LADY KILLERS-Tori Telfer

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there are no female serial killers. Lady Killers. Based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and the Hairpin disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Urzebet Bathory, Nanni Das, Marianne Cotton, and Darra Nikolovna Saltakova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.

Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject and then proceeds to unpack back her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes

and sexist cliches then inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it, and tire tropes she was a female fit, a femme fetale, a black widow, a witch.

Delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation, Featuring fourteen illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a blood curdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness. The book that we're featuring this evening is Lady Killers, Deadly Women Throughout History, with my special guests, journalist and author Tory Telfer. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for a Greenness interview. Tory Telfer, Hi, thank

you so much for having me. Thank you so much. This really is quite eye opening. We more than alluded it to it in the introduction. I want to ask a little bit about, because we put it in the introduction, about Jezebel and the Hairpin, the online series, and how this was based on the popular online series, and where you dispute the claim that there are no female serial killers.

So tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to this writing Lady Killers, and tell us a little bit about Jezebel and the Hairpin and this idea that you wanted to spell in this book Lady Killers.

female serial killers because I've always liked creepy history. I've always liked weird history, and I've always liked sort of deranged individuals that history has overlooked. So I pitched the idea to the All and they shot it over to their sister site, The Hairpin, and that's where it started. And I was really pleased how much people liked it. I think, you know, as you probably know, women love true crime, and I just had all these amazing readers

who who really enjoyed reading about these killer women. And then the reason it ended up on Jezebel is because my editor at The Hairpin moved to Jezebel, so she took their home fair, which is nice. And I only ever did four installments of those, and then I started working on the book. But all of those columns are in the book, but in a more updated format with new research and I think some smarter conclusions. So it was a fun process.

than Eileen Werno's or someone else. So I had that. I also tried to make it as diverse as possible in terms of time period, country of origin, method of killing class. You know, serial killers both male and female are very white. But I managed to find a little diversity there. And so I was kind of looking at when I had my women, when I had some of the women I would have to like. Whoever else I wanted to include had to sort of fit into the

ones that were already in there. If that makes sense, sure, and I just I also just kind of looked for ones that just made me excited and intrigued me. And that's really you know, you just sort of know when you come across a serial killer that you want to learn more about. That's kind of a personal criteria that I can't really articulate. But just all the women in this book, there's just something about their stories that I

was like, ooh, that's she sounds complicated or something. So I think that that was all.

first story we talk about with his Erzabit Bathory. But before we get to that, is there some other theme, like when you talk about nineteen ninety eight, you know, the famous profiler Roy Hazel would declaring that there are no female serial killers, and then you say, well, we can find fourteen. There's a little bit more discussed in this book than you just happen to find fourteen female

serial killers. So respond to that statement, I have and compared to what Roy hazel would sayd in nineteen ninety eight and what you.

like that. But all the serial killing is is, you know, I would say, I think the XBI says too, killing three or more people with a cooling off period in between. So just because women are poisoning people and that's maybe not as quote unquote scary, that doesn't mean they're not a serial killer. I mean, you poison three people with a cooling off period in between, you're totally a serial killer. And so I think that's why people, you know, have

thoughts that there haven't been any historically. Does that answer your question?

the grand Dame of serial killers. So talk about she was born in fifteen sixty, talk about her life, some of the things that shaped her, Talk about as you do about the peasants, and you talk about at some point where they have even less rights than they did when we open this story. So tell us a little bit about as you do, about her early life and the society that she was born into and was surrounded.

rumors that she had epileptic fits. Of course, none of these are things to turn someone into a serial killer. But she also seemed to have a penchant for violence. It was a violent time back then, and she would have seen a lot of violence. She probably would have seen some public executions. There's a rumor that she saw a peasant who had been accused of stealing, that she saw him being sewn alive into the belly of a horse, which is almost worse for the horse, and she laughed

and cackled. I mean, you have to be really careful with these things, because it's like it's sort of a hindsight. It's twenty twenty with serial killers type of thing, Like, how do we know she actually cackled diabolically when she saw this peasant being sewn into the belly of a horse. Do we just think that because we know about her later crimes. But there are a lot of there's a lot of rumors in folklore about her early life as kind of troubled and violent, but also very privileged and wealthy.

