Lorena Bobbitt was born October 31, 1970 in Bucay, Ecuador. Not much is documented about her life until she married John Bobbitt in 1989.

On June 23, 1993 Bobbitt claimed that her husband raped her. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence and she had suffered other forms of physical and mental abuse from him.

That night, after he went to sleep, she went to the kitchen and grabbed a carving knife. She then returned to her bedroom and cut off his penis.

Bobbitt then left the apartment with the severed appendage and drove away. After a while she threw it out of the window then stopped to call 911, telling the police what happened. The appendage was later found and reattached.

Bobbitt was tried for her crimes. During the trial vendors sold shirts that said “Love hurts” and penis-shaped candy.

John was charged with marital sexual assault. During this time period, marital rape was a relatively new crime and the law made it almost impossible to prove. He was arrested several more times and has served jail time for assault.

In court she testified that he sexually, physically, and emotionally abused her during their marriage. Her attorneys claimed that all the abuse made her snap and that because of the abuse she was suffering from depression and PTSD.

John denied the claims but, during cross examination his statements would conflict.

John was later acquitted of rape and she was found not guilty due to insanity. As a result she had to undergo a 45 day evaluation at Central State Hospital, after which she was released.

In 1995 the two divorced.

John went on to form a band and star in two porn films. He was also a regular on the Howard Stern show.

This case received a lot of media attention. Terms like the "Bobbittized punishment" and "Bobbitt Procedure" became common and the Bobbitt worm was named after this case.

After Lorena served a short sentence in a mental hospital she went back to her life as a manicurist. She remarried and had one child. She also formed a charity called Lorena’s Red Wagon which helps survivors of domestic violence.

Elizabeth Holmes  was born on born on February 3, 1984 in Washington D.C. Her mother worked as a congressional staffer while her dad was employed by Enron and later worked for government agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. 

She was considered to be a bright child and, at age seven, tried to invent a time machine. She filled notebooks with notes and ideas. 

At age nine she told her family that she wanted to be a billionare when she grew up. She was known to be very competitive. 

In high school she was a straight A student and started a business where she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to schools in China. She also participated in a summer program at Stanford. 

After graduating she went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. She spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore. 

In her sophomore year she went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and asked him if he wanted to start a company with her. With his help she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company's name to Theranos and filed a patent for a "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery”. She then dropped out of college to work at her company full time. 

She claimed to be developing a machine that could run a variety of tests from a small drop of blood for things like high cholesterol and cancer.

Some of the early Theranos investors were Larry Ellision, who founded Oracle, and Tim Draper, founder of VC firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Holmes was able to raise over 700$ million dollars from investors.

Holmes began to model her style and speech after her icon, Steve Jobs and was known to dress like him. She also dropped her voice to a lower tone. 

She began dating the president and COO of Theranos, Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years older than her. They had met during Holmes' third year in Stanford’s summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college. 

In 2008 the Theranos board attempted to remove Holmes to replace her with someone more experiences. After a two hour meeting Holmes convinced them to let her stay on. 

As Theranos gained in fame so did Holmes. She was on the cover of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba's Jack Ma. Theranos also began partnering with other companies such as Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic. They made a deal with Walgreens to open testing centers in their stores. 

Holmes became the world’s youngest self made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion but no one in the outside world knew how her company worked. Anyone who visited Theranon had to sign NDAs and was escorted everywhere by security. 

In 2015 Ian Gibbons, a chief scientist at Theranos, warned Holmes that the tests weren’t ready to take public and that there were issues with the technology. Others began voicing their concerns too. 

In August of that year the FDA began investigating the company and found "major inaccuracies" in their testing. 

Then in October John Carreyrou, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, published his investigation. He had discovered that the blood testing machine wasn’t giving accurate results and that they were running their samples through traditional blood testing machines. He spoke to ex-employees and retrieved official company documents. 

Theranos threatened to sue if he published the story but did it anyway. 

