained and studious attention – up to now, that is
Now available online is a recently complied list of Black Widow Serial Killers (women who murdered two or more husbands or paramours). It is the first of its kind. Yes, despite the fact that there is a whole mountain range of material available on male serial killers, the female serial killer still suffers from a severe “recognition gap” for her contribution to the history of criminal deception wanton violence. The Black Widow list has now passed the 100 count (108), and includes mostly previously ignored cases, yet definitely still far from being a complete list of cases that are to be discovered in old newspapers, court documents and historical chronicles.
Cases collected so far date from the second millennium BC to the present and it includes serial husband-killers from 23 countries: Armenia, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, England, Ethiopia (Abyssinia), France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Maldives, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, United States. A sub-category called Champion Black Widow Serial Killers (four or more husband-murders) stands, at the moment, with a count of 22.
A sub-category, Aristocratic Female Serial Killers, includes sixteen aristocrats. One of these noble ladies, Empress Taitu Betul of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), represents the most prolific Black Widow discovered so far, having racked up an impressive score of ten widow-whacked spouses.
Of the 108 listed murderesses of two or more husbands [updated count is 168, as of Nov. 2013], 47 of these women additionally murdered another person or persons: children, other relatives, in-laws, friends, neighbors or others. Tillie Klimek, for example, a still fairly well known Chicago serial Black Widow, cast her fatal net wide, polishing off nine people and left five survivors of murder attempts in addition to taking out four husbands and getting caught working on husband number five.
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Creative killers
A number of the repeat self-made widows under examination were unusually reckless, in that they managed (after already being caught and prosecuted for husband-whacking) to commit an additional act of murder.
For instance, the take story of the “Brazilian Black Widow” (whose name is not yet determined) who wouldn’t let having a less than stellar reputation stop her from doing what she did best. A convicted double husband-killer, she was sentenced in the 1920s to Brazil’s remote South Seas island penal colony, Fernando Noronha Island. The isle’s inmates were, nevertheless, permitted to marry one another. While serving her long sentence, the devil’s island widow married a fellow whom not too long afterwards she evaluated as in need of a bumping-off. This widow’s story was discovered by a foreign scientific researcher as he toured the island with a guide who felt the need to steer his tired and thirsty charge away from the woman’s cabin where he was tempted to request a drink of water. The writer of the following account then head the guide’s reason why:
“That unfortunate man came home one night, slightly under the influence. She tore his clothes off him, and tied him up. Then she criss-crossed him with the thin side of a razor, and rubbed salt in the wounds.
“She turned him loose, naked, to hop around with pain. She drove a red-hot poker through his skull, which seemed to be carrying it quite far enough. She ended by tying him to his donkey and starting him back for the grog-shop where the ether woman could usually be found. She couldn’t read or write so that her method of sending word that she was through with him.
“The second husband was killed in a much more humane manner. The terrible woman drove a stake through his middle into the ground. To his feet she hitched a donkey, and whipped the little animal round and round, as if her husband were some new form of merry-go-round. He soon died from such treatment.
“For that second murder,” continued the red-mustached exile, “she was sent to this island, out of the world, where she married one of the prisoners who fished each day for the governor’s table.
“The woman one day came to the conclusion that he was using his fishing as an excuse to stay away from her. The next morning she caught him asleep, tied him to his bed, and then poured boiling water on him a little at a lime and beginning win his feel, until he passed out.”
Lizzie Halliday, of Sullivan, New York, was one of the most savage of all serial killers. Wild Lizzie committed a triple murder in 1893, shooting to death her husband and two women in a single day and making shoddy effort to hide the bodies. After the killer’s arrest it was revealed that she had been suspected of several previous murders, including that of several previous husbands, one spouse having survived a poisoning, plus a step-son and a peddler. Declared by the court to be insane she was sent to be kept at Mattewan Women’s Hospital. During her tenure in the hospital she continued her rages, directed towards the lives of the only two women who pitied and befriended her. In 1895 she attempted to murder attendant Catherine Ward, by strangulation. In 1906, she murdered hospital attendant Nellie Wickes, stabbing her in the face more than 200 times with a pair of scissors. Lizzie came to be known by the moniker “the worst woman on earth” because of her passion for killing those who loved her.
