10 Disturbingly Sneaky Female Murderers Who Nearly Got Away

There comes a time in every person’s life where they glance around a room and consider beating someone to death with a packet of rice or smacking them with a spoon. Most people overcome this urge and move on with their lives, thankfully. However, there have been quite a few women who have decided to take it further and actually murder someone.

But just because they’re murderers doesn’t mean they should have to give up their way of living and go to jail, right? Well, they certainly seem to agree with this sentiment. And so here below is a list of ladies who have killed and the sneaky methods that they used. I’d highly recommend that you don’t cross them . . .

10 Leigh Ann Sabine
Method Of Murder: A Stone Frog

The woman with the perfect murder. Leigh Ann was a nurse when she married John Sabine, a man ten years her senior, who she’d been nursing in a hospital. Throughout their marriage, he was utterly obsessed with her, while she wasn’t really fazed. Fast-forward a number of years, and the couple, living in New Zealand, abandon their five children and set off for the UK.^[1] One day, Leigh Ann decides that she’s tired of her loving husband and so she sets off on an affair with a far younger man recently released from prison. John, the ever-loving and forgiving husband, wins Leigh Ann back and convinces her to move to Wales with him. And this is where the trouble started.

Leigh Ann decided she couldn’t take any more of this man who adored her so. One night in 1997, as he was climbing into bed, she battered him with a stone frog she kept nearby. At first, Leigh Ann would simply tell people who asked about John that he’d run off with another woman. But as the months went on and no one suspected anything, she just started telling the truth. She would tell anyone she met how famous she would be once she died because she had killed her husband and gotten away with it. No one believed it until she passed away in October 2015.

A few days after she died, John’s body was discovered, next to a shed outside a block of flats where they had once lived. John was wrapped in plastic and was still in the pajamas from that fateful night 18 years before. There was even a time when Leigh Ann asked a neighbor to help move his body outside to the shed, claiming it was a medical skeleton from her nursing days. And so Leigh Ann goes down as the perfect murderess: one who told everyone the truth and was never convicted.

9 The Curry Killer
Method Of Murder: Poisoned Curry

Lakhvir Singh is a lady with a serious love for revenge. After she and her lover, Lakhvinder Cheema, split up, she just couldn’t get over him. In 2009, they’d been having a secret affair for 16 years when Cheema decided he wanted to marry a younger woman. When Singh found out about this younger woman, she threatened to burn Cheema’s house down. Later, though, she took off from the UK and headed for India. But it wasn’t for any sort of holiday. Her sole purpose for going to India was to acquire some aconite, a deadly poison. Upon returning to England, she snuck into Cheema’s house and laced a curry dish in the fridge.^[2]

It would have worked perfectly, with no traces pointing to her, except the poison didn’t work as quickly as she had hoped. Once Cheema and his new lover finished supper, he began vomiting. He dialed 999 and told them that he’d been poisoned by his ex-girlfriend and that he’d need to be admitted to the hospital, words that would later incriminate Singh. And so, the jealous lover was sentenced to prison when Cheema later died. The younger lover fortunately survived.

8 Hazelynn Stomps
Method Of Murder: Shoot And Burn

Another almost perfect murder. Hazelynn Stomps was a wife with a problem. She had racked up tons of debt that her husband had no idea about, and she needed money fast. In 2009, she shot her husband at close range on the Christmas tree farm where they lived in Corbett, Oregon. She then burned his body until all that remained were tiny fragments of bone, practically charcoal. She dumped these in the trash can and headed off to the police station to report him missing. And for five days, hundreds of people searched for Jerry Stomps.

Finally, investigators found the fragments and also found the gun with Jerry’s blood on it. And although this didn’t immediately incriminate Hazelynn, one of her elaborate lies did. She had broken her hip while planting fake evidence to make it look like her husband had died in a fishing accident, so she told the police that she and her husband had been attacked instead. Her husband had been abducted, whereas she had been thrown off a bridge and had broken her hip. Later, however, it was revealed that her injury had occurred before the time of the “attack,” and she was thus arrested.^[3] It just goes to show, you have to be a genius if you’re intending on making up fancy lies and then trying to keep track of them all.

7 The Lethal Lovers
Method Of Murder: Smothering

Gwendolyn Graham (pictured above) and Cathy Wood were lovers who worked as nursing aides at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Michigan. In 1987, Graham began killing the elderly patients by smothering them while Wood kept watch at the door. They believed that committing murders together strengthened their bond. And because they simply smothered the patients, it seemed as though all the deaths were natural. It has even been said that she would take a personal item from each victim to serve as a memento of the act.

All was well, and no one suspected anything. The ladies had gotten away with murder. Then one day, over a year later, after the couple had split up, Wood’s conscience got the better of her.^[4] She went to the police and managed to also get a reduced sentence for spilling the beans about Graham. Talk about a dirty breakup!

