Read Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century Online
Authors: Sylvia Perrini
Tags: #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century
WOMEN SERIAL KILLERS
IN
THE 20
th
CENTURY
SYLVIA PERRINI
GOLDMINEGUIDES
.COM
Copyright © 2013
Sylviaperrini.goldmineguides.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
This book is for informational and entertainment purposes. The author or publisher will not be held responsible for the use of any information contained within this eBook.
DISCLAIMER
In researching this book, I gathered material from a wide variety of resources, newspapers, academic papers, and other material both on and offline. In many cases, I have referenced actual quotes pertaining to the content throughout. To the best of my knowledge, the material contained is correct. Neither the publisher nor the author will be held liable for incorrect or factual mistakes.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Despite centuries of horrific acts of cruelty, bloodshed and murder, women are still regarded as the gentle nurturing sex.
In Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century, as in the Women Serial killers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, I only look at profiles of women who committed their crimes without a male partner involved. In the majority of the cases, all the women committed their crimes solely on their own.
The 20th-century, like the previous centuries, has seen no end of murders by women with poison as their choice of weapon. Furthermore, just like in the previous centuries, the murders have been just as cold and calculating.
Why do women prefer to murder with poison? I’ve come to suspect three reasons:
1. It avoids physical confrontation.
2.
It is cleaner than the ugly bloodied scenes of guns or knives.
3.
The women serial killers believe it is a method that will allow them to get away with murder.
Those lucky few who have managed to survive an attempted murder by these women have described being poisoned as being equal to being devoured alive.
However, the 20th century has also seen murders committed by women with guns and, in the case of Dana Gray, with physical violence. Dana is a rarity among women serial killers, in both her choice of victim and her hands-on method of using her hands, a cord or rope, and an object with which to batter her victim.
Aileen Wuornos was described in the popular press as the first American woman serial killer. This is totally incorrect. American women serial killers existed long before Aileen Wuornos was even born. Yet, even after all this time, we are left with the same question: what leads a woman to commit serial murder? After much study, I’ve concluded there are several reasons:
1. The vast majority of serial murders committed by women in the 20th century, as in earlier centuries, have been committed for money and materialistic gain.
2.
Other reasons include a need to overpower either someone who is abusive or someone who is physically stronger.
3.
Attention seeking behavior and personality disorders such as schizophrenia, Münchausen syndrome, and Borderline Personality Disorder to name just a few.
In this book, I examine the profiles of twenty-five women serial killers, all of whom acted alone.
I have not included mothers who solely kill their own children as I believe that is a subject that deserves to be written about entirely separately.
Even leaving those specific types of Women Serial Killers aside, there are still many women who choose to commit murder again, and again, and again…
Welcome to the world of 20th century women serial killers.
Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan, née Duggan, was born in October 1868 in Litchfield, Connecticut. Amy was the eighth child born to James Duggan and Mary Kennedy.
In 1897
, Amy married James Archer and in December of 1897, they had a daughter Mary. In 1904, the Archers opened a boarding house, “Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly", in Newington, Connecticut. They soon built up a reputation as genteel caregivers for the area’s wealthy elderly providing nurturing tonics and nutritional meals, despite neither Amy nor James having any medical qualifications. It was an era when there were no regulations governing nursing homes.
The home was so successful that, within six years, they upgraded to a larger property in nearby Windsor.
Shortly after the move in 1910, James Archer died. His death certificate issued by the local coroner, Dr. King, said the cause of death was kidney disease. A few weeks before James’s death, Amy had insured his life, and the day after James funeral, at which she cried profusely and was comforted by Dr. King, she visited the insurance office.
Amy’s care home rates were considered
exceptionally reasonable. She would charge $7 per week or a one-time upfront fee of $1,500 for lifetime care. However for Amy’s home, with only fourteen paid beds, to remain profitable, she realized that she needed a constant supply of fresh patients.
Between 1907 and 1910
, twelve of Amy’s patients had died. Given the ages of the patients, four deaths per year were not considered suspicious. However, after James’s death, that number began to rise significantly.
The increase in deaths in the summer of 1911 was partly attributed to the unprecedented heat wave that hit the northeastern United States. More than 3,000 deaths had been
attributed to this natural disaster. Yet even after the heat wave had finished, the elderly patients in Amy’s home continued to die. Dr. King attributed each death to old age.
