Shadowing Practice: Every PSYCHO Female Killer in 16 Minutes - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Vera Renzi.
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When you're in a relationship, it's totally normal to feel a little jealous now and then, and maybe you can even get a bit possessive or tempted to sneak a peek at your partner's text.
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But this particular psychopath, named Vera Renzi, took jealousy and possessiveness to a whole new level.
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Like, six feet under level.
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It's a classic case of, if I can't have you, then nobody can.
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Vera's obsession with men started when she was very young.
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She lost her mother when she was just 13, and by the time she was 20, she was already married to an older wealthy banker.
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Well, her new husband suddenly disappeared, and when people asked her about him, Vera just told them he left.
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She was probably saying the truth because he's left this dimension, but that's probably not what the neighbors were thinking.
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You see, Vera was very pretty, so getting another husband wasn't difficult at all.
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But within a few months, husband number two also disappeared faster than a pizza at a teenage sleepover.
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But the thing is, it wasn't just husbands disappearing
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because every single one of Vera's lovers over the years also suddenly vanished into thin air.
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The truth came to light in 1936 when the wife of one of Vera's latest flames reported him missing.
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The police came knocking and Vera casually confessed to killing him.
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The police, thinking they'd be lucky to find one body,
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were in for a surprise when they found 35 coffins neatly stashed in her basement like some twisted IKEA collection.
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Inside those coffins were her two husbands, her son, and 32 of her lovers,
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whom she killed by poisoning their wine with arsenic because she suspected them of being unfaithful or simply growing tired of her.
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In her twisted mind, this was a way to ensure they would never leave her.
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She was sentenced to life in prison and died in her cell in 1960.
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Miyuki Ishikawa.
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If you were one of the Japanese babies delivered by the midwife Miyuki Ishikawa in the late 1940s
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and happened to make it out alive, it probably means that your parents desperately needed a child or that they were wealthy.
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You see, Miyuki was supposed to be a beacon of hope, ushering new life into the world.
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But instead of seeing her job as a sacred duty of care, she saw it as a burden.
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And if you were a baby born to a poor family, Miyuki figured it was better to help you skip the whole life part altogether.
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The simple yet horrific method she used in killing these babies was by neglecting them.
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As the senior midwife at the Kotobuki Maternity Hospital in Tokyo, she would deliberately not provide care, food, or warmth for these babies till they died.
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In her twisted head, she was sparing them from a life of poverty.
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The craziest part is that her husband
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and a doctor from the hospital were her accomplices because they helped her cover up the deaths.
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Sometimes, they would even make a profit from killing the babies
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because some desperate families who cannot afford the means to care for another child would deliberately accept Miyuki's deadly solution.
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The horrific scale of her crimes came to light in 1948 when two police officers discovered the remains of numerous infants.
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Further investigation revealed that Miyuki killed about 103 babies.
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When she was finally brought to trial, the serial baby killer received just eight years in prison, which was even later reduced to four after an appeal.
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What a joke.
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Juana Barraza.
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If you had a grandmother living in New Mexico from 1990 to 2006, she would probably be on a security detail
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that rivals the President of the United States and a personal bodyguard that would follow her wherever she goes.
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Because Juana Barraza was on the prowl targeting lonely elderly women
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and delivering a death grip far more lethal than anything she had ever used in the wrestling ring.
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This retired professional wrestler turned notorious serial killer would pose as a nurse, social worker, or someone offering assistance to gain the trust of older women who live alone.
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Once inside their home, she would channel the same strength she once used in the
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wrestling ring to strangle her victim to death with her bare hands, stockings, or telephone cords.
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Sadly, she managed to end the lives of 49 old women in this brutal way.
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After strangling her victims, she would rob them, taking whatever valuables she could find to keep herself going.
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This wasn't just a crime spree, it was a full-blown crime marathon, and Juana was sprinting toward the finish line.
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The police, however, were looking for a male suspect, convinced that no woman could be behind such savage killings.
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Eventually, in 2006, she was caught red-handed fleeing the scene of her last murder.
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What drove Juana to such murderous madness?
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Well, it turns out she had some serious mommy issues.
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Her mother had been abusive and even sold her to an older man as a child.
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This deep-seated rage festered inside her, and in her twisted mind, every elderly woman she strangled was a stand-in for the mother who betrayed her.
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Now she was convicted of 16 counts of murder and sentenced to 759 years in prison, where she remains to date.
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Dorothea Puente.
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So it's 1982, and you start looking for the perfect home to put your sick dad for care, and a friend tells you about this nice old woman called Dorothea Puente,
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and her boarding house in Sacramento, California.
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Basically, Dorothea was an old woman who was offering free rooms to the elderly and mentally disabled individuals,
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but what you don't know is that her hospitality came with a sinister catch.
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This woman was basically killing people and burying them in her backyard
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and cashing in the victim's social security checks as a pastime hobby.
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Once you lodge as one of her guests, she would drug you with heavy doses of sleeping pills, then suffocate you.
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Most of the time, some people would even die from the drug overdose.