So she got engaged when she was four, No, when she was ten. She got engaged when she was ten to a fifteen year old son of another incredibly wealthy family. So they were like this superstar match. And there's a rumor that while they were engaged or so, that took a lover this peasant boy and became pregnant by him, and the peasant boy got caught and got thrown to the wolves by her fiance. So it's all very violent stuff, and as you'll see, it's starting to get kind of sexual.

So anyway, her fiance was named sarrienk Not not Dusty, I'm not. I'm not used to saying these names out last, just writing them. So he was a violent man himself. He was a sort of career warrior and he was constantly going off to battle. So the two of them didn't see each other very much during their during their whole marriage. It took them ten years to have their first child, which was really unusual for the time. You know, that wasn't that wasn't what a wife was supposed to do.

And I hate to keep saying rumor says, but a lot of this is rumor. Rumor has it that her husband, Farreank, would learn torture and just sort of terrible cruel things when he was away at war and would come back and teach these things to his wife, who also who was developing a statistic streak, so he would he would teach her how to torture her servant girl. He would teach her these very creative punishments where he would cover a girl with honey and force her to stand outside

naked and just get stung by bees and bugs. He also apparently gave her this romantic gift of a glove with claws attached that she could wear and just splash at her servants if the mood struck. So I think we kind of had these two sociopaths who happened to get married to each other and encouraged each other, and it was kind of their way of bonding because they

didn't often see each other. And while all this is happening, they're getting incredibly wealthy because pharrenk is going off and he's fighting Let's see, I think he's fighting the Ottomans, and so he's like sending back these streams of treasure back to or said it. And it turns out that they get so wealthy that the King of Hungary actually has to borrow from them. So they're not only rich, but they're sort of in this very powerful political position

where the king is in their debts. So you can sort of imagine how that could go to the head of someone who's already got some sociopathic, narcissistic tendencies.

But you talk about that there was some people that moved into the house and Darvolia. They also had this you talk about and again this is some of the stuff that this is why this woman is so infamous. Talk about a torture chamber in this castle that he has given her his wife, and then she has this assistant Darvola. So and also what we haven't explained is how is it that the you know the time, is

that the peasants are so dispensable. What is it? As you explain in the book, the status of the peasant enables this person not only to be able to do whatever they want, but literally do whatever they want, no matter what happens. So explain that as you do in the book.

but the violence was definitely simmering before then. And yeah, before her husband died, she had this this kind of I don't know what to call her, this creepy friend slash peasant woman move in named Anna Darvoglia, and the

locals of the town really didn't like her. They described her as a wild beast in female form, and she was just a bad influence on Ursabet, and she moved into the castle and the servant, the servants started seeing or Sabbat's personality start to change, and then her husband died. Should I move on to that time in her life?

you got it. This isn't right. You know, you can't you have to stop doing this, like this isn't right in the eyes of God, and she got really angry and just hissed at him that you know, she was powerful,

she was untouchable. He couldn't do anything. And yeah, her husband did manage while he was alive to kind of squelch those rumors and keep things under control, but that all ended when he died in sixteen oh four, when Ursabette was forty four years old, and that was one thing started getting really oh go ahead, no, go ahead, I was just gonna say. That's when things started getting terrible, terrible, awful,

awful for her servant girls. And that's when you know the rumor in the confessions that the servants who helped her torture, in the confessions that they gave at the end of their life, they say that this is like a real changing point in her personality. And you know, maybe it was that her husband was gone and she suddenly had all this pressure completely on her shoulders to manage all these estates, to manage all these people. You know,

maybe she was mentally cracking in some way. And then there's also speculation that she hated getting older and wanted to stay young forever. I mean, that is mostly just goth rumors, but you know, that's another thing to throw into the pot.

in the seventeen twenties. Like you say, these people testified, So tell us what these servants said about the kind of torture and the things that they did do in reality to these women.

was that Ursabet was very creative in her torture. So if someone was stewing and made a stewing mistake, she would start by maybe snatching their needle and shoving it into the girl's hand, and then she would say, if it hurts the whore, she can pluck it out, and then the girl would pluck it out, and Ursabette would come at her with shears or something and cut off

her fingers. So she would play these nine games with her girls and do these quote unquote little things for them to hurt them compared to what happened later, But a lot of what went on in these torture chambers was truly tortured to the point of death. She would beat and beat and beat them all. Her torture squad would help. They'd beat the girls with irons, they would burn them. There was testimony that they would use pincers to rip out chunks of flesh. They would lash them.

