Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
As the “Witch of the Super-Rich,” Catherine Monvoisin—also known as “La Voisin”—made her mark on 17th-century French criminal history. She exploited the intrigues and desires that prevailed at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, in Paris. This allowed Catherine to rise into...
Satanic Panic
The sadistic serial killer Werner Kniesek went down in criminal history as one of Austria’s most dangerous criminals. Werner went off the rails at a young age, stealing, skipping school, and repeatedly running away from home. For these reasons, on June 5, 1962, his...
The youngest people in Irish history to be convicted of murder were two 14-year-old boys. They had brutally killed a young girl in what appeared to be a satanic ritual. Their victim was 14-year-old Anatasia Kriégel, known as Ana. Ana was born on February...
The last woman to be convicted under a British witchcraft law from 1735, the so-called “Witchcraft Act,” was 46-year-old Scot Helen Duncan, better known as “Hellish Nell.” The Witchcraft Act did not criminalize witchcraft itself, but rather the exploitation of belief in witches for...
A diabolical crime took place in June 2000 in the Italian village of Chiavenna, a town of 8,000 people in the Lombard Alpine province of Sondrio, where the 60-year-old nun Maria Laura Mainetti was brutally murdered. For three weeks, the Carabinieri puzzled over who...
A series of gruesome murders of seven male youths aged between 11 and 18 shook the Rhine-Main area in the 1980s. Between 1976 and 1983, seven male prostitutes from the Frankfurt and Offenbach train station milieu were tied up, sexually abused, mistreated, and then...
