17 Little Old Ladies Who Were Actually Unspeakably Brutal Murderers

When most people think of serial killers, their thoughts turn to steely-eyed young men with a penchant for wearing a lady’s skin, not little old ladies. Grandmothers might not be the typical version of a bloodthirsty murderer, but when you think about it, being a sweet, beloved old woman is the perfect cover for murdering a bunch of strangers and burying them under your floorboards. Grandmas who kill are motivated for a lot of different reasons: sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s because they felt God told them to, and sometimes it's out of pure boredom. 

Whatever the reason, old ladies who murdered are often the least expected suspect with the most gruesome of crimes. These geriatric female serial killers committed horrific acts of violence, and while most of them paid dearly for their crimes, at least one of them walks free despite her sins. Remember to be nice to grandmother the next time you see her, you never know what hidden talents are up her sleeve.

For 20 years Amelia Dyer is said to have killed more than 400 infants while she was working as a "baby farmer," someone who adopts children for lump sums of money. It was common practice in Victorian England for older women to take in children for a fee. She offered her services to young mothers who were unwed or unable to care for their children. 

Initially, she would neglect the children until they died, but when that began to take too long she started murdering them at the onset of their adoption in order to make more of a profit.

Police were only able to pin one murder on her, but investigators found concrete evidence of 12 and 50 children. However, it's widely speculated she killed hundreds more. She was sentenced to death and killed in the summer of 1896.

At the age of 64, sweet old Dorothea Puente was put on trial for murdering nine people, including a former boyfriend. She was convicted after her victims' bodies were found buried under her unlicensed boarding home in Sacramento.

Puente went out of her way to murder victims who police referred to as shadow people: the elderly, alcoholics, and the disabled - people without friends or family. She would give her victims fatal doses of drugs, causing them to overdose, and then cash their Social Security checks. She was finally arrested in the early '90s, and sent to prison where she died at the age of 82. 

This old lady killer liked to off her own kind: other old ladies. Between 1998 and 2006, Barraza murdered close to 50 women while moonlighting as a luchador named La Dama del Silencio (The Silent Lady.) Most of the women she killed were over the age of 60, and she either strangled or bludgeoned them to death before robbing them. After her arrest she was sentenced to 759 years in prison. 

Italian serial killer Leonarda Cianciulli's murderous career only lasted one year, but this older woman with a penchant for the occult made the most of her victims. Between 1939 and 1940, Cianciulli killed three women as human sacrifices to break a family curse.

Cianciulli suffered numerous miscarriages and lost many of her children to illness when they were young. To protect her surviving children, she turned to the occult for answers, and chose to offer the dark powers human sacrifices in exchange for safety.

In order to dispose of the bodies, she dismembered them. She would turned them into soap or bake them into tea cakes. She noted that her final victim made excellent soap, and a wonderful snack: "The cakes, too, were better: that woman was really sweet.”

Nannie Doss was a sweet old lady who loved to fill her family up on home cookin' and arsenic. She began her silent murder spree at the age of 16 when she tried to poison her first husband. When she failed, she turned her murderous sights on two of her daughters.

For the next 30-some years, Doss would go on to allegedly kill four husbands, her mother, one of her mothers-in-law, her two sisters, a grandson, and a nephew. She was finally caught in 1954 when her fifth husband keeled over after drinking his morning coffee. The doctor who performed the autopsy found enough arsenic in his body to kill a horse and suspected foul play. In jail, she confessed to her killings and served a life sentence. This didn't seem to phase her. News reports from the time say she was cheery, going as far to joke to journalists about her dead husbands. 

When asked why she killed, she told investigators it was a case of "marital boredom." 

These two Southern Californian women, dubbed the “Black Widows,” set up an elaborate scheme where they would take in homeless men, apply for life insurance policies for these men valued in the thousands, and then crush them with their cars in staged hit-and-run accidents. 

The ladies received $2.8 million in insurance payouts before their plot was unearthed. The two successfully killed two men, but were discovered after they botched a third killing. They tried to convince a homeless man named Jimmy Covington to apply for an $800,000 life insurance policy. He became suspicious and fled. Golay and Rutterschmidt were charged with two counts each of murder and conspiracy in the deaths of Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados and were sentenced to life in prison.

Faye Copeland worked with her husband Ray to kill drifters who they would lure to their Missouri farm.

Ray Copeland was a known fraud in his small Missouri town. When money was tight, he would pick up drifters to act as farm hands to commit cattle fraud. The drifters would buy cattle using bad checks and then after the transaction was done, they would mysterious disappear. That's because the couple would kill them and bury them on the farm. Faye even sewed a quilt from her victims' clothes. 

They were arrested after a former employee called a Crime Stoppers tip line in 1989. Both Ray and Faye Copeland were sentenced to death. Faye is the oldest woman to be put on death row. Her sentence was reduced on appeal, and she died in 2003 after having a stroke. 

Hazel Dulcie Bodsworth had a reputation for baking cakes and delivering them to the local police station. That's why it was such a huge surprise when it was later revealed she killed three men, including the father of her four children.

Bodsworth, an Australian woman, had a penchant for staging her killings as accidents. Her first husband "accidentally" drowned, another of her victims was tragically burned in a "strange" house fire. She even tried killing her son-in-law by shoving him into a hole, but he survived the attack.

When she was finally caught by the police in 1964, she and her new husband were on their way to pick up their newly adopted son. She admitted everything and only had to go to prison for 14 years. 

Melissa Ann Shepard might look like a sweet old lady, until you find out her nickname is "The Black Widow." This 81-year old woman from Halifax, Canada murdered two of her five husbands and tried killing the others over the span of two decades. Her method of choice was to give her husbands tranquilizers causing them to overdose. 

After the death of her second husband she was convicted of manslaughter and was sentenced to six years in prison. She was released early, and went on to kill another man. Evidence also shows she tried unsuccessfully to kill two of her other husbands as well. Police finally charged her with attempted murder after the near death of her fifth husband. Her husband had been admitted to the hospital for poisoning, and they found a stockpile of prescription pills from five different doctors at her home. 

She's out of jail now, but does have to report to police any potential relationship with a man and to report weekly either by telephone or in-person to the police.

Tamara Samsonova, also known as the "Granny Ripper," is a 68-year-old woman from Russia who confessed to killing 11 people over the span of two decades. Shortly after she was arrested the police found Samsonova's diaries, which included the gruesome details of how she would murder, dismember, and eat some of her victims.

As brutal as the details of her story are, her journals give a fairly straightforward version of each of her crimes: "I killed my tenant Volodya, cut him to pieces in the bathroom with a knife, put the pieces of his body in plastic bags and threw them away in the different parts of Frunzensky district."