The subject of female serial killers in the US has been gaining increasing popularity owing to true crime movies and shows. The true-crime genre digs deeper into the minds of criminals and tends to put their crimes in the larger political context including factors such as gender, race and sexuality. The implications of female serial killers and their pattern of crimes as opposed to those of males have also been a subject of growing importance.
The details of how investigations and trials differ based on the gender of the accused is also important to discuss. Among the most prolific female serial killers in the US, are Dorothea Puente, Jane Toppan and Aileen Wuornos. Several other serial killers are slowly becoming part of the true crime genre and shedding light on the female serial killers in the US who have managed to break crime records with horrifying kill counts.
Jane Toppan
Popularly known as Jolly Jane, Jane Toppan was a nurse who killed at least 31 victims. She targeted patients and their family members. Toppan allegedly took a great deal of pleasure in experimenting with the dosages of drugs and inflicting those experiments onto the patients. Morphine and atropine were among her most used drugs as she used them to test the patient’s nervous systems out of curiosity.
Jane Toppan soon moved on to killing by poisoning. Her landlord and her foster sister were the first among her victims who were not her patients. Although her experimentation was coupled by complaints of theft from patients, there wasn’t any serious action against Toppan until 1901 when she was arrested and confessed to the killing of 31 victims. However, she was found not guilty on grounds of insanity and died in an asylum in 1938.
Kristen Gilbert
Like Toppan, Kristen Gilbert was a nurse who was known to induce heart attacks onto her patients. She injected them with excessive epinephrine, commonly known as adrenaline. Although she was only convicted of four murders and two attempted murders of patients, the staff who worked at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center claimed that almost half of the 350 deaths that occurred at the hospital were attended to by her.
After she was arrested, an investigation proved that Gilbert created emergencies for the patients so that she could prove her merit as a nurse. The court found Kristen Gilbert guilty of three first-degree murders and one second-degree murder. She was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison and no chance for parole.
Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos is one of the most popular female serial killers in the US owing to how much her case and trial contributed to the conversations around crime and gender. Wuornos, unlike a lot of serial killers, committed all of the murders within a short period. She killed and robbed seven middle-aged men and dropped their corpses along the highways of Florida and southern Georgia.
In court, Aileen Wuornos pled not guilty and claimed that she acted in self-defence after the men attacked her. Her argument was highly debated before she was proven guilty of one murder out of the seven. She later admitted to murdering all seven men. However, the body of one of the victims was never found, which reduced her conviction to that of six murders. She was executed in October 2002, when she claimed that she would do it all over again is left free.
Dorothea Puente
In the 1980s, Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house in California. She murdered the elderly and mentally ill boarders to cash their social security checks. She reportedly murdered at least nine people and was held guilty of three of the murders. The case blew up because of her vulnerable targets and she began being identified with the title, Death House Landlady.
Puente allegedly drugged her victims until they overdosed and then wrapped them in bedsheets. She then lined them with plastic and buried them in the backyard. She died in March 2011, at the age of 82 in a prison at Chowchilla.
