Top 14 Most Dangerous Inmates Held at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility

14 - Anna Sorokin

Landing in New York City in 2013, Anna Sorokin had already shed her middle-class roots and began to reinvent herself as Anna Delvey, a German heiress with a €60 million trust fund and a vision for the Anna Delvey Foundation.

Anna stayed in luxury hotels like 11 Howard, racking up bills in the tens of thousands while claiming her funds were stuck in Europe or blaming a bureaucratic error with her father’s business managers when the credit card was declined.

Acting like she belonged in high society, Sorokin began befriended high-society figures, including Rachel Williams and Neffatari Davis, a hotel concierge who became Anna’s closest confidante.

Anna used forged bank statements to convince financial institutions she was worth millions. She nearly secured a $22 million loan from City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group, using "shell" accounts and fake aliases.

The house of cards collapsed in 2017 and after unpaid hotel bills at the Beekman and the W New York, and the $62,000 "theft" from Rachel Williams, Anna was effectively homeless and being hunted by creditors.

She was arrested in Los Angeles during a sting operation coordinated by the NYPD and Rachel Williams and reportedly tried to flee to a luxury rehab facility before being apprehended.

The 2019 trial was a media circus with Anna famously refusing to enter the courtroom if her outfit wasn't up to her standards and she even hired a professional stylist for her "courtroom looks."

Stealing over $200,000 from banks and friends landed her a guilty verdict for Grand Larceny and this was in addition to the Unpaid hotel and restaurant bills.

She was found guilty on eight counts and sentenced to between 4 and 12 years in prison but was released in 2021.

13 - Sante Kimes

Known as The Dragon Lady, Kimes spent decades perfecting a persona of wealthy refinement while being a shoplifter, a con artist, and a charismatic manipulator who married a wealthy motel tycoon.

Despite their wealth, Sante couldn't stop grifting, and in the 1980s, she was convicted of involuntary servitude after holding young Mexican women as domestic slaves in her luxury homes.

When Kenneth Sr. died in 1994, Sante didn't just inherit his money, she drafted their son, Kenny, into a criminal partnership and they became a traveling duo of death.

They forged a deed to a property owned by David Kasdin, a business associate but when he discovered the fraud, Kenny shot him in the back of the head at a Los Angeles construction site.

Before Kasdin, a Bahamian banker named Syed Bilal Ahmed vanished after meeting them before drugging and killing him to cover up a failed offshore banking scam.

In 1998, Sante set her sights on the ultimate prize, a $10 million mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side with the owner, 82-year-old Irene Silverman, a former ballerina and wealthy socialite.

Kenny rented an apartment in the mansion under the name Manny Guerrin and Sante lived in a parked car nearby, using walkie-talkies to direct Kenny who bugged Silverman’s phones and stole her social security card and blank checks.

On July 5th, 1998, Irene Silverman vanished and the Kimeses were caught the very same day Irene disappeared, having been picked up for an unrelated scam involving a "rubber check" used to buy a $15,000 Lincoln Town Car.

When police searched their vehicle, they found a literal murder kit complete with handcuffs and syringes filled with sedatives, loaded handguns and the forged deeds to Irene Silverman’s home.

The trial was a spectacle with Sante, ever the actress, claiming she was the victim of a vast conspiracy while frequently disrupting the court, firing dozens of lawyers, and even trying to "charm" the jury.

The most damning evidence came when Kenny Kimes eventually turned on his Sante, confessing to their crimes in order to avoid the death penalty in California.

In the year 2000, Sante and Kenny were convicted of murder, robbery, and over 100 other charges with Sante sentenced to 100 years in prison and she died in prison in 2014, never expressing remorse and maintaining her innocence until the end.

12 - Lacey Spears

Lacey Spears, originally from Alabama, built an online identity as a tireless, devoted single mother to her son, Garnett-Paul Spears while she chronicling his "mysterious" illnesses on Facebook and her blog, Garnett’s Journey.