Just a lot of brutalizing the body to the point of where it wasn't recognizable, and a lot of bloodshed. And it was just like an obsession for Usa that she couldn't She would get very anxious after socializing and she would need to come home and torture or one of her servants, one of the torture squad servants said she couldn't eat or drink until she had seen one of her maids killed in a bloody way. So very story stuff.

us about this genasium and what her plan is. And this is the beginning of the downfall with this idea.

she tells everyone that she's opening this finishing school. It was called a genasium, and you know, she lures these young noble women in and she's promising that she's gonna, I don't know, teach them good posture and how which forks you use and how to sit up straight or whatever.

And she hasn't really fought out the plan past that she didn't the plan was clearly doomed because you know, the law might not protect peasants, but the law certainly protects nobles, and noble parents certainly have resources that peasant parents didn't. So she hasn't thought this plan through. She's just got this blood lust happening. So she ushers these young noble girls in, kills them all, and then she's sort of like, whoops. The parents are mad, they're wondering

where their daughters went. I've gotta I've gotta throw them off the scent. So you can tell her she's really cracking because she comes up with this elaborate story where she says, okay, here's what happened one of the girls stole everyone's jewelry because she was really she was really jealous about it. And I'm sorry, that's not it's even worse.

It wasn't that the girl stole the jewelry. It's that the girls one of the girls was jealous of everyone's jewelry, and so she murdered everyone else because she couldn't have their jewels. She was so jealous, and then she was so sad that she murdered everyone that she herself committed. So the parents hear this story and they're like, that

definitely didn't happen. We have a mad woman on our hands. No, you can just imagine hearing some you know, trembling, pale faced Hungarian countess telling you that story and how terrified you would be. So that wasn't exactly what led to legal action being taken against her, but that didn't help. And and like you said, her down, Paul was starting.

and how does he choose to proceed? How does he suggest they that Thurzele proceeds?

So yeah, the son in law literally wrote, public punishment would shame us all. And as I say, I think that's telling because to me, it says that they suspected or they knew because they weren't flustered. They were almost resigned to this idea that she was going to get caught, and they just didn't want to be embarrassed. It's pretty damning. I think.

due diligence fifteen hundred style. He went around and collected all the evidence he could before bringing an accusation against her. So three hundred and six people gave evidence. But as we've touched on before earlier, the most absolutely, the most damning testimony came from her torture squad, and they were the ones who were saying, you know, she's tearing out chunks of flesh. She's beating these girls until their bloody bodies burst. She's beating them so hard that she herself

was covered in blood. She's torturing them ten times a day. This is all coming out of her servant's mouths. It's very damning. And yeah, there was no number of dead girls that was ever really officially decided upon. The rumors were flying one young witness that there were six hundred, and then the accomplices of the in the torture squad did put it lower around thirty to fifty. Still a huge number of victims for a serial killer. So that

was what happened on the witness stand. And then let's see, three of the torture squad were executed, and then one woman, Kataline, who had always been more soft hearted and always been more reluctant, she was thrown into jail. And then what happened to ursa bet as she was never taken to trial, as was promised to her son and son in law, but she was imprisoned in her own castle and she was literally bricked up in a room with a little

swat to get food through. It was a Gothic Gothic punishment, very befitting our Gothic Hungarian countess.

But basically what happened was the guy who rediscovered her trial transcript in the seventeen twenties was a Jesuit scholar, and he's sort of the one we have to think that we know about her at all, but he's also the one we have to not thank for some of these legends. So he the blood bathroomor I don't know why, but it first appears in the book he wrote, and it does not appear in the trial transcripts, and but

people have watched on to it. I mean, it's compelling, it's fascinating, it's creepy, it makes it explains why she did what she did. You know, well, oh, she was vain, she needed virgin blood, and the bloodbathrumor is become like part of her symbol. So there are a lot of black metal songs about her, and they mentioned bloodbaths. There's a lot of art about her, and she's always in

a bloodbath. That sort of become the number one thing people think about when they think about verst of that bassory, But there's no proof that it's true, and there's a lot of there's a lot of proof that it's not true, like the fact that it's not mentioned in the trial, or like the fact that some of her torture squad mentioned her beating these girls so badly that her blood or that her shirt would get drenched in blood and she would have to stop the torture and go change.