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Her scam show finally came to an end in 1988 when Alberto Montoya, a mentally disabled man who was living at Dorothea's boarding house, suddenly disappeared.
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His social worker got suspicious when Dorothea's excuses started piling up like uncollected rent checks, and the social worker filed a missing persons report.
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When the police showed up, they didn't suspect anything but saw Dorothea as a sweet old lady running a home for people in need.
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But when her story about Alberto's disappearance didn't add up, they decided to dig a little deeper, literally.
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A total of seven bodies were dug up from her backyard, one of which was Alberto's.
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The gruesome discovery led to her arrest, but Dorothea, being an ever-crafty granny, tried to play it cool and even asked the officers if she could step outside for a moment.
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She used that opportunity to run away, but they caught up with her in Los Angeles a few days later.
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In 1993, Dorothea was convicted of three murders, though she's suspected of at least nine, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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Jane Topan Jane Topan, affectionately known as Jolly Jane, was a nurse in the late 1800s who had a deadly fascination with the human body.
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Well, unlike most nurses, Jane preferred to see people dead rather than alive, and she took it upon herself to make it happen.
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Between 1895 and 1901, she used her position as a nurse to experiment on her patients,
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blending her medical knowledge with a twisted desire to play God.
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Jane's method was as chilling as it was calculated.
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She would administer her patients with a lethal cocktail of morphine
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and atropine that would push her victims to the brink of death and then pull them back, only to repeat the process.
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She got a sick thrill from watching them suffer, taking pleasure in the moments when they hovered between life and death.
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Sometimes, the sick woman would even have sex with her victims as they took their final breaths.
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For Jane, this wasn't just murder, it was a twisted form of intimacy.
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Over the years, Jane claimed the lives of at least 31 people,
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but her killing spree came down in 1901 when the family of one of her victims demanded a toxicology report.
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The results show that the patient had been poisoned, leading to Jane's arrest.
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During her trial, Jane confessed to 31 murders and expressed a desire to have killed more people than anyone else in history.
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She was declared insane and committed to a mental institution for the rest of her life where she died in 1939.
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Bella Gunness.
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These days, people use Tinder and such to find their partners and go on dates, but things were a little different in the 1880s.
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Then, if you wanted to find a husband or wife, you would have to place an ad in the Lonely Hearts newspaper to explain what you want
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and what you have to offer.
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Well, things took a really dark turn from 1884 to 1908, because a woman named Bella Gunness,
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who was fondly called the Black Widow of the Midwest, used the newspaper ads to lure unsuspecting males to her farm.
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It seems that Her idea of happily ever after usually involved a shovel and a plot of land out back.
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She was like the praying mantises of the human world.
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Now, once you fell victim to her newspaper ad and came to her farm, she would drug you up until you're out cold, then strike you on the head with a blunt weapon,
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or sometimes would just slit your throats.
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The crazy woman would then cut up your body into tiny pieces, feed some to her pigs, and bury the rest.
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Over the years, Belle is believed to have killed more than 40 people,
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but thankfully, everything came to a stop in 1908 when her farmhouse burned down under mysterious circumstances.
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Among the ruins, authorities discovered the bodies of her children, body parts of several men, and a headless corpse that was initially believed to be Belle herself.
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However, the size of the body didn't match Belle's physical stature, leading to suspicion that she had faked her own death to escape capture.
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Sadly, she did evade the capture.
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Nanny Doss If you were a man in the US from the 1920s to the 1950s, and you happened to be charmed by a middle-aged woman with a sweet,
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seductive smile, there's a good chance you just met Nanny Doss.
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And if you were unlucky enough to marry her, well, let's just say you'd soon be six feet under, possibly with a belly full of poisoned pie.
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Nanny was married five times, and each husband died by her hand, but not before she had taken out hefty life insurance policies on them.
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Her weapon of choice was poison, which she would usually mix into food or drink.
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Crazy Nanny didn't stop at killing her husbands, though.
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She extended her deadly touch to her children, grandchildren, and even her own mother and sister.
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Clearly, Nanny believed in keeping things in the family, especially when it came to her poison supply.
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Thanks to her constantly smiling face and habit of giggling, which earned her the nickname Giggling Granny,
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she was never suspected of a thing until 1954 when she murdered her fifth husband, Samuel Doss.
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Apparently, Samuel Doss had been hospitalized with flu-like symptoms but recovered, only to drop dead as soon as he got home.
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An autopsy revealed enough arsenic in his system to kill five men.
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This new development opened up an investigation that led to the arrest of Nanny Doss.
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In total, she murdered about 11 people.
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During her confession, Nanny was disturbingly nonchalant, admitting to the murders with a smile on her face.
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In 1955, she was sentenced to a life in prison at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary,
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where she continued to be cheerful and unrepentant until she died on June 2nd, 1965.
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Beverly Allitt Well, if you were not a young child admitted to the Grantham
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and Kestavan Hospital in England during the early 1990s, then you have nothing to worry about, because sadly this is where this This particular predator, disguised as a caring, attentive,
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and perfect caregiver for vulnerable children, decided to carry out her most horrible acts.