She painted a picture of a tragic heroine, a woman whose husband, who she claimed had died in a car accident leaving her to battle the medical establishment to save her son.

In reality her husband never existed and Garnett's father was a neighbor named Chris Hill, who was very much alive but was kept away by Lacey’s lies.

Garnett was hospitalized over a dozen times across Alabama, Florida, and New York with his acute symptoms only flaring up when Lacey was present, often having no symptoms when she was away.

In early 2014, while living in a holistic community in Chestnut Ridge, New York, Lacey brought 5-year-old Garnett to Nyack Hospital, claiming he was having seizures, but within two days of the admission, his Sodium levels spiked.

Doctors were baffled; such a spike is nearly impossible without massive, direct ingestion of salt and he was airlifted to Maria Fareri Children's Hospital where his brain began to swell from the toxicity.

Lacey was reportedly more concerned with posting updates to her followers, even sharing a final photo of Garnett just before he passed on January 23rd, 2014.

The investigation quickly turned toward Lacey when hospital surveillance footage showed her taking Garnett into a private bathroom with his feeding tube and a connector.

A search of her apartment revealed two bags used for Garnett’s nutrition that were saturated with salt, equivalent to roughly 69 individual salt packets per bag.

Lacey’s computer revealed searches for "effects of high sodium in babies" and she was arrested on charges of second-degree murder but was later found guilty of Depraved Mind Murder.

The judge, while acknowledging she likely suffered from a mental illness, called her actions unfathomable in their cruelty and sentenced her to between 20 years and life in prison.

Lacey remains in Bedford Hills and will not be eligible for parole until at least 2034.

11 - Amy Fisher

Famously dubbed the "Long Island Lolita," this story began when 16-year-old Amy Fisher met Joey Buttafuoco, a 35-year-old auto body shop owner in Massapequa, New York.

Amy’s father had taken her car to Joey’s shop for repairs and what followed was a classic grooming scenario with Amy becoming obsessed with Joey, intentionally damaging her car multiple times just to see him.

Driven by a mix of teenage angst and Joey’s alleged complaints that his wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, was "in the way," Amy decided to take matters into her own hands.

On May 19th, 1992, Amy drove to the Buttafuoco home and rang the doorbell, when Mary Jo answered Amy used a fake name and claimed she was the sister of a girl Joey was having an affair with.

As Mary Jo grew skeptical and turned to go back inside to call her husband, Amy pulled out a .25-caliber semi-automatic pistol and shot Mary Jo in the face at point-blank range.

Miraculously, Mary Jo survived with the bullet lodged in her skull, leaving her partially paralyzed and deaf in one ear, but she remained conscious enough to later identify Amy from a photo lineup.

The case became a national obsession and was dubbed the "perfect" tabloid story and in a single week in 1992, three separate made-for-TV movies about the case aired on different networks.

Initially charged with attempted murder, Amy pleaded guilty to first-degree aggravated assault and she was sentenced to between 5 and 15 years and was later moved Albion Correctional Facility where she served 7-years.

10 - Jean Harris

By the late 1970s, Jean Harris was the epitome of "old school" prestige and had the job as a strict headmistress of the Madeira School, an elite girls' boarding school in Virginia.

For 14 years, she had been in a tumultuous, long-distance relationship with Dr. Herman Tarnower, a wealthy cardiologist in Scarsdale, New York who was also a local celebrity through his best-selling book.

The relationship was far from a fairy-tale and Tarnower was a lifelong bachelor who enjoyed his status as a "catch," but by the late 70s, he began a blatant affair with his much younger lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos.

Jean, struggling with the pressures of her career and the indignity of being replaced, became increasingly addicted to the amphetamines that Tarnower had prescribed her for "weight control."

Driven by a mix of exhaustion, clinical depression, and a "broken heart," Jean Harris drove five hours from Virginia to Scarsdale with a .32-caliber revolver in her purse.