So you know, she's clearly not collecting the blood if that's what she's doing, She's just it's just sort of like a gross side effect. So yeah, the blood baths are not true, as much as you know, it would make for a spooky story.

like this tittilating figure. And I think that's stupid because for trial transcripts, you know, if you read them, they didn't that's not what she was.

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this is just the introduction. This is one of the many chapters is in your book. Let's move on to a chapter you call the Worst Woman on Earth. Lizzie Holliday. And this is in late eighteen hundred. So Lizzie is serving time for Arson in a Pennsylvania East State penn attentiary. And you say he's a model prisoner. So take us back to this story Lizzie Halliday the Worst Woman on Earth, and tell us a little bit about Lizzie Halliday and why on earth she'd be called the worst woman on Earth.

And so she gets transferred to an asylum and does the rest of her sentence there and then she walks free. She gets out of the asylum, she goes straight to this little town in Pennsylvania called Newburgh and meets an older man who is looking for like a housekeeper, and she kind of charms him, even though she's definitely a weird person her whole life. People were both interested in

her and repelled by her. She charms him and she gets the job, and then soon enough he's like, well, if I marry her, it's cheaper, I don't have to pay her the forty dollars a week or whatever he's paying her. So they get married. And there they get married, and.

his poor son inside. And when they came racing back and saw the rubble, Lizzie was standing there and she had She claimed, oh, he died trying to save me. He went back into the fire to try and save me. But somehow they could tell from the sun's bedroom door it was locked and Lizzie had the key with her, so they could tell she had her locked this poor son in there and he had died. So that's like her first murder that barely even gets mentioned because she

there were so many more. But basically, Lizzie is from Ireland, very originally as a young child. She came over to the US when she was young, and her family kind of lost touch with her because she was always difficult, troublesome too much. She would get very angry at you. She would she attacked some of her family members, but she also loved them very deeply. She was just unpredictable and wasn't that much fun to have around. I think

she was married with it five times. She went through all these marriages, often with older men, that ended really poorly. No one died yet, but they were just filled with drama and screaming, and in some of those marriages they were both terrified of each other and bad news all around. So oh, and over this period, there's so many details in her story, so please sedat me if I'm getting

bogged down. But she had a son with one of these men, and he was taken from her when she went to jail for arson this was a separate thing of arson. This wasn't the arson where she killed Paul Holiday's son. And while she was in jail, her son was given away to Foster Home and she was never able to find him. So that was, you know, one of the early tragedies of her life.

So he's gone, He's gone, I'll be back soon, but everyone is suspicious. Her neighbors have heard really strange sounds coming from the farm at night. Paul Holliday's kids were never cool with her, so instantly they're like, I don't like this. We don't know where dad is. So basically what happens is these neighbors decide that they're going to search the farm and see if they can find poor Paul Halliday anywhere. And what happens is they search the

farm house, they don't find anything. They search the barn and they find this big pile of straw, and underneath the straw there's like garbage. And then underneath the garbage they find two bodies. They're looking for one and they find two, and these are two bodies of women. So that was when the town and the police, who quickly got involved, knew that they had sort of an exceptional

case on their hands. This wasn't just one of your husband, you know, wife kills husband in a fit of rage, but this was a far bigger crime than that.

pick them off. She just like starts acting weird, but people report that she has this clever look in her eyes, so they aren't convinced that she's not acting. So she gets blocked up put in jail, where she starts immediately doing her thing where she's screaming and she's being very performative. And meanwhile, Paul Holliday's kids are still worried about their father. So one of the boys goes over to search the farm with a friends, very worried about what he might find.

What he finds is that there's a floorboard in the

kitchen that looks a little unusual. He lifted up the dirt underneath has been disturbed, and they sort of he and his friend put a like a metal rod down to kind of see what's down there, and they hit something that's sort of firm but also soft in a way, and I assume they went screaming out of their and their worst fears were confirmed when it's dug up and it's the body of Paul Holliday, their dad, and he's been shot and he's been hit beaten in the head so hard that his left eye had fallen out of

a socket. So now she's got three bodies kind of around. So she's in jail now, and there's these three bodies that have been found around her home and her farm, and people immediately start questioning whether or not she's insane, because I mean, we still have, you know, the insanity plea.

