5 Infamous Women Killers and the Books You Should Read About Them

True Crime master and #1 New York Times bestselling author Gregg Olsen compiled his list of deadly women and the books written about them.

Lyda Southard, Twin Falls, Idaho

Read: Ordinary Wife: America’s Forgotten Serial Killer by Gregg Olsen and Morgan Olsen

Fittingly, the defense rested on Halloween 1921 in the case of arsenic poisoner Lyda Trueblood Dooley McHaffie Lewis Meyer Southard and the murders of her four dead husbands, a two-year-old daughter, and a brother-in-law. Lyda, like many other husband killers, murdered for insurance money. The tool of her trade? The arsenic she boiled off the flypaper.  Lyda made headlines as a femme fatale, a cold-blooded killer, and America’s Lady Bluebeard, and later, prison escapee.

Belle Gunnes, LaPorte, Indiana

Read: Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter

If anything, Belle was direct. Very. She’d more likely smack a visitor over the head and feed them to the hogs on her Indiana Farm than use poison. She killed at least 14 people (including her husbands and children), though estimates go as high as 40 victims. Like Stella and Lyda, she did it for the money. She vanished when her farmhouse burned to the ground in 1908, spawning a mystery that has captivated true crime fans for more than a century. Did she get away with it?

Stella Nickell, Auburn, Washington

Read: American Mother: The True Story of the Seattle Cyanide Killer by Gregg Olsen

Housewife and barfly, Stella Nickell had dreams bigger than her double-wide trailer. She concocted a scheme to kill her husband Bruce by reenacting the unsolved Chicago Tylenol cyanide poisonings. To make it appear a random act, she placed bottles of poison-laced headache capsules on grocery shelves, killing a mother of two, Sue Snow.

Stacy Castor, Syracuse, New York

Read: Mommie Deadliest by Michael Benson

Former ambulance dispatcher Stacy Castor used antifreeze to kill two husbands. Michael was first, in 2000; his death was ruled a heart attack. Five years later, she staged husband David’s death as a suicide using a turkey baster as the implement to deliver the poison. Two years later, when suspicions turned into a bona fide investigation, Stacy tried to kill her daughter in order to keep her quiet. Not mom or wife of the year, for sure.

Nannie Doss, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Read: Deadly Desserts by Jerry Jamison

Nannie Doss takes the cake – at Halloween and in the annals of true crime. Indeed, the grandmother and frequent widow had a couple of those “ironic” nicknames – the “Giggling Granny” and the “Jolly Black Widow.” She seemed to enjoy the attention that her crimes brought. Nannie murdered at least 11 family members (four of whom were husbands) between 1927 and 1954 – making her America’s number one female murderer. No laughing matter by any stretch