When she arrived at his mansion, she found Lynne Tryforos’s nightgown in the bedroom and a struggle ensued that saw four bullets strike Dr. Tarnower with the fatal shot entering his back.

Earlier that day, Jean had mailed a 14-page letter to Tarnower referring to Tryforos as a "vicious adulteress" and described herself as an "empty vessel."

The 1981 trial was a media sensation that pitted the image of the "jilted woman" against the "haughty academic," with her later found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15-years to life.

She became a legendary figure at Bedford Hills teaching fellow inmates how to read and write, starting a parenting center and nursery program and even wrote several books.

After suffering several heart attacks in prison, Jean Harris was granted clemency by New York Governor Mario Cuomo in 1992 before passing away in 2012 at the age of 89.

9 - Stacey Castor

In 1988, Stacey married Michael Wallace and the couple had two daughters, Ashley and Bree, but by the late 1990s, the marriage was strained and Michael suddenly fell ill with what appeared to be a severe stomach flu.

Michael died at the age of 38 on January 11th, 2000, with doctors attributing his death to a heart attack and Stacey insisting on a quick burial with no signs of foul play at the time.

She collected a modest life insurance payout and moved on, soon marrying David Castor, who owned a successful heating and air conditioning business.

On August 22nd, 2005, Stacey called 911, claiming David had locked himself in their bedroom with a bottle of liquor after a fight and was likely suicidal but when police kicked down the door, they found David Castor deceased on the bed.

A container of antifreeze and two glasses were found on the bed and a turkey baster was found under the bed with David’s DNA on it and Stacey claimed David had committed suicide by drinking the antifreeze.

Investigators soon found a crucial piece of evidence, Stacey’s fingerprints were on the glass containing the antifreeze and the police decided to exhume Michael Wallace’s body.

The toxicology report was a bombshell showing that Michael had not died of a heart attack and that his body tissues were riddled with calcium oxalate crystals the tell-tale sign of ethylene glycol poisoning from antifreeze.

In September 2007, as the police closed in, Stacey invited her oldest daughter, Ashley, over for drinks to "de-stress," but after a couple of drinks, Ashley collapsed.

The next morning, Bree found her sister unconscious with a typed suicide note nearby that confessed to murdering both her father, Michael and her stepfather David, but Ashley survived.

When she woke up in the hospital, she was horrified to learn she had supposedly confessed to two murders but police had noticed something in the suicide note.

The word "antifreeze" was misspelled as "anti-free," and investigators had previously recorded Stacey using that exact same mispronunciation during her police interviews.

In 2009, Stacey Castor was found guilty of second-degree murder, attempted murder of her daughter, and forging David’s will and was sentenced to 51 years to life.

Stacey Castor never expressed remorse and maintained her innocence until she died in prison of a heart attack in 2016 at the age of 48.

8 - Barbara Kogan

Barbara and George Kogan were the quintessential Upper East Side power couple, with George being a successful real estate tycoon and antiques dealer who had built a fortune in Puerto Rico before moving to New York.

By 1990, the marriage was disintegrating and George had moved out of their Fifth Avenue apartment and was living with his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Hawkins, a publicist the couple had originally hired.

Barbara, meanwhile, had become accustomed to a life of limitless luxury and when the divorce proceedings began, Barbara’s demands were staggering with a judge famously denying her request for $5,000 a week in temporary support payments.

On the morning of October 23rd, 1990, George Kogan was walking to his girlfriend’s apartment on East 69th Street when he was approached by a gunman and was shot three times at close range.

As George lay dying in the hospital, Barbara’s behavior was almost tell-tale with her reportedly called a stylist to her apartment to have her hair done for $500 instead of rushing to the hospital.

Within hours of the shooting, before George had even been pronounced dead, investigators discovered that Barbara had called her insurance company to confirm she was still the sole beneficiary of his $4.3 million life insurance.

