Instead, Dyer discarded the children, made them overdose on opioids, and hid their bodies. It took 30 horrifying years before anybody figured out her crimes. By the time she was caught, Dyer had murdered an estimated 400 children.

Legend has it that Lavinia would feed their visitors poisoned tea and invite them to lie down when they didn’t feel well. Then, while they rested, her husband John would stab them to death and rob them blind.

When they finally checked her home, they found 138 of the serfs under her care had died, all under suspicious and brutal circumstances.

After getting away with his first murder, Bell teamed up with a friend named Norma Bell to kill again. The pair attacked a three-year-old this time; cutting his flesh with scissors, mutilating his penis, and carving an « M » for « Mary » into his stomach.

Afterward, Rosemary started luring women into the house so that she and her husband, Fred, could rape and murder them. They didn’t stop with strangers, either as the pair sexually abused their own children, as well.

At first, Bathory only murdered peasants, luring them in by hiring them as serving girls in her castle and then beating and torturing them to death. When she started to realize that she was getting away with it, though, she started to lure in some of the lesser gentry, as well.

She’d burn, starve, and mutilate the girls under her care. She’d scald them with tongs, cover them in honey and ants, and even bite the flesh off of their faces before giving them the mercy of death.

Puente would load up her tenants up pills and drugs until they overdosed, then suffocate them while they were unconscious and bury them out back. By the time she was caught, Puente had already killed at least nine people.

When Leonarda Cianciulli’s son went off to war, she became convinced that the only way to keep him safe was through sacrifice. And so she lured a woman into her home, drugged her, hacked her body into pieces, and used her remains to make soap and teacakes — which she then served to her friends.

Between 1998 and 2006, Barraza killed an estimated 40 elderly women. She would trick them into thinking that she was going to help them sign up for welfare programs, and then either bludgeon or strangle them to death. She later explained that she killed the women because they reminded her of her mother.

She’d killed them, as Jones would later tell the police, because she thought the hospital needed a pediatric intensive care unit and, apparently, that was worth the lives of 46 babies.

While working in a maternity hospital, she became convinced that some of the babies of the poor would be better off if they were never born at all. She started deliberately neglecting children and letting them die, often with the parents’ support. She’d quote them a fee to murder their babies, then tell them how much more it would cost if they tried to raise them alive.

Despite having massacred more than 100 children, Ishikawa was only given four years in prison.

In reality, though, the twisted women poisoned every baby they were given and disposed of their bodies. They massacred at least a dozen infants before they were finally caught. The paired died together, hanging side-by-side.

Hoyt reported the deaths of her children, pretending that they’d been tragically lost through Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At the time, nobody questioned her story. However, about 30 years later in 1994, a forensic pathologist named Dr. Linda Norton looked over Hoyt’s case while studying SIDS and realized that these deaths had been no accident.

For Gunness, though, murder wasn’t a one-time thing. She made it a living, luring in men with ads that called herself a « comely widow » and then murdering them for their money. Over the course of eight years, she murdered upwards to 40 people including several children.

It took three years before the people of Leiden, in the Netherlands, figured out what she was doing. By the time they’d caught her, Maria Swanenburg had already killed 90 people.

Inside, a slave was chained to the stove. She’d started the fire in an attempt to kill herself. If she didn’t, Madame LaLaurie was going to take her up to the attic, where horrible things happened.

Up in the attic, they found slaves were chained and bound to the walls, all horribly beaten and tortured, some with their skin flayed off. For years, Madame LaLaurie had been torturing her slaves to death and the pain had been so unendurable that some would rather burn alive than go through it. Madame Lalaurie’s story was featured in the third season of American Horror Story.