The Serial Killer Files (7 page)

My late husband sure did like prunes. I fixed a whole box and he ate them all.

—Nannie Doss

Marie Besnard

An exact contemporary of the “Giggling Granny” was the French Black Widow, Marie Besnard, known in her country as the “Queen of Poisoners.” Born in 1896 in Loudon, France, she received strict religious training at a local convent—an education that didn’t prevent her from acquiring an apparently well-deserved reputation for sexual promiscuity as an adolescent.

In 1920, at the age of twenty-three, she wed an older cousin, Auguste Antigny. The marriage ended abruptly seven years later when her husband died of what the doctors called “fluid in the lungs”—the first in a long string of medical misdiagnoses that would be made on Marie’s murder victims.

In 1929, she married her second husband, Leon Besnard. Over the course of the next twenty years, Leon’s family would be eliminated, one by one, in a series of shockingly unexpected deaths that came to be known locally as the “Besnard curse.” The first to die were two great-aunts. Then Leon’s father, mother, sister, two spinster cousins, and finally Leon himself. During this time, Marie also knocked off her own father, mother, and an elderly couple she had befriended. Her victims’ deaths were attributed to everything from strokes to bizarre accidents. Two of her victims died, she claimed, when they had mistakenly eaten from a bowl of lye, thinking it was a special dessert.

That the police accepted such far-fetched explanations suggests that the investigation into the “Besnard curse” was led by Inspector Clouseau. After the thirteenth suspicious death, authorities decided to perform an autopsy on Leon Besnard, whose body was found to be full of arsenic. More exhumations followed, all with the same result.

Arrested in 1950, Marie first confessed, then recanted and hired the best lawyers money could buy. Her legal dream team did its job. She was brought to trial three times: in 1952, 1954, and 1961. The first two

proceedings ended in mistrials, the third with her acquittal. In France, her case is considered to be the

“perfect crime.”

Deadlier Than the Male

“The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” wrote Rudyard Kipling. Anyone who doubts that female psychopaths can be as lethal as any man should consider the following cases: Marie de Brinvilliers (1630–1676)

The spoiled, sexually promiscuous daughter of a prominent Parisian family, Marie murdered her father, two brothers, and as many as fifty other victims with a poison that she secretly tested on unwary patients at a Parisian pauper hospital. In July 1676, she was publicly beheaded for her crimes in front of Notre Dame Cathedral.

The execution of Marie de Brinvilliers

Anna Zanzwiger (1760–1811)

Born in Nuremburg, Germany, Anna grew to be a profoundly unattractive woman, and was said to resemble a toad. In her forties—after a life of hardship and disappointment, including a miserable marriage to an abusive alcoholic that ended when he drank himself to death—she hired herself out as a housemaid to a succession of well-to-do men, hoping that one would become so dependent on her domestic skills that he would marry her. Unfortunately, each of her prospective mates was either already married or engaged. Zanzwiger attempted to solve this problem by murdering the women with arsenic.

She also killed one of her employers for spite and poisoned the food of at least a dozen other people—including an infant to whom she gave a teething biscuit dipped in arsenic-laced milk. By the time of her arrest in 1811, the act of poisoning had grown to be an uncontrollable passion. She was beheaded in July of the same year. Her body was then lashed to a wagon wheel and displayed in public.

It is perhaps better for the community that I should die, as it would be impossible for me to stop poisoning people.

—Anna Zanzwiger, at her sentencing

Gesina Gottfried (1798–1828)

A native of Bremen, Germany, the beautiful, blond Gesina was a classic psychopath, who experienced supreme ecstasy from watching people die and was, by her own admission, “born without a conscience.”

During a ten-year span, she poisoned sixteen people, including her three husbands, her two young sons, her parents, a brother, an old friend, and the wife and five children of an employer named Rumf.

Arrested in March 1828, after Rumf grew suspicious, she displayed not the slightest trace of remorse.

On the contrary, she boasted of her crimes. “I was born without conscience,” she declared, “which allowed me to live without fear.” Convicted of six counts of murder, she was beheaded in 1828.

