The Most Evil Woman From Each Time Period

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Wu Zetian Wu Zetian was born in 624 AD into a merchant family in Tang Dynasty China, a society so rigidly Confucian that women were expected to remain invisible behind silk screens for their entire lives.

[00:00:16]She did not remain invisible. By the time she was done, she had ruled the most populous empire on earth for over two decades, executed or exiled virtually everyone who had ever threatened her position, and become the only woman in 4,000 years of Chinese imperial history to rule not as a regent, not as a consort, but as emperor in her own name. She entered the imperial court at age 14 as a low-rank concubine to Emperor Taizong, a position that should have ended with her shaving her head and entering a Buddhist monastery upon his death, which is exactly what happened briefly. Her escape from that fate came through Emperor Gaozong, Taizong's own son, who had become infatuated with her while his father still lived. Within years of Taizong's death, she had returned to court, displaced the reigning Empress Wang, and begun the systematic dismantling of every obstacle between herself and absolute power.

[00:01:08]The method she used to destroy Empress Wang is the detailed story and still argue over in that nobody can quite look away from. According to the official Tang records written after Wu's death, records hostile to her authored by a Confucian scholars who despised everything she represented, she gave birth to a daughter, waited until Empress Wang came to visit the infant out of courtesy, and then, once Wang had left the room, smothered the child herself. When Emperor Gaozong arrived and found the baby dead, Wu pointed at Wang. The accusation held. Wang was arrested, stripped of her title, and later executed, reportedly by having her hands and feet cut off before being submerged in a vat of wine until she drowned, a punishment Wu called making a human pig, a deliberate echo of a torture that had been inflicted on a royal concubine centuries earlier.

[00:01:55]Whether she truly killed her own daughter is disputed by modern historians who point out that every source making this claim was written by political enemies decades after the fact. But what is not disputed is the result. Empress Wang was gone. Wu's rivals at court were gone, and the path to power was open.

[00:02:13]She moved through that path with the methodical patience of someone who had been planning since the age of 14. She established a secret intelligence network staffed by informants embedded throughout the court and the bureaucracy. A shadow apparatus that meant no minister, no general, and no member of the Tang royal family could speak privately without the possibility of those words reaching Wu's ears. Tens of thousands were exiled or executed during her reign, including multiple members of the Tang royal bloodline and at least two of her own sons who displayed insufficient deference. She forced one son into suicide, another she had exiled and then demoted repeatedly until he died in disgrace. A third she removed from the succession entirely.

[00:02:54]And yet, and this is the part that makes Wu Zetian genuinely complicated rather than simply monstrous.

[00:03:01]She was also by most objective measures an effective ruler. She expanded the imperial civil service examination system, opening government positions to talented men regardless of aristocratic birth, which destabilized the old landed nobility and built her a bureaucracy loyal to the state rather than to inherited privilege. She stabilized the borders, managed the economy competently, and oversaw a period of genuine prosperity. She ruled officially as emperor of her own Zhou Dynasty from 690 to 705 AD, 15 years of uncontested sole rule in a civilization that had never seen anything like her.

[00:03:38]She was deposed at age 80 by a palace coup while she lay ill and died that same year. The Tang Dynasty immediately began rewriting her out of history with the enthusiasm of people who had been afraid to say a word against her while she was alive. Empress Irene of Byzantium. Irene of Athens became Empress of Byzantium through marriage in 769 AD and then refused with extraordinary tenacity to accept that her power should end when her husband did. When Emperor Leo the Third died in 780, Irene became regent for her young son Constantine VI, which in Byzantine political tradition was understood as a temporary arrangement. A placeholder until the boy came of age and assumed his rightful place as sole ruler.

[00:04:20]Irene had a different understanding of the arrangement. For the next 17 years she maneuvered, exiled rivals, cultivated church allies, and positioned herself so thoroughly at the center of Byzantine power that when Constantine VI finally attempted to assert his authority as an adult emperor, he found that his own mother had spent nearly two decades making sure every lever of power ran through her. Constantine did eventually manage to sideline her temporarily in 790, ruling alone for a period, but he made the fatal mistake of allowing her back into influence and back into court.

