Some famous names come from battlefields, and some famous names come from incidents that you really don’t want to be a part of.
The Miami name
Moving drugs is one thing. Griselda Blanco took it to a whole new level. During the 1970s and 1980s, she moved cocaine in Miami in a way that looked more like a crime movie than real life. Her crime spree ran from Colombia to New York.
Blanco was accused of ordering numerous murders, including public shootings, while she also brought in huge amounts of cocaine to the United States. How much did she earn? Just around $80 million a month. All of that with a ton of bodies around it.
Behind castle walls
The facts and legend got mixed up with Elizabeth Báthory. Honestly, though, the true story is horrible enough that you don’t need to add anything extra. Báthory was a Hungarian countess. She tortured and killed numerous young women during the 1500s and 1600s.
However, Báthory somehow managed to escape justice. Only her servants were tried, and some of them were executed. Báthory was confined in Castle Csejte until her death. But she never got put on trial, even though basically everyone knew she did it.
The camp wife
The Nazi concentration camps were easily some of the worst places on Earth. Buchenwald was one of the very worst of its kind. Ilse Koch’s husband was the camp’s commander from 1937 to 1941, and she got a reputation for her absolute cruelty to prisoners.
One rumor said that she chose Jewish prisoners to be killed so lampshades could be made from their skin. She was tried by an American military court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Koch killed herself in prison in 1967.
The young guard
Another famously feared Nazi figure was Irma Grese. She worked at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen during her late teens. Apparently, Grese beat the prisoners. She whipped them.Â
She also set dogs on some of them, too. Grese was later executed following the Belsen Trial in 1945. She might’ve been young. But harmless? Not even close.
The moor road
Myra Hindley. Anyone from the U.K. will recognize that name because it’s tied to one of the darkest murder cases in British history. Hindley, along with Ian Brady, killed at least five children between 1963 and 1965. Their murders became known as the Moors Murders.
They buried their victims in the English Moors, although one of the victims, Keith Bennett, was never found. In 1966, Hindley was convicted of two of the murders. She was also convicted for helping Brady with another, and later, she admitted her involvement in two other killings.
The royal order
No gang. No weapon. Mary I didn’t need any of that because she had a throne, and she started her deadly reign in 1553. She tried to bring England back to Roman Catholicism. But not through simple persuasion. Mary I had deadly punishments for Protestants.
Over 200 Protestants were burned at the stake when she was queen. A lot of these took place at Smithfield in London. Their only ‘crime’ was being in a different denomination of Christianity, that’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The burned towns
Boudicca was a dangerous woman from way back then. After Roman officials abused her family and took control of Iceni lands, Boudicca swore revenge on them. She got what she wanted. Yes, Boudicca led an open revolt against the Romans and attacked major Roman settlements.
Her forces burned London. They burned many other Roman towns, too. They spared nobody. Unfortunately, since it happened almost 2,000 years ago, it’s hard to know exactly how many people died. But it sure was a lot.
The ravine outlaw
With a nickname like ‘the Bandit Queen,’ it’s not hard to see why Phoolan Devi has such a bad reputation. She joined armed gangs in Chambal, India. The gang carried out the 1981 Behmai massacre that killed around twenty men. Devi denied any involvement, of course.
But the charges continued to follow her, and she surrendered two years later during a public ceremony. She spent only eleven years in prison. Craziest of all, Devi went on to have a political career afterward.
The family hideout
Ma Barker’s a name that has a lot of stories about it. The truth, however, was probably the worst part. Her sons were part of the Barker-Karpis gang that committed bank robberies and murders. They also stole cars and were involved in big-money kidnappings.
Ma Barker didn’t sit by while that was happening, though. No way. She stayed close to the group and moved with them. Allegedly, Barker was involved in planning a lot of the crimes. She was the mastermind behind some of the worst ones, apparently. Â
The highway pattern
There’s no denying it. Aileen Wuornos was one of the most horrific female serial killers in all history. Men would meet her. They’d drive off with her. They wouldn’t come back alive. Wuornos killed at least seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 on highways and isolated roads.
At first, the police couldn’t figure out what had happened. The bodies were scattered all over. Wuornos claimed in court that they were all in self-defense, but the courts rejected her claims for six of the murder convictions.
The locked door
Killing’s bad enough. But trouble kept following Lizzie Halliday, even after people thought she’d been contained. She was convicted in 1894 of murdering two women, Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, in New York. Halliday was the first woman sentenced to the electric chair in the state.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Far from it. Halliday was declared insane, and her sentence was changed, so she was sent to Matteawan State Hospital. She killed one of the attendants there with a pair of scissors.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
