Here's somebody's idea of the top 10 "most evil women" in history. I don't know enough to judge its accuracy, but note the number of serial killers, for those of you who think that is exclusively a male enterprise. One of them is Belle Gunness of LaPorte, Ind., whom I read a lot about when I lived in Michigan City:
At 6 ft (1.83 m) tall and over 200 lb (91 kg), she was a powerful Norwegian-American woman. She may have killed both of her husbands and all of her children (on different occasions), but she is known to have killed most of her suitors, boyfriends, and her two daughters Myrtle and Lucy. Her apparent motives involved collecting life insurance benefits. Reports estimate that she killed more than twenty people over several decades--some claim more than one hundred--and possibly got away with it.
Belle was a woman ahead of her time. Without benefit of the Internet, she used lovelorn ads in print to lure her suitors, whom she killed and buried on her farm.
A lot of people will be tempted to have fun with this list. Why isn't Hillary Clinton on it? Or Margaret Thatcher? I have my own nomination, unfortunately another Hoosier: Gertrude Baniszewski. I was just a kid when the story broke, and it horrified me more than anything before or since. In 1965, she kept teenager Sylvia Likens chained up in her basement and, all summer long, invited neighborhood children in to beat and torture her. Whenver I think there might not be a hell, I think of Gertrude. Unbelievably, she was merely imprisoned and got out on parole in 1985, dying five years later of cancer. The fact that she is merely dead is not nearly enough punishment.