[00:04:53]What followed in 797 AD is one of the more deliberately symbolic acts of violence in medieval history. Irene had her own son arrested, brought to the Porphyra, the purple chamber in the imperial palace where he had been born, and blinded, not superficially.

[00:05:09]The blinding was so severe, carried out so thoroughly, that Constantine died from his injuries shortly afterward.

[00:05:15]Byzantine law held that a physically mutilated man could not hold the imperial throne, which was precisely the point. By having him blinded in the room where she had given birth to him, Irene made the statement with a clarity that required no words. The same room that had given him life would take his power, and she would be the instrument of both.

[00:05:33]She then ruled as sole emperor, not empress emperor in the masculine title, from 797 until 802 AD. During her reign she carried out the restoration of icon veneration that the Eastern Orthodox Church later considered saintly enough to canonize her, which creates one of history's more uncomfortable contradictions.

[00:05:51]A woman venerated as a saint by millions of Orthodox Christians today who achieved her saintly ecclesiastical work by murdering her own son. Her other methods of consolidating power included having the tongues of former co-regents cut out so they could not speak against her and systematically exiling or mutilating anyone in the bureaucracy who showed loyalty to Constantine's memory.

[00:06:13]Some sources suggest she opened negotiations with Charlemagne about a possible marriage that would have united the Eastern and Western Empires under joint rule, which would have made her the single most powerful ruler in the known world. Though the exact nature of those negotiations is disputed and the marriage never occurred. She was deposed in 802 by her own finance minister, Nicephorus, who had grown tired of her tax policies and her habit of giving away imperial revenue to buy popular support. She was exiled to the island of Lesbos, where she died in 803, reportedly supporting herself by spinning wool in her final months. The Eastern Orthodox Church canonized her.

[00:06:51]Her feast day is August 9th. Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 into one of the most powerful noble families in the Kingdom of Hungary, a family whose members included princes, cardinals, and a king of Poland, which meant that by the time she began torturing and murdering young women at her castle in Čachtice, she had a level of legal and social protection that made her effectively untouchable for years. The estimates of her victim count range from 80, which is the conservative figure drawn from court testimony, to 650, which comes from what was allegedly her own diary, a document whose authenticity is disputed.

[00:07:28]What is not disputed is that investigators who finally raided Castle Čachtice in December 1610 found one woman dead, several more dying, and others imprisoned in various states of injury. The testimony collected from over 300 witnesses during the subsequent proceedings, described a consistent and methodical pattern of abuse. Young women, mostly peasant girls, recruited to the castle under the promise of domestic work or embroidery lessons, who were beaten, burned with hot irons and candles, had needles driven under their fingernails, were forced outside in winter and doused with water until they froze to death, were bitten by Báthory herself on the face, neck, and shoulders, and were subjected to other cruelties that several witnesses described in specific, consistent, corroborating detail. The legend that she bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth is almost certainly a myth.

[00:08:19]It appears in print for the first time more than a century after her death, and no contemporary account from the trial makes mention of it.

[00:08:26]But the documented reality requires no embellishment to be horrifying.

[00:08:30]What makes Báthory's case particularly instructive is how long it went on and why. Complaints about disappearing servant girls had reached local authorities years before the raid.

[00:08:39]Those complaints went nowhere because Báthory was a countess, a widow of a celebrated military hero, and one of the wealthiest landowners in Hungary. And no one in the early 17th century had the political standing to prosecute a woman of her rank. It was only when victims from minor noble families began disappearing, women slightly above peasant status, women whose families had enough standing to push back, that the investigation moved forward. When she was finally arrested, her four accomplices, the servants who had assisted in the torture and disposal of bodies, were executed after having their fingers torn out with hot pincers before being burned alive.

[00:09:16]Báthory herself, because of her noble blood, could not be executed. Instead, she was walled into a set of rooms in her own castle, with small slits cut in the masonry for food and air. She survived four years in those rooms, dying in August 1614. The exact number of her victims will never be confirmed because the majority were peasant girls whose disappearances had been noted by no one with the power or inclination to write them down.