Holmes denied all allegations and appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money to defend herself and her company, saying that "This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.” 

By 2016 the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos. In January Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent Theranos a warning letter that talked about issues with staff, procedures an

Andrea Yates was born in Hallsville Texas in 1964. She started to show signs of depression at age 17. She graduated from high school in 1982 as class valedictorian,  captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. She went on to get her nursing degree from the University of Texas and then worked as a nurse until she married Rusty Yates on April 17, 1993.

In 1883 she immigrated to Chicago to live with her sister while her brother stayed in Norway. 

In 1884 she married Mads Albert Sorenson and they had four kids and one foster child. Her husband owned a candy store. 

In 1890 their house burned down and in 1895 the store burned down and they received insurance money for both. During this time two of their children died from acute colitis. 

Interestingly acute colitis and strychnine poisoning share some common symptoms, such as abdominal pain and this will come into play later in Gunness’ life. 

Her husband also died in this time period on the one day that his two life insurance policies overlapped. His family demanded an inquiry but no charges were filed. The family thought that it was strychnine poisoning but her doctor overruled them and ruled it as heart failure. 

With the insurance payout, Gunness bought a farm with more than 40 acres near La Porte, Indiana. She remarried Peter Gunness, who had two children. He suspected that something wasn’t right and sent his oldest daughter to live with relatives. She is the only child who survived Gunness. Peter and his younger daughter both died shortly after. 

After this Gunness began posting in a singles column in the local paper.  Many men answered the posting. She demanded that the men sell everything they had before coming to see her.

In July 1907 Gunness hired Ray Lamphere to be farm hand and began sleeping with him. He didn’t like all of her suitors but she refused to be with him because of his gambling problem. 

She began a long distance relationship with Andrew Helgelien from South Dakota. They wrote each other for 16 months before meeting. He arrived in January 1908 with $2839  to build a new life with her. 

Shortly after Gunness and Lamphere got into a fight and she kicked him off the property. She complained to the sheriff that she saw him through her windows and had him arrested and fined for trespassing. 

During this time Helgelien’s brother Asle began to worry about him. One of their farmhands found their letters and Asle became suspicious of her motives when he read the she asked him to withdraw all of his money and come to her. 

He wrote to Gunness and asked where his brother was. She claimed that he left for Chicago and speculated that he may go to Norway. Alse didn’t think that that sounded like his brother. 

Gunness was still worried about Lamphere and in April went to a lawyer and had a will drawn up. After the meeting, she went shopping and came home with cakes, a toy train, and two gallons of kerosene. She treated her family that evening to a large meal of meat and potatoes and spent the night sitting on the floor, playing with her children and their new toy train.

The following morning her house had burned down. Four burnt bodies were found, three were children and the last was an adult female. The woman’s corpse was headless. It was assumed that the woman’s body was Gunness’. Lamphere  was arrested immediately and when Alse read this in the paper he rushed to Indiana.  

Alse went to the sheriff’s office and the sheriff drove him to the house to search for clues. A week later and the skull of the woman’s body had yet to be found. Some assumed that Lamphere had hidden it. 

Since they weren’t having luck digging through the rubble Asle suggested that they look in the hog pen. There they a gunny sack Inside were two hands, two feet, and one head. Asle recognized the withered, rotten face: It was his brother. Then the men digging realized that there were dozens of slumped depressions in Gunness’s yard. As the property was searched more body parts were found. Between 14 to 40 bodies were recovered. 

Each body was butchered into six parts: The legs chopped at the knee, the arms hacked at the shoulder, and the head decapitated. Most of the remains could not be identified. The skulls had evidence of blunt force trauma. The bodies that were still in tact had evidence of rat poison.

Gunness was nicknamed th

In Nasik, Pune India a mother, daughter, Seema Mohan Gavit, and step daughter, Renuka Kiran Shinde, trio teamed up to commit crimes. The daughters were in their twenties when they started pick pocketing people.

