Five female serial killers behind Netflix’s darkest true-crime stories
Serial killers have been sold in movies as lone men lurking somewhere in the shadows, so when the person at the centre of the murder turns out to be a nurse on shift or a landlady collecting the rent, your brain takes it in as a delay response.
Look at Beverley Allitt and Dorothea Puente; neither needed a massive disguise or a secret lair. Come on, this is real life, not a Bond villain audition. The trust was already built into their roles, and bloody hell, that makes suspicion a lot slower to build up.
Female serial killers might be fewer compared to men, but every time you look at one, you find a surprising new motive and story. Circumstances change, and so does motive, but the thought that a woman did it makes the idea a lot more unsettling.
And that is what makes these five female serial killers from Netflix so interesting. So if you are watching them with a similar type of expectation or a stereotype in mind, you’d better wipe your thoughts before reading about these five.
Five female serial killers behind Netflix’s darkest true-crime stories
Aileen Wuornos – Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers (2025)
We thought we’d start with the best, or the worst, you decide, but in all fairness, Aileen Wuornos has been the topic of discussion so many times now, you would think this case had been wrung dry. It has been dissected in documentaries, books and headlines for decades, yet there is still so much more left to say.
Between 1989 and 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven men in Florida while working as a sex worker. She said the first killing was self-defence after an assault, while prosecutors disputed the broader claim. She was convicted of murdering Richard Mallory, pleaded no contest to five more killings and was executed in 2002.
Netflix has its own take on her with the doc Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, but it does not just chuck the old mugshots on screen and call it a documentary. Emily Turner’s 2025 film pulls in police tapes and courtroom footage, along with unseen death-row conversations with Wuornos, which gives the case a different texture. The murders never disappear from view, but neither do the abuse in her past or the media circus that grew around her.
Rose West – Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story (2025)
The next notorious serial killer brings a different kind of horror, because from the pavement, 25 Cromwell Street looked like just another family home. Then the police started digging, and the whole picture changed.
Rose and Fred West targeted young women over a number of years, and nine bodies were found buried in the garden and cellar of their Gloucester house. Rose was convicted of ten murders in 1995, while Fred died by suicide before he could stand trial.
Netflix launched Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story last year, where police interview tapes and first-person accounts do most of the work, so you are hearing the case through the people who were there as investigators move from the disappearance of the couple’s daughter Heather to the full scale of what happened inside that house.
Dorothea Puente – Worst Roommate Ever (2022)
When you picture a grandma with white hair, you certainly do not see her as a serial killer. Ha! That’s Dorothea Puente laughing in your face. She ran a boarding house in Sacramento and built a reputation for taking in people who had nowhere else to go.
All that until one day, police dug up the garden, and seven bodies were found on the property, with prosecutors claiming Puente had killed vulnerable and elderly tenants while continuing to collect their benefit cheques. She was convicted of three murders.
Netflix tells her story in the Worst Roommate Ever episode ‘Call Me Grandma’, which, come on, gets more sinister the more you know. The episode follows the missing tenants and the investigation that cracked the whole thing open, while Puente’s grandmotherly image hangs over every revelation. Talk about hiding in plain sight.
Beverley Allitt – Murder by Medic (2024)
A children’s ward is the last place you expect the danger to be, with the nurse standing beside the bed, but that is exactly what makes the Beverley Allitt case hit so hard. In 1991, while working at Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital, Allitt murdered four children and injured nine others in her care, and for a while, the collapses kept coming with no clear answer.
Then people started joining the dots, and well, the person meant to be helping was the one causing the harm. Allitt received 13 life sentences.
Murder by Medic digs into that very trust, because Allitt did not need some clever disguise; she already had the uniform. The 2024 series follows healthcare workers who became killers, and her episode shows how one emergency after another began to raise questions around the ward. That is the chilling bit, isn’t it? Nobody had to let her in, because she was already there.
Myra Hindley – See No Evil (2006)
Myra Hindley’s case is a unique kind of punch in the gut, because See No Evil is not another documentary talking at you from behind a desk. Hindley and Ian Brady murdered five children and teenagers around Manchester between 1963 and 1965, with victims buried on Saddleworth Moor.
Hindley was convicted in 1966 of murdering Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and of being an accessory after the fact in John Kilbride’s murder.
Maxine Peake plays Hindley, and the series does not turn her into some grim celebrity double act, with Sean Harris playing Brady. Quite right too. It keeps pulling you back to the investigation and the damage left behind. You still feel the horror, of course, but without all the lurid fuss, because with a case this unpleasant, what more can you add?