Black widow may refer to:
Amy Duggan "Sister" Archer-Gilligan was a nursing home proprietor and serial killer from Windsor, Connecticut. She murdered at least five people by poisoning them. One of her victims was her second husband, Michael Gilligan; the others were residents of her nursing home.
Daisy Louisa C. de Melker, simply known as Daisy de Melker, was a South African nurse who was accused of poisoning two husbands with strychnine for their life insurance money; all she was found guilty of, however, was poisoning her only son with arsenic for reasons which are still unclear. De Melker is the second woman to have been hanged in South African criminal history.
The Angel Makers of Nagyrév were a group of women who lived in villages in the Tiszántúl region of Hungary and poisoned about 300 people between 1911 and 1929. They were supplied arsenic and encouraged to use it by a local midwife named Zsuzsanna Fazekas, née Oláh, wife of Gyula Fazekas. Their story is the subject of the documentary film The Angelmakers and the feature film Hukkle.
Anna Marie Hahn was a German-born American serial killer. She murdered 5 elderly men from Cincinnati by poison between 1933 and 1937. She was convicted of murder and executed by electric chair in 1938.
Ottilie "Tillie" Klimek was a Polish American serial killer, active in Chicago. According to accounts, she pretended to have precognitive dreams, accurately predicting the dates of death of her victims, when in reality she was merely scheduling their deaths.
Judias Anna Lou "Judy" Buenoano was an American serial killer who was executed in Florida for the 1971 murder of her first husband James Goodyear. She was also convicted of the 1980 murder of her son, Michael Buenoano, and of the 1983 attempted murder of her boyfriend, John Gentry. Buenoano is also acknowledged to have been responsible for the 1978 death of another boyfriend, Bobby Joe Morris, in Colorado. But by the time authorities tied Buenoano to Morris, she had already been sentenced to death in the state of Florida.
Janie Lou Gibbs was an American serial killer from Cordele, Georgia, who killed her three sons, a grandson, and her husband, by poisoning them with arsenic in 1966 and 1967.
Audrey Marie Hilley, also known by the aliases Robbi Hannon and Teri Martin, was an American murderer and suspected serial killer. She was suspected in the death by poisoning of her husband and the attempted murder of her daughter, and spent three years as a fugitive from justice. Her life and crime spree are the subjects of the 1991 telefilm Wife, Mother, Murderer.
Autopsy is a television series of HBO's America Undercover documentary series. Dr. Michael Baden, a real-life forensic pathologist, is the primary analyst, and has been personally involved in many of the cases that are reviewed.
Mary Ann Cotton was an English convicted murderess who was executed for poisoning her stepson. Despite her sole conviction for murder, she is believed to have been a serial killer who killed many others including 11 of her 13 children and three of her four husbands for their life insurance policies. Her preferred method of killing was poisoning with arsenic.
Lyda Southard, also known as Lyda Anna Mae Trueblood, was an American female suspected serial killer. It was suspected that she had killed four of her husbands, a brother-in-law, and her daughter by using arsenic poisoning derived from flypaper in order to obtain life insurance money.
Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus was a German serial killer believed to have been responsible for poisoning her husband, aunt, and lover, and of attempting to poison her servant. Her trial led to a method of identifying arsenic poisoning.
Martha Wise was an American poisoner and serial killer. After her husband died and her family forced her to end a relationship with a new lover, Wise retaliated by poisoning seventeen family members, of whom three died, in 1924. She was convicted of one of the murders, despite defense claims that she was mentally ill and that her lover had ordered her to poison her family. The case is considered one of the most sensational of the era in Ohio, where it occurred.
Elizabeth Ridgeway was an English woman convicted of poisoning her husband. While awaiting execution by burning at the stake, she confessed to previously poisoning her mother, a fellow servant, and a lover.
Sarah Jane Robinson, known as The Boston Borgia, was an Irish-born American serial killer who poisoned her family members and other people from 1881 to 1886, with the help of her accomplices Thomas R. Smith and Dr. Charles C. Beers. She was initially sentenced to death for the poisoning of her brother-in-law, but the verdict was later changed to life imprisonment, with Robinson dying behind bars.
Ana di Pištonja, better known as Baba Anujka, was a Serbo-Romanian convicted serial killer amateur chemist from the village of Vladimirovac, which was during her life part of the Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary and eventually Yugoslavia. She poisoned at least 50 people and possibly as many as 150 in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was apprehended in 1928 at age 90 and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1929 as an accomplice in two murders. She was released due to old age after spending eight years in prison.
Mária Gerzsány was a serial killer in Austria-Hungary responsible for poisoning at least three people with arsenic in Kistelek between 1905 and 1911. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for these murders, but it's presumed that she might've been responsible for more, selling her poisons to people who wished to get rid of unwanted relatives.
Edith Murray was an American woman suspected of fatally poisoning three of her husbands and two of her children for insurance money. She was later arrested in connection to deaths in April 1922, but released due to a lack of evidence. She then died in 1969.
Baptistine Philip was a French serial killer who fatally poisoned her employer, uncle-in-law, and husband in Aix, France, between 1871 and 1878 for monetary gain. Philip was caught after murdering her husband, when neighbours, who had long suspected Philip of the poisonings, went to the police with their suspicions. Experts examined the bodies of every victim and found large amounts of arsenic in all of them. The following year, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