For nearly two decades, Barbara lived off the insurance money, moving to Puerto Rico and maintaining her social status and case went cold because police couldn't find a direct link between her and the hitman.

The breakthrough came via Manuel Martinez, Barbara’s divorce attorney, who revealed that Martinez had acted as the middleman and used $100,000 to pay the killer.

Martinez was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to 25 years to life, and Barbara, who finally pleaded guilty to manslaughter and conspiracy in 2010, was sentenced to between 12 and 36 years in prison.

In a move that sparked outrage from George's former girlfriend and niece, Barbara Kogan was granted parole in 2020 at the age of 77, after serving the minimum 12 years of her sentence.

7 - Pamela Smart

In 1990, 22-year-old Pamela Smart was the media coordinator at Winnacunnet High School, ambitious, polished, and also obsessed with becoming a television news anchor.

Newly married to Gregory Smart, a 24-year-old insurance salesman, to the outside world, they were a young, successful couple, but behind closed doors, Pamela was bored with her marriage and had begun an affair.

Pamela didn't just want a fling, she wanted her husband gone, but a divorce would be costly and she feared losing her belongings and her professional reputation.

Over several weeks, she systematically convinced Billy Flynn and three of his friends, Patrick Randall, Vance Lattime Jr., and Raymond Fowler, into a murder plot that would see her husband gone.

On May 1st, 1990, Pamela drove the four to her home and then went to a school board meeting to establish an alibi while Billy Flynn and Patrick Randall entered the house and waited in the dark.

When Gregory Smart walked through the door, the boys forced him to his knees and Billy Flynn shot him once in the head with a .38-caliber revolver before ransacking the house to make it look like a robbery gone wrong.

When Pamela arrived home later that night, she "discovered" the body and called the police, playing the role of the hysterical, grieving widow but the police were immediately suspicious of Pamela’s lack of genuine emotion.

The break in the case came from Cecelia Pierce, a student intern and confidante of Pamela who agreed to wear a wire for the police and recorded incriminating statements made by Smart.

The 1991 trial was a media explosion and Pamela took the stand in her own defense, portraying herself as a victim of a "obsessed" teenager who killed her husband because he was jealous.

But the jury did not buy it and all were convicted with Pamela Smart sentenced to Life Without Parole and she remains incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York.

In a shocking turn of events in 2024, Pamela released a video statement finally accepting "full responsibility" for her role in the murder and admitted that her behavior was "despicable," asking for a chance at a sentence reduction.

6 - Valerie Solanas

Born in 1936, Valerie Solanas’s early life was a gauntlet of trauma, having been abused by both her father and grandfather, was homeless at 15 years old before having two children in her teens.

Despite this, she was remarkably brilliant, earning a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, where she was a member of the Psi Chi Honor Society.

By the mid-1960s, she had moved to New York City, supporting herself through panhandling and sex work while writing what would become one of the most infamous texts in feminist history, the SCUM Manifesto.

The manifesto was targeted at the overthrow the government, eliminating the monetary system, and " the destruction of the male sex," with Solanas arguing that males were a "biological accident."

In 1967, Solanas met Andy Warhol and passed him a script but Warhol found her writing to extreme even for his standards and he misplaced the document which triggered Solanas’s burgeoning paranoid schizophrenia.

She became convinced that Warhol and her publisher, were conspiring to steal her intellectual property and on June 3rd 1968, on a sweltering Monday afternoon, she arrived at Warhol’s studio carrying a .32-caliber Beretta.

She rode the elevator up with Warhol and he even commented on her appearance, noting she looked "good" because she had put on makeup, but while Warhol was on the phone, she pulled out the gun.

She fired three times with the first two bullets missing, but the third tore through his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, and both lungs before she shot Mario Amaya and attempted to shoot Warhol’s manager, Fred Hughes.

Warhol was initially pronounced dead at the hospital, but doctors performed a daring open-heart massage and revived him, though he was forced to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life to hold his organs in place.

