The Noblewoman Who Tortured and Murdered 600 Young Women

Some people want to help society every chance they get, whether volunteering and doing community service or donating to worthwhile causes and individuals, making their lives and the lives of those around them, all the more better. Then there are others. Those people who are so dark, so evil, that there are no redeeming qualities about them.

These wicked individuals, through their actions, have received fame and infamy for all the wrong reasons. Unlike those who obtain fame through their athletic achievements, art, or groundbreaking endeavors, these notorious criminals were catapulted to infamy by their criminal acts and vicious deeds.

To compile a list of the most notorious criminals in history, 24/7 Tempo turned to sources including Britannica, Biography, Crime Museum Mysteries Unresolved, the BBC, the New York Times, Fox News, and CNN, using editorial discretion to assemble our list. While the majority of people here are mass murderers, we have also included examples of massive fraud and several other horrible crimes. (Then there are assassination plots, like the most recent report stating that Russia plotted to kill the head of the biggest arms company in Germany.)

Many of the worst crimes in history are included here, like 17th-century Hungarian Elizabeth Báthory, who killed up to 600 people, and Austrian Josef Fritzl who held his daughter captive as a sex slave for 24 years, fathering 7 children with her. Then there was former medical student Henry Howard Holmes who murdered over 200 victims in a Chicago house of horrors. These horrific acts represent humanity's darkest impulses and most reprehensible deeds.

Not all criminals are directly responsible for bloodshed but their actions caused immense, and often irreparable harm. In the early 1920s, Italian immigrant Charlie Ponzi created a fraudulent investment scheme still bearing his name. In a similar vein, respected investor Bernie Madoff ran a pyramid scheme in the 1990s that deceived famous victims like Steven Spielberg and Kevin Bacon.

Even as recent as 2019, 31-year-old Samuel Bankman-Fried engineered the FTX cryptocurrency exchange collapse, costing investors billions. While their methods differed, these criminals all inflicted devastating financial ruin through deception and greed. (These are the most depraved serial killers in history.)

• Victims: 600 (?)
• Crime: Torture and murder by Various methods
• Location: Central Europe
• Time frame: 1600s

This Hungarian noblewoman was also known as the "Blood Countess," for her role in the death of hundreds of people. According to Guinness World Records, this makes her the most prolific female murderer ever. Along with several of her servants, she was accused of torturing and murdering other servants and noblewomen of lesser stature who came to her for education.

Because of Báthory's aristocratic station, even though she was apprehended, she didn't face the death penalty. Instead, she was forced to live out the rest of her life in her castle and died there in 1614.

• Victims: 40 (?)
• Crime: Murder by poisoning
• Location: Indiana
• Time frame: 1884-1908

Norwegian immigrant Belle Gunness came to the U.S. looking to strike it rich in her new country. Rather than work, she developed a scheme for acquiring wealth – posting public lovelorn messages to lure men to her farm, then either marry or romance them, and kill them for their insurance money. At least 14 men died by her hand.

Some of their children from previous marriages were also killed. Gunness may have been involved with as many as 40 murders in all, but she appeared to have died in a 1908 fire that burned down her Indiana farm. Authorities found the remains of some of her suitors, several children, and a woman presumed to be Gunness though some believe she faked her death.

• Victims: At least 5
• Crime: Murder by stabbing
• Location: London
• Time frame: 1888

One of the earliest known serial killers – and most infamous – was Jack the Ripper who terrorized London for over two months in 1888, slaying at least five sex workers in the city's Whitechapel section. Taking advantage of the emerging mass media in print in the late 19th century, the assailant taunted police with letters that were published in London newspapers.

The murderer was never caught. Many theories have circulated as to the Ripper's identity, including the possibility that Jack was a member of the British royal family or that the killer was a woman. Although a scientist as recent as 2019 stated his identity was that of 23-year-old Polish barber Aaron Kosminski, there isn't enough evidence to support this.

• Victims: 200 (?)
• Crime: Murder by poisoning and other methods
• Location: Chicago
• Time frame: 1890s

While still in medical school in Michigan, Henry Howard Holmes started his bizarre crime spree when he would steal cadavers, burn and disfigure them, and arrange them to look like accident victims to collect insurance money. In 1855, after he passed his medical exams, he moved to Chicago, where he bought an empty lot and built a three-story hotel dubbed the "castle."

Holmes paid the premiums on the life insurance policies of employees and hotel guests if they listed him as a beneficiary. But the hotel was a house of horrors where many of the people disappeared. Some rooms were soundproof and there were rumors, later proven to be untrue, that some had gas lines so Holmes could asphyxiate his victims. His scam insurance scheme caught up with him and he was arrested. He confessed to 27 murders but was convicted for only one and was hanged in 1896.

• Victims: Thousands
• Crime: Investment fraud
• Location: United States
• Time frame: 1919

Italian immigrant Carlo (Charles) Ponzi was the creator of the original scheme that was named after him – the "Ponzi scheme." This scheme, or scam, involved luring investors with the promise that they could double their money within 90 days through the arbitrage of international reply coupons – vouchers accepted by multiple countries that could be converted into local postage stamps.