6 Waneta Hoyt
Method Of Murder: Suffocation

Waneta Hoyt was a mom who killed. In the 1960s and 1970s, she suffocated five of her six children, claiming each time that they had passed away due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). And for the most part, people pitied her and her tragic losses.

20 years later, she confessed to the murders during a study on SIDS in which she was partaking. Her reason? The babies were crying, and she wanted some peace and quiet.^[5]

5 Genene Jones
Method Of Murder: Injection

Genene Jones was a pediatric nurse during the 1980s. Her favorite pastime? Ensuring that she was showered in praise and adoration. To get the praise she felt she deserved, Jones injected the children and babies in her ward with drugs such as heparin. These drugs would cause the kids to experience some sort of medical crisis, such as heart paralysis. Jones, knowing exactly what was really wrong, would then swoop in and save the day. The parents would be beyond thankful, and she would be showered in praise. It was the perfect plan.

Except it didn’t always work, and some children ended up dying. She initially worked at the Bexar County Hospital. The large number of deaths behind her name, strangely enough, didn’t raise much suspicion. She was instead simply asked to leave, as she was clearly not qualified enough. The following clinic she worked at, though, a pediatrician’s clinic in Texas, became suspicious after six children died on her watch.^[6] She was convicted when injection puncture marks were found in a bottle of succinylcholine that only she and the head doctor had access to. So, as many as 60 murders all for the occasional pat on the back and a gold star!

4 Darya Saltykova
Method Of Murder: Torture

Darya Saltykova was a Russian noblewoman in the 1700s. Her favorite pastime? Torturing and killing the many serfs at her disposal. She enjoyed beating the serfs and ended up murdering at least 100 of them. Most of her activities were overlooked simply because of her ranking in society. Eventually, however, she was just killing too many people to be ignored. And so, Empress Catherine decided to put Saltykova on trial.

The death penalty had just recently been abolished, so Catherine didn’t really know what to do with Saltykova. In the end, she decided to put Saltakova on a public platform in Moscow with a sign around her neck that indicated that she had tortured and murdered people.^[7] Saltykova spent an hour on the platform and was later placed in prison for life. There could have surely been a way to stop her before she killed quite so many people, though!

3 Dagmar Overbye
Method Of Murder: Burning

Dagmar Overbye was a Danish woman who was paid to look after children. She soon grew tired of the screaming children and tough lifestyle and started simply killing the ones in her care. She used many methods, such as strangling and drowning. Later, though, she started simply putting the children in an oven and burning them to death.

She killed as many as 25 children before anyone realized. No one really knows how people figured out what she was doing, only that she was convicted of only nine of the murders in 1921 and imprisoned for life after escaping the death sentence.^[8]

2 Tillie Klimek
Method Of Murder: Arsenic

Tillie Klimek was a female serial killer active in Chicago in the early 1900s. She was said by some to be psychic, but in all actuality, she simply told people when she would kill them. She killed several husbands, neighbors, and even a dog by arsenic poisoning. She would joke and tell her victims how few days they had left and that she would soon be buying them a coffin. And then she would poison them.^[9]

It was only after she’d killed three husbands and her fourth became ill that people got a tad suspicious and exhumed the bodies for further inspection. Klimek must not have been that great of a psychic because she never saw prison coming.

1 Countess Elizabeth Bathory
Method Of Murder: Torture

Little Miss Bathory was born in Hungary in 1560. She experienced a pleasant childhood as her uncle instructed her in the ways of Satanism and her aunt taught her about sadomachism. So by the time she got married at 15, she knew all about entertaining herself. All she needed was a few victims and some methods of inflicting pain, and she was happy for hours, which is why her husband, Count Nadady, is said to have agreed to build Elizabeth her own personal torture chamber. What a cutie pie!

Bathory pretty much got away with whatever she wanted because her daddy was quite well-off, and her family included quite a few lords and high-ranking people in society. And so she spent many pleasant years torturing and killing servants and peasants. Sometimes, she would bite chunks out of a screaming, bound victim. Other times, she would tie them up, cover them in honey, and just watch bees sting them. She also particularly enjoyed jamming needles under her servants’ finger nails. The worst thing she did, in my opinion, was making one of these poor girls cook and eat parts of her own flesh while the countess watched.

Bathory is said to be one of the first vampires. She believed that human blood would keep her young. But alas, one day, the king decided that high-ranking or not, she had to be stopped.^[10] It didn’t help that she had decided to try killing off a few nobles’ daughters. Although convicted, she was not sentenced to death, rather just left to rot, confined in a castle. I would not have wanted to come across this bloody countess!

I am a freelance writer from South Africa. I have a passion for anything quirky and interesting.