[00:09:40]Mary I of England. Mary, I became Queen of England in July 1553, the first woman to rule England in her own right, and she spent the next 5 years doing everything in her power to undo the Protestant Reformation that her father Henry VIII had imposed on the country. Her method was fire. Between February 1555 and November 1558, Mary's government burned approximately 283 Protestants at the stake across England, a figure drawn primarily from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a Protestant source with obvious ideological stakes in the count, but one broadly accepted by historians as roughly accurate. The burnings were not quiet administrative executions carried out in prison yards. They were public spectacles staged in town squares and open fields attended by crowds designed to terrorize the Protestant population into reconversion through the visible demonstration of what heresy cost. Among those burned were Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had written the Book of Common Prayer, and Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, two senior bishops whose deaths at the stake in Oxford in October 1555 produced the famous reported words from Latimer, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out."

[00:10:59]Whether Latimer actually said that is uncertain, but what is certain is that Mary's campaign of burnings produced exactly the opposite of her intended effect. Rather than extinguishing English Protestantism, the executions generated martyrs, hardened Protestant resistance, and handed her enemies a propaganda weapon they used for the next century.

[00:11:19]Mary's personal history goes some distance toward explaining, if not excusing, the ferocity of her reign. She had been declared illegitimate by her father at age 17 after he annulled his marriage to her mother Catherine of Aragon, Stripped of her title, separated from her mother, and forced to serve as a lady-in-waiting to her infant half sister, Elizabeth. She was 37 when she finally took the throne after a life defined by humiliation, religious persecution, and political vulnerability. And she appears to have arrived at power with the convictions of someone who had paid very dearly for them. Her marriage to Philip II of Spain in July 1554 was widely unpopular in England, viewed as the subordination of English interests to a foreign Catholic king. And Philip's influence over English foreign policy led directly to the loss of Calais in January 1558, England's last territorial possession in France, held for over two centuries.

[00:12:14]Mary reportedly said on her deathbed that Calais would be found written on her heart. She died in November 1558, likely of uterine or ovarian cancer, having suffered two false pregnancies during her reign, and having failed in every strategic objective she had set for herself.

[00:12:29]England returned to Protestantism the moment Elizabeth took the throne. The 283 people she had burned stayed dead.

[00:12:35]Belle Gunness. Belle Gunness arrived in the United States from Selbu, Norway in 1881, and spent the next 27 years constructing what was, in operational terms, one of the most efficient murder enterprises in American history. She settled eventually on a hog farm outside LaPorte, Indiana. And it was there, in the dark turned earth of that property, that investigators in 1908 would excavate the remains of at least 11 people. A number almost certainly representing only a fraction of the actual total. The mechanics of her operation were straightforward and effective. She placed advertisements in Norwegian language newspapers across the Midwest, describing herself as a well-off widow with a prosperous farm, who was seeking a partner.

[00:13:18]Specifically, a partner with capital who was willing to liquidate his assets before arriving. Since, as she explained in her letters, she wanted no complications from creditors. The men who responded, almost all Norwegian immigrants, lonely enough to be persuaded by a letter and a photograph, arrived at the farm with their money.

[00:13:35]None of them left. The working theory, supported by physical evidence and by the account of a farmhand who later turned state's witness, was that Gunness drugged her victims, killed them, dismembered the bodies with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been butchering hogs for years, and buried the pieces in the hog yard, relying on the animals and the soil to handle the rest. She had done this before the farm. Her first husband, Mads Sorenson, had died in 1900 on the one day that two of his life insurance policies overlapped, a coincidence that generated suspicion at the time and resulted in nothing. Several of her children died young and were insured. A second husband, Peter Gunness, died in 1902 when, according to Belle, a meat grinder fell from a shelf and struck him on the head, an account the local coroner accepted. The farm burned on the night of April 28th, 1908. Inside the ruins, investigators found a headless female body alongside the bodies of three of Gunness's children. The body was identified as Belle by neighbors and by the family dentist, initially. Then the dentist's identification began to unravel. The body was the wrong size.

[00:14:43]The bridgework identified as Belle's turned up intact in the ashes in a way that suggested it had been placed rather than lost. Ray Lamphere, the farmhand she had recently fired and who had been making threats, was convicted of arson.

[00:14:56]The question of whether Belle Gunness died in that fire or staged her own death and walked away has never been definitively answered. Reported sightings of a woman matching her description occurred across the United States for years afterward. She was declared legally dead in 1931. The hog yard gave up 11 confirmed bodies. The actual number of people who went to that farm and did not come back is unknown and at this point unknowable. Irma Grese.

