The fictional criminal psychopath from TV’s Killing Eve is based on a real life criminal who killed more than twenty people in the 1980s. That is just one fascinating criminal tidbit from history, which range from a conman who conned CIA spies out of their life savings, to a depraved nun who went on a murder spree with her lover. Below are twenty four things about those and other fascinating criminal facts from history.
24. La Tigressa, the Inspiration Behind ‘Killing Eve‘
Villanelle, the psychopathic killer for hire from Killing Eve, is one of the more memorable TV characters of the twenty first century. Each episode, viewers get to see the silver screen hitwoman, depicted by Jody Comer, stab, gas, break the necks of, shoot, and poison her victims. As it turns out, the fictional character is based on a real life hitwoman who slew more than twenty victims on behalf of a terrorist organization in the 1980s. The character’s creator, author Luke Jennings, based Villanelle on real-life assassin Idoia Lopez Riano. Also known as La Tigressa, Riano killed 23 people for the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (“Basque Homeland and Liberty”), the infamous ETA. Born in northern Spain in 1964, Riano got into Basque nationalism as a teenager. She was eventually radicalized, and joined the chief – and increasingly violent – separatist group, ETA.
Riano proved herself one of the group’s most bloodthirsty members. Like the fictional Villanelle, she combined extraordinary ruthlessness with extraordinary vanity. On the silver screen, Villanelle slays her targets, then rewards herself with shopping sprees at posh stores. Riano, also nicknamed The Princess by her comrades, was of the same mold. As a former ETA member put it in a memoir, “Idoia was, above everything, a slave to her body and hair … I never met an ETA member who was more vain than this woman“. That vanity caused problems. Unlike the fictional Villanelle, Riano had a normal upbringing and education, and as a child, she dreamt of becoming a firefighter. At age eighteen, however, the increasingly Basque-nationalist Riano was recruited by her boyfriend into the ETA, just when the group kicked off a terror campaign that resulted in hundreds of military and civilian casualties across Spain.
