Wicked Women Part 2

8. Andrea Yates

Andrea Yates drowned her five children in her bathtub. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity so you could make a case that she doesn’t belong on this. I’ve always sympathized with the mentally ill (most because I am one) and to commit such a horrendous act certainly doesn’t seem like she was right in the head. She was diagnosed with postpartum depression, post partum psychosis, schizophrenia, evidently a deadly combination. There were instances leading up to the murders. Andrea Yates tried to kill herself and had been hospitalized several times. Their doctor urged them not to have any more children for Yate’s sake because she had already shown postpartum psychosis with previous pregnancies. They had their fifth child not long after that ignored bit of wisdom. Yates went off her medication (Haldol, a strong antipsychotic they have administered to me several times but only in the hospital. Another thing they didn’t listen to was not to leave her alone but her husband went off to work leaving a fragile Yates alone with her five kids. If  you ask me, if anyone’s guilty its the husband who wanted to keep having children.

7. Diane Downs

Nothing insane about this woman. She calculated a plan, similar to Susan Smith’s, saying a man had carjacked her and for whatever reason had shot her  three children in the backseat which didn’t make any sense to anyone. After shooting her children herself, she drove them to the hospital, confident it was too late. She had also shot herself in the arm to make her story more plausible. One of her children was paralyzed from the waist down, one suffered a stroke and one died. There was mounting evidence against Downs who said she “sped” to the hospital while witnesses described her as driving slowly. But the lynchpin in her case was when her daughter testified against her own mother. The motive was similar to Susan Smith’s: a man.

6. Gertrude Baniszewski

A coldblooded woman with one victim that she inflicted torment upon for three months. Poor Sylvia Likens and her sister Jenny were entrusted in Baniszewski’s care. Their parents sent Gertrude money in exchange for their children’s room and bored. But behind Getrude’s eyes was a monster. Slyvia was tortured in so many different ways- sexually humiliated, starved, beaten, and burned to name a few. Official death: subdural hematoma and starvation. But it was just Getrude. She encouraged her own children and several of the neighborhood kids to participate. Gertrude should have served her life imprisonment sentence but she was released on parole. A senior investigator describes it as one of the most sadistic case he has ever investigated in 35 years. It is disgusting what they did to her and I’m not going to go into it here but you can google it if you are curious. 

5. Melinda Loveless

Melinda’s childhood was rocky. Her parent’s marriage was far from  harmonious; her father forced her mother into orgies, gangraped her and eventually beat her so badly she was convicted of battery. Melinda and her sisters knew what was going on: they could hear their mother being raped through the doors. Her older sister and cousin claimed her father molested them. Melinda did not claim this but she might have been trying to protect her father. She slept in the same bed with him until he was fourteen which I find odd. 

When she was fifteen Loveless began dating a girl named Amanda Heavrin (incidentally her two older sisters had come out as lesbians too). In detention after a fight Heavrin met victim Shanda Sharer. They went to the school dance together and Heavrin and Loveless broke up. Loveless began dating another girl but she felt furious. She got together with three other girls (Lawrence, Rippey and Tackett, all under the age of eighteen) and they went to go get Shanda (Larence and Rippey lured her out of her out pretending, Heavrin was waiting for her). When Shanda got to the car, Loveless sprang on her with the knife. The girls bound her arms and legs with rope. They found a dark spot in the woods where they began to torture the girl, primarily done by Loveless. She even tried to slit the girls throat with the knife she brought but it was too dull. She was strangled with rope until she was unconscious. Even at 2:30 in the morning Sharer clung to life. Tackett beat her with a tire iron. They even sexually assaulted her with a tire iron. Then they burned her (they weren’t sure if she was alive or not at the time). 

Loveless and the other murderers left a trail of evidence a mile long. She was released after nine years mostly because of mitigating factors such as her history of child abuse. Do you think that’s fair? A girl was sexually assaulted with a tire iron and burned alive? Do you think that’s fair?

Most of this infirmation came from Wikipedia and Investigative Discoverys Deadly Women.