Read World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds for Free Online

cronies, then, began scouring the countryside for children and young girls, who were either lured to the castle or kidnapped. They were then hung in chains in the dungeons, fattened and milked for their blood before being tortured to death and their bones used in alchemical experiments. The countess, it was said later, kept some of them alive to lick the blood from her body when she emerged from her baths, but had them, in turn brutally killed if they either failed to arouse her or showed the slightest signs of displeasure.
    Peasant girls, however, failed to stay the signs of ageing; and after five years, Elizabeth decided to set up an academy for young noblewomen. Now she bathed in blue blood, the blood of her own class. But this time, inevitably, news of her depravities reached the royal court; and her cousin, the Prime Minister, was forced to investigate. A surprise raid on the castle found the Countess in mid-orgy; bodies lying strewn, drained of blood; and dozens of girls and young women – some flayed and vein-milked, some fattened like Strasburg geese awaiting their turn – in the dungeons.
    Elizabeth’s grisly entourage was taken into custody and then tortured to obtain confessions. At the subsequent trial for the murder of the eighty victims who were actually found dead at the castle, her old nurse, Ilona Joo, and one of the Countess’s procurers of young girls were sentenced to be burned at the stake after having their fingers torn out; many of the rest were beheaded. The Countess, who as an aristocrat could not be arrested or executed, was given a separate hearing in her absence at which she was accused of murdering more than 600 women and children. She was then bricked up in a room in her castle, with holes left for ventilation and food. Still relatively young and youthful, she was never seen alive again. She is presumed to have died – since the food was from then on left uneaten – four years later, on 21 August 1614.

Born Under a Bad Sign
    Everything was against Aileen Wuornos, right from the beginning. Her father deserted her mother before she was born; and her mother ran off from Rochester, Michigan, not long afterwards, leaving her and her elder brother in charge of her grandparents, both of whom were drunks. Her grandfather beat both his wife and them; allowed no friends in the house; and wouldn’t even let them open the curtains. Malnourished and unable to concentrate in school, the children took to lighting fires with firelighters for amusement, and at the age of six, Aileen’s face was badly burned, scarred for life. By the time she reached puberty, she was already putting out to boys for food and drink, uppers, anything she could get. At thirteen she was raped by a friend of her grandparents. At fourteen, she was pregnant – and the child, she said, could have been anybody’s: the rapist’s, her grandfather’s, even her brother’s. The baby, a son, was put up for adoption almost immediately after birth.
    Then, when her grandmother died of cancer in 1971, she and her brother were thrown out of their grandfather’s house and became wards of court. She dropped out of school and took up prostitution, while her brother robbed stores to feed an increasing drugs habit. Soon after her grandfather committed suicide in 1976, her brother died of throat cancer. He was only 21, a year older than she.
    As if all this wasn’t enough, even her own genes seemed to be against her. For, quite apart from the cancers, the drinking and the suicide, the father she never met turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and a convicted paedophile. After spending time in mental hospitals for sodomising children as young as ten, he hanged himself in a prison cell.
    She had a couple of chances to go straight, it’s true. She was picked up while hitch-hiking by an older man, who became besotted with her and married her; and she also got $10,000 from a life-insurance policy her brother had taken out. But the husband she