Another Black Widow of particular note was an Armenian immigrant to California named Maria Torosian whose six husbands had “died mysteriously.” Mrs. Torosian raised a daughter, Eliza Potegian, who followed in her multi-widowed mother’s bloody footsteps. Mom’s string of six dead husbands came to light only after the record-breaking wife of six had hung herself – just after daughter Eliza was nabbed by the cops on suspicion of having serially wiping out husband and step-kids. Mr. Potegian, a successful vintner, died first. Then the widow, after finding that the deceased had willed his property to his children Margaret (18) and Gordon (21), promptly eliminated these obstacles in her quest for possession of the vineyards.
An 1881 case exhibits an efficient labor-saving mindset. Mrs. Gossau, a Swiss repeat widow, employed the time honored device of proxy violence favored by savvy predators. She had her paramour assist her in ridding herself of her first husband, only to execute the executioner following their marriage-made-in-hell.
Thrice-widowed Jane Taylor Quinn of Chicago was a cool customer: clam and calculating as they come. Her arrest in 1911 after her third husband got himself killed led to curiosity about the fates of the first two short-lived spouses.
The arrest of Mrs. Quinn after the death of her third husband was made by the police, who thought they had a strong circumstantial case against her. Her first husband, John McDonald, died at London, Ont. in 1901, under mysterious circumstances. Her second spouse, Warren Thorpe, was found dead in bed on the morning of June 13, 1903, a bullet wound indicating murder. At that time Mrs. Quinn was charged with the murder, but was acquitted. John Quinn, the third husband, was shot to death as he lay in bed on the night of November 4, 1911. There were powder burns on his night shirt. The revolver from which the shot was fired was found later in the Quinn bathroom, which appeared in a towel which was identified as one Mrs. Quinn had been seen to carry into the bathroom. The revolver was identified as one belonging to a roomer in the house who had mislaid the weapon from his bureau drawer about a week before the tragedy.
Mrs. Quinn, never for a minute losing confidence of her acquittal, thanked the all-male jury warmly as they packed her on her merry way on June 1, 1912.
The failed Quinn prosecution was added to the long and rapidly growing list of Chicago female homicide cases resulting in non-convictions, which by 1914 had become a national scandal.
Illinois State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, declared to reporters that:
“The manner in which women who have committed murder in this county have escaped punishment has become a scandal. The blame in the first instance must fall upon the jurors who seem willing to bring in a verdict of acquittal whenever a woman charged with murder is fairly good looking and is able to turn on the flood gates of her tears, or exhibit a capacity for fainting.”
Prosecutor Hoyne aggressively lobbied the state legislature with a bill that would permit women to serve on Illinois juries, believing that male chivalry was so hopelessly entrenched in Windy City males that there was little point under existing conditions bothering even to go to trial against a female homicide defendant.
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Lonely hearts, sudden deaths
Some Black Widow Serial Killers fit neatly into the “lonely hearts killer” category. These trollers for love victims used old-fashioned personal ads in newspapers (and more recently the internet) to hook their prey. Oklahoma-based champion Black Widow Nannie Doss related that she was merely looking for true love as she pursued her romantic career, bumping off a series of four failed husbands in the course of her quest for a Mr. Right worth being left breathing. The “Giggling Grannie” – as the papers christened her after her gleeful demeanor in the court appearances – failed, nevertheless, to explain the deaths of five others: her mother, her sister Dovie, a 3-1/2-year-old) grandson Robert and a mother-in-law.
