The Most Famous Women Who Are Currently Stuck In Prison

In early 2024, just over 190,000 women and girls were under some form of incarceration in the United States, including jails, state and federal prisons, immigration detention, tribal facilities, juvenile programs, and military prisons. (The United States has any number of places to lock someone up.) This is a fraction of the estimated total 2025 US incarceration population of 2 million people — if “incarcerated” were its own city, it would be bigger than Phoenix — but nonetheless, female offenders often capture media interest outstripping that of their male counterparts.

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Rightly or wrongly, the media and its audiences alike are captivated when a woman (or girl) goes bad. Whether a female felon was noteworthy before her legal troubles began or whether she came to public notice as a result of her case, a woman involved in crime (or accused of involvement) can expect to make plenty of headlines. Regardless of their fame, these women have so far failed to ride their notoriety to freedom.

In February 1994, police in Gloucester, United Kingdom, arrested married couple Fred and Rosemary West for the simple reason that they couldn’t account for why their daughter Heather hadn’t been seen in seven years. Heather had been murdered by her parents and buried in the back garden … as had several more young women and girls. All told, Fred had murdered two women before he’d met Rose (including his first wife, Rena Costello); Rose had murdered Fred’s 8-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine (Rena’s by another man) while Fred was in jail; and the couple had jointly slain nine more people, one of their shared daughters among them.

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Fred died by suicide while waiting for trial, so Rosemary West went before the jury alone and was convicted of 10 murders. She was given 10 life sentences, subject to review under the British system by the Home Secretary, then Jack Straw. Straw had the authority to set a minimum sentence, but did not: therefore, barring an extremely unforseen development, Rosemary West will die in prison. (Her son applauded the move, citing his mother’s remorselessness.)

West has made further gruesome headlines from prison, striking up a prison romance with her fellow female serial killer Myra Hindley. They broke up because West found Hindley manipulative, which is easy to imagine. Occasional reports on West’s prison life report radio soap operas, baking projects, and a certain mother-hen role toward newer inmates, who, considering the fate of some of West’s real children, might do well to find another patroness.

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Lori Vallow Daybell’s nickname “Doomsday Mom” may be unflattering, but she certainly earned it — at least, “Doomsday” is accurate. “Mom” is a stretch, as she’s been convicted of the murders of her children Tylee and JJ as part of a complicated and interlocking web of murder, delusion, and fraud that claimed several lives across multiple states.

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As of April 2025, Vallow Daybell is on trial in Arizona for charges surrounding the death of her third husband, Charles Vallow. Both Lori and her fourth husband, Chad Daybell, have been convicted of the murder of Lori’s children, who were reported missing by JJ’s grandparents before their remains were found on Daybell’s land in Idaho, as well as the killing of Daybell’s first wife. Chad Daybell will face an Idaho firing squad for his crimes, while Lori Vallow Daybell was sentenced to life. Where and when she serves her term is in flux depending on the outcome of the Arizona proceedings. (Vallow Daybell is representing herself.)

According to reports, Vallow Daybell’s eccentric religious beliefs helped drive her crimes: she allegedly thinks that some people’s bodies, including those of her children, can be inhabited by “zombies.” Furthermore, it is apparently Lori Vallow Daybell, a convicted murderess who bought herself a wedding ring before her boyfriend’s wife had even died, who will lead 144,000 souls to Heaven in the end times. Juries have thus far been skeptical.

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When Jodi Arias went on trial for the murder of her on-again, off-again beau Travis Alexander, the mousy, bespectacled defendant didn’t look like a temptress or a murderer. The jury — and the country — would soon see a different side of Arias, however, as the details of her intense sexual relationship with her victim, intertwined with their shared hit-or-miss adherence to the Mormon faith, were presented to the court. The evidence even included racy images of the attractive, if toxic pair, thrilling spectators who lapped up the sex-and-violence cocktail the case served.

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After Alexander ended their relationship, an obsessed Arias began to stalk him, with her aberrant behavior crescendoing to his violent murder in his Mesa, Arizona, apartment in June 2008. She had caught him in the shower, stabbing him 27 times, cutting his throat, and shooting him once in the head. Arias then zipped off to an out-of-state friend’s bed to try to establish an alibi, but investigators didn’t buy it.

The court also didn’t swallow Arias’ self-defense argument, and she was convicted of Alexander’s murder in 2013. Arias expressed her preference for the death penalty, citing in part her family history of longevity — she feared a life sentence begun at 33 might be very long indeed. She was, however, sentenced to life without parole, a sentence she’s currently serving at the Perryville women’s prison in Goodyear, Arizona.

