female killers

In 1954, in the conservative city of Christchurch, New Zealand, two teenage girls—16-year-old Pauline Parker and 15-year-old Juliet Hulme—committed one of the country’s most notorious crimes by brutally murdering Pauline’s mother, Honorah Rieper, in Victoria Park. Bound by an intense, obsessive friendship forged in shared illnesses and elaborate fantasies, the pair had created a fictional “Fourth World” of saints and eternal youth, viewing Honorah as an obstacle to their inseparable future when Juliet’s family planned to leave New Zealand. On June 22, after tea at a park kiosk, they lured the unsuspecting woman into the woods and bludgeoned her to death with a brick wrapped in a stocking, delivering 45 blows in a frenzied attack. Their diaries, seized by police, revealed meticulous planning and delusional justifications, leading to a sensational trial that captivated the nation, diagnosed them with “folie à deux” (shared psychosis), and convicted them of murder—though spared the gallows due to their youth. Sentenced to indefinite detention, they were released in 1959 under new identities; Juliet reinvented herself as crime novelist Anne Perry, who died in 2023, while Pauline lived reclusively. The case sparked moral panics over juvenile delinquency and homosexuality, inspiring Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures and enduring as a chilling study of adolescent obsession and unchecked fantasy.

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Elizabeth Diane Downs, born in 1955 in Arizona to a strict fundamentalist family, grew up in emotional isolation that fueled her narcissistic and histrionic tendencies, leading to an impulsive marriage at 18, multiple affairs, and three children she viewed as burdensome obstacles to her romantic obsessions. On May 19, 1983, in rural Oregon, the 27-year-old postal worker shot her children—eight-year-old Christie, seven-year-old Cheryl, and three-year-old Danny—at close range during a staged roadside ambush, killing Cheryl and leaving the others severely disabled, all to eliminate them as barriers to reconciling with her married lover, Robert “Nick” Knickerbocker. Her fabricated tale of a “bushy-haired stranger” quickly unraveled under forensic scrutiny, Christie’s hypnotic testimony, and her own failed polygraphs, culminating in a 1984 trial where she was convicted of murder and attempted murder, sentenced to life plus 50 years. Downs’ chilling lack of remorse persisted through a 1987 prison escape, multiple denied paroles, and psychological evaluations diagnosing her as a malignant hysteric psychopath; her case, immortalized in Ann Rule’s Small Sacrifices and a 1989 TV movie, exposed the horrors of maternal filicide while profoundly scarring survivors Christie and Danny (adopted by prosecutor Fred Hugi) and her fourth child, Rebecca. As of October 2025, at age 70 in a California prison, Downs’ latest appeal—challenging nonunanimous jury verdicts—grinds on amid public outrage, underscoring her unyielding denial and the enduring legacy of a mother’s monstrous betrayal.

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