Deadly & Twisted: 10 Women Who Murdered by Torture

They lived in different countries, at different times. Some of them were housewives, members of the Gestapo, guards at Nazi concentration camps, lovers who were envious, landlords, or even a fictitious friend of a tenant. It’s hard to believe, but each of the ten women on this list committed a very rare form of murder: torture murder.

10 Elizabeth Branch

As The New Newgate Calendar relates, in 1740, during the indictment of Elizabeth Branch and her daughter Mary for murdering Jane Buttersworth, their dairymaid, Ann Somers testified that Buttersworth returned late after being sent for yeast, so Mary struck her. Then, she and her mother threw Buttersworth down, whipping and beating her until she collapsed, unconscious.

Somers went outside to milk the cows after Mary attempted to revive the girl. Buttersworth was dead when Elizabeth returned, but she denied this and told Somers to lie in bed with the corpse that night and stay in the house the next day—the same night Elizabeth “privately” buried the girl.

The burial at night raised suspicions among neighbors. After receiving notification, the coroner issued a warrant to retrieve the body and determined that “almost any of them” of Buttersworth’s numerous injuries could have resulted in his death. Without providing any evidence, the defense argued that Buttersworth, who was known for having fits, had fallen and injured herself.

The mother and daughter were hanged after the jury found them guilty. Mary pleaded with those who witnessed Elizabeth’s execution to refrain from committing crimes similar to her own to treat their own servants with respect. The case became one of the most well-known 18th-century trials for servant abuse thanks to modern pamphlets about it.

9 Elizabeth Brownrigg

Had Elizabeth Brownrigg been present at the Branches’ hangings, she might have taken their words to heart, avoiding her own execution on September 14, 1767. As the Capital Punishment UK website observes, Brownrigg had “systematically tortured and abused her apprentice girls, eventually killing one of them.”

Brownrigg and her son attempted to flee, but they were also apprehended, as was Brownrigg’s husband. Mary Clifford, Brownrigg’s apprentice, had been starved and starved in a cellar while the family beat her for the smallest of infractions—real or imagined—and Brownrigg was tried for her murder. The cruelty of the family was confirmed by witnesses. The jury found Brownrigg guilty, and the judge sentenced her to be hanged. Afterward, he ordered that her body be “dissected and anatomised.”

Her notoriety was so great that her name entered English folklore; satirists and reformers alike used her case as an example of unchecked cruelty in London’s apprentice system.^[2]

8 Lorraine Thorpe

On September 7, 2010, Lorraine Thorpe, 16, received a life sentence for killing two individuals when she was 15 years old. Forty-one-year-old Paul Clarke was also convicted of the murders, the victims of which were Thorpe’s father, Desmond Thorpe, and Rosalyn Hunt, a mother of two. Desmond Thorpe was smothered to prevent him from notifying the police about Hunt’s earlier murder.

Clarke would need to serve at least 27 years in prison, having already been sentenced to life in prison. Because Thorpe had stomped on Hunt’s head, kicked, punched, and beaten her to death over several days, Hunt’s death was regarded as torturous. Thorpe, then 29 years old, was denied parole in August 2023.

British tabloids dubbed her “Britain’s youngest female double murderer,” and her case shocked the public because of both her age and the sheer brutality of the crimes.^[3]

7 Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova

Russian noblewoman Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova (1730–1801) was as imaginative and brutal a killer as she was sadistic. Contemporary rumors claimed she tortured and killed as many as 650 serfs, though official investigations confirmed around 138 suspicious deaths.

It was said that she would kill her victims by using hot irons, freezing them in ice water, beating them for days, covering them in honey so that insects would eat them, sewing their lips shut to starve them, and even biting off chunks of their flesh.

Early complaints were ignored due to her high social status until a petition reached Catherine the Great. The empress issued an arrest warrant for Saltykova in 1762. She was found guilty of multiple murders after six years of investigation. Before being imprisoned for the rest of her life in a convent, she was displayed in Moscow’s Red Square with a sign declaring her crimes. 4]

6 Juana Bormann

Despite being a devout Catholic, concentration camp guard Juana Bormann earned a reputation for cruelty. She often beat prisoners or set her dog—by some accounts, a German shepherd, by others, an Irish wolfhound—on her victims. At least two prisoners’ deaths were attributed to mauling.