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According to Darlie Routier, the attack that killed her two sons and left her badly injured was unexpected and unprovoked. A knife-wielding man burst into her Rowlett, Texas, home, stabbing boys Damon and Devon and slashing at Darlie’s throat. Police doubted Routier’s explanation, and she was ultimately tried and convicted for the boys’ death. (Her husband, sleeping upstairs with the couple’s infant at the time of the murders, was not charged.) 

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Routier’s alleged motive was the life insurance policies on the boys, but the real evidence that sent Routier to death row was, in many people’s eyes, a notorious video of her at the boys’ graves. The “Silly String video,” showing Darlie and others smiling, laughing, and spraying Silly String at the gravesite as a makeshift birthday party for one of her late sons, was seen as evidence of callousness. This video of an eccentric grief process was presented along with testimony about Routier’s breast implants and erratic church attendance as “evidence” that she was cold enough to kill her own children.

Wrongful conviction advocates have taken up Routier’s cause, noting two unaccounted-for fingerprints lifted from the home and potential tainting of evidence during the initial investigation. Those who believe her guilty point to her fingerprints on the fatal knife and the fact that jewelry in plain sight wasn’t swiped by the alleged intruder, assumed to be after valuables. Meanwhile, Darlie Routier remains in the Texas women’s death row in Gatesville.

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Heather Mack had a problem, as she saw it: her mother, Sheila von Wiese-Mack, stood between Heather and full control of her 1.5 million dollar trust fund. Mack and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaefer, bludgeoned the older woman with a fruit bowl in the Bali hotel room in which the mother and daughter had been staying, then stuffed the remains into a suitcase. There their creativity ended, as they simply left the suitcase in the trunk of a taxicab and checked into another hotel. Questions did indeed follow, and Mack was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Indonesia for her role in her mother’s murder. She served seven years, giving birth during that time to her and Schafer’s daughter, before her 2021 deportation to the United States.

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Upon her return to the United States, Mack was again arrested, in O’Hare airport, to face U.S. charges related to the murder. American authorities argued that the relative leniency of the sentence in Indonesia, along with the added-on charges in the U.S. indictment, meant that the new charges did not run afoul of double jeopardy protections. Mack took a plea deal in June 2023 and was sentenced in January 2024 to a further 26 years in prison in the United States for their part in the killing. Schaefer remains in prison in Indonesia; American charges await him if and when he returns.

Real Housewife of Salt Lake City Jen Shah wasn’t just a “housewife,” she was an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, her business was a wide-ranging and sleazy telemarketing scam. For at least nine years, Shah participated in a phony business consulting scheme in which she sold false business services and pursued “leads” (that is, targets), bilking thousands of financially unsophisticated victims out of their savings. Shah’s apparent attempts to conceal her wrongdoing, including moving operations overseas, deleting records, and putting accounts in other people’s names, didn’t fool the Federal Trade Commission, and Shah pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

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For her crimes, Shah was sentenced to 78 months in prison, five years of supervised release, and the forfeiture of numerous luxury and counterfeit luxury items. Shah reports working through an anger management program while incarcerated, punctuating her statement with the hashtag #ZenJen. She is also allegedly working on a holiday beauty showcase while continuing to serve her sentence at a minimum security prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

If you had a black turtleneck and a creepy gaze in the late 2010s or early 2020s, you were all set for Halloween: you could go as Elizabeth Holmes, Stanford dropout turned biotech wunderkind turned billionaire turned federal prisoner. In 2014, Holmes started a medical testing company called Theranos, whose claim sounded too good to be true: their processes could screen a subject for any number of conditions or diagnoses with a very small amount of blood.

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Holmes’s claims about Theranos’ capabilities and expected revenues were irrationally optimistic to the point that, in 2018, she was indicted for fraud following reports that the company was using outside technology to fudge results. (These fudged results were, let’s be clear, people’s actual medical tests on which they made crucial decisions.) Holmes, who still alleges that Theranos was a simple failure, not an intentional fraud, went to trial on 11 counts and was found guilty of four.

Today, Elizabeth Holmes is serving an 11 1/4-year sentence in Bryan, Texas, where she is regularly visited by her partner and the two children to whom she gave birth during her legal ordeals. (Her daughter is optimistically named Invicta, meaning “unconquered.”) In prison, Holmes works out, helps other inmates prepare for reentry into society, and teaches French.

