The ruthless murder of scores of innocent,
helpless children; the sadistic torture of unsuspecting young women; the brutal abuse
of immaciated concentration camp prisoners; even the grisly collection of the skin of
victims. Believe it or not, each of these horrific
and bloodthirsty crimes - and more besides - were committed by a woman. The most evil women that ever lived would
give the most well-known male killers and villains a run for their money. 1. Queen Mary the First of England. Mary Tudor was the Queen of England from 1553
until her death in 1558, and she was the first woman to rule England in her own right. Though her reign was short, it was brutal
enough to earn her the ominous nickname of Bloody Mary. When Mary took the throne, she immediately
turned her attention to reversing the religious reforms of her father, King Henry the Eighth. Mary, a staunch Catholic, held a burning hatred
for Protestants - perhaps because her father had split with the Catholic church and became
a Protestant in the first place in order to divorce her mother and marry the second of
his 6 wives. The heresy laws that Queen Mary enacted made
it a crime to believe in a different religion than the Queen. At the time, heresy was commonly believed
to be an infection of the body, so, to prevent it from spreading to others, convicted heretics
were not only killed, but their corpse was utterly destroyed to ensure that no part of
it remained which could be used as a religious relic. During her 5 year reign, Queen Mary was personally
responsible for more than 300 Protestants being burned alive at the stake, a brutal,
agonizing and very public death. 2. Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos had a rough life, to say the least. Her father was a child molester and sociopath
who was killed in prison when she was a child. When Wuornos became pregnant at the age of
14, she dropped out of school and began working as a prostitute along Florida’s interstate. In late 1989 and 1990, Florida authorities
discovered the bodies of 7 men strewn along the highways, each shot to death at close
range. Investigators believed that they had a serial
killer on their hands, and they finally caught a break in the case when items belonging to
2 of the victims turned up at a local pawn shop. The fake names the suspect had used when pawning
the goods led the police straight to their killer, and they were shocked to discover
that a woman was behind these brutal murders. Wuornos claimed she had killed the men in
self defence, but the police didn’t buy it - Wuornos was the first American woman
to fit the FBI’s profile of a serial killer, and she was found guilty and sentenced to
death for the murders. She was executed by lethal injection in 2002,
after enjoying a single cup of black coffee for her last meal. During her time on death row, Wuornos sold
the movie rights to her life story, and the Oscar-winning film Monster is based on her
life and crimes. 3. Amelia Dyer
Amelia Dyer trained as a nurse before turning to baby farming in 1869 after she became a
widow. Baby farming was a common practice in Victorian
England - the laws at the time didn’t require men to support their illegitimate children,
so many desperate young women would pay baby farmers like Dyer to adopt and care for their
children. Unsurprisingly, the children weren’t always
given the best care and neglect and abuse were rampant, but Amelia Dyer was in a league
all her own. Dyer initially let the children in her care
die of neglect and starvation, drugging them to stop them from crying and moaning in pain. She was caught by the authorities, convicted
of neglect and sentenced to 6 months labor, but upon her release she quickly returned
to baby farming - and this time, she had learned her lesson. Dyer began moving frequently and using aliases
to avoid detection. She also started murdering the children outright
to turn a quicker profit, strangling them with tape around their necks and disposing
of their bodies in the River Thames. She was finally caught when a body of a child
pulled from the river with tape around its neck was traced back to her. Though she was only convicted of 1 murder,
she likely killed anywhere from 200 to 400 children in total. She was hanged to death in 1896. 4. Karla Homolka
Karla Homolka was a young veterinary assistant living near Toronto, Canada when she met the
charming and handsome Paul Bernardo. The two were engaged within months of meeting
each other in 1987 when Karla was just 17 years old. Homolka’s fairy tale romance quickly unravelled
- her fiance was not only a suspect in a string of violent rapes in a nearby town, but he
had also become obsessed with Karla’s 15 year old sister Tammy. Just before Christmas in 1990, Homolka stole
powerful tranquilizer drugs from the veterinary office where she worked, drugged her sister
and let Bernardo rape her. Tammy reacted badly to the drugs, began vomiting
and choking, and eventually died of asphyxiation. Officials and her family all believed that
her death was the result of intoxication, but Bernardo knew otherwise - and he now had
a taste for murder. Over the next 2 years, the pair would stalk
a number of women and brutally torture and murder 2 other young girls before finally
being caught - though they had been questioned by police several times over the same period
in connection with the rapes and Tammy’s death. Once in custody, Homolka told a harrowing
tale of abuse and coercion at the hands of her husband, and was given a plea deal in
return for her cooperation. Bernardo was ultimately convicted and sentenced
to life in prison, the maximum sentence in Canada, while Homolka received just 12 years
for manslaughter. After the trial, new video evidence surfaced
that clearly showed that Homolka was a willing participant in the torture and murder of their
victims, but by then it was too late to change her sentence. Homolka was released in 2005, and Canada’s
most prolific female serial killer now lives in South America with her new husband and
