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History’s Deadliest Woman and Other Lesser Known Killers

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2019 54 min

If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women - Ravensbrück concentration camp

4. The Central African Emperor’s Mad and Murderous Rule

Bokassa’s rule created a reign of terror. During his reign, he personally oversaw the judicial beating of suspects. He also ordered that thieves lose an ear for the first two offenses, and a hand for the third. Bokassa also tortured suspected political opponents, then fed their corpses to lions and crocodiles kept in his private zoo. He also practiced cannibalism. In Paris-Match magazine, an expose ran photos of a deep freezer in Bokassa’s palace, containing the bodies of children. The best known of Bokassa’s atrocities includes the arrest of hundreds of schoolchildren in 1979. The reason? Refusing to buy school uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives. Bokassa personally oversaw the murder of more than 100 of the kids by his imperial guard. That caused an uproar, and soon thereafter, French paratroopers deposed Emperor Bokassa I.

A Lavish Exile

However, he spent his exile comfortably in France, financed by millions of dollars embezzled from his impoverished country. Which, of course, he stashed in Swiss bank accounts. But his comfort did not last for long. Within a few years, Bokassa managed to waste his fortune; reduced to poverty. Things got so bad that he made a brief reappearance in international news in the 1980s. One of his hungry children was arrested for shoplifting food. Bokassa returned to Central Africa in 1986, where he was tried and convicted of murder and treason, and sentenced to death. However, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was released in 1993. He lived another three years, before dying in 1996.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.