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Before her arrest in 2013, Shannon Richardson was a little famous. She’d been on “The Walking Dead” and “Vampire Diaries” and had a bit part in a movie called “The Blind Side” — unfortunately, not the Sandra Bullock one, but a short that came out a few years later. She was a working actress, but you couldn’t blame her for wanting her star to shine a little bit brighter.

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However, Richardson is now much more well-known than she was when she appeared on “Vampire Diaries.” The Texas redhead and mother of six decided she wanted to bring the heat to her estranged husband, so she pretended to try to assassinate the president. Apparently, Richardson ordered ingredients online that would allow her to prepare ricin, a derivative of the castor bean that’s one of the deadliest poisons known. Ricin’s ability to readily enter cells and interfere with their ability to make proteins, quickly causing illness and death, has made it the subject of chemical weapons research (and at least one Soviet assassination), so when it appeared on threatening letters sent to President Barack Obama and New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, authorities took note.

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Richardson contacted the Shreveport police to point the finger at her spouse, but her attempts to implicate her soon-to-be ex-husband in the ricin letters failed. Instead, Richardson herself faced charges in the incident, pleading guilty to a count of possession of a toxin for use as a weapon. She was sentenced to the maximum: 18 years in federal prison.

Julie Chrisley and her children shot to fame on the coattails of flamboyant paterfamilias Todd Chrisley, star of “Chrisley Knows Best.” The family appeared to have it all, but alas, it wasn’t the Chrisleys’ own money they were using to fund their idyllic Southern lifestyle. Todd and Julie had used a production company to conceal money from the taxman, in addition to presenting falsified documents to obtain large bank loans to fund their lavish spending. They settled with the Georgia tax authorities, but the feds were less forgiving, sentencing Todd to 12 years in the clink and Julie to seven.

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The Chrisleys remain unrepentant, claiming to be the victims of a politically motivated prosecution and announcing their plans to seek pardons from President Trump. A former inmate, who had served time alongside Julie in a federal prison in Kentucky, appeared on her daughter Savannah’s podcast to talk about Julie Chrisley’s life behind bars: she apparently spends much of her time worrying about her children and wiping the floor with the other ladies at card games. Chrisley successfully petitioned to have her sentence reviewed, but the judge declined to assign her less time, again slapping her with the seven-year term.

The case of Lucy Letby shocked the United Kingdom and the world. An apparently dedicated neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester, England, Letby was charged with seven murders of infants and the attempted murder of seven more, using a variety of methods and with no apparent motive. The complex trial took 11 months and ended with Letby receiving 15 life sentences to be served under a whole life order, a British sentencing term meaning, essentially, “no really, this is a life sentence.” For her part, Letby has consistently maintained her innocence.

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The fiasco was so complete that, in addition to Letby, the Countess of Chester Hospital itself is under investigation. British law includes a charge called “corporate manslaughter,” which allows organizations and businesses to be investigated and held accountable for their part in unlawful deaths.

New evidence has recently cast doubt on all of Letby’s convictions. Shoo Lee, a prominent Canadian pediatrician whose work was cited in Letby’s trial, convened a panel of 14 leading lights in pediatrics and had them review the cases, reaching a consensus that while medical malpractice was possible, nothing in the dead or injured children’s medical records could be considered unambiguous evidence of homicide. Lee has pushed for Letby’s case to be reevaluated, and his panel’s concerns are not the only ones. A doctor who claimed to have seen Letby standing motionless over a struggling baby has had his evidence called into question, and Letby’s new legal team has publicized their own objections to aspects of the medical testimony. Whether the British justice system will proceed with a reexamination of the case remains to be seen.

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Spates of deaths at a children’s intensive care unit in San Antonio and a pediatric practice in Kerrville seemed to have one factor in common: the presence of nurse Genene Jones. While Jones was decried in the press as a serial killer, she was initially tried for just one murder in Kerrville. With a 99-year sentence for the death of Chelsea McClellan from an overdose of the potent muscle relaxant succinylcholine, Jones seemed unlikely to leave prison, and the Texas court system was spared years of sifting cases to distinguish potential victims from the merely unfortunate.

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This relaxed attitude to Jones’ other potential murders changed when prosecutors realized that Texas’ laws attempting to limit overcrowding would mean Jones would be released in 2018, and not just up for parole, but released. So from 2017, prosecutors reopened a handful of further cases involving Jones, hoping to achieve the life sentence they felt she deserved. Jones initially denied the murders, telling a “Texas Monthly” reporter “I’m sick and tired of being crucified alive … I haven’t killed a damn soul.” However, at her later trials, Jones was reported as having confessed to some of the killings, on more than one occasion. 