In 1913,
Amy met and married a rich widower, Michael Gilligan. Soon after the wedding, he changed his will leaving his entire estate to Amy. On the 20
th
of February in 1914, Michael died after eating one of Amy’s special nutritional dinners. Dr. King gave the cause of death as “natural causes.”
Many of Amy’s patients had no relatives to keep an eye out for them
, but one resident, Franklin Andrews, an apparently healthy man, had a sister, Nellie Pierce, who regularly visited him. When he died unexpectedly on May 29, 1914, Nellie became suspicious. The cause of her brother’s death, according to Dr. King was a gastric ulcer. Going through her brother’s papers, Nellie noted that Franklin had just signed an agreement allowing Amy to withdraw a large amount of money. Nellie began watching the obituary column in the local paper and began to feel evermore alarmed by the number of deaths occurring at the home.
Nellie, as her suspicions grew
, went to the district attorney’s office and reported her findings. The District Attorney checked the death certificates and seemed satisfied that everything was in order.
Nellie then went to see a
journalist at the
Hartford Courant
and relayed her suspicions to him. He promised to investigate.
The reporter discovered that there had been forty-eight deaths at
the home over a five-year period and that shortly before each death, the elderly patient had signed over to Amy large sums of money. Dr. Howard King had signed the death certificates in each case as due to natural causes. The journalist, by consulting with other physicians around Connecticut, learned that an average death toll in a small establishment as Amy’s would be eight to ten over a five-year period, not forty-eight.
The reporter wrote up his
story on May 9, 1916, and entitled it “The Murder Factory”.
The story forced the police to investigate. Armed with a search warrant
, they raided “Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly.” In the clinic’s storerooms, the police found large amounts of bottled arsenic. Amy explained that they were to keep the rats under control. The police did not believe her and requested the local judge for permission to exhume some of the patient’s bodies as well as that of Amy’s last husband, Michael Gilligan. Altogether, five bodies were exhumed, and all were found to have died either by arsenic or strychnine poisoning.
Amy Archer-Gilligan
Amy was arrested and charged with five counts of murder. Her trial took place in Hartford, Connecticut in June of 1917. Amy pleaded not guilty. On June 18, 1917, a jury found her guilty. The judge sentenced her to death. Amy appealed and was granted a new trial in 1919 in which she pleaded insanity. Amy’s daughter, Mary, testified that her mother was a morphine addict. In this trial, the jury found Amy guilty of second-degree murder, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
It soon became obvious to prison authorities by Amy’s behavior that she was insane, and she was moved to an insane asylum. She died in 1928, at the age of 59 at the Connecticut state insane asylum.
DAGMAR OVERBYE
And Her Kitchen Stove
Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye was born on April 23
rd
1887 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dagmar began running a service offering to find homes for illegitimate babies in 1915. For this service, she charged mothers a one-time fee.
However, Dagmar did not
make any attempt to find homes for these babies. Once they were in her care, she simply disposed of them by either strangling them or drowning them. She disposed of the corpses in her kitchen stove.
Her crimes were discovered when a young unmarried mother,
Karoline Aagesen, placed an advertisement in the newspaper in July of 1920 looking for a family to adopt her new-born daughter. The advertisement was answered by Dagmar who said she would find a loving home for the baby girl. With a heavy heart, Karoline handed over her baby and two hundred Kroner ($34.88
)
to Dagmar.
The following day, Karoline visited Dagmar to ask for her daughter back. Dagmar told her that she could not recall the address of the family where she had placed the baby. The heart-broken Karoline reported the incident to the police. The police went to Dagmar’s apartment in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district on Englhavevej.
On searching the apartment, the police discovered baby clothes and charred bones and a baby’s skull in the kitchen stove. In the attic of the apartment, more baby bones and skulls were discovered. Dagmar was arrested.
Dagmar under questioning confessed to killing sixteen babies. At her trial, which became one of the most talked about in Denmark’s history, she was convicted of nine murders.
Dagmar was sentenced to death
, but this was later changed to life imprisonment. Dagmar died in prison on May 6, 1929, at the age of forty-two.
The trial caused the laws on childcare in Denmark to be changed.
Although only convicted of nine murders, the authorities believed the number could have been closer to thirty; this number included Dagmar’s own baby.