Deadly Women is an American documentary television series focusing on true crime , specifically female killers. It first aired in on the Discovery Channel. It was originally based on a TV documentary film called Poisonous Women , which was released in Deadly Women started as a miniseries comprising three episodes: "Obsession", "Greed", and "Revenge". After a three-year hiatus, the show resumed production in and began airing on the Investigation Discovery channel as a regularly scheduled series.
The series is produced in Australia by Beyond International. It covered four cases of women throughout history who committed murders using poison. Between and , Nannie Doss fatally poisoned four of her husbands, two of her children, her mother, one of her mothers-in-law, and two of her grandsons. She received the nickname "The Giggling Granny" because she seemed to giggle when she confessed to the murders. Avoiding the death penalty because of her gender, she was sentenced to life in prison on May 17, , and remained in prison until she died 10 years later, in In the United Kingdom during the early s, Mary Ann Cotton murdered 21 people by poison, including three of her husbands, her mother, a lover, a friend, and 12 children, 11 of whom were her own.
She was sentenced to death and executed by hanging on March 24, In , at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, nurse Kristen Gilbert injected poison into six of her patients, killing four of them. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole on March 27, , and served her sentence at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. Each of the three original episodes covered cases of various groups of women who were united by the episode's central theme.
These three episodes were narrated by Marsha Crenshaw. In Romania during the s and s, Vera Renczi poisoned her husbands, lovers, and son with arsenic before placing their bodies in zinc-lined coffins in her wine cellar. In New Orleans during the early 19th century, French socialite Delphine LaLaurie beat, tortured, and performed medical experiments on enslaved people in the basement of her mansion.
In the early s on a farm in La Porte, Indiana , Norwegian immigrant Belle Gunness poisoned her boyfriends with strychnine before feeding their remains to the hogs. Gunness' motive was to collect life insurance, cash, and other valuables from her victims. Between and in Windsor, Connecticut , nursing home proprietor Amy Archer-Gilligan purchased life insurance policies on her elderly residents before poisoning them with arsenic.
