10 Terrifying Women Who Committed Murder by Torture

They lived in different times, in various countries. Some were homemakers, Gestapo employees, Nazi concentration camp guards, jealous lovers, landlords, or even just the supposed friend of a tenant. It’s difficult to believe, but each of the ten women on this list committed an act extremely uncommon among women: murder by torture.

Related: 10 Trivial Disputes That Led To Tragic Murder Cases

10 Elizabeth Branch

As The New Newgate Calendar relates, in 1740, during the indictment of Elizabeth Branch and her daughter Mary for murdering Jane Buttersworth, their dairymaid, Ann Somers testified that Buttersworth returned late after being sent for yeast, so Mary struck her. Then, she and her mother threw Buttersworth down, whipping and beating her until she collapsed, unconscious.

After Mary tried to revive the girl, Somers went outside to milk the cows. When she returned, Buttersworth was dead, but Elizabeth denied this, ordering Somers to lie abed with the corpse that night and to stay in the house the next day, on the night of which Elizabeth “privately” buried the girl’s body.

The nighttime burial aroused neighbors’ suspicions. The coroner, notified, issued a warrant to recover the body and found that Buttersworth’s multiple injuries were such that “almost any of them” could have been fatal. The defense argued that Buttersworth, subject to fits, had sustained her injuries in a fall but offered no proof.

The jury found the mother and daughter guilty, and they were hanged. Elizabeth called upon those who witnessed her execution to treat their own servants well, while Mary pleaded with them to avoid crimes like hers. Contemporary pamphlets circulated about the case, making it one of the more infamous servant-abuse trials of the 18th century.^[1]

9 Elizabeth Brownrigg

Had Elizabeth Brownrigg been present at the Branches’ hangings, she might have taken their words to heart, avoiding her own execution on September 14, 1767. As the Capital Punishment UK website observes, Brownrigg had “systematically tortured and abused her apprentice girls, eventually killing one of them.”

Brownrigg’s husband was eventually arrested, and although she and her son sought to escape, they, too, were apprehended. Brownrigg was tried for the murder of her apprentice, Mary Clifford, whom the family had kept locked in a cellar, starving her, while the household beat her for the least infractions, real or imagined. Witnesses testified to the family’s cruelty. The jury found Brownrigg guilty, and the judge sentenced her to be hanged. Afterward, he ordered that her body be “dissected and anatomised.”

Her notoriety was so great that her name entered English folklore; satirists and reformers alike used her case as an example of unchecked cruelty in London’s apprentice system.^[2]

8 Lorraine Thorpe

On September 7, 2010, Lorraine Thorpe, 16, received a life sentence for killing two individuals when she was 15 years old. Forty-one-year-old Paul Clarke was also convicted of the murders, the victims of which were Thorpe’s father, Desmond Thorpe, and Rosalyn Hunt, a mother of two. Desmond Thorpe was smothered to prevent him from notifying the police about Hunt’s earlier murder.

Clarke, having already been jailed for life, would have to serve at least 27 years. Hunt’s death was considered torturous because Thorpe had beaten the injured woman to death over a period of days, kicking and punching her and stomping on her head. In August 2023, Thorpe, then 29, was denied parole.

British tabloids dubbed her “Britain’s youngest female double murderer,” and her case shocked the public because of both her age and the sheer brutality of the crimes.^[3]

7 Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova

Russian noblewoman Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova (1730–1801) was as imaginative and brutal a killer as she was sadistic. Contemporary rumors claimed she tortured and killed as many as 650 serfs, though official investigations confirmed around 138 suspicious deaths.

She was said to burn victims with hot irons, pour ice water over them and leave them to freeze, beat them to death over several days, cover them in honey so insects would devour them, sew their lips shut to starve them, and even bite chunks from their flesh.

Due to her high social rank, early complaints were ignored until a petition reached Catherine the Great. In 1762, the empress ordered Saltykova’s arrest. After six years of investigation, she was found guilty of multiple murders. She was publicly exhibited in Moscow’s Red Square with a sign proclaiming her crimes, before being confined for the rest of her life in a convent prison.^[4]

6 Juana Bormann

Despite being a devout Catholic, concentration camp guard Juana Bormann earned a reputation for cruelty. She often beat prisoners or set her dog—by some accounts, a German shepherd, by others, an Irish wolfhound—on her victims. At least two prisoners’ deaths were attributed to mauling.

