The story of Marie Margarethe Beier—known simply as Grete—could easily have come straight out of a penny dreadful. She was a woman just 5 feet tall and extremely cunning, whose love for a petty criminal proved to be her undoing. Grete was the daughter...
Neighborhood Secrets
One of the most notorious murder cases in Spanish criminal history involves the so-called Alcásser girls. These were three girls—Miriam García Iborra, Antonia Gómez Rodríguez, and Desirée Hernández Folch—from the Spanish village of Alcásser. These 14- to 15-year-old girls were abducted, brutally raped, tortured...
The worst female poisoner of all time, who is even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, was Maria Catharina Swanenberg, better known as “Goeie Mie,” which means “Good Mia” in English. Good Mia is said to have been responsible for more than...
A shabby semi-detached house at 25 Cromwell Street in the tranquil county of Gloucester in southwest England went down in English criminal history as the “House of Horror.” The house was purchased in 1972 by Rosemary and Frederick West, a couple known for being...
Christa Lehmann was a serial killer who went down in German criminal history as the “Poison Witch of Worms.” The mother of four was the first person in Germany to use the highly toxic, over-the-counter pesticide E 605 as a lethal weapon, and it...
In 2008, a serial killer from Lithuania kept the Guarda Civil in Tenerife on their toes. The serial killer was 44-year-old Maris Meiers from Madona, Lithuania. He was a Navy diver and passionate photographer who couldn’t cope with the fact that his great love,...
