Black Widows: Notorious female killers who turned on their loved ones
An Ice Princess who seduced a teen to kill. A wrestler with an iron grip on her lover. And a “dancing assassin”. Their shocking betrayals of loved ones came at the ultimate price.
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They turned on those they were supposed to love, in the most terrible betrayals imaginable.
Here are six shocking stories of unexpectedly evil female killers.
The Ice Princess
Former cheerleader Pamela Smart dreamt of making it big in television news.
And in 1990 the US school volunteer got what she wished for, in a manner of speaking.
Smart had her husband of less than a year, Gregory, murdered by her high school student lover in a case so salacious it made news around the world.
Scheming Smart’s deadly seduction of a virgin teen also spawned the 1996 film To Die For starring Nicole Kidman.
Smart, a high school media co-ordinator, was volunteering at a self-esteem program for students of Winnacunnet High School, New Hampshire, when she met 15-year-old Billy Flynn in 1989.
Music-loving Smart, who named her dog Halen for her favourite band Van Halen, liked to entertain the teenagers in the program with tales of her university days hosting a radio show as the “Maiden of Metal”.
She also became close friends the student intern helping her to produce educational school videos, Cecelia Pierce, 16.
Smart, 22, invited Flynn and Pierce over while her husband Greg was away on business one night in 1990.
After watching the movie 9 1/2 weeks, she sent Cecelia out to walk her dog while she had sex with Flynn and re-enacted steamy scenes from the film, which stars Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.
Flynn would later say Smart was the “first girl I’d ever loved” and she manipulated him by threatening to end the affair if he didn’t kill Gregory.
She didn’t want to give up her house, car and dog in a divorce.
His first attempt on Gregory’s life failed when Flynn got lost on the way.
But on May 1, 1990, Flynn and friends Vincent Lattime, 18, and Patrick Randall, 17, went to the Smart home armed with a gun stolen from Lattime’s father.
Smart had asked that they use a gun instead of a knife and to avoid bloodstains on her white leather couch.
She also asked Flynn to shut away Halen so the killing wouldn’t traumatise the animal.
The plan was to make it look like a burglary gone wrong, and the boys made Greg remove his wedding ring when they confronted him.
“My wife will kill me,” were his last words.
Flynn told Smart’s trial: “He was kneeling there and it was obvious that we weren’t going to be able to cut his throat (with a knife Randall had taken from the kitchen). “We couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.
“So I took the gun out of my pocket and cocked the hammer back. I pointed the gun to his head. I said, ‘God forgive me’ and pulled the trigger.”
Flynn and his accomplices pleaded guilty over the killing and agreed to testify against Smart.
Smart admitted her illicit relationship with Flynn, but stuck to her claim that she knew nothing of a murder plot.
The local media dubbed the emotionless Smart the “Ice Princess” after watching her calmly giving evidence during her trial.
But secretly recorded conversations with Cecelia Pierce after the murder went a long way to convincing a jury otherwise.
Smart was heard telling Pierce to lie to police, warning that if she told the truth she’d send her and the boys “to the f-----g slammer for the rest of our lives”.
Prosecutors also used raunchy photos Smart had given to Flynn to demonstrate her sexual power over the teenager.
“She threatened to take away the only thing that was good in my life,” Flynn would say in an apology to Gregory Smart’s family in 2008.
“I know none of this excuses what I did. I take full responsibility for my actions. Every day I think about what I’ve done to you and the people I hurt, and I’m terribly and deeply ashamed of myself for being so weak.”
Smart is serving life without parole after a jury convicted her of conspiring to murder her husband, being an accessory and witness tampering.
But to this day she maintains her innocence, doing regular television interviews and posting to her website, www.Pamelasmart.com
The Welsh dragon
As female wrestling’s Lycra-clad “Welsh Dragon”, Donna Marie Parsons rarely lost a bout, but her supreme skills on the mat were matched only by her talent for manipulation.