People are very conflicted by her because she's doing these things that we think of as what someone who's not in their right mind would do, Like she's raving and screaming and picking at her clothes and froughing is a mouth more or less. But then people also sometimes catch her in moments where she seems like she knows what's going on, Like, you know, if she doesn't know anyone's watching,

she'll just sit on her bed very quietly. Once she knows someone's watching, she'll start to scream and tear at her hair and stuff. And she has this knowing look in her eye sometimes that people point at. So people don't know what to make of her, and people really never never do. It's the theme that haunts her whole career as a serial killer. It's people don't know if she was insane or not. And so the bodies of the women are identified, and they're they're sort of random,

like they're not even really her neighbors. They live in a nearby town, and it's a mother and a daughter, and she basically lured them over to her house one after the other on the pretense that she wanted to hire a meeting woman. And she said her name was missus Smith. And you know, we don't there are no witnesses from the night they died, so we don't know

exactly what went down. But she had shot them in the heart and wrapped them up and put cloth around their heads, which is so creepy, and wrap them up and drag them to the barn and put them under the hay. So all that is that their identity comes out.

And as the as she's being held in jail and the trial is getting underway, and then the trial is a lot of speculation about her mental state, and you know, the prosecution has doctors go in and examine her, and she flies at one of them with she picks up the lid off her toilet and her jail cell and tries to crack his head open, and she raves at them, and she talks about the Holy Spirit and the number thirteen, and she says there's a river running outside of her

cell door, and they're not convinced. One of them says that she's overdoing the art, which I love. He's just like, no, you're trying too hard. So basically what happens. But she has this great lawyer. I love her defense layer. There are a lot of really sweet, well meaning defense lawyers in this book who are just like you can just tell they were very empathetic people. And her defense lawyer

is just like everyone looks. She's completely friendless. She's silent, she's not speaking for herself, She's completely silent in this courtroom. She's just this pitiful figure, and she's clearly insane because there's absolutely no motive for this crime of the two of killing the two women, and a motiveless crime is an insane crime, is basically his argument. But the jury

does not buy that argument. The jury debates her a couple of hours, and then they come out and they say guilty of murder in the first degree and not insane in the slightest And I think that no. I know for a fact that with that verdict came the electric chair, and that would have made her the first woman to ever die in the electric chair, I believe, And in fact, the sort of monumentousness of that idea that she would be the first woman in the electric

chair changed people's minds. Immediately after the verdict was handed down, People all of a sudden, we're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, okay, we weren't sure that she was insane, but we didn't actually think she should get the death penalty. It suddenly started seeming too serious and just too terrible to people,

and so people started petitioning the governor. The governor of New York I think to take another look into her case, and he listened, and he actually appointed this special commission of doctors who were, you know, I guess, less biased than the prosecutions doctors to inspect Lollie Holiday and sort of hand down a new verdict on her sanity. And these doctors are also really great. They were appalled at how the trial went down. The trial was way too sensational.

They said, it was just too much of the public screaming that she was saying and she needed the death penalty, and just too much drama, and it wasn't like a fair scientific examination of her mental states. And basically, what this new special Commission of doctors decided, and this is what I believe too of Lizzie Holliday, is that she

was a smart woman. She was not completely clueless. She knew what she was doing because not only could she maintain sort of a normal life and social appointments and pay her bills, but the crimes were well executed. She hid the bodies, she killed normal people. This wasn't the work of someone just kind of raving around with a gun in her hand and no idea where she was.

So they acknowledged that she was smart and she was with it in some way, but they said that she had something called conscious impulsive insanity, which was kind of violence that just burst from her that she couldn't help, and she was sort of, yeah, she was helpless in

the face of her own violence. So they couldn't They said that they couldn't decide if she knew that what she was doing was wrong, but they were positive that she was unable to stop herself from doing it, and so they declared her insane, which got her off the electric chair, got her out of the electric chair, and got her life in the insane asylum at this town called Mattiawan. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

of the insane asylum. So people even at that time were afraid that people might dodge justice by the insanity defense you also talk about very interesting character. Also was a intrepid girl reporter that she was already did investigations into the women's lunatic asylum on Blackwells Island. And she was named Nellie Bly and she had interviewed Lizzie Holiday. So what is some of the stuff, as you write in the book, that she got Lizzie to say or what Lizzie did say to her?