In 1990 they realized that they could use children to creat a diversion. Shinde was caught pickpocketing outside a temple and her son was with her. She used him as a defense, convincing the crowd that a woman with a child couldn’t be a thief.

Shortly after this the women began abducting children and using them as a front. Most of the kidnappings took place in busy places such as temple compounds and fair grounds in cities like Nasik, Kolhapur and Pune. They were nicknamed the Sinister sisters by the news.

Kiran Shinde drove the getaway car, a Fiat. Most of the kidnapped children were from poor families.

The first victim was a beggar woman's one-year-old son, Santosh. The sisters used him as a distraction, if they were caught the woman carrying the child would throw them on the floor, creating a commotion while the other escaped.

If the child cried or complained they would kill them. The mother was usually the one in charge of this.

The sisters were caught when they visited Mohan to kidnap his second daughter in October 1996. His second wife had filed a complaint against them and their mother when her elder daughter went missing. During questioning the police found evidence of the other murders. The women were arrested on November 19, 1996.

The police were able to get Shinde to crack and tell them everything, though later the women denied all the charges.

On June 29, 2001, The women were charged with thirteen cases of kidnapping and nine murders. The first court found them guilty of kidnapping and murdering of six children. The high court found them guilty in five of those cases and gave them the death sentence. They did not convict them of the murder of Gavit’s son.

The mother died while awaiting trail. The two daughters have exhausted their appeals, in 2014 the President of India rejected their mercy appeal.

In 1908 the family moved into the house. That was also the year that Chester won a House a Representative seat in the State Congress. 

He died at 63 of a heart attack. When he died he was the richest person in Minnesota. 

The adult children later all moved out of the house and Clara remained, living a less lavish lifestyle. She was still involved in the community but it was less public. 

Their youngest daughter, Elizabeth, dropped out of college to stay with Clara when her dad died. Elizabeth never married but adopted two daughters to live with her at the estate.

Clara died in 1950 at age 96. 

Elizabeth suffered a stroke in 1964 and required a full time nurse. 

The murders took place on June 27th, 1977. Someone broke into the mansion and killed the 67 year old nurse, Velma Pietila, on the stairway with a candlestick. The killer then went upstairs and smothered Elisabeth Congdon with a satin pillow. The next day it was discovered that a watch and a ring she was wearing were missing, along with other pieces of jewelry and a wicker suitcase. 

Suspicion immediately fell to Marjorie Caldwell, one of Elisabeth’s adopted daughters, and her husband, Roger for several reasons. First, in 1949 she had been diagnosed as a sociopath. In 1973 her mother had to be hospitalized after eating a sandwich with Caldwell’s homemade marmalade. She survived, but hospital staff were unable to explain the high level of tranquilizers found in her system.

Also Caldwell and her husband were desperate for money. Caldwell was in line to inherit 8$ million when her mother passed.  A month before Elisabeth was killed Caldwell had asked the Congdon trustees for $750,000 so they could buy a horse-breeding ranch. They’d been denied.

After the funeral the two went to the Twin Cities where Roger collapsed. He was taken to the hospital and it was found that he had a high dose of sedatives in him, similar to the ones found in Elisabeth’s body in 1973. 

While Roger recovered the police searched the couple’s hotel toom and found the diamond watch, sapphire ring, and wicker suitcase, leading to them being charged. 

Roger was found guilty and given two life sentences. Caldwell was also charged with conspiring to kill her mother. Many thought that she was the mastermind behind the crimes. 

During Caldwell’s trial she would knit at the defense table. She also brought a birthday cake for one of the lawyers. People believe this helped lead to her being acquitted. 

Two years after Roger was found guilty two new pieces of information -a disputed fingerprint and changed witness testimony- lead to him getting a new trial.  Prosecutor’s didn’t want to risk a not guilty verdict so they gave him a deal. Roger confessed to the murders and was freed after serving five years in jail. He later committed suicide. 

After being acquitted Caldwell left Minnesota. She later served two prison terms for arson and was accused of murdering her third husband after he died of a drug overdose. 