Nannie poisoned her final husband twice because “he was so mean to me.” Once she poured “a lot of poison on his prunes.” After eating them he went to the hospital for 23 days. The day after he returned, she was quoted, she gave him a tablespoonful of poison in a cup of coffee. Doss drank the coffee and died the next day at the hospital, she recalled. “He sure did like prunes,” said the murderess. “I fixed a whole box and he ate them all.” Crime chronicler Harold Schechter, one of the most insightful writers on serial killers summed up Doss’s motive in crystal clear language (avoiding the psychobabble favored by the “gender” talk types) stating simply that “She killed because she liked it.”
Mysterious Belle Gunness of LaPorte, Indiana, who was the most prolific of these lonely hearts ladies, known for her “murder farm” which came to light in 1908. Estimates of the farm’s death toll range from 16 to 120.
“Personal – Comely Widow, who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Ind., desires to make the acquaintanceship of gentleman with a view to joining fortunes. No replies by letter will be considered unless the sender is willing to follow an answer with a personal visit.”
The wife-seeking men who answered her ads and made the fatal mistake of making “a personal visit” to her corpse-seeded farm were stripped of as many assets as possible and later drugged and in those cases when the victim did not die from her soporific brews the large and muscular Belle would bash the supplicant’s sleepy head in with her handy axe.
There is, in writings on crime, a commonly made claim asserting that female murderers are inclined to be “merciful” in their preferred killing technique, preferring, as the feminist social scientists like to assert, to use “soft” methods such as painless poisons or smothering. It is said by these writers the fair sex is, when murdering, more compassionate than the male. Most poison deaths resulting from the murderous acts of female serial killers are excruciating painful and the other brutal methods used by female serial killers: strangling, stabbing, chopping, shooting are not any softer.
Tennessee lonely hearts murderess Ada Wittenmyer got away with murdering two of her four husbands before getting caught in 1984. During Ada’s trial her cellmate was called to the stand to relate what the personal-ad murderess had told her of her scheme:
“She said she was going to go through life finding men with money and poisoning them, using the lonely hearts club ads. She said that she enjoyed to see them in pain from the poison.”
A psychiatrist assigned to the murderess while she was serving her prison term said he believed she was schizophrenic, but Roger Hensley, one of the two husbands who were fortunate enough to be married Ada before she developed her husband-killing business model said he did not believe she was mentally ill. “I lived with her off and on for nine years and she has always known what she was doing,” said Hensley. “She is just mean … She was kind to people, but then she would turn around and be worse than heck.”
Ada’s final mark, Henry Joneson, a successful but lonely Canadian rancher, got lucky. His mail-order fiancee was already a prisoner before he got cheated out of some of his hard-earned cash. Joneson sent 12 letters and a $1,150 check to Mrs. Wittenmyer before learning that the address she had given him was the prison and not the retreat she had told him it was.
In 2009, a new personal-ad murderess who almost rivals the infamous murder farm proprietress Belle Gunness, was nabbed in Japan. Kanae Kajima, dubbed “Konkatsu Killer” by the media for the konkatsu (marriage-hunting) sites she used, bagged seven victims in her love-lure killing career.
She met her victims on internet dating sites and poisoned them with carbon monoxide by burning charcoal briquettes after giving them sleeping pills. Kijima reportedly set up each death to look like a suicide: In the latest case, she’s suspected of putting a sedative in one man’s beef stew then poisoning him with carbon monoxide. The trial featured two opposing narratives: prosecutors said she killed the men so she would not have to pay back the money they had given her. Kijima’s lawyer said they had either committed suicide because broke up with them or died by accident.
Kanae Kajima raked in $2.2 million from her racket. On April 13, 2012 she was sentenced to die in payment for the vicious acts of her cold-hearted man-hating career.
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Black widows who murdered husbands for other women too
It should not come as any surprise that among the large number of women during the past five centuries who practiced the craft of homicidal poisoning for profit that a good portion of them applied their art within their own households. In Eastern Europe, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries husband-killing syndicates were uncovered and prosecuted with great frequency. Hungarian double widow-by-design Kathi Lyukas of Szerdaltely, who was hanged in 1882, represents an average example of numerous professional female serial killer-for-hire cases of this region.