Bormann was taken into custody and tried by a British military court following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where she was stationed, in 1945. She was accused of setting her dog on inmates and selecting prisoners for execution. The brutality of her actions was well-documented, despite the fact that some charges, such as direct involvement in Mengele’s experiments, remain controversial.

She was hanged on December 13, 1945, after being found guilty of war crimes, and she was buried in an unmarked grave in Hameln. Bormann stood out among the group of female guards executed that day for her particularly vicious use of animals as torture instruments.

5 Anneliese Kohlmann

A chilling photograph by George Rodger shows two German guards knee-deep in decaying flesh and bones, hauling bodies into a Belsen mass grave. One of them is Anneliese Kohlmann.

She returned to the camp disguised as a prisoner after the SS staff left, reportedly to have a romantic relationship with a female prisoner. Only after the liberation of the camp was her secret made public.

Kohlmann was known for her brutality at an SS camp in Neugraben, where she beat and whipped pregnant women until they passed out or died, despite this relationship. She was tried and found guilty, receiving a two-year prison term after the war. However, given her track record of cruelty, survivors thought that this punishment was far too light.

4 Christa Pike

Christa Pike, 18, became the youngest American woman sentenced to death in modern times for her role in the torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Pike, jealous and convinced Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured her to a secluded area.

Before a pentagram was carved into Slemmer’s chest, she was taunted, beaten, and cut. After that, Pike struck Slemmer in the head with an asphalt chunk. As a grisly trophy, she even kept a piece of the victim’s skull in her jacket pocket.

Pike remains on Tennessee’s death row. Her history of violence has continued behind bars: in 2004, she attempted to strangle an inmate with a shoestring, and in 2012, she was accused of plotting an escape.^[7]

3 Michelle Knotek

The Court of Appeals of Washington’s 2006 decision regarding Michelle Knotek’s appeal revealed horrific facts about her crimes.

Kathy Loreno, who boarded with the Knoteks in South Bend, Washington, was allegedly poisoned, starved, forced to work outside in inclement weather without clothing, and repeatedly beaten until she lost over 100 pounds, her hair, and her teeth, according to testimony. She eventually passed away, and her family burned and buried her body.

Another tenant, Ronald Woodward, suffered nearly identical abuse until he, too, died and was buried in the backyard.

Both second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter were found against Michelle. The court found no basis for her attempt to overturn her conviction. The true-crime book If You Tell, which chronicled her shocking cruelty, made her story widely known.

2 Natalie Vinje

Initially charged with first-degree murder, Natalie Vinje pleaded guilty to manslaughter in June 2024. Nearly a year later, she was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Vinje was a part of the brutal murder of Tammie Howard, also known as “Irish,” who was hanged for twelve hours from a garage rafter while her killers beat her and shot her with a nail gun. Later, she was buried near Gleichen, Alberta, near her body. A fisherman found Howard’s skull on Siksika Nation land in 2021, nearly five years after the murder, finally opening the case.

Vinje appears to have been enraged at Howard for abandoning her in Drumheller, which is 62 miles (100 kilometers) away. In the case, she is one of several defendants who were found guilty.

1 Rosa Baca

Rosa Baca, 55, of Porterville, California, was found guilty of beating her 38-year-old boyfriend Jose Magaa to death with a hammer. This added a charge of torture to the indictment for first-degree murder.

After they had argued, Baca told investigators that he had left their trailer without his shirt or shoes. She claimed that he came back injured the following morning. However, the police found no evidence of a struggle, and Magaa’s clean feet contradict her claim that he had walked barefoot in the rain.

Even though her car was found to be warm, Baca insisted that she had not left the trailer that night. She was captured on surveillance footage throwing something, possibly clothing, into a dumpster.

Convicted on December 17, 2018, she was sentenced to life in prison. Local papers reported that prosecutors described the killing as among the most brutal hammer murders ever seen in Tulare County.^[10]