Falsely portraying herself as the wife of violent paedophile who molested their children, she enlisted the help of a young vigilante to help get rid of her “abusive” husband in September 2000.
Werribee locksmith Paul Parsons met his wife, a former champion wrestler, in their native United Kingdom when she replied to an ad for a travelling companion in 1995.
They married and came to Australia, raising two daughters.
Paul showed Norwich terriers and was a member of the Sporting Terriers Club of Victoria, while Parsons revived her passion for wrestling and started a company to promote the sport.
Her fledgling business, Melbourne Wrestling Promotions, staged its first show on September 16, 2000 — a night after her husband was murdered.
Parsons filled shelves at Altona Safeway of a night, working alongside Belal El-Ahmad, 23.
She knew her lies about Paul being a molester and abuser would engender sympathy and draw El-Ahmad to her cause.
Parsons encouraged El-Ahmad to spy on her husband, keeping him informed of Paul’s whereabouts and even buying him a mobile phone.
Records would later show there were 215 phone calls between Parsons and El-Ahmad in the 50 days before the murder, as the pair plotted Paul’s demise.
On August 22, El-Ahmad cut the brakes on Paul’s car while it was parked at the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds, where he was attending a meeting for the dog club.
But Paul quickly twigged the brakes were shot as he slowly drove from the carpark.
Paul confided to a friend the suspicions planted by his wife, that someone “in the wrestling world” had cut his brakes.
He also told her he was “worth more dead to Donna than alive”, referring to his $896,177 life insurance policy and a super payout that would see his wife reap around $1m in total.
El-Ahmad’s second botched attempt on his life two days later — which Parsons would also blame on a rival wrestling identity — involved leaning out of a car window and pushing Paul from his motorcycle.
El-Ahmad and his friend Andrew Stocker, 25, would hide in the back of her ute.
She’d drive home so they could slip into the house unseen and lay in wait for Paul, and parsons would create an alibi by being seen elsewhere.
On September 15 the plan was put into effect.
Paul arrived home around 5.30pm, and was beaten with two metal bars. His attackers then cut his throat.
El-Ahmad and Stocker then called Parsons to pick them up. She drove them away from the scene to a waiting driver some distance away.
Parsons had a neighbour enter the house later that night to discover Paul’s body.
It didn’t take long for police to track down El-Ahmad, who had items taken from the Parsons home at his house.
Paul’s blood was also found on a coat there.
El-Ahmad pleaded guilty and was jailed for at least 15 years, but Parsons and Stocker denied involvement in the killing.
They claimed El-Ahmad went to the house to assault Paul alone, and ended up killing him.
A Supreme Court jury convicted both of murder.
Susan Freeman, the dancing assassin
Loving father, teacher and local Tattslotto agent Ian Freeman was found floating in a lake beside his car by two fishermen on November 29, 1996.
After viewing her husband’s body at the mortuary, Freeman’s distressed wife Susan, 31, announced that she “just couldn’t understand why he would have taken his own life”.
There was no doubt that Freeman, a father of two, had drowned.
But once his body was pulled from the Cairn Curran Reservoir near Castlemaine, the suicide theory quickly began to waver.
He’s been found in less than a metre of water. His keys were in the ignition, and all the internal door locking knobs were missing.
There were grazes on his wrists, and while Freeman, 54, needed glasses to drive, they were not found on him but inside the car on the back seat.
And there were tiny haemorrhages behind his eyes that were not normal with a drowning — but usually seen in cases of asphyxia.
Very few people take their own lives by drowning, as Supreme Court Justice Philip Cummins would later note; “It is quite hard to drown yourself”.
Even fewer do so without the help of alcohol or drugs, he said, and neither was present in Freeman’s system.
Two days after he was buried, Susan went to the bank with a friend, Ian Brown, and took out her husband’s valuable stamp and coin collections.