She wanted to talk about, you know, make sure you get my horse to go, you know, she just wanted to talk business in a weird way. But Nellie finally got her to talk about the crimes and what Lizzie did was, and she does this a couple times in her life. Is she kind of acknowledges that she was there, but she uses very passive language and says that some

shadowy other figure did it. It's really weird because you know, if you were gonna, if you were completely with it, you would just deny that you were anywhere near the scene of the crime, I assume, But.

husband and these women and buried them. I don't believe you were ever insane one moment in your life, and that you are the shrewdest and most wonderful woman criminal of the world has ever known. And creepy Lizzie just gave her a big old smile and didn't say anything. And then Nellie goes, did you or did you not

kill these people? And Lizzie says, some other time. My head feels bad now some other times, And then Nellie's about to leave, but she decides to try one more time, and she just asks, do you repent of your crimes? Do you think you did something wrong? And Lizzie says, God will send you back to me, and that's her last blind and Nellie, which is so creepy. And in the article, Nelly says she left the prison with a little chill running to her body.

vibe in the asylum. People aren't scared of her. She's given sewing privileges, so she has a little basket of supplies. And Nellie Wicks is the head attendant of the women's department there, and she's just a great the great girl, great worker, and she has dreams of leaving the asylum and training to be a nurse. But in the meantime she's doing it great. She's doing great work in the asylum. So Lizzie and Nelly get very close, and Nellie just

trusts Lizzie. She thinks that her violent days are over, and she thinks they have a special bond, which they do, but it's a special creepy bond. So finally Nellie gets the news that she's you know, she gets into a nursing school or whatever. So she comes into the asylum and she tells everyone, yeah, I'm leaving to pursue my dreams.

And Lizzie really does not like this, and Lizzie begs her not to go, begs her not to go, and Wick says, you know, I have to go, but everything's gonna be fine, and Lizzie starts murdering, sorry, it's Fridian slip. Lizzie starts murmuring, oh, I'm gonna kill her if she goes. But that was Lizzie. People were used to her making threats. She talks about murdering people under her breath all the time, and she never did anything, so people didn't think anything

of it, which was a huge mistake. So one day before Nellie's last day at work, Lizzie takes her gets her basket of sewing supplies and she gets the scissors out of it and she follows Nellie into the woman's bathroom and Nellie doesn't see that she's there, and Lizzie springs up behind her and starts beating her to the floor and grabs the keys and locks from Nellie's you know, belt or whatever, and locks the door from the inside

and begins to stab Nellie. And she stabs her over two hundred times in the face and the heart and the neck, and by the time the other attendants at the asylum here her screaming and managed to break down the door. She's unconscious and bleeding out, and she dies twenty minutes later. And actually Nelly became because of that. Nelly became the first known female law enforcement officer in the US to be killed in the line of duty. And someone asked, Lizzie, why did you do that? She

was your friend. You guys got a little like, how could you do something this awful? And Lizzy said, she tried to leave me. Yeah, incredible, terrible.

just calmed down and she wasn't violent anymore. But you know, she's already in the she's already in the asylum of her life, so there's really not much they can do, and she just lives out the rest of her days there. Nelly was her last murder. I think that makes her fifth murder. She had attempted to kill a sixth person, but so Nelly was her last murder. And something that's unique about Lizzie is that it's the randomness of her killing.

I mean there's no you know, a lot of people kill family members or like Ted Bundy, like Brunette girls, but Lizzie was just such a random killer. You know, a husband here, some neighbors there, you know of what would you call Nelly, like sort of almost a supervisor figure there. Just really scary. But yeah, she stayed in the asylum for the rest of her life and she died. Let me look up where she died. I forgot. I think she was in her sixties. She was fifty eight.

So she was in the asylum after killing Nellie for a decade and a half.