Hélène Jegado (c. 1803–1851)

During her thirty-year career as a a domestic servant in villages throughout Brittany, France, Jegado murdered as many as twenty-seven people with no motive other than the sheer pleasure of killing.

Wielding arsenic as her weapon, she poisoned men, women, and children. Arrested after killing off another servant in the household of a university professor, she staunchly maintained her innocence, denying all responsibility for the long string of corpses she had left in her wake. Wherever she went, she tearfully insisted, people just happened to die. The evidence against her, however, was overwhelming.

She was guillotined in 1851.

Mary Ann Cotton (1832–1873)

One of the most prolific serial killers in English history, Mary murdered an estimated twenty-three people in a twelve-year period. Among her victims were her three husbands, ten children, five stepchildren, a sister-in-law, and an unwanted suitor. Most of the deaths were attributed to “gastric fever” until an autopsy on her seven-year-old stepson revealed enough arsenic in his stomach to have killed three men. She was hanged on March 24, 1873, and quickly immortalized in a popular children’s rhyme.

Mary Ann Cotton

Mary Ann Cotton

She’d dead and she’s rotten

She lies in her bed

With her eyes wide oppen

Sing, sing, oh, what can I sing

Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with a string.

Where, where? Up in the air.

Sellin’ black puddens a penny a pair.

—Nineteenth-century British nursery rhyme

Sarah Jane Robinson (1839–1905)

A frighteningly remorseless psychopath who felt no qualms about subjecting her nearest relations to agonizing deaths, the Irish-born Sarah Jane Tennent emigrated to America after being orphaned at the age of fourteen. Her lethal career began around 1880, when she poisoned her husband, three of her eight children (including her infant twin sons) and the elderly landlord to whom she owed fifty dollars in back rent. Her homicidal mania reached a pitch during an eighteen-month period that began in February 1885, when—partly for mercenary reasons, partly out of sheer depravity—she murdered her sister, her brother-in-law, her one-year-old niece, her six-year-old nephew, her own twenty-five-year-old daughter and twenty-three-year-old son. Arrested in August 1886, she became known in the press as America’s worst

“poison fiend.” After one mistrial, she was condemned to hang, though her sentence was later commuted to life in prison. She spent the remainder of her life in a narrow cell decorated with engraved newspaper portraits of her victims.

Marti Enriqueta (?–1912)

This self-styled witch kidnapped, sexually abused, and ritualistically butchered small children in Barcelona, Spain, in the early years of the twentieth century. She apparently cannibalized her victims, then boiled the leftovers for use as an ingredient in the “love potions” that she sold to local peasants. She was arrested and executed in 1912 after a young victim named Angelita—who had been forced to eat human flesh while in captivity—escaped from Enriqueta’s lair and alerted the police.

Julia Fazekas (c. 1865–1929)

A midwife in the remote Hungarian village of Nagyrev, Fazekas not only delivered babies but also performed illegal abortions and supplied poison to any woman wishing to rid herself of an unwanted husband, troublesome child, aging parent, or wealthy uncle. Ordering flypaper in bulk, she would boil off the arsenic coating and render it into powder, which she sold to her clients for $8 to $40 a dose, depending on what they could afford. For two decades following the end of World War I, countless local women—who would come to be known as “the angel-makers of Nagyrev”—availed themselves of her lethal services. When the police finally caught on and came to arrest her, Fazekas committed suicide with one of her own potions. Eventually—in a case that gained worldwide notoriety—thirty-four peasant women, ranging in age from forty-four to seventy-one, were put on trial for murdering relatives with Fazekas’s poison. Eighteen were convicted, eight executed, the rest acquitted.

Dorothea Puente (1929–)

Born in Mexico, Puente was abandoned as an infant and raised in an orphanage. Over the next forty years, she married four times and gave birth to a daughter whom she immediately put up for adoption. In 1983, at the age of fifty-three, she was sent to prison for drugging old men and stealing their money.