Jones would ultimately plead guilty to a second murder, that of Joshua Sawyer, in early 2020, receiving a life sentence. Updated counts of suspicious cases reckon that Jones may be responsible for as many as 60 deaths. Today, Jones is at Murray prison in Gatesville, Texas, near the death row her plea deal allowed her to avoid.

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Don’t date at work, but if you do, definitely don’t go on a killing spree together. Unfortunately for five patients at the Alpine Manor Nursing Home in Walker, Michigan, employees Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood ignored both these rules. 

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Wood blabbed to her ex-husband, who went to the police; when investigators confronted her, she was ready to make a deal. According to her account, Wood would stand guard while Graham entered patients’ rooms and smothered them with washcloths. These murders relaxed and aroused Graham, with the pair sometimes trysting in empty rooms after attacks. Almost as luridly, Wood claimed she and Graham intended to spell the word “murder” with the initials of their victims, though this plan didn’t ultimately come to pass. 

Graham maintains this is all a fiction. She maintains that Wood, embittered by Graham’s infidelity, concocted a wild story to pin blame on Graham, never expecting that she herself would face charges and imprisonment. With small-town Michigan already suspicious of the openly lesbian Graham, the local public was ready to believe this eye-popping saga of sex-crazed lesbian serial killer nurses, allowing them to convict both women largely on Wood’s statements. After serving nearly years, Wood was released from prison in early 2020 after eight parole denials, over the objections of her victims’ families and, of course, Graham. Graham herself remains behind bars at Huron Valley Women’s Prison in Ypsilanti.

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In November 1994, Susan Smith went to the police with a nightmarish story: a man had carjacked her and taken her two young sons away. This triggered a manhunt, made even more tense by the fact that Smith, who is white, had reported a Black man as the kidnapper. This Black man, however, proved not to exist. 

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Smith had murdered her children by placing them in her car and allowing it to roll into a lake. Prosecutors said she wanted to free herself of her children to pursue a wealthy man she was infatuated with, while Smith’s defense argued that she’d meant to join her children on the fatal descent but balked at the last minute. (“Balked” and saved herself, of course, not her sons.)

By late 2024, Smith had served 30 years of her life sentence, making her eligible for parole. However, she did not make a very good case for herself. Smith had recently gotten in trouble for having communicated with a journalist about a documentary to be made after her hoped-for release, a conversation that involved negotiations over Smith’s payment and her providing information for other contacts, including the boys’ father, David Smith. She told the parole board she was confident God had forgiven her and asked, effectively, that they give her as much grace as she felt He had. In the end, the parole board was more swayed by David’s argument that 15 years for each murdered child was insufficient punishment, and Smith’s parole was denied.

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In May 1983, Diane Downs was driving her children along a road in rural Oregon, “sightseeing” at the unconventional hour of 9:45 p.m., when the car was attacked by a strange man. When Downs hesitated to surrender the car, he shot Downs and all three of her children. Downs faked throwing her keys away from the car to distract the assailant, then gunned it for the hospital. When she arrived, her daughter Cheryl was dead; Danny and Crystal would survive with significant disabilities. On the other hand, the single bullet wound to Downs’ arm wasn’t very serious.

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Downs would revise her story after her initial statement, but it didn’t matter: her surviving daughter, Crystal, was able to testify that it had been her mother who had shot her and her siblings. She even remembered the song that had been playing: Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Downs blamed her inconsistent story on confusing dreams of the attack but was convicted and sentenced to life plus 50 years, giving birth between the trial and sentencing. Her daughter was adopted and, having attempted a relationship with Downs, no longer wants anything to do with her birth mother.

Diane’s extralegal hijinks were far from over. In July 1987, she escaped prison by simply climbing over a fence, going on to hide out with a heroin addict who also happened to be married to a friend of hers from prison. And as an additional injustice, child murderer Diane Downs was played by glamorous actress Farrah Fawcett in a 1989 miniseries about the case — far more flattering casting than she deserved.

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Yolanda Saldivar, killer of rising Tejano music superstar Selena, has one of the least convincing excuses in the history of crime. According to Saldivar, she had been trying to shoot herself during the confrontation with Selena, but the gun misfired. As an original defence as it may have been, it didn’t get her anywhere with the jury, who instead bought the prosecution’s argument that Saldivar had intentionally killed Selena because the star had caught Saldivar skimming money from Selena-related businesses that she managed. Saldivar was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.