And then she was still famous. I mean, she became a celebrity like serial killers often do, and she was still famous when she was doing her years in the asylum before she killed Nelly, who journalists would occasionally come out there and check up on her, kind of write an update, but by the time she was dead, she was pretty much forgotten. So this worst Woman on Earth, I couldn't find.

was insane in her way. She had this conscious, impulsive insanity, you know, I don't know, I don't I didn't want to diagnose her with like a term we would use today, but she wasn't sane. So it's just interesting that she got called the worst on Earth. And I think it shows how just horrified people were of her and how grossed out they were of her. There was a lot of referring to her as an animal or this sort

of wild, feral beast, which they said about Bathory too. Actually, so yeah, those I think there's a lot to say about the fact that she was called the worst woman on earth or absolutely.

and they don't see that happening. So this is like nineteen nineteen, I think, and Alexandria is very tense. There's a lot of riots, there's a lot of violence breaking out, there's strikes going out. The Egyptian people, the Alexandrian people are very angry at the authorities. And because of all this violence, the police are kind of distracted. And so our tale takes place in the poorest district of Alexandria,

which is called a Laban. And not only are the police distracted by these riots and demonstrations, but the police were never paying that much attention to this district in the first place, because I mean, we've you know, we've seen how this go. You know, the poorer districts, the poorer places tend to just sort of slip through the cracks. The authorities don't really care if a dead body turns up here or there. So Riya and Sakina are sisters, and we there's one. I don't know a ton about

their early lives. I will say there is a great book about them that is very well researched, and it is in Arabic, and I cannot find a translation of it, but it is in the footnotes or it is in the end notes of this chapter, so if anyone wants to dive into them further. But basically, they came from a broken home with a narcissistic mom, and they just kind of moved around Upper Egypt a lot and lived this sort of transient lifestyle with full of petty crime.

So they were just they were petty criminals from early on, but they were also very well, it's not either or they were petty criminals, and they were very enterprising. They were kind of like entrepreneurs. They were hustlers. They always had a scheme going to make money, and they got into the brothel business because it was lucrative because they lived near these British camps and the British soldiers were

happy to frequent these brothels. So for a while they were making a lot of money, and they had husbands who were kind of secondary characters because it honestly seemed like Ryan Sequino or the brains behind the operations. But what happened after World War One and all this tension was that they started making less money with these brothels, and basically they just power dynamics were shifting both in the world and in the city and in the microcosm

of their neighborhood and their brothels. And it's complicated, but that led to violence because they, especially Riah, the older sister, was very paranoid and was very what's the word for when you just you think everyone's out to get I guess literally paranoid. She just was suspicious. She always thought people owed her money or the people were trying to con her. So what happened was their girl, you know, the sex workers, the girls that worked at their brothels.

Were back in the good old days of World War One, when they were making a ton of money, they were able to buy their girls gold bracelets, which was sort of the thing to where as, you know, to advertise yourself to the Johns, you wanted as many gold bracelets

and gold jewelry as possible. And then when time started getting tougher after World War One, when they were making less money, Rya started getting really suspicious, like she would the girls had to buy their own bracelets, and she would get really suspicious that maybe they'd gotten money for an encounter with a client and hadn't given ray or her cut. So it all kind of happened around gold.

And the rumor that's endured that I don't really think is true is that Ryan Sequina would actually start hunting down women who were wearing a lot of gold in the marketplace, just random women, and lure them back to their apartment and apply them with drugged wine. Should I get to the crimes or is there anything you want to talk about before? I?

had nothing to do with the cases. So tell us how everything comes undone?

care about the inhabitants of this neighborhood. They didn't this a Labon was a poor district, and it was also kind of if you were like a European sailor, it was where you went to find vice. You know, you could find some drugs and some boods and some women and the police didn't care. And I mean we see this throughout history in cases where the victims are prostitutes or sex workers. You know, it's you just they people don't care as much as when it's like the cheerleader

from the Chicago suburb or whatever. Sure, there's a sense that these people are disposable. And there's a sense too, I think that Ryan Sequina were disposable. So yeah, the police are not doing a good job here. There's a lot of shady stuff happening and they're just kind of ignoring it and what's really happening or Okay, so I'll jump, I'll jump ahead to how it really started to unravel. Basically, neighbors this is so gross. But neighbors start to complain

that Riat's house smells really awful. There's this the caying stench coming from it, and no matter how much incense she burns, she can't hide the stench. And Raya's like, well, people drink here, it's we have parties here. It gets thirty people are like, oh, so the police are getting

complaints about that. And then simultaneously, in a house that Sekina used to live in, uh, the owners decide to redo the pipes, and so they're digging into the floor and the guy who they've it's their cousin they've hired to dig up the floor hits something hard and it's

a human arm. So sort of at the same time, Sequina's old apartment floor is dug up and they find bodies under it, and then Raya's apartment, with all the accusations that it's smell bad, is dug up and they find bodies under the floor, and they even find a couple bodies under the floor of their old land lady.