Following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where she was stationed in 1945, Bormann was arrested and tried by a British military court. Accusations included selecting prisoners for execution and setting her dog on inmates. While some charges, such as direct involvement in Mengele’s experiments, remain debated, the brutality of her conduct was well attested.

Convicted of war crimes, she was hanged on December 13, 1945, and buried in an unmarked grave in Hameln. Among the group of female guards executed that day, Bormann stood out for her especially vicious use of animals as instruments of torture.^[5]

5 Anneliese Kohlmann

A chilling photograph by George Rodger shows two German guards knee-deep in decaying flesh and bones, hauling bodies into a Belsen mass grave. One of them is Anneliese Kohlmann.

When the SS staff fled the camp, she slipped back in disguised as a prisoner—reportedly to pursue a romantic affair with a female inmate. Her secret was revealed only after the camp’s liberation.

Despite this relationship, Kohlmann was infamous for brutality at an SS camp in Neugraben, where she was known to beat and whip pregnant women until they passed out or died. After the war, she was tried and sentenced to two years in prison. However, survivors regarded this punishment as far too lenient given her record of cruelty.^[6]

4 Christa Pike

Christa Pike, 18, became the youngest American woman sentenced to death in modern times for her role in the torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Pike, jealous and convinced Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured her to a secluded area.

Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed before a pentagram was carved into her chest. Pike then bashed Slemmer’s skull with a chunk of asphalt. She even kept a fragment of the victim’s skull in her jacket pocket as a grisly trophy.

Pike remains on Tennessee’s death row. Her history of violence has continued behind bars: in 2004, she attempted to strangle an inmate with a shoestring, and in 2012, she was accused of plotting an escape.^[7]

3 Michelle Knotek

The Court of Appeals of Washington’s 2006 decision regarding Michelle Knotek’s appeal revealed horrific facts about her crimes.

According to testimony, Kathy Loreno, who boarded with the Knoteks in South Bend, Washington, was poisoned, starved, forced to work outdoors in harsh weather with little or no clothing, and subjected to constant beatings until she lost over 100 pounds, her hair, and her teeth. Eventually, she died, and her body was burned and buried by the family.

Another tenant, Ronald Woodward, suffered nearly identical abuse until he, too, died and was buried in the backyard.

Michelle was convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter. Though she sought to overturn her conviction, the court found no grounds to do so. Her story became widely known through the 2021 true-crime book If You Tell, which chronicled her shocking cruelty.^[8]

2 Natalie Vinje

Initially charged with first-degree murder, Natalie Vinje pleaded guilty to manslaughter in June 2024. Nearly a year later, she was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Vinje participated in the torture death of Tammie Howard, aka “Irish,” who was hanged from a garage rafter for twelve hours while the killers beat her and shot her with a nail gun. Her body was later buried near Gleichen, Alberta. In 2021, nearly five years after the killing, a fisherman discovered Howard’s skull on Siksika Nation lands, finally breaking open the case.

Vinje’s motive appears to have been anger at Howard for leaving her stranded 62 miles (100 km) away in Drumheller. She is one of several defendants convicted in the case.^[9]

1 Rosa Baca

Rosa Baca, 55, of Porterville, California, was convicted of murdering her boyfriend, Jose Magaña, 38, by beating him to death with a hammer—an act which added a charge of torture to the first-degree murder indictment.

Baca told investigators that he had left their trailer after they had argued, leaving his shirt and shoes behind. The next morning, she claimed, he returned injured. But police found no signs of a struggle, and Magaña’s feet were clean, inconsistent with her story that he had walked barefoot in the rain.

Baca also insisted she had not left the trailer that night, but her car was found warm. Surveillance footage showed her dumping something in a dumpster—believed to be clothing.

Convicted on December 17, 2018, she was sentenced to life in prison. Local papers reported that prosecutors described the killing as among the most brutal hammer murders ever seen in Tulare County.^[10]