children. 5. Elizabeth Bathory
Elizabeth Bathory was born in Hungary in 1560 into a prominent family of nobles. She married and became a Countess at the age
of 15, and she would soon become infamous across the country for her rumored love of
torture and murder. According to Guinness World Records, Bathory
was the world’s most prolific female serial killer, and her gruesome activities would
lead many to consider her one of the first vampires in recorded history. Bathory was rumored to have a specially built
torture chamber in her castle, and was accused of mutilating and murdering up to 650 women
between 1585 and 1610. Some of her favorite methods of torture included
jamming pins and needles under the nails of her victims, and smearing women’s naked
bodies with honey before tying them up and letting them be attacked by bees and ants. After her husband died in the early 1600s,
Bathory’s bloodlust apparently got much worse - she was said to have bitten chunks
of flesh off of her living victims, and even forced some of her victims to cook and eat
their own flesh. Bathory was also rumored to have bathed in
- and possibly drank - the blood of her victims, believing it would keep her youthful. Her crimes were widely known but largely ignored
due to her family’s influence - that is, until she grew tired of killing peasants and
began searching for victims among the daughters of the nobility. At that point, the King stepped in and had
her arrested and tried for 80 counts of murder. She escaped execution, but was confined to
a single dark room of the castle, where she survived for 3 years before her death in 1614. 6. Beverley Allitt
Beverley Allitt was working as a pediatric nurse in Lincolnshire, England in the early
1990s when she committed a string of horrific crimes that earned her the sinister moniker
“The Angel of Death”. Over the course of 59 days in February and
March 1991, Allitt attacked 13 children in her care, ranging in age from just 2 months
up to 11 years old. When it was available, she would inject the
children with large doses of insulin or potassium to cause cardiac arrest, but if she was unable
to secure the drugs, she would resort to smothering the children with a pillow. In all, Allitt murdered 4 children and seriously
injured 5 others before she was caught. Hospital staff, suspicious about the unusual
number of cardiac deaths in such a short period in the children’s ward, called in the police,
who discovered that Allitt was the only nurse on duty during each incident. She was convicted and sentenced to 13 concurrent
life sentences, and her judge recommended that she serve at least 40 years before being
eligible for parole - one of the longest recommended sentences by a trial judge. Her motives have never been fully explained,
though some believe that she suffers from the controversial psychiatric disorder Munchausen
by proxy. 7. Irma Grese
The female guards at Nazi concentration camps may be less well known than their male counterparts,
but they were no less evil. At least 10 percent of all guards were women,
and the worst among them was Irma Grese, known as the Beautiful Beast of Belsen. Grese worked as a guard at two of the most
notorious Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. By the end of her first year at Auschwitz
she had risen to the rank of Senior Supervisor and was the second highest ranking female
in the camp, in charge of 30,000 female Jewish prisoners. Grese was well known for her brutality and
cruelty, and for the heavy boots she wore and the pistol she carried at all times to
facilitate her vicious abuse. Grese clearly enjoyed inflicting emotional
and physical torture on her prisoners, and her ruthlessness was characterised by her
regular sadistic beatings of prisoners with a special braided whip and her frequent arbitrary
shootings of prisoners. Grese enjoyed personally selecting prisoners
for the gas chamber, and she was well known for setting her trained and half-starved dogs
to viciously attack prisoners. Being a woman did not make her immune to justice
- at the end of the war, Grese was sentenced to death for her crimes alonside her male
colleagues, after being convicted of murder and crimes and atrocities against the laws
of humanity. 8. Ilse Koch
The Nazis were so evil that it should come as no surprise that 2 of the most evil women
who ever lived were among their ranks. Isle Koch, known as the Witch of Buchenwald,
was the wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the horrific concentration camp Buchenwald
from 1937 to 1941. Koch, drunk on her husband’s absolute power,
indulged her sadistic tendencies at the expense of the prisoners. The Kochs were known to eat and drink to their
hearts’ content, and even built an elaborate fitness facility using money stolen from the
camp’s budget. They frequently held lavish parties and were
even rumored to have hosted orgies for the camp’s SS officers. Koch revelled in forcing the weak and emaciated
prisoners to endure physically exhausting activities for her amusement, and she was
infamous for the gruesome souvenirs that she collected - she would reportedly order that
prisoners with “interesting” tattoos be murdered, and that their tattooed skin be
turned into artifacts like lampshades and gloves. Koch was promoted to Chief Overseer of the
female guards at Buchenwald before her husband was accused of stealing from the SS in 1941. He was executed by the SS in 1945, and Koch
herself would be arrested and tried for her crimes at Buchenwald in 1947. She was sentenced life in prison, and committed
suicide by hanging at Aichach’s women’s prison in 1967. True evil is clearly not just the exclusive
purview of men. Throughout history, some of the most horrific
and sadistic crimes have been committed by the most evil women that ever lived. If you thought this video was fascinating,
be sure and check out our other videos, like this one called “America’s Most Evil Serial
Killer - John Wayne Gacy”, or perhaps you’ll like this other video instead.