Instead of trading these items, Ponzi used new investors to fund returns to older ones while seeking legitimate investments to keep the scam going. Ponzi's scheme eventually cost investors $20 million, or about $250 million in today's dollars. After serving 42 months in prison, Ponzi was deported to Italy, where he died.

• Victims: 71
• Crime: Murder by various methods
• Location: Brazil
• Time frame: 1960s-1970s

Brazil's most prolific murderer, Pedro Rodrigues Filho was born with a damaged skull that was the result of a beating his mother received from his father when she was pregnant. This brain damage may have set Rodrigues Filho on his homicidal path, in the course of which he killed some 24 people, by various means and for various reasons. Among them was an official who had falsely accused his father of stealing food and gang members who killed his girlfriend.

He also killed his father, who had killed Rodrigues Filho's mother with a machete. On one occasion, he was arrested and put into the back of a police car with an accused rapist. When the door was opened, it was discovered that he had somehow killed the rapist.

Being arrested and jailed didn't stop Filho. While he was incarcerated, he murdered 47 more people. His rampage boosted his sentence to 400 years, but the maximum jail time in Brazil was 30 years (since extended to 40 years), and he was eventually released. He claimed to have reformed and became a YouTube star in 2018 where he campaigned against violence. He was shot and killed in March 2023.

• Victims: 28 or more
• Crime: Murder by strangulation or stabbing
• Location: Across the United States
• Time frame: 1966-1978

Ted Bundy, the subject of documentaries and movies, was an intelligent and charismatic man who preyed on college-age women during his 12-year killing spree. He killed victims in Washington, Utah, and Colorado before he was arrested, but while awaiting trial in Colorado, Bundy escaped custody twice and fled to Florida.

While there, he killed several young women at a college sorority before he was captured. Bundy eventually confessed to 28 murders, though some estimated that he was responsible for hundreds of deaths. He acted as his own attorney at his televised trial where he was found guilty and was electrocuted in 1989.

• Victims: 218
• Crime: Murder by drug overdose
• Location: England
• Time frame: 1970s

Shipman was an English physician nicknamed "Dr. Death" who killed at least 218 patients in the 1970s. In 1999, Kathleen Gundy, the daughter of one of his victims, claimed that he killed her mother and tried to create a fake will that named him as the beneficiary. Shipman's previous victims had been cremated, but Gundy's mother had not.

An autopsy revealed an unusually high level of the opioid diamorphine, which Shipman had used to kill other patients. He was officially charged with the deaths of 15 people, found guilty, and sentenced to life without parole. He killed himself in jail in 2004.

• Victims: 13
• Crime: Murder by bludgeoning
• Location: England
• Time frame: 1975-1980

Dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper" by the British media, Peter Sutcliffe killed 13 women and injured seven others in northern England over five years. He had been questioned by police who determined that he did not fit their profile of the killer. During his trial, Sutcliffe said he was sent on a mission from God to kill the women. He died in prison in 2020 from COVID-19.

• Victims: 17
• Crime: Murder by stabbing
• Location: Milwaukee
• Time frame: 1978-1991

College dropout and drifter Jeffrey Dahmer seduced young men and boys, mostly African-Americans, drugging and killing 17 of them. He performed necrophiliac acts on their bodies, dismembered them, cooked body parts, and ate them. Dahmer was caught when one of his intended victims escaped and led police to Dahmer's apartment.

There they found photos of Dahmer's victims, seven skulls in his apartment, and a heart in his freezer. He was sentenced to 957 years in jail in 1992 and was killed in prison two years later.

• Victims: 21 or more
• Crime: Murder by beating, stabbing, or strangulation
• Location: Southern California
• Time frame: 1979-1980

William Bonin and two accomplices abducted, sodomized, beat, and strangled at least 21 teenage boys in Southern California. Bonin lured his victims into a van as they walked, biked, or hitchhiked, and their bodies were subsequently dumped along freeways, earning Bonin the moniker the "Freeway Killer."

Atypically for serial killers, Bonin had accomplices. One of them was arrested for car theft and while in jail, provided evidence linking the freeway murders to Bonin, which led to his arrest. Before he was executed by lethal injection in 1996, Bonin corresponded with victims' families telling them how their loved ones reacted while he was torturing them.

• Victims: 53
• Crime: Murder by stabbing or strangulation
• Location: Soviet Union
• Time frame: 1979-1990

Soviet teacher Andrei Chikatilo couldn't hold a job because of claims that he assaulted young children. He became a clerk for a raw materials factory, a job that involved extensive travel and allowed him to attack young victims. Chikatilo befriended young women and children at train stations and bus stops, lured them into forests, raped them, and mutilated them.

After he was arrested for suspicious behavior in 1990, Chikatilo provided details of his crimes to a psychiatrist. He was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murder charges and was executed by firing squad in 1994.