She is still alive and lives in Arizona. 

The house is open for public tours but they won’t discuss the murders.

Baniszewski was born September 19, 1929 as Gertrude Wright, She was very close to her father but had a strained relationship with her monther. When Baniszewski was 11 she watched her dad die of a heart attack. 

She dropped out of school at 16 to marry 18 year old John Baniszewski. They had four kids together and he was abuse. Eventually Baniszewski divorced him. She then married someone new, divorced them and remarried Baniszewski and have two more kids. The pair was permanently divorced in 1963. 

Baniszewski then began to have an affair with a 23 year old named Dennis Lee Wright. He was also abusive. Baniszewski went on to have one more child with him. 

As she aged Baniszewski’s health declined. She was ill with a number of unidentified illnesses.

She moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in the 1960s. She was very poor and would make money by watching neighborhood kids. This was how she ended up watching Sylvia Likens and her younger sister, Jenny. Their parents were on the road trying to make money and would leave the kids with her for months at a time. Sylvia was 16 at the time. 

Syliva was abused from the beginning, likely because she was attractive. She was punished for eating candy they she purchased, called a slut or whore while being kicked in the genitals. She would be given only scraps to ear or was forced to eat rotten food. 

Baniszewski also convinced other people in the neigborhood to engage in the torture.  Baniszewski’s daughter, Paula, and a boy from the neighborhood, Randy, force fed her hot dogs and when she vomited they made her eat the vomit. At one point Paula hit Sylvia so hard that she broke her own wrist and then used the cast to keep beating her.  The kids also practiced brutal judo moves on her.

Baniszewski made Sylvia hit her own sister if she didn’t comply with any of the orders. 

Sylvia was also raped with an empty soda bottle, her gentials were cut up and mutilated. 

At one point, because she had nothing to wear, Sylvia stole clothes from school. She was then beat with a belt for her actions. 

The sisters were scared to report the abuse because they thought it would make things worse. Jenny was threatened that she would be beaten as well if she said anything. 

When their parents visited they didn’t see any signs of mistreatment. Baniszewski would stay with the girls, not letting them be alone with their parents. 

The two girls had an older sister that they did tell but she thought that they were exaggerating.  

Sylvia became incontient due to all of this abuse but wasn't allowed to use the bathroom. If she soiled herself she was punished. 

Eventually Baniszewski tied Sylvia up in the basement. She was kept down there naked and rarely fed or given water. People from the neighborhood could apy five cents to see her body and mutilate her. Salt was rubbed in her wounds and her screams were muffled. Baniszewski and her son rubbed urine and feces in her mouth. Her son then made her eat soup with her fingers but took the bowl away when she tried. 

Baniszewski  then allowed Sylvia to sleep upstairs, on the condition that she not wet herself. Jenny secretly gave her sister water and Sylvia wet herself. She was punished by being made to mastrubrate with a soda bottle and was then put back in the basement. 

Baniszewski  then branded the words "I'M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT" on her abdomen with a heated needle. She then instructed one of the neighborhood children who was present at the time to finish. He would later claim that he only lightly etched the remaining letters.

She continued to torture the girl, branding her more and taunting her. 

Baniszewski made Sylvia write a letter saying that she had run away with a group of boys and implying that they had tortured her. The plan was to take Sylvia into the woods and dump her body. 

On October 25th Sylvia tried to escape but Baniszewski caught her. She was then beat again and put back in the basement. 

By the morning of the 26th Sylvia couldn’

Anna Sorokin is a Russian Immigrant. Her father was a truck driver in Russia who later ran a heating and cooling business in Germany. Sorokin moved to Paris for an internship at Purple magazine and then moved to New York in 2014. 

From here she began to embed herself in high society. She wasn't as rich as many of the people in her social circle so she began to run a scam to trick banks and shops into paying for a more extravagant lifestyle. 