Solanas walked up to a policeman in Times Square, handed him two guns, and said that Warhol had to much control over her life, with her trial becoming a media circus that divided the feminist movement.

Radical feminists like Ti-Grace Atkinson hailed her as a hero and the "first outstanding champion of women’s rights," while others viewed her as a dangerously ill individual whose violence harmed the cause.

Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, pled guilty to "reckless assault with intent to harm" and served only three years in prison, but Warhol, terrified of her and of the legal system, refused to testify against her.

After her release, Solanas drifted into obscurity, living a transient life in Phoenix and later San Francisco, where she was known to the local police as the "Scab Lady" because she would sit on curbs and scrape at her skin.

On April 25, 1988, Valerie Solanas was found dead in a welfare hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, having died of pneumonia at age 52, surrounded by her latest unedited manuscripts.

5 - Marybeth Tinning

Marybeth and Joe Tinning appeared to be a normal, albeit profoundly unlucky, couple as for fourteen years, the medical community in New York, watched on as the family buried one child after the other.

The timeline of these deaths is staggering with the first occurring in 1971 and the last, and ninth death, occurring in 1985, with the ages of the children ranging from between 8-days and 4-years.

At the time, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome was a common "catch-all" diagnosis and doctors believed the Tinnings carried a lethal recessive gene, except there was one fundamental problem, Michael Tinning, the second last to die, was adopted.

When Michael died in 1981 under Marybeth’s care, the "genetic" explanation collapsed, but despite the mounting suspicion from social workers and a few skeptical doctors, no one intervened until the death of the ninth child.

Marybeth brought the infant to the emergency room, claiming she found her tangled in blankets and not breathing, but this time the police and the District Attorney’s office stepped in.

Forensic pathologists conducted a rigorous autopsy and found no natural cause of death and under intense police interrogation, Marybeth finally cracked, admitting to smothering Tami, Nathan, and Timothy with pillows.

In 1987, Marybeth Tinning was tried for murder, convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years to life, appearing before the parole board multiple times due to her lack of remorse.

In a decision that shocked the community, Marybeth Tinning was granted parole in 2018 at the age of 75, with the board suggesting she was no longer a threat to society.

4 - Carolyn Warmus

In 1987, Carolyn Warmus, the 23-year-old daughter of a Michigan millionaire, was working as a computer teacher at Greenville Elementary School in Scarsdale, New York.

She began an affair with Paul Solomon, a 40-year-old fifth-grade teacher at the same school and Paul viewed the relationship as a fleeting diversion from his marriage to Betty Jeanne Solomon.

Warmus became intensely obsessed with him, began tracking his movements, and even harassed his former lovers before deciding that if she could not have him, no one could when Paul returned to his wife.

On the night of Sunday January 15th, 1989, Paul Solomon went to a bowling alley, leaving Betty Jeanne home alone and when he returned, he found her slumped on their living room sofa having been shot 9-times.

Initially, Paul was the prime suspect, however, his alibi at the bowling alley was solid and the investigation then shifted toward Warmus when a private investigator claimed she had paid him $2,500 to buy her a .25-caliber Beretta with a silencer.

The first trial in 1991 ended in a hung jury after the defense argued that Paul Solomon and Vincent Parco had conspired to frame Warmus but the second trial introduced new, devastating evidence.

A single, high-end dark leather glove found at the crime scene. Warmus was known to own an identical pair and records showed Warmus had called a gun shop using a fake name shortly before the murder.

Warmus was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life but has since been paroled under lifetime parole supervision unless her conviction is overturned.

3 - Nicole Addimando

On September 28th, 2017, around 2:00am, a police officer in Poughkeepsie, New York, spotted a car stopped in the middle of the road and inside was 28-year-old Nicole Addimando, covered in bruises and visibly shaken.

She told him she may have hurt her partner and when police arrived at the apartment she shared with 30-year-old Christopher Grover, they found him dead on the couch having been shot once in the head.