[00:15:24]Irma Grese was 22 years old when she was hanged at Hameln prison on December 13th, 1945, making her the youngest woman executed under British authority in the 20th century.

[00:15:34]A fact that sits in strange contrast with what she had been doing for the 3 years prior. She had joined the SS Aufseherinnen, the female auxiliary of the SS, in 1942 at age 19. And by 1943, she was serving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most lethal of the Nazi concentration camps, where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered, the vast majority of them Jewish.

[00:15:57]At Auschwitz, Grese held the rank of Oberaufseherin, senior guard, with authority over tens of thousands of female prisoners. The testimony collected from survivors at the Belsen trial in 1945, testimony from dozens of witnesses who did not know each other, who had been liberated from different parts of the camp, and whose accounts corroborated each other on specifics, described a woman who beat prisoners with a braided leather whip, who set trained dogs on inmates without provocation, who shot women arbitrarily, including shooting prisoners who bent down to pick up scraps of food ground, and who carried out these acts not with the mechanical indifference of someone following orders, but with visible, active enthusiasm. Survivors used the word enjoyed. They described her laughing. She participated in selection, the process by which SS personnel decided which arriving prisoners would be sent to forced labor, and which would be sent immediately to the gas chambers.

[00:16:51]And multiple witnesses described her role in those selections as eager rather than reluctant. She was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945 as the war collapsed, and it was there that British forces found her when they liberated the camp in April 1945.

[00:17:05]Found her amid tens of thousands of unburied corpses, amid the living skeletons of survivors, amid conditions so extreme that British soldiers who had fought through Normandy and across Europe described Bergen-Belsen as the worst thing they had ever seen. Grese was arrested, tried, and convicted.

[00:17:22]Throughout the trial, she maintained a composure that observers described as cold and contemptuous, showing no remorse and minimal engagement with the evidence against her. She was 21 years old during the trial. On the morning of her execution, she walked to the gallows without visible fear and spoke one word to the hangman, "Schnell." Quickly. She was 22 years and 67 days old. The hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, later wrote that she was the bravest person of any gender he had ever executed. Rosemary West. Rosemary West and her husband, Fred West, committed their crimes inside an ordinary red brick terraced house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England. A house so unremarkable from the outside that neighbors passed it daily for years without suspicion, which was precisely the point. Between 1973 and 1987, the Wests murdered at least 10 young women and girls, burying most of the bodies beneath the house itself.

[00:18:20]In the cellar, under the bathroom, in the garden, including Rosemary's own stepdaughter, Charmaine, who was 8 years old when she was killed, and Rosemary and Fred's daughter, Heather, who was 16. Heather's bones were found under the patio in 1994, more than 7 years after her death, when police finally excavated the property following the disclosure of a teenage girl who had been abused at the house. The victims, mostly young women in their teens and 20s, many of them runaways or hitchhikers who had no one likely to report them missing quickly, were subjected to prolonged sexual torture before their deaths. The bodies were dismembered, with fingers and toes frequently missing and never recovered, suggesting removal while the victims were still alive. Though pathological certainty is impossible given the condition of the remains. What made Rosemary West's case distinct from the standard narrative of women in such partnerships, the coerced accomplice, the dominated wife, the woman too frightened to resist, was the testimony of survivors and of the West zone children who described Rosemary as frequently the more violent and more sexually sadistic of the two. She ran a prostitution operation from the family home with Fred watching through peepholes and filming, but it was Rosemary who initiated abuse of the children in the house, Rosemary who beat them, and Rosemary whose volatility made the household climate more immediately terrifying than Fred's. Fred West committed suicide in his prison cell on January 1st, 1995 before he could stand trial, leaving Rosemary to face proceedings alone. Her defense argued domination and fear. Surviving victims argued otherwise. The jury convicted her on all 10 counts of murder after less than two days of deliberation on November 26th, 1995.

[00:20:01]The judge, Sir Charles Mantell, told her, "If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released." She has maintained her innocence from that day to this one. She is currently held at New Hall Prison in West Yorkshire.

[00:20:15]At 25 Cromwell Street was demolished in 1996.

[00:20:19]The site is now a footpath, deliberately unmemorable, which is the closest thing to appropriate that anyone could manage.

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