Five of the Most Interesting and Intelligent Crimes Committed by Women
Updated September 22, 2026
Five women, Patty Hearst, Kathy Boudin, Nancy Wake, Charlotte Corday, and Kristen Gilbert, committed crimes ranging from armed robbery and wartime sabotage to murder carried out from inside a hospital. Their cases still turn up in criminal justice coursework today, in discussions of coercion defenses, radicalization, espionage law, and how a trusted profession can conceal a serial offender.
You’ve probably pictured the criminal mastermind as a man in a trench coat. History disagrees. The five cases below span two centuries and every level of the justice system, from a French Revolution assassination to a modern-day hospital homicide investigation.
Each woman made this list for a different reason: some were convicted felons, some were technically enemies of a wartime government rather than criminals under U.S. law, and one wasn’t caught until an unusual pattern of medical emergencies prompted scrutiny. What they share is a level of planning or nerve that still gets studied by people training for careers in law enforcement, corrections, or forensic psychology.
Five Women in Crime You Should Know
Patty Hearst
Hearst was the granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. At 19, she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical left-wing group. Weeks later, she was photographed participating in an armed bank robbery.
Hearst claimed she’d been brainwashed and sexually assaulted during captivity. Prosecutors rejected her claim that coercion excused her later participation in the SLA’s crimes, and she was convicted. President Carter commuted her sentence after she’d served two years. You’ll still see her case cited any time a criminal law class covers duress or coercion as a defense.
Kathy Boudin of the Weather Underground
Opposition to the Vietnam War produced the Weather Underground, a group of college-educated radicals convinced that only militant action could shift national policy. Boudin was a member during its bombing campaign against the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, and she survived the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion when a bomb being built for a military dance detonated early.
While a fugitive, she gave birth to a son with fellow member David Gilbert. Her run ended in 1981, when she took part in an armored car robbery with remaining Weather Underground members and the Black Liberation Army. The robbery left a Brink’s security guard and two police officers dead. Boudin was convicted and served 22 years before her release on parole in September 2003, publishing academic work, including a piece in the Harvard Educational Review, while incarcerated. Before she died in 2022, she taught at Columbia’s School of Social Work, where she co-founded and co-directed the university’s Center for Justice, training others in restorative and family justice.
Nancy Wake
Wake spied for the Allies during World War II, which made her a hero to one side and a criminal to the other. She was never a criminal under U.S. law, but the Axis powers would have executed her on sight, which is exactly why her case belongs on a list about crime and how you define it.
Wake later recounted killing an SS sentry with a hand strike to the neck during a reconnaissance operation when her team was spotted. She went on to run guerrilla operations against the Nazis for the rest of the war. She became one of the most highly decorated Allied women of the war, earning honors including the George Medal, the U.S. Medal of Freedom, and the Légion d’Honneur.
Charlotte Corday
Corday’s case dates to 1793, during the French Revolution. She assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, a revolutionary journalist whose newspaper had real power over who lived and who was denounced.
She gained access to him by claiming to have important information about Girondins hiding in Caen. Marat suffered from a severe skin condition and often worked while soaking in a medicinal bath, which is where she found him. She read him a list of dissidents; he told her they’d all be executed. She then drew a knife and killed him. Corday was executed for the assassination four days later.
Kristen Gilbert
Gilbert worked as a nurse at a VA hospital when an unusual pattern of medical emergencies during her shifts drew scrutiny. She was ultimately convicted of murdering four patients and attempting to murder two others by injecting them with unauthorized doses of epinephrine, a heart stimulant that’s difficult to trace once metabolized.
After triggering the cardiac emergencies herself, she’d respond to them and position herself as the one trying to save the patient. Hospital staff and investigators suspected her actual toll could have been higher, but her convictions never established those additional deaths.
Frequently Asked Questions
What crimes did these five women actually commit?
The list spans very different offenses: Hearst was convicted of armed bank robbery, Boudin of felony murder tied to an armored car robbery, and Gilbert of murdering four patients and attempting to murder two others. Corday was executed for assassination. Wake technically committed no crime under U.S. or Allied law. She was a spy the Axis powers would have treated as a criminal or worse.
Why do criminal justice students still study cases like these?
Each one maps onto a topic that still comes up in training: coercion and duress defenses (Hearst), domestic terrorism and radicalization (Boudin), wartime espionage law (Wake), political assassination (Corday), and how a position of medical trust can conceal a serial offender (Gilbert).
Did any of these women serve their full sentences?
No two outcomes matched. Hearst served two years before a presidential commutation. Boudin served 22 years before parole in 2003. Gilbert received life without parole. Corday was executed days after her trial. Wake was never prosecuted; she was decorated for her wartime service instead.
What is the coercion or duress defense raised in the Hearst case?
It’s the argument that a person committed a crime only because they reasonably believed they, or someone else, would be seriously harmed if they refused. Courts weigh it on a case-by-case basis, and it rarely succeeds on its own, which is part of why Hearst’s trial is still taught as an example of how hard that defense is to win.
Is violent crime really less common among women than men?
FBI arrest data show that men make up the majority of arrests for major violent offenses. In the FBI’s 2019 arrest data, males accounted for 88.0% of murder arrests, 84.2% of robbery arrests, and 76.5% of aggravated assault arrests. That gap doesn’t mean women lack the capacity for calculated, high-stakes crime, as the cases above show.
Key Takeaways
- Coercion defenses are hard to win: Patty Hearst’s case remains a go-to example of how difficult it is to prove duress in court, even with a documented kidnapping.
- Radicalization built the Weather Underground: Kathy Boudin’s path from Vietnam War protester to convicted felon shows how ideology can escalate into violence over years, not overnight.
- Wartime status changes the legal picture: Nancy Wake was a criminal only to the side she was fighting, a reminder that “crime” depends heavily on which government is doing the defining.
- Access enables the crime: Charlotte Corday and Kristen Gilbert both relied on trusted access, as a visitor and as a nurse, to get close enough to their victims.
- Trusted professions can hide serial offenders: Gilbert’s case is still cited in hospital security and forensic nursing training because the setting made her harder to catch, not easier.
Want to see how these methods hold up against modern investigation? Cases like these still shape how investigators build a circumstantial case today, from behavioral evidence to forensic toxicology.