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You see, Beverly Allitt would inject the children in her care with insulin or potassium, causing them to suffer from sudden,
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life-threatening conditions like cardiac arrest or hypoglycemia.
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In some cases, she went old school and smothered them with a pillow.
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And over just 59 days, she managed to kill four children and left nine others with severe, lifelong injuries.
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She was basically a one-woman wrecking crew in a nurse's uniform.
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The worst part was that the hospital didn't initially suspect that one of their own was behind these incidents.
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After all, who would ever imagine that a nurse, a person whose very job it is to care, would be the one causing such devastation?
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It wasn't until after several suspicious deaths and near-fatal incidents that the hospital began to investigate the pattern of sudden collapses,
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all occurring when Allett was on duty.
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This eventually led to her arrest, and then during her trial she was diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome,
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a condition where a caregiver causes harm to those in their care to gain attention or sympathy.
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Want to find out more about how twisted the minds of some people are?
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Then join our Discord server today to get all the exciting updates.
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Rosemary West Now, when a man and a woman meet up and start talking about marriage and family, you would think they were discussing matters concerning children or buying a house.
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Well, yes, but not for Rosemary West and her husband Fred West.
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This depraved couple during the 1970s and 1980s killed, brutally tortured, mutilated, and sexually assaulted at least 12 young women and girls,
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including their own daughter.
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Sadly, their victims were sometimes lodgers, while others were just abducted from the streets to be subjected to extreme cruelty and torture before being killed.
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Once you died, they would dismember and bury you in the cellar or garden of their home at 25 Cromwell Street,
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which became infamously known as the House of Horrors.
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Well, they were finally caught when their daughter Heather suddenly went missing.
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The police opened an investigation, found Heather's body buried in the garden, and, well, the bodies of the other poor victims.
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Rosemary and her husband were arrested, even though the man took the chicken way out by unaliving himself just before trial.
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Rosemary faced trial, however, and was convicted of 10 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
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She remains in prison to this day, one of the few women in the UK to be sentenced to a whole life order.
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Janine Jones.
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If you were sadly born in one of the hospitals where nurse Janine Jones worked, the chances of you reaching six months old were very, very slim.
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During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Janine would inject her young patients with drugs like digoxin,
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heparin, and sucanilcholine, which are medications that can stop a heart or paralyze their lungs.
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After inducing these crises, Janine would often be the first on the scene, appearing to save the child in a sick attempt to play the hero and save the child.
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It's believed that she was driven by a condition known as hero syndrome.
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This psychological condition leads a person to create dangerous situations so they can save the victims, thereby gaining praise and recognition.
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Unfortunately, many of her victims did not survive these attempts, making her actions even more tragic.
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The truth began to surface in 1982
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when the unusually high death rate among her young patients caught
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the attention of hospital staff at Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio.
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An investigation revealed that Janine was the common link in many of these cases.
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She was convicted in 1984 of murdering 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan by injecting her with a lethal dose of muscle relaxants
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and the attempted murder of four-week-old Rolando Santos.
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She was sentenced to 99 years in In 2017, she was indicted on additional murder charges for the deaths of other children,
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bringing her total number of suspected victims to possibly over 60.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 165 sentences and 2724 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:14. The speaker talks at a natural 179 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| twist verb | /twɪst/ | To turn the ends of something, usually thread, rope etc., in opposite directions, often using force. |
| poison noun | /ˈpɔɪ.zən/ | A substance that is harmful or lethal to a living organism when ingested. |
| sadly adverb | /ˈsædli/ | In a sad manner; sorrowfully. |
| convict verb | /ˈkɑnvɪkt/ | To find guilty, as a result of legal proceedings, or (informal) in a moral sense. |
| lethal adjective | /ˈliː.θəl/ | Of, pertaining to, or causing death; deadly; mortal; fatal. |
| bury verb | /ˈbɛɹi/ | To outlive. |
| disappear verb | /dɪsəˈpɪɹ/ | To vanish. |
| elderly adjective | /ˈɛldɚli/ | old; having lived for relatively many years. |
| deadly adjective | /ˈdɛdli/ | Causing death; lethal. |
| arsenic noun | /ˈɑɹsənɪk/ | A toxic grey brittle nonmetallic chemical element (symbol As) with an atomic number of 33. |
| caregiver noun | /ˈkɛɹɡɪvɚ/ | A carer; a person who looks after another person. |
| giggle verb | /ˈɡɪɡl̩/ | To laugh gently in a playful, nervous, or affected manner. |
| inject verb | /ɪnˈd͡ʒɛkt/ | To push or pump (something, especially fluids) into a cavity or passage. |
| midwife noun | /ˈmɪd.waɪf/ | A person, usually a woman, who is trained to assist women in childbirth, but who is not a physician. |
| wrestle verb | /ˈɹɛs(ə)l/ | To take part in (a wrestling bout or match). |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| add up verb | To take the sum of; to total. | |
| burn down verb | To cause (a structure) to burn to nothing. | |
| carry out verb | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | To hold while moving it out. |
| cover up verb | To conceal