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Those 30 years were up in 2025, and Saldivar pleaded her case before the Texas parole board. Her 1995 denial of guilt, in which she announced that her conscience was clear as the murder was in fact an accident, would not count in her favor, though her disciplinary record in prison is clean. (Rumors that Saldivar told a BBC interviewer that she hoped to work with Colombian superstar Shakira upon her release spread widely but were refuted by the BBC.)

Shakira and her famously truthful hips were safe in any event, as the parole board denied Saldivar’s parole. She will be eligible for another review in 2030, when she will be 69 years old. In the meantime, like most serious female offenders in Texas, she will continue serving her sentence in Gatesville.

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For many Americans, the Manson girls are the female criminals of the last century, a Mount Rushmore of delusion, stringy hair, and wild eyes. They’re so frequently referred to as a set, “the Manson Girls,” that their individual personalities (such as they are) can get lost, but now there’s an easy way to tell them apart. Their fates have finally diverged: Susan Atkins is dead, Leslie van Houten is free, and Patricia Krenwinkel is still in jail.

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Van Houten had her parole board recommendation for release reversed five times by various California governors who didn’t want to be the one who let a Mansonite go, but Krenwinkel has some catching up to do. She was rejected for parole by the board a startling 15 times, despite having become the state’s longest-serving female prisoner after Atkins’ death. (Van Houten’s  streak was irregular due to some retrials.) Krenwinkel finally got recommended for parole by the board in 2022, only to have Governor Gavin Newsom quash it, arguing that the 74-year-old woman remains dangerous.

Krenwinkel will meet the parole board again in May 2025. In her favor, she has obtained a bachelor’s degree and remained active in creative endeavors and sports, also boasting an unblemished disciplinary record. Additionally, Krenwinkel’s youth at the time of the murders (she was just 21) may now be considered, per a 2016 change to California law. Case watchers will soon know whether these factors will override the notoriety and viciousness of her crimes for the parole board and governor.

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A “family annihilator” is exactly what it sounds like: a murderer whose victims are close relatives, usually an entire family unit. Family annihilators skew heavily male and tend to be at least in their 30s; they usually — but not always — die by suicide after the murders. But for every trend, there’s an outlier. One such is East Texas’ Erin Caffey, who as a teenager conspired with boyfriend Charlie Wilkinson in an attempt to eliminate her entire family.

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Caffey’s parents had attempted to forbid her from seeing Wilkinson, based on gossip that he’d been moving too quickly around the bases. She responded by colluding with Wilkinson and an older friend of his, Charles Waid, to rampage through the Caffey home, shooting Caffey’s parents, stabbing her younger brothers, and cutting her mother’s throat for good measure. They then set the house ablaze and drove off, with Caffey allegedly proclaiming the murders and arson “awesome.” The young murderers did not realize that their father, Terry, had survived the attack and was able to escape, call the police, and identify Wilkinson; after that, Erin Caffey’s involvement was soon evident.

Caffey’s co-conspirators got life without parole; Caffey will be eligible at the age of 59, in 2038. Her staunchest supporter has proven to be her father and would-be victim Terry, who has regularly visited her in Gatesville before, during, and after her trial. Terry, who has remarried, believes that Erin did not know Wilkinson and Waid were planning the murders; her co-defendants and mental health counselor describe a far more manipulative and sinister young woman who was involved in the murder plot up to the hilt.

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In Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre, located in Sydney, Australia, lives the first woman in Australian history to be given a sentence of life without parole. Katherine Knight is considered so dangerous that she’s not allowed near knives, and hasn’t been assigned a cellmate due to her gruesome, cannibalistic murder of boyfriend John Price.

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Price had gotten the Australian equivalent of a restraining order out against the erratic and violent Knight, but inexplicably went back to have sex with her anyway. Even more bewilderingly, he went to sleep afterward, giving Knight, a slaughterhouse worker, her opportunity. She stabbed Price over 30 times before flaying the body and hanging the skin up as macabre decor. She went on to cook part of his body, prepared a series of side dishes, and set the table for supper, complete with place cards bearing his children’s names. Mercifully, police found the scene instead.

Knight works in the prison factory making headphones and, after her shift, writes letters and makes art in her cluttered cell. Surprisingly, she refuses to sign her paintings to avoid attracting buyers fascinated by her notoriety. Out of contact with her family (including her four children) and former friends outside, Knight focuses on building community in the prison, organizing potlucks, and mediating disputes. Even so, prisoners and even staff remain cautious around her … as well they might.

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If you or anyone you know may be the victim of child abuse, needs help with mental health, is struggling or in crisis, contact the relevant resources below: