4. Juana Barraza, aka“La Mataviejitas” (The Old Lady Killer)
Barraza ranks 4th in our list of the 9 most evil female serial killers of all time. She was a professional wrestler from Mexico who got several life sentences for the murder of 11 elderly ladies in the late 1990s, although she’s believed to have killed about 50. Her ring name in Lucha Libre (a Mexican mock-wrestling form that involves masks) was “La Dama del Silencio” (The Silent Lady).
In her young years, Barraza was sold by her drunkard mother in exchange for a beer to a stranger, who raped her repeatedly and got her pregnant. Resentful towards her mother, Juana targeted ladies over 60 years old, who either lived alone or were unaccompanied at the time. She would bludgeon or strangle them and then she would rob them, although in several cases there were also signs of abuse.
Baffled in the face of this jigsaw, the investigators called the elusive killer “a brilliant mind”, and bred several hypotheses: that she disguised as a government employee to obtain access to the homes, that she met the women days prior in order to gain their trust, or even that there were two killers. Of course, all of these theories pictured Barraza as a man, and not even when it was discovered that the assailant “would wear women’s clothes to appear less threatening” did it occur to the police that the murderer could actually be a woman. As you can imagine, the whole thing took some time.
48-year-old Barraza, definitely one of the 9 most evil female serial killers of all time, was finally captured in 2006, after being seen leaving a murder scene, and linked to the case through a fingerprint found in the victim’s house. In 2008 she was sentenced to 759 years in prison.
