Griselda Blanco was born in 1943 and grew up poor in Medellin, Colombia, according to Vice. Her criminal career began with petty theft and sex work, but she soon moved on to much deadlier work. At 11, she and some other kids kidnapped the son of a wealthy family. She murdered the boy when his parents took too long to pay the ransom. By her teens, she was married to Carlos Trujillo. After they divorced she had him murdered in the early 1970s — despite having three children together, per Maxim.

Blanco would make a habit of killing, whether for business dealings or personal reasons, leaving a trail of as many as 200 victims in her wake, per The Guardian. “I don’t think the fact that she was a female trying to prove something had anything to do with her violent behavior; I just think it was inherent to Griselda Blanco,” former DEA agent Bob Palombo told Maxim. “This goes back to her life, the way she was brought up. She was just a violent person.”