So all of a sudden, it all kind of snaps into focus for the police, and they're like, Okay, we've had all these missing women, we've had these reports of missing women, and now we've got like these seventeen bodies and they're in the they're all connected to these sisters. So the sisters get dragged in for questioning and Sakina manages to deny, deny, deny, but apparently Riah, the older sister, ends up breaking and that kind of dooms them both and she confesses.

really gruesome, obvious sign of the police not caring. So the journalists at the time there were some impassion and very sad editorials written, and one of them said the common refrain was just like where are the police or the police? One of them said, where are the police when these crimes are committed? Some of these bodies have turned into skeletons, showing that the victims were murdered a

long time ago. So, yeah, it was that sense of abandonment by the authorities in that sense that no one cares about these victims, and no one cares about us, the neighborhood where these crimes have been happening.

bodyguards of the brothels, were also involved. So there were six people accused of the crimes, but the men were just totally forgotten because it was like these killing sisters were I mean, they were so perfect for the headlines, and yeah, they turned into these symbols. The case ballooned beyond the facts of the crime, and they turned into

these symbols for this decline and female morality. So these editorials were written like that really blamed the victims for sort of getting themselves to the point in society where they would even encounter a Riah or a Sakina, blaming the victims for moral failings, for walking down the streets

where people like Ryan and Saquina lurked. And so it was like, you know, Egypt and Alexandria was already in a place of anxiety about the fact that women's roles were changing and women were walking around and being a little bit more free and maybe even frequenting cafes and bars, and so this case was like a perfect warning sign, I guess for people who wanted to argue that when shouldn't be allowed to walk around the streets, because it was like, well, look at what happens you walk, and

you walk around the streets of Alaban as a woman, you get yourself murdered. So yeah, it became this, They became this pawn in a cultural battle. I guess you could say about female morality.

sort of you kill. Well, his example was when a woman is when women are driven to kill their husband's second wives, which is sort of a dumb example, but you know, he's talking about things where there's sort of an emotional reason or something like jealousy or abuse, or not that abuse is an emotional reason, but he's saying, Okay, women's crimes generally demand an element of mercy. But Yenza China's crimes were not done in self defense or jealousy

or anything, and so they don't deserve compassion. And he also said that the death penalty used to be a public thing, and so that was reason enough not to give it to a woman because you didn't want to have society see woman be Hong. But now the death penalty had been taken sort of folded inside the prison, and so he was like, so reason number two for not killing a woman is gone, so we should give them the death penalty. And indeed they did get the

death penalty. Whose argument was effective and people were so horrified by them, and actually all six of them got the death penalty. So the sisters, their husbands, and these two bodyguards who were implicated in the crimes.

or books, so they immediately became characters. There was a film from nineteen fifty three called Ryan Sequina that showed the police as these heroes who caught the sisters just in time before they were about to do their final murder. Obviously that's a little propaganda ish, because as we know,

that's not what happened with the police. They were in a TV show in I want to say, two thousand and five, and my friend has watched it and I've just been apparently it's just like really pulpy and hilarious. So yeah, they were in a lot of a lot of sort of popular culture things, and their legend definitely spread all across Egypt and I think remains that way to this day.

place where strong people stand. I'm a strong woman, and I've done things that even men can't do, and I mean very impressive bowld fiery words, and oddly enough, when those words are published, people, a certain type of person who is maybe a little bit more anti establishment, was like, oh, I'm kind of liking Sechina. Now she's sort of this anti establishment hero. And those are also some embarrassing final words for the police and the government, who because that's

exactly what happened. She did fool the police, She did fool the government for a long time by being this strong woman. I mean, you know, I don't want to praise what she did at all, but she did. She did kind of con the system, and so I think people were weirdly impressed by her final words, and like, Okay, she's not just some you know, shrinking violet whose husband manipulated her into killing or something. She's she's a strong woman, as she says.

or whatever, and yeah, that would be great. And if anyone's in Chicago, I have the launch is happening on October tenth, and the details are on my website. So I'm excited about that absolutely.