She began telling people that her name was Anna Delvey and that she was a German heiress so she could open a members only arts club on Park Avenue South. She told her friends that Delvey was her mother’s maiden name, which wasn’t true, and that her dad was a diplomat, oil executive or a solar panel magnate. She began buying expensive brands and living in fancy hotels. She would hired private planes and buy expensive gifts for her friends. 

She also met some members of high society. She became friend with Gabriel Andres Calatrava who is an architect and the son of famous architect.  She nearly got him to agree to build her private club. 

She paid for all of this by getting loans from banks. City National Bank gave her 100,000$ and let her overdraft her account. With this money she went on a shopping spree at Apple and Net-a-Porter. 

All of this was going well until she took a trip to Morocco with one of her close friends, Rachel DeLoache Williams, who was a former Vanity fair editor and her friend. The two stayed in a five star resort and racked up a 62,000$ bill. When Sorokin’s card got decline she convince Williams to pay the bill, promising to pay her back.

When Sorokin didn’t repay her Williams went to the police. 

Sorokin was first arrested in July 2017  for skipping out on thousands of dollars of bills at the Beekman and W New York hotels and a lunch bill of less than $200 at a restaurant at the Le Parker Meridien hotel.  She was released but then arrested again in October. 

Before her trial Sorokin was offered a plea deal with a sentence of three to nine years in prison but she considered that too long and instead took her chances at trial. 

At her trial Williams, her friend, testified against her. 

The jury deliberated for only two days and, on April 25th 2019, returned a guilty verdict. She was found guilty on multiple fraud charges, including second-degree grand larceny and theft of services. She was, however, found not guilty on two other charges: one of two counts of attempted grand larceny, and one for allegedly stealing more than $60,000 from Williams.

She was sentenced to four to twelve years in prison and ordered to pay almost $199,000 in restitution, as well as a fine of $24,000.

During the trial Sorokin seemed unconcerned. The district attorney commented that she, "more seriously her clothing than anything else."

Sorokin has not since expressed any sadness or remorse over her actions. She is quoted as saying: “The thing is, I’m not sorry. I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything. I regret the way I went about certain things.”

After her release Sorokin hopes to move to London but will likely be deported to Germany.

Williams is writing a book about her time with Sorokin and Netflix has acquired the right to a TV show on her.

The Forty Elephants got their name from the Forty Thieves, a similar male gang. They were different in that they were comprised entirely of women and instead of breaking into stores they would steal while the stores were open.

They were in existence from at least 1873 through the 1950s but it’s possible they were around longer. 

They ran the largest shoplifting operation in Britain and made special coats, cummerbunds, muffs, skirts, bloomers and hats with hidden pockets to stuff the stolen goods into.  They would enter a store and steal from it, never keeping the goods but instead selling them off at a merchant’s. 

They eventually became so well known that they needed to spread out because panic would erupt as they neared. 

They would also sleep with wealthy men and then blackmail them to stay quiet and get maids positions in wealthy houses in order to rob them. 

As technology advanced they invested in cars and would also leave empty suitcases on trains to deposit the stolen goods into. 

If caught, they were freed using a fund that the women set up for exactly that. 

Their leaders were known as Queen and their most renowned queen was Alice Diamond, she lead the group starting in 1912 after coming from a criminal background herself. 

Her second in command was Margaret Hughes. Diamond would use a local male gang to ensure that her blackmail was paid. She also kept razors and diamond rings on her to use as a weapon. 

Their decline started with a woman in the group named Marie Britten. She fell in love with a man outside of the group, which was against their rules. She was summoned to Diamond and brought her dad along with her. Britten refused to stop seeing the man and Hughes attacked Britten’s dad with a razor. The two escaped but Diamond went after them. 

Members of the gang hurled rocks through Britten’s windows, injuring several people. The police were called and many members of the gang were arrested- Diamond and Hughes escaped though. At trial they were the only ones charged and were convicted and sentenced to hard labor. 

When Diamond returned to the gang they had weakened and she gave up her leadership. They crumbled after that.