Grover was a well-liked local gymnastics coach, and to the outside world, they were a young, happy couple with two small children, but the investigation quickly revealed a hidden world of extreme violence.

Nicole’s defense team presented a mountain of evidence detailing years of systemic torture with injury's matching that of domestic battery and thousands of photos on her phone documenting cigarette burns.

The District Attorney pointed to the fact that Grover was shot while appearing to be asleep on the couch and argued that it was an execution style murder rather than defensive.

In 2019, a jury found Nicole guilty of second-degree murder and she was sentenced to 19-years, but the case became a rallying cry for activists and in 2021, she won an appeal that saw her sentence reduced to 7-years.

Now released on parole, her case has become a cornerstone of legal study regarding coercive control.

2 - Shirley Winters

One of New York’s most prolific serial killers, the horror began in Watertown, New York, when Shirley was just 18 years old and death seemed to follow her everywhere.

A fire broke out in the home of a friend where Shirley was staying and three children died but Shirley was hailed as a "hero" for supposedly trying to save them.

Shortly after the fire, Shirley’s first child, Ronald, died at five months old with the cause listed as "aspiration of pneumonia, but months later, her second child, Julie, died at age two, allegedly due to "viral pneumonia."

By 1979, Shirley had moved to the Syracuse area when another massive fire broke out at her home in Hyde Park with the two children from her second marriage, Anna and Ronald perishing in the blaze.

Once again, Shirley was seen as a grieving mother struck by lightning twice, however, fire investigators began to notice a pattern in which Shirley was always the "first" to discover these fires.

She always emerged relatively unscathed while others perished yet for the next 27-years she remained a free woman, until November 2006 when Shirley was visiting a friend, Mary Shaver, in Pierrepont Manor.

While the mother was out of the room, Shirley was left alone with 23-month-old Ryan Rivers, but when Mary returned, Ryan was unresponsive in the bathtub with Shirley claiming he had drowned.

No water was found in his lungs and investigators found physical markers indicating the boy had been smothered before being placed in the water and this led to a mass exhumation of Shirley's previous children.

Using modern forensic technology, pathologists re-examined the remains of Ronald and Julie finding that the "pneumonia" mentioned in the original reports was actually pulmonary edema caused by suffocation.

In 2008, Shirley Winters was charged with the murder of Ryan Rivers and her infant son, Ronald, from 1966 and facing a mountain of evidence, she took a plea deal to avoid multiple life sentences.

Winters was sentenced to 25 years to life with the judge in the case calling her the personification of evil and she died in prison in 2014 at the age of 66.

1 - Blanche "The Hitwoman" Wright

In the 1970s, Harlem was the epicenter of a heroin epidemic controlled by "The Untouchable" Nicky Barnes who utilized a ruthless paramilitary arm to keep his empire running.

Blanche Wright emerged not as a background player, but as one of the most feared contract killers on his payroll, earning a reputation for being cold-blooded and surgically efficient with a firearm.

The Council was plagued by internal power struggles and external threats from rivals and she was specifically linked to the elimination of lower-level dealers who tried to skim off the Council's profits or "snitch" to the NYPD.

The crime that eventually sealed her fate was the murder of Herbert "Fatty" Thomas in 1980 when she tracked him to a social club and executed him in a manner that investigators described as "professional."

She fled the scene, disappearing back into the Harlem underworld before police could establish a perimeter, but when Barnes was finally convicted and sentenced to life, he did the unthinkable, he turned supergrass.

He provided a "Who’s Who" of Harlem’s underworld, and Blanche Wright’s name was high on the list with her soon indicted on federal racketeering and murder charges.

She was found guilty of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and the murder of Herbert Thomas and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Thanks for watching, if you enjoyed the video then make sure to check out two others on this page. On the right we have the most dangerous women in the UK's new hall prison and on the left, we look at a closed women's prison in the UK named Holloway, we will see you in the article.