Her customers were chiefly wives who had got tired of their husbands, lovers, who thought the removal of a rival would facilitate their own purposes, and even some children purchased the cakes that by offering them to elderly relatives they might the more rapidly come into the possession of their property. Lyukas killed two husbands of her own, and was accused of 26 other murders, six of which she confessed she had committed.
Cases like Frau Lyukas’s continued popping up every so often in that part of the world over the years and decades. It was in 1929 that a voluminous series of poison murders in Hungary’s Tisza Valley garnered international attention. Over a hundred women were arrested. Of these, 46 were charged. The conspiracy, centered in the village of Nagyrev, was widespread and sported at least three self-made widows among the scores of women arrested for poisoning not only no-longer-wanted husbands, but also other men, women and children, most of the victims being family members. Ringleaders Julia Fazekas, “The White Devil of Nagyrev,” and Suzi Olah each chalked up a pair of husbands of their own among their huge cache of profit-producing of victims.
Mrs. Fazekas, who moved through the village like a veritable she-devil. According to the court testimony, it was she, who, for years, had instigated murder, by selling the flypaper poison solution to wives who wanted to get rid of their husbands. And, in the end, just as she was about to be arrested, she swallowed a big dose of the fatal poison herself and died.
As Suzi Olah’s sister, Lydia, made her case to the police she harnessed a rhetorical flourish and mastery of rationalization worthy of any Ivy League “gender studies” professor of the present day who makes a living spouting off post-modern critical theory palaver. Lydia defended her actions by confidently asserting:
We are not assassins! We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang them or drown them either! They died from poison and this was a pleasant death for them!
The husbands, nevertheless, had been poisoned with arsenic the women had extracted from flypaper, and arsenic, though traditionally popular with murderers remains, as WikiDoc reminds us, “not a particularly efficient toxin, leading to a slow and painful death.”
While MRA pioneer Sigurd Hoeberth was still operating his Vienna storefront headquarters for his Liga, the world’s first men’s rights organization (founded in 1926), he posted news reports on the Tisza Valley mass murders that became public in 1929 in the group’s window – along with other news pertaining to the men’s issues, promoted in the Liga’s newsletter – for passers-by on the busy commercial street to see. In America the public became acquainted with the Hungarian husband-killing syndicates, which continued to explode into the news through the 1930s, in such illustrated Sunday supplement articles as “How Wives Gained Power by Mass-Murder of Husbands.”
Marie Aszendi was one of the numerous customers of Fazekas/Olah poisoning ring. After Mrs. Aszendi’s arrest she admitted to killing two husbands, asserting she had been a victim of a thrashing at the hands of her first husband (precipitated, she admitted, by her husband’s learning of her sleeping around). Her excuse for murdering the replacement spouse was that he was planning to divorce her. Ms. Aszendi was, like the “third wave” feminist of today’s sexual landscape, very much concerned with her attractiveness to the opposite sex. And the desire to put up a good front is the motivation is why she decided her son had to be erased from the picture. As she told the court he had to go “because he made her look too old.”
Suzi Olah’s reputation lived on long past her suicide. Four decades following the Tisza Valley mass murder scandal, a feminist writer was – apparently – so admiring of the Olah sisters’ accomplishments in the “gender justice” realm, that the women’s lib essayist seems to have adopted the name as her pseudonym “Suzie Olah” for an article. “The Economic Function of the Oppression of Women,” published in Shulamith Firestone’s cutting-edge essay collection that came out in 1970: “Notes From the Second Year: Women’s Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists.”
Husband-killing syndicates are still with us as is made clear by a recent case in South America. The “Black Widow Gang” of Medellin, Colombia erupted in the international news in June 2011 with the arrests of its kingpin, Mauro Gomez Cataño, and six others, including the two “lonely hearts” lures, and Sandra Nataly Giraldo.
