![]() She eventually settled in the town of Correggio where she opened a shop. Born in 1893, she was troubled from an early age – she twice tried to commit suicide, served time for fraud in the 1920s, and had 17 pregnancies, with most of her children dying young. Italian serial killer Leonarda Cianciulli has fallen into obscurity, yet the facts of her case are almost flamboyantly gruesome. Whatever her true motivations, Barraza’s crimes have made her one of the most enigmatic and disturbing serial killers of all time. It was later theorised that Barraza’s savage animosity towards old ladies stemmed from an in-built rage towards her own mother. During her trial, it transpired that she’d had a rough upbringing, raised by an alcoholic mother who had pimped her to men when she was still a child. In fact, Barraza was a strong, strapping woman who’d made her name as a masked wrestler called The Lady of Silence. Though eyewitnesses had reported seeing a woman hanging around the crime scenes before the bodies were found, police simply assumed the killer was a man wearing women’s clothing as a clever disguise. The killings had been taking place for years, elderly women being found strangled with scarves, stockings and wires. Sentenced to 759 years in prison, Juana Barraza had actually been apprehended a few years earlier, after she’d been spotted leaving the home of her last victim – a pensioner named Ana Maria de los Reyes whom Barraza had throttled with a stethoscope. It was back in 2008 that Mexico City came to terms with a horrifying reality: that the prolific murderer of dozens of elderly women – a spectral figure who had been dubbed Mataviejitas or ' The Old Lady Killer' in the press – was a woman herself. 'I have hate crawling through my system… I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.' Her troubled, tragic, lethal life ended with her execution in 2002. Scoring highly on the Psychopathy Checklist, Wuornos herself admitted that she was a stone-cold killer. Her victims fought for their lives as desperately as any female murder victim.' ![]() As her biographer Sue Russell put it, 'she gunned down complete strangers, shooting them multiple times, sometimes in the back as they tried to flee. This initial murder was allegedly done in self defence when he assaulted her, but it paved the way for a series of killings she carried out with ruthless aplomb. She was forced to scrape together a living through sex work, was arrested for numerous crimes including armed robbery, and eventually killed her first victim in 1989. The daughter of a schizophrenic, convicted sex offender father, the young Wuornos was sexually abused by her grandfather and his friend, and eventually thrown out of the family home as a teenager. ![]() It’s certainly true that Wuornos was brutalised throughout her life. Pop songs, artworks and even an opera have all helped enshrine her as an avenging angel of furious female defiance in the face of patriarchal male violence. She became darkly mythologised, described in some quarters as a 'cult hero' and 'feminism’s first serial killer'. ![]() Shooting to death a string of men in Florida between 19 didn’t merely make Aileen Wuornos notorious. ![]()
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