Wannabe serial killer ends 'joyous' woman's life

The last day of Tosha Thakkar's life begins very pleasantly, with a leisurely sleep-in after a long late shift at Woolworths the night before.
She's jolted from her half sleep at 10am by the beep of her mobile phone. It's her boyfriend, Ali Syed, a fellow accountancy student at the Sydney campus of Southern Cross University.
She tells Ali she'll rustle up a rice dish for his lunch, jump in the shower and head into the city to meet him at 1pm, at the Bathurst Street convenience store where he works. From there they'll have lunch in Hyde Park before he goes back to work and she sets off for classes in the city. "I'll call you before I leave to catch the train," she says cheerfully.
Tosha was so joyous, so full of life, and she was always so trusting of people. 
The pretty 24-year-old Indian with the arresting ebony eyes and jet-black hair pads about her cramped single room, one of only three bedsits in a run-down boarding house above an abandoned nail salon in Croydon, in the city's inner west. Bollywood love songs are soon ringing out from her white laptop, email is dropping into her inbox, and steam is wafting up from her small rice cooker, further warming this windowless space.

Rosemary West

Rosemary West
AKA Rosemary Pauline Letts
Born: 29-Nov-1953
Birthplace: Barnstaple, Devon, England
Gender: Female
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Criminal
Nationality: England
Executive summary: British serial killer, along with husband Fred
Husband: Frederick West (m. 29-Jan-1972, d. 1-Jan-1995, suicide)
Son: Stephen West (b. Aug-1973)
  Was convicted in November 1995 of ten murders.

Gesche Gottfried, The German Serial Killer

Tags: Gesche Gottfried, Bremen

Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, born Gesche Margarethe Timm (6 March 1785 – 21 April 1831), was a serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hanover, Germany, between 1813 and 1827. She was the last person to be publicly executed in the city of Bremen.
Gottfried’s victims included her parents, her two husbands, her fiancé and her children. Before being suspected and convicted of the murders, she garnered widespread sympathy among the inhabitants of Bremen because so many of her family and friends fell ill and died. Because of her devoted nursing of the victims during their time of suffering, she was known as the “Angel of Bremen”.

Myra Hindley

Tags: Myra Hindley, Chemical Company, Greater Manchester

Ian and Myra met while working for a chemical company in Hyde, Greater Manchester. She thought he was quite an intellectual as he sat in the canteen reading Mein Kampf in German.

As their love blossomed they became more obsessed with Nazi paraphernalia, pornography and sadism. At first they enjoyed shooting pictures of themselves naked and in S & M drag. They thought they could crack the local porn market with their pictures but failed.
Most of their victims were children whom they sexually molested before killing. They kept an extensive collection of photographs of their victims as well as a recording of the screams of one girl's torturous death.

Dana Sue Gray

Tags: Serial Killer, Dana Sue Gray, Elderly Women

 By the time Riverside County Police caught up with Dana Sue Gray, she had garroted and bludgeoned to death a number of elderly women, then gone on binges with their credit cards. "I had," she said later, "this overwhelming need to shop." But others saw only an overwhelming need to kill

CANYON LAKE IS built around a meandering golf course and a man-made lake carved from the desert of Riverside County. For retirees like June Roberts, it was just the place to contemplate life in the golfing leisure class from behind 12-foot walls with 24-hour security, * Early one afternoon in 1994, a Cadillac belonging to one of Roberts's former neighbors nosed through the development's gates and stopped in front other olive and white house on Big Tee Drive. Leaving her 5-year-old passenger in the front seat, the driver walked up to the front door. What immediately transpired when she opened her door isn't known, but Roberts, 66, was ultimately strapped to a chair, strangled with cord ripped from her telephone and hammered savagely on the face with a wine bottle. (Her autopsy included the phrases "moderately deep ligature furrow" and "6-x-3-inch purple contusion.")

Juana Barraza

Tags: Juana Barraza, Serial Killer, Woman Killer

 
Juana Barraza (b.1957) is a Mexican serial killer dubbed Mataviejitas (Sp. “Old Lady Killer”) sentenced to 759 years in jail for killing eleven elderly women . The first murder attributed to Mataviejitas has been dated variously to the late 1990s and to a specific killing on 17 November 2003.The authorities and the press have given various estimates as to the total number of the killer’s victims, with estimated totals ranging from 24 to 49 deaths. Prior to her arrest, Barraza was a professional wrestler under the ring name La Dama del Silencio (The Silent Lady).

Profile

All the murderer’s victims were adult women aged 60 or over, most of whom lived alone. Murder was by bludgeoning or strangulation, and the killer invariably robbed the victims. In a number of cases, police said, evidence of sexual abuse was also found.
Bernardo Bátiz, the chief prosecutor in Mexico City, described Mataviejitas as having “a brilliant mind, [being] quite clever and careful”,^[6] and probably struck after a period spent gaining the trust of an intended victim. Officers investigating the killer’s modus operandi suspected that Mataviejitas posed as a government official offering the chance to sign up to welfare programmes.
The search for Mataviejitas was complicated by conflicting evidence. At one point the police hypothesised that two killers might be involved, and attention was also drawn to the odd coincidence that at least three of the killer’s victims owned a print of an 18th century painting, Boy in Red Waistcoat, by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze.^[7]

Jeanne Weber

Tags: French, Serial Killer, Jeanne Weber, Insane, Paris

Jeanne Weber (7 October 1874 – 1910) was a French serial killer. She strangled 10 children, including her own. She was convicted of murder in 1908, and declared insane. She hanged herself two years later.