It was when young Emilsen Rojas claimed the body of Diego Hernandez, 60, who had been drowned after having been thrown into a reservoir, and she had attempted to collect a large insurance payment, that the insurance company began to investigate. The police joined in, eventually uncovering an organized operation, whose method was to arrange a marriage or legally binding cohabitation, purchase life insurance, and then after the honeymoon, the victim would be “accidented.” The “brides” received a fraction of the gang’s take. Police investigated five specific homicides and expect there are more.
If the gang had not been so boldly transparent in letting Rojas handle the pay-off so clumsily the gang’s husband-killing game, a type of enterprise notoriously hard to detect, would have gone on, and on and on.
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“Having it all”
One of the most pernicious of the numerous feminist theories to have infected the social sciences is the notion – based upon a distortion, or misunderstanding, of early laws on a man’s legal responsibility for wife and child – that fathers harbor cruelly proprietary attitudes towards spouses and children while women, as passive victims of “patriarchy” do not. Yet abundant examples exist of divorcing mothers who murdered their children for the specific motive of preventing the other parent from obtaining custody – and even to prevent the father from having “visitation.” Such cases, labelled by this author as “Maternal Filicide: Spousal Revenge Motive” are in the process of being posted online.
The “proprietary” fixation we observe in many maternal filicide cases is exemplified, in spades, by the amazing story of a Romanian aristocratic heiress, Vera Renczi, residing in Yugoslavia in her spacious Berkereckul chateau. The story of her astonishing career of slaughter broke in 1925.
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A handsome young woman of wealth … is accused of murdering thirty-five husbands and lovers, simply “because she could not bear to think they might love another woman.”
“Why did you kill all these human beings?” he asked.
“They were men,” she answered. “I could not endure the thought that they would ever put their arms around another woman after they had embraced me.”
It was shown that the woman was possessed by the passion of jealousy to a degree never before recorded.
“But,” the judge stammered, “you also murdered your own son.”
“He had threatened to betray me,” said Madame Renczi. “He was a man, too. Soon he would have held another woman in his arms.”
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Beautiful Vera ended up spending the rest of her natural life in prison
With Empress Taitu Betul of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) who reigned from 1889-1910 we find a well worked-out philosophy of how to get ahead employing the serial Black Widow method with military precision. The six maxims attributed to Taitu reveal a mind fixed upon ruthless self-advancement, rivaling Machiavelli’s most brutal adages while focusing squarely on the relations of the sexes as means for purely political ends. Here you have the bloody Empress’ six maxims of women’s empowerment:
- If you would gain a throne and hold it, fear not to make of human skulls thy stepping stones.
- As a woman dealing with men, let dissimulation be thy watch-word. Let no man know thy secret thoughts and ambitions.
- If another woman stand in thy way, take her to thy bosom; if a man, beguile and marry him.
- Harden thy heart to all pity, all remorse; then shall thy mind and heart be free, without scruple, to gain high aims.
- A heart that is without tenderness of mercy alone can inhabit a body able to endure and to suffer all.
Taitu Betul proved with actions and words that she was indeed a paragon of the “strong woman.”
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“Sheer delight in homicide”
In 1903 an East Prussian woman by the name of Caroline Pryzgodda was caught in the act of trying to murder her fifth husband with poison. Frau Pryzgodda’s career exemplifies, in its eerie cruelty, the typical female serial killer (whether she be a husband-killing specialist or not) who frequently stays near by her suffering victim unflinchingly for an extended period of time while coolly observing his excruciatingly painful decline. In this case each of the four husbands were deliberately poisoned so as to take a full year of horrible suffering before they were finally finished off.
The trial of Caroline Pryzgodda, charged with poisoning four husbands and with attempting to poison a fifth, was concluded at Allenstein [in the village of Bobbau]. The prisoner being found guilty of murder, was sentenced to death.
The evidence showed that all the husbands were healthy young men when they married. Each in succession suddenly lost his health, complained of terrible pains in all his limbs, violent headaches, loss of appetite and growing weakness. The wife administered arsenic to each of the victims in small quantities, mixing it in meat, soup and various dishes. She watched them one after another literally sinking into the grave, and their sufferings left her unmoved. She calculated how long the poison would take to complete its fatal work, and all four husbands died about a year after she began administering the poison.
