10 Sex Workers Turned Cold-Blooded Killers

When you hear about sex worker crimes, it's normally cases where the prostitutes are the victims. In fact, there are plenty of horror stories of prostitutes being targeted by serial killers. They are especially vulnerable because of the illegality of their work and the fact that they often won't be noticed missing as quickly, making them natural prey for a criminal. But there is another story, the story of the killer prostitute, which isn't heard as often -well, besides in the movie Monster, anyway.

Prostitutes have access to people at their... well, at their most exposed. Literally and figuratively. And intimate access to a person's personal life in a private space is the perfect opportunity for murder. Sometimes prostitutes are just defending themselves, sometimes it's just an opportunity for a sociopath to run wild, but prostitution and murder seem to be all too frequently linked.

Not just a Charlize Theron role, Aileen Wuornos was a real woman, and perhaps the most famous female serial killer. She shot seven men between 1989 and 1990. Working as a prostitute, she said that all of these men had raped or attempted to rape her. But not everyone believed it was self-defense. She was sentenced to death - six times, in fact. She was eventually killed by lethal injection in 2002. 

With a sordid background that including trading sex for cigarettes at age 11, a father in prison for child molestation, sex with her own brother, and possible molestation by her grandfather, Wuornos's tragic life has been documented in books, documentaries, and the film Monster. 

Rosemary West and her husband Fred were two of the most prolific and violent killers that the UK has ever seen. Rosemary worked as prostitute for extra money, but it was her murders with her husband that were her true crimes. Though she was thought to have murdered both her step-daughter and the girl's mother, most of the victims were young women who were kidnapped and tortured between 1973 and 1979. The cellar of the West home was a torture chamber where they would sexually abuse their victims. Not to mention West was complicit in Fred's rape of their daughters and in the murder of one.

Eventually, Rose was found guilty of ten counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Her husband committed suicide while in jail awaiting trial.

When a Confederate soldier's body was found in a bed - and his head was found on the floor - witnesses remembered he had been with a beautiful woman earlier. The woman, legend goes, was Molly Hatchet. A prostitute with great beauty and a thirst for blood (specifically decapitation), she was thought to target lonely men. Wherever she was seen, headless bodies turned up not far behind. Sometimes, the heads themselves were never found. She became so legendary that a Southern rock band named themselves after her. A tribute, of sorts. 

When your dad is the whorehouse fiddler (yes, a real profession in the 19th century), it's only a matter of time before you join in the family business. And at age 12, Delia Swift (nicknamed Bridget Fury for her fiery temper) became a prostitute and an early career criminal. One thing you can say about her is that she loved knives. After a conviction for a stabbing in Ohio, she took refuge in New Orleans. But she didn't stop stabbing there: she ended up with dozens of crimes under her belt, not only murder but throwing eggs at another prostitute. Because that's a thing. 

Perhaps the only woman who loved the blade as much as Bridget Fury was Mary Jane "Bricktop" Jackson. She was rumored to carry a specially designed knife with a five inch blade on each end. Oh, and she designed it herself... as you do, if you don't want to waste time figuring out which is the pointy end. 

Jackson actually moved in with Fury in 1857 as a fellow prostitute-murder aficionado. You can imagine what their chat around the house sounded like. Bricktop slashed countless men, including her husband, before finally spending a year in jail for killing a man who had a ball and chain where his arm should be. That's right, an actual ball and chain, which is as badass as it is terrifying. When she got out, Jackson promptly disappeared, presumably on the run. 

She may have been a murderer, but Barbara Hoffman must have been convincing. When she called her boyfriend saying she had found a body - who just happened to be a client of hers from the "massage parlor" she worked - and that she just needed help to move it, he actually believed her. Love really is blind. 

But a guilty conscience must have set in, because he eventually reported her to the police. He was found a few months later, having been murdered by cyanide poisoning. And the first victim? Also found with deadly level of cyanide in his system. Hoffman was, unsurprisingly, found guilty of murder. The story was made into a book and movie, The Winter Of Frozen Dreams.  

Rough sex gone wrong or a violent burglary? When Juan Carlos Martinez-Herrera and Edwin Faulkner killed John Laubach, the facts pointed in both directions. The flower designer was bound and gagged so tightly that he died from asphyxiation. Though they said the death was an accident during consensual sex, they were found in Florida with a suitcase of valuables from Laubach's home. Not a great sign. 

“The defendants may not have intended the death of John Laubach, but there is no doubt they recklessly engaged in conduct that killed him," the prosecutor said. In any case, it's definitely not what Laubach signed up for. 

If you don't want to get caught committing murder, you may want to erase your message trail. Unfortunately for them, Amanda Logue and Jason Andrew, two adult film stars, sent these messages back and forth:   

Andrews: I'm so glad you're really commited (sic) to this take. Keep eyes for a knife, etc (sic) for me!

Logue: I'm (expletive) exited (sic) … I want to (have sex) after we kill hum (sic).

Andrews: You just get him relaxed and face down … Take. Your. Time.

Wow. Not exactly criminal masterminds. Logue, who also occasionally worked in prostitution, had been hired for a sex party where she and Andrew left their victim bludgeoned to death, with blood spattered over the walls. They also left with a credit card and $6,000 in cash. Unsurprisingly, their texts, tweets, and other communication left a pretty easy trail for the police. They were arrested a few weeks later. 

When there is so much blood in a place that the prosecutor can't worked out what even happened, you know that there was some serious violence. Whatever Edith McAlinden, her son John, and Jamie Gray did to their three victims, it was no joke. McAlinden was a drifter who also worked as a prostitute and she had recently been released from jail. It was suggested that she had an argument with her boyfriend over money and stabbed him, before calling her son and his friend over to help take care of the witnesses. 

That's when hell broke lose. Not only were the victims beaten with an ax, hammer, golf club, and baseball bat, among many other things, but boiling water was poured over at least one of them, in an inconceivable attempt to see if he was still alive. Despite these "appalling levels of savage violence,",McAlinden was found holding a corpse and screaming at it to wake up. Talk about wishful thinking. 

There's overkill and then there's tasering someone, suffocating him to death, and chopping him into pieces - but that's exactly what happened to Francis Zarzycki, a Philadelphia man. Two prostitutes, Angel Weston and Stephanie Foulke, and their pimp killed the man, whose torso was found in the river. Just the torso, that is... no head or limbs.

Zarzycki was a frequent costumer and it was thought that the three assailants had planned a robbery that went wrong. Really wrong. The body was only identified because of a tattoo on the torso, which is a sentence nobody every wants to hear.