The collections, worth around $25,000, along with Freeman’s $76,000 in superannuation would have meant Susan — who’d met Freeman at a dance class — was well-provided for as she grieved her second husband.
What she did not know was that her husband had changed his will and cut her out, leaving everything to his children from his first marriage.
The Freemans had a Tattslotto agency at the Lansell Plaza Shopping Centre, Kangaroo Flat, but both their marriage and their business were in trouble.
Both had children from their first marriages that did not adapt well to the union, and she was put out that he was giving away free Tattslotto tickets.
Freeman’s daughter Claire told police her father was leaving Susan, and had been looking for a flat to move out when he died.
Soon Brown came forward to police with a shocking tale: Susan had asked him to kill her husband, or find someone else who would.
Sadly, it wasn’t hard. Several months before Freeman’s death, Brown had mentioned her request to the owner of a local garage, Emmanuel Chatzidimitriou. He was also known as Max Chatz.
Susan agreed to pay him a $10,00 deposit, and another $40,000 when the job was done.
Prosecutors would later allege that Chatz abducted Freeman, tied him up and tried to drown him in his car.
Police arrested Chatz 10 weeks after the murder. Susan handed herself in and was also charged.
Chatz’s mobile phone records showed he was near the reservoir the night Freeman died.
A letter from Susan was found among Chatz’s belongings as they awaited trial. It read:
“Please say little and no deals. If I can my trial will be first and suicide will be proved. I’m strong and so must you be. My lips are sealed forever.”
But Chatz wasn’t so confident, and plotted unsuccessfully to have Brown, the star witness, killed before the trial.
A jury convicted both Susan and Chatz.
After the murder, a family friend found a crime novel in the Bairnsdale public library about a wife hiring a hit man to murder her husband by drowning him and masking it as a suicide.
It was donated by Susan Freeman and her first husband.
The ruthless Martha Needle
Martha Needle was a beautiful and ruthless poisoner.
Her murder toll was five, including her three young children, first husband Henry and her future brother-in-law, Louis Juncken.
Louis’ brother Hermann was just three gulps of tea away from being her sixth victim, before detectives intervened.
Rat poison was her weapon of choice and Martha’s heartless motives were never revealed, though she did profit greatly from the hundreds of pounds in life insurance payouts.
Thirty-year-old Martha was hanged on October 22, 1894, one of four women to be executed at the Old Melbourne Gaol.
It took the jury just 40 minutes to return a guilty verdict and Martha, without emotion, accepted Supreme Court Justice Hodge’s death sentence.
“The prisoner received the death sentence with extraordinary calmness. She walked out of the dock unassisted, with a firm step and unblanched face,’’ one newspaper reported.
Martha was born in South Australia in 1864 and her childhood was blighted by poverty and family violence.
At 17, she married Henry Needle and a daughter, Mabel, was born soon after. The following year Elsie came along and two years later, May.
In 1885, the family moved to Richmond.
In a short time, three-year-old Mabel became seriously ill with painful stomach spasms, fever and vomiting.
Mabel eventually died and Martha collected an insurance payout of 100 pounds sterling.
Four years later, husband Henry also died of a mysterious illness and Martha pocketed 200 pounds.
Within 12 months, Elsie and May also succumbed to illness, and again Martha was on the receiving end of substantial payouts.
Having disposed of her husband and three children, Martha Needle was indeed the Black Widow.
But more was to come.
In 1892, Martha started to take in boarders. Saddlers Louis Juncken and his brother, Otto, were operating their business in the front room of the house.
Otto caught Martha’s eye and a relationship quickly developed. He proposed and Martha gleefully accepted.
But not everyone was happy. Louis vigorously opposed the marriage and was about to call in other family members to reinforce his will.
But Louis’ campaign was cut short when he too died. It was put down to a dose of typhoid, which had been going around, and Louis’ body was shipped back to his relatives in South Australia.