The motives of the murderess remain a mystery, but it is stated that a fortune-teller once informed her that she was destined to have six husbands before attaining happiness with the seventh. It is suggested that the woman shared the superstition common in East Prussia, and got rid of her husbands to fulfill the prophecy.
Several experts entrusted with the task of examining the prisoner’s mental condition came to the conclusion that she murdered her husbands from sheer delight in homicide.
The Pryzgodda case following the original news reports has, like the majority of cases on the Black Widow Serial Killer list, never been mentioned anywhere in print again in the in any English-language publication despite its obvious value to criminological studies.
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If women ruled the world, there would be less violence.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Feminists love to make broad generalizations. They claim that they can be sure that when a wife kills a husband, it is always almost a justified “act of self-defense.” The public frequently hears such generalizations, yet a more detailed look at a sufficient quantity of individual husband-killing cases will wash away forever such vague magical thinking promoted by the hoaxing propagandists of “gender” ideology. Faulty generalizations based on cooked statistics are then turned into public policy, resulting in social disruption, chaos in the courts and tyrannous governmental mission creep.
The next time you hear someone say that most women who kill their husbands are, by “gender” definition acting in self-defense, you might want to counter this nonsense by declaiming that “the era of the misandry apologists is over.”
For misandry is now gradually becoming socially unacceptable among normal people, and with this welcome change will arrive a growing unwillingness of the public to accept having taxes and college tuition fees extracted from them only to be invested in deceptive propaganda by the hoax factories operated by social engineers who have created the “social construction” known as political correctness.
The cases reviewed in this article are but a fraction of collected Black Widow Serial Killer cases. And that larger portion is itself but a fraction of the total reported cases, most of which have yet to be mined from sources not yet digitized. In turn, the quantity defined by the total that will eventually turn up in printed matter is again but a fraction of identified cases around the world from past times, many which are not going to be found in preserved records. Further, the total number of identified cases (including those not archived) is yet again only tiny fraction of those cases that have actually occurred.
We must keep in mind that the vast majority of victims of female serial killers are identified incorrectly as having died a natural death. This is in stark contrast to victims of male serial killers, who are almost always correctly identified as homicide victims, regardless whether or not the investigator is able to determine the perpetrator is a serial killer. Because the females of this criminal species keep their crimes under wraps – unlike their counterparts of the male sex, who seem to want the public to know about their crimes – the female serial killers get away with murder at an enormously greater rate.
We seldom saw an organized “woman-hunt” resulting from the discovery of a pattern of murders hypothesized to be the work of female serial killer. A female serial killer seldom becomes a major media sensation for the simple reason that their crimes rarely come to light until after a solitary death – the most recent – is determined to have been a murder. Only then, in the vast majority of female serial killer cases, are the perpetrators identified – in retrospect – as multiple murderers. The chase narrative, typical of the male serial killer case, is where a great deal of the media excitement over serial killer cases is generated.
The old news you have read here in this article is in a very real sense now new news. Spread the word that what we believed once is now no longer believable. Spread it far and wide. Together we can help along “herstory” in its slow-motion scandalous collapse.
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“If women ruled the world, there would be less violence.”
“Women only kill their men in self defense.”
“Women never lie about rape.”
Gimme a break, will ya.
