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When a person thinks about a serial killer they inevitably think of a man. It just doesn't seem that women are capable of such brutal crimes. Do most of us think that serial killers are mentally ill? If we do then we have to concede the fact that women get mentally ill also. But this wouldn't account for all serial killers because most of them are not mentally ill or, that at least is what the courts have ruled. But there are women who are serial killers and they are just as vicious as the men.

Martha Beck hated other women. Why did she possess this hatred? No one really knows, but it festered inside her. It may have been because of her looks, she may have felt ugly and was jealous of other women, but whatever the reason it was there. She had joined forces with a con man named Raymond Fernandez. The two began to ply their trade in 1947 by putting ads in the lonely hearts columns of the newspapers. Fernandez was used to cheating women out of their money but now that he hooked up with Beck the scam had changed. The change was a profound one, Beck would murder the women when Fernandez was finished bilking them. Everything came to a head when Beck posed as Fernandez's sister and moved into an apartment with him, and a woman named Delphine Dowling and her 2 year old daughter. Dowling was very pretty and much younger than Beck. She and her child disappeared. The police investigated the disappearance and found that the basement floor had recently been cemented. When they dug there they found the two bodies. They confessed to the murders of 19 people. The little girl had been drowned in the bath tub while the mother had been murdered in a furious rage by Beck. Both Beck and Dowling were electrocuted in New York's Sing Sing Prison in 1951.

A more recent serial female killer plied her ugly trade just a few years ago. This woman was truly evil. She had raised her son to be her partner in her gruesome acts. Her name is Sante Kimes and her son is Kenneth or Kenny as he was sometimes called. Kimes was a woman with a long criminal career. She had been arrested many times and her crimes included everything from shoplifting to keeping slaves. Can you believe that, keeping slaves? These were the crimes that she was caught at, can you imagine what she did where she wasn't caught? Her son Kenny was the same as his mother, she had molded him to her image. The crime that had finished the pair was the murder of Irene Silverman an elderly lady who lived in an East Side mansion that she would lease for $6,000 per month. Silverman was just too well known to be allowed to disappear without a trace. What had happened was that Sante and Kenny had gotten Silverman to go into their apartment then shot her in the head with a stun gun. While she lay paralyzed on the floor, Kenny strangled her with his bare hands. After that, her body was stuffed into a suitcase and Kenny threw it into the truck of a car and then disposed of it. Sante had produced a false bill of sale for the mansion and her story was that Silverman had sold her the house. Sante Kimes had more nerve than anyone could imagine. She and her son had forged an invitation to the White House and actually met with Mrs. Nixon, the then President's wife, where Sante took a photograph of her son with Mrs. Nixon to be used to influence other politicians in a grand bunko scheme. Somehow they had also avoided the Secret Service and got to Vice President Ford during a party and had a conversation with him. Their scheme was thwarted when the Washington Papers got hold of the story about them crashing the party. People began to disappear. The family lawyer took a trip with Sante and Kenny and never returned. Sante's husband died of a heart attack, or did he? She went into a deal with David Kazdin a real estate agent and then murdered him. A Bahamian banker named Sayed Bilal discovered that Sante was doing some illegal transactions with her husband's former bank accounts and scheduled a meeting with Sante, he was never seen again. The list just goes on and on. Both Sante and Kenny are in jail and I doubt that they will ever get out.

Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine Wood were nurses working at the Alpine Manor Nursing Home In Walker, Michigan They were also lovers. They discovered that killing gave them added sexual pleasure. They killed at least six elderly women and when they were washing the bodies for burial would make love. The women were two twisted psychopaths. They were caught because Catherine Wood told her ex husband about the women they had killed, and he called the police. Catherine Wood became the star witness against Gwendolyn Graham. Graham was sentenced to life and Wood to 20 to 40 years.

One way to get victims to murder was to offer an apartment at very cheap rates. Dorothea Mantalvo Puenta learned this. She seemed very nice and had a great garden. She even took in the homeless. Social workers used to place people with her. One day the social worker decided to try and find out what happened to a person that disappeared. She began to wonder about the high turnover of tenants. New cement had been poured in the garden and driveway and the police came around and began to dig. They found 7 bodies that had lime sprinkled over them, they had been poisoned. She was charged with a total of 9 murders in 1993 but found guilty of only 3. She was sentenced to life without parole.

So you see, female mass murders can be as vicious as males, there just aren't as many of them, they account for about 8% of all serial killers in this country. Their favorite methods of killing in the order of preference are: poison, shooting, beating, suffocation, stabbing and drowning.