But Louis also had another brother, Hermann, who had been sent to Melbourne to look after his dead sibling’s business affairs.
Martha immediately thought the worst. Would Hermann also oppose the marriage and what information was he armed with?
Once again, The Black Widow took the matters in her own hands ... and reached for the rat poison.
First of all, she encouraged Hermann to stay in her Richmond house, where she could keep him within sight.
After a meal prepared by Martha, he suddenly became violently ill, only to recover, and then suffer a relapse.
Hermann contacted a local doctor whose initial diagnosis concluded it was not the dreaded typhoid.
The GP advised Hermann to contact him if the illness returned. It did and the doctor was duly alerted.
The doctor collected vomit samples and a forensic examination revealed traces of arsenic.
He went straight to the police, who then set about laying a trap.
Hermann was asked to sit at Martha’s table one more time. After being served a cup of tea, Hermann raised the alarm and police burst into the room.
Martha, sensing the game was up, had tried to empty the contents onto the floor, but one officer made a saving dive for the cup.
The contents were later found to contain about 10 grains of arsenic. It was enough to kill five people.
Martha was initially arrested for attempted murder, but when the remains of her husband, three children and Louis Juncken were exhumed and scientifically tested, the charges became wilful murder.
Martha Needle’s trial took just three days, despite her plea of not guilty.
The granny killer
American grandmother Betty Neumar was either a serial spouse-killer or shockingly unlucky — having lost five husbands in suspicious circumstances.
Two husbands were shot dead by strangers and a third supposedly shot himself. One died after a long illness. Another husband was an alcoholic who reportedly died of exposure, but details of his death remain murky.
Tragedy beset Neumar all her life. And it’s unlikely we’ll ever know if it was misfortune, or murder.
The five-times married American died in 2011 aged 79, while awaiting trial over the death of her fourth husband Harold Gentry in 1986.
It was his shooting murder that resulted in her arrest more than twenty years later, in 2008.
She married Gentry in 1968. He was shot six times at their home in North Carolina.
Neumar told police she was out of town at the time, but walked away with a life insurance payout, sold the family home and received military benefits.
Al Gentry’s brother always suspected Neumar was behind it, and hounded local police to re-examine the case.
When they did, their investigation led them to the discovery of Neumar’s other ill-fated unions.
They charged her with soliciting the murder of Gentry, with allegations she had approached three different men to have her husband killed in the weeks before his death.
After her 2008 arrest, US authorities would allege she used more than two dozen aliases, including on drivers licences and passports.
There were claims of secret overseas bank accounts held by the former beautician and bus driver, whose only income was social security that added to the mystery.
Born a coalminer’s daughter in Ohio in 1931, she married her first husband, Clarence Malone, as an 18 year old in 1950.
They split after less than two years but had a son, Gary, in 1952. That son would also die a violent death in 1985, shot in a suspected suicide.
Neumar collected a $10,000 payout as his beneficiary.
Malone was shot dead outside his car repair shop in 1970 and the murder remains unsolved, although it seems unlikely Neumar was involved.
Second husband James A Flynn was an alcoholic who died in New York in 1955.
Neumar variously told people he’d died on a pier, or in a truck, and had frozen to death — or been shot.
Neumar told police husband number three, sailor Richard Sills, drunkenly and fatally shot himself in an argument at their Florida mobile home in 1965.
A medical report emerged suggesting Sills may have suffered two gunshot wounds, not one.
In a 2009 documentary, Neumar explained: “I cannot control when somebody dies. That’s God’s work.”
Even Neumar’s own death after a long illness was greeted with scepticism.
The daughter of her last husband told a local television station she wouldn’t put it past Neumar to fake her own death.
Lover left to burn
Black Widow Vicky Efandis weaseled her way into her lover’s life, took over his finances, then fed him a drugged dinner and left him to die.
Efandis, was a separated mother who claimed a disability pension and worked as a house cleaner.