Released in 1985, she rented a run-down house in Sacramento, California, and opened a rooming house for elderly persons on fixed incomes. Over the next two years, more than a dozen of her boarders disappeared. In November 1988—investigating neighborhood complaints about the stench emanating from Puente’s property—police found the first of seven corpses on her premises. Puente took flight, though she was eventually arrested in Los Angeles. She was charged with nine counts of murder, although authorities believed her victims totaled twenty-five. After a marathon six-month trial, she was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Aileen Wuornos (1956–2002)

Commonly, if mistakenly, called “America’s first woman serial killer,” Wuornos had the kind of upbringing that is almost guaranteed to produce a psychopathic criminal. Her father was a habitual pedophile who eventually hanged himself after being arrested for molesting a seven-year-old girl. At six months of age, Aileen was abandoned by her mother and left in the care of her grandparents. Her violent, alcoholic grandfather constantly threatened to kill her. He threw her out of the house when Aileen gave birth to an illegitimate child after being raped. She was fourteen years old. From then on, she became a drifter, selling her body for drinks, drugs, and food. At twenty, she married a seventy-year-old man, a union that lasted all of a month. Two years later, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. Upon recuperating, she robbed a convenience store and spent slightly more than a year in prison. Her rage against the world—and particularly against men—reached a lethal pitch in late 1989, when she shot to death a male motorist who had picked her up at a Florida truck stop and driven her to a remote wooded area for sex. Six more nearly identical murders followed over the next year. Eventually, Wuornos was arrested in a biker bar. She claimed self-defense for all seven murders. At her 1992 trial, her lesbian lover turned state’s evidence and testified against her. Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death. Ten years later, in October 2002, the sentence was finally carried out.

Recommended Reading:

Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (1996)

Michael and C. L. Kelleher, Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer (1998) Terry Manners, Deadlier Than the Male: Stories of Female Serial Killers (1995) Michael Newton, Bad Girls Do It! An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers (1993) Patricia Pearson, When She Was Bad (1997)

Kerry Segrave, Women Serial and Mass Murderers: A Worldwide Reference (1990) BLACK AND WHITE

Though the great majority of American serial killers are white, there is no racial or ethnic basis for this fact. That is to say, there’s nothing “white” or “black” or, for that matter, Asian or Hispanic or anything else about serial murder. Serial murder is a human phenomenon found throughout history and in virtually every culture, with the possible exception of the Inuits.

(Actually, one serial killer, William Tahl, was an Eskimo by birth, but he committed his homicides in Texas and California, earning a spot on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list in 1965.) The preponderance of white serial killers in our own country is simply a matter of demographics. In point of fact, as the New York Times reported in an article on October 28, 2002, “black serial killers occur in roughly equal—or even slightly greater—proportion to the number of blacks in the population.”

According to recent studies, between 13 and 22 percent of United States serial killers are African-American.

Why, then, are people so surprised to learn that a fair number of serial killers are black men?

Unfortunately, the most likely explanation has to do with lingering racial prejudice.

Serial murderers generally kill within their race. White serial killers tend to prey on white victims; blacks on black. And the sad fact is that the white majority is not especially interested in crimes involving minority victims. As a result, these cases get relatively little media coverage. This is true, not just of serial murder but of other horrific crimes as well. When the pretty blond Mormon girl, Elizabeth Smart, was abducted from her home in Salt Lake City in June 2002, for example, her picture ended up on the cover of Newsweek. By contrast, when a four-year-old African-American girl, Dannariah Finley of Orange, Texas, was abducted from home and slain just one month later, the newspapers barely reported the story.

Indeed, some white serial killers have deliberately exploited this sorry circumstance in order to avoid detection. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, preyed mostly on African-American and Asian young men, apparently in the belief that the police would pay less attention to the disappearance of minority victims.

And in the 1920s, the hideously deranged child-killer/cannibal Albert Fish snatched an untold number of black children from the streets of inner-city ghettos for the same reason.

In short, one reason that most Americans haven’t heard much about black serial killers is that, throughout the decades, the police have been lax in pursuing them and the media uninterested in reporting on them—so long, that is, as the victims were also black.