• Victims: Hundreds
• Crimes: Murder, drug dealing
• Location: Colombia, US, Europe
• Time frame: 1980-early 1990s

Pablo Escobar was the leader of the Colombian drug cartel that dominated the cocaine drug trade with the U.S. His influence and the unlimited cash that corrupted society's institutions, as well as the lack on the part of law enforcement to stop him, was detailed in the Netflix series "Narcos."

Complicating attempts to apprehend him were his efforts at funding facilities and donating food to the poor in the Colombian city of Medellín, which made him popular with the downtrodden. Escobar's reign as the world's leading drug tsar was brutal. He killed hundreds of rivals, law-enforcement officers, and politicians who opposed him, as well as innocent bystanders.

Escobar also had blood on his hands for the number of people who overdosed on the narcotics he trafficked. He died in a shootout with Colombian police in 1993.

• Victims: His daughter
• Crimes: Rape, false imprisonment, enslavement, and negligent homicide
• Location: Austria
• Time frame: 1984-2008

Fritzl is an Austrian man who held his daughter captive in his basement as a sex slave for 24 years. The 48-year-old Fritzl imprisoned his 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth in a dank secret room he had built beneath his home. Over the ensuing years, he raped her frequently, fathering seven children with her, one of whom died shortly after birth because of breathing complications.

For neglecting this child, Fritzl was tried for homicide. He had already pled guilty to threatening to kill his daughter and her children if they tried to escape. Fritzl is serving a life sentence in northeast Austria.

• Victims: 42
• Crime: Murder by strangulation
• Location: Indonesia
• Time frame: 1986-1997

Indonesian cattle breeder Ahmad Suradji confessed to killing 42 girls and women ranging in age from 11 to 30 over 11 years. He claimed he was a mystic who could make them rich and beautiful, then strangled them with a cable after burying them up to their waists at a sugarcane plantation near his home in North Sumatra as part of a ritual.

The heads of his victims faced his house because he believed that would give him extra power as a sorcerer. Suradji had three wives, who were sisters, who were arrested for assisting in the murders and hiding the bodies. Suradji was sentenced to death by firing squad and executed in 2008.

• Victims: 37 (?)
• Crime: Murder by shooting
• Location: California
• Time frame: Late 1960s, early 1970s

The Zodiac Killer is a still-unidentified serial killer who instilled fear throughout Northern California in the late 1960s and early '70s. The killer sent letters that taunted the police and the media, claiming to have killed 37 people, though only five of the murders were confirmed, and also wrote some letters in code and included bloody bits of clothing to use as proof of the criminal deeds.

In 2020, a trio of codebreakers claimed to have broken one of the ciphers, but the murderer's identity remains a mystery. The Zodiac killer has inspired books and films, and was the model for the serial killer in the Clint Eastwood movie "Dirty Harry."

• Victims: 189
• Crime: Murder by stabbing
• Location: Colombia
• Time frame: 1992-1997

Garavito murdered an estimated 189 boys aged 6 to 16, many of them homeless or orphaned. Dressed as a laborer looking for extra help or as a monk or a priest, he would lure the children into an isolated area and promise them money or food, and would then torture, rape, and dismember them. A nationwide manhunt started when a mass grave was discovered in 1997 near the city of Pereira, leading to Garavito's arrest.

• Victims: 100
• Crime: Strangulation
• Location: Pakistan
• Time frame: Late 1990s

Javed Iqbal sent a confessional letter to police in 1999, admitting that he had abducted and raped about 100 boys aged 6 to 16 – mostly beggars and street children – before strangling them and disposing of their bodies in a tub of acid. Iqbal, who kept meticulous records of the victims, including their names and photographs, was sentenced to death.

Besides the depravity of the crime, the episode garnered international attention because he was sentenced to die like that in which he had tortured and killed his victims. Pakistan's interior minister protested the sentence, but it became a moot point, as Iqbal killed himself in prison.

• Victims: Thousands
• Crime: Fraud
• Location: United States
• Time frame: 1992-2008

The man behind the biggest financial fraud in U.S. history was Bernie Madoff, the former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market who defrauded thousands of people and institutions out of billions of dollars over decades through his firm Madoff Investment Securities.

Among his victims were celebrities such as movie director Steven Spielberg, actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgewick, former New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, and talk-show host Larry King, as well as banks, colleges, churches, and charitable organizations.

As early as 2003, a whistleblower had exposed Madoff's scheme but it wasn't until the economic crash of 2009 that investigators began to look into his massive ruse. In 2021, Madoff died in prison while serving a 150-year sentence.

• Victims: Thousands
• Crime: Cryptocurrency fraud
• Location: Worldwide
• Time frame: 2019-2022

Samuel Bankman-Fried is the face of the scandal surrounding the implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The MIT alumnus was arrested in the Bahamas in December 2022 after he was indicted on numerous federal charges for diverting customers' funds from FTX to his crypto-trading hedge fund, Alameda Research.

FTX faced a liquidity crunch and fell into bankruptcy, cutting off at least a million depositors from their accounts. Bankman-Fried was indicted on eight criminal charges by the U.S. Department of Justice and two separate civil charges by the Commodity Futures Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.