It was this occupation that enabled her, at age 44 in 2002, to creep into the life of George Marcetta, a 56-year-old divorced father who ran a very successful painting business.
Through fake affection, Efandis stole the lonely man’s heart.
As Efandis infiltrated Mr Marcetta’s life, they began a relationship.
The dominating, manipulative and scheming Efandis took control of his business and financial affairs.
On September 8, 2004, Mr Marcetta’s charred body was found in the burnt-out bedroom of his fire-ravaged home.
Toxicology tests revealed he’d been drugged. Efandis was arrested and charged with murder.
She spent some time in jail and faced a committal hearing at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, during which a friend of Mr Marcetta, Zoran Obradovic, said Efandis controlled the purse strings.
“George (told me), ‘I can’t lend you any money because Vicky is controlling the money’,” Mr Obradovic told the preliminary hearing.
In a police statement tendered at the committal hearing, a former prisoner who shared a cell with Efandis said another inmate drew a picture of a black spider on a pinboard in their cell where Efandis allegedly confessed to murder.
In her statement the former prisoner said: “Vicky asked me one night, ‘Do you think I lit the fire?’ I said to her, ‘Well did you?’ Vicky said, ‘It was arranged. We did it but they’ve got nothing.’ She told me the fire at the house had been planned for a few months.”
The former prisoner said she believed Efandis had tried to poison her in jail by slipping rat poison or snail bait into her tea.
Efandis pleaded not guilty to murder, but at the trial the jury was told that on the night of September 8, 2004, she laced a home-cooked meal with sedatives and left Mr Marcetta to die in his burning Bellfield home.
For his last supper, Efandis had cooked Mr Marcetta his favourite dish — pork rolls and noodles — laced it with a large dose of the sedative Serapax.
In the preceding months her doctor had twice prescribed her Serapax, Prosecutor John Champion, SC, told the jury.
After drugging Mr Marcetta, who ended up in his bed, Efandis splashed up to 28 litres of kerosene around the home and lit small newspaper fires in nearly every room.
By that stage, Mr Champion told the court, Efandis had come to be in control of a large amount of Mr Marcetta’s assets and stood to gain financially from his death.
Mr Marcetta had sold his Dandenong home and entered into a joint contract to purchase the Bellfield property, which was registered in Efandis’s name.
She’d gained a 50 per cent share of his business and convinced him to register a Jaguar car in her daughter’s name.
“Over a relatively short period of time Vicky Efandis insinuated herself into George Marcetta’s personal and business life, and business affairs, to the extent where she became a controlling and dominant figure,” Mr Champion told the jury.
Efandis told police on the night of the fire, she left the house about 10.30pm and sent Mr Marcetta a goodnight text from her own house in Ivanhoe, which responded to.
But a telecommunications expert told the court both messages were sent from the Bellfield home.
Efandis tried to blame the murder on a man who’d previously argued with Mr Marcetta.
But the jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to 24 years’ jail with a 20-year minimum.
Justice Kaye described the crime as chilling, saying that while Mr Marcetta was very fond of Efandis she had “no sentimental attachment to him at all”.
“Rather,” Justice Kaye told Efandis, “you insinuated your way into his life, gained his trust and then abused it in the most appalling way. You resorted to lacing his favourite meal with the sleeping tablets, in order to prepare him for his death.
“It was only fortuitous that Mr Marcetta did not survive long in the fire. However, you were not to know that.
“By drugging him and then setting fires around him, you potentially condemned him to die helplessly in the midst of a horrifying inferno.”
Efandis showed no emotion as the judge described her greed-driven crime as evil.
“You showed no pity to your unwitting victim,” Justice Kaye said, “and you clearly suffered no pangs of conscience as you set about murdering him.
After the verdict Mr Marcetta’s daughter Athanasia said outside court: “She deserves everything she got.”
Compiled from reports by Elissa Hunt, Paul Anderson and Russell Robinson
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