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►►SOURCES
►News sources for black widow serial killer cases (reproduced online)
Aszendi – “Woman Poisons Son. – Made Her Look Too Old. – Also Kills Two Husbands.” The Argus (Melbourne, Australia), Jan. 20, 1930, p. 8
Betul – “The Worst Woman In the World – Dowager Empress Taitu, Who Climbed from the Gutter to the Throne, Married Eleven Times, Joined in Innumerable Intrigues and Murders, and Is Now at Last Safely Locked Up, to the Great Relief of Abyssinia,” Indianapolis Star Magazine Section (In.), Feb. 22, 1914, p. 1
“Brazilian Black Widow” – George Finlay Simmons, “Strange Adventures on Mystery Isles of the South Atlantic,” Oakland Tribune (Ca.), Magazine Section, p. 6
Black Widow Gang, Mesellin, Colombia – two Spanish language sources: (1) (2)
Doss – “Grandmother Signs Statements Admitting She Killed 4 of 5 Husbands With Rat Poison,” syndicated (AP), The Racine Journal News (Wi.), Nov. 29, 1954, p. 1
Fazekas – “100 Husband Poisoners Trapped Tell-Tale Finger Nails – How an Unfailing Microscopic Test Led to Wholesale Arrests of Much Surprised Widows Charged With Getting Rid of Husbands They Didn’t Want.” Ogden Standard-Examiner (Ut.), Feb. 9, 1930, Magazine Section, p. 5-C
Gossau – “A Fiendish Wife.” Brief: The Week’s News (London, England), Feb. 18, 1881, p. 160
Gunness – “130 Murdered By Indiana’s Female Bluebeard – Victims Lured to Death in Matrimonial Advertisements Inserted by Plotter in Small Magazine of Far West. – Faltering Justice Always One Lap Behind This Queen Of Crime – Investigation of Strange Disappearance of Lovers Is Started But Flames Consume Monster—Gruesome Police Discoveries.” Syracuse Herald (N.Y.), Mar. 15, 1925, section 3, p. 3
Halliday – “Notorious Woman Dies – Lizzie Halliday Had Earned Terrible Name Of ‘Worst Woman On Earth.’ – She Murdered Six Persons – Husband, Step-son, 2 Friends And Two Attendants In State Hospital.” The Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), Jul. 15, 1918, p. 1 (spelling error in orig. “Holiday”)
Kajima – many sources are available online
Klimek – Roy Gibbons, “Husband Seeks to Send Wife To Gallows in “Bluebeard” Murders,” syndicated (ULU), Joplin News Herald (Mo.), Feb. 26, 1923, p. 3
Lyukas – “A Wholesale Murderess.” The Camperdown Chronicle (Victoria, Australia), Feb. 7, 1883, p. 4
Olah, Suzi – Max Haines, “If You Knew Suzi… – Arsenic Gave the Lady the Power of Life and Death in Two Simple Hungarian Villages,” Lethbridge Herald (Mi.), Jul. 8, 2008, p. A-4
Olah, Lydia – Nash, Robert Jay, Look for the Woman: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Female Poisoners, Kidnappers, Thieves, Extortionists, Terrorists, Swindlers and Spies from Elizabethan Times tom the Present, Evans, 1981, p. 159
Pryzgodda – “Poisoned Five Husbands.- A German Tragedy.” The Star (Christ Church, New Zealand), August 29, 1903, p. 4
Quinn – “Her Three Husbands Are Dead – Tacoma Times (Wa.), Nov. 14, 1911, p. 7
Renczi – “A Real Female Bluebeard – Strange Tragedy of the Jealous Beauty and Her Thirty-five Unlucky Sweethearts,” American Weekly (San Antonio Light Sunday magazine section), Aug. 22, 1925, p. 5
Torosian – “Mother Kills Self As Daughter Tries To,” Reno Evening Gazette (Nv.), Nov. 6, 1923, p. 2
Wittenmyer – “Husband-Poisoner Hangs Herself in Cell,” syndicated (AP), Youngstown Vindicator (Oh.), Aug. 9, 1984, p. 29
►Other links
Aristocratic Black Widow Serial Killers
Black Widow Serial Killers
Champion Black Widow Serial Killers
Hoeberth & the world’s first men’s right organization
“How Wives Gained Power by Mass-Murder of Husbands.” (1937)
Hoyne, District Attorney, on Chivalry Justice
Maternal Filicide: Spousal Revenge Motive
►See also
Acid Queens: Women Who Throw Acid (victims of both sexes)
Give ‘em the Axe: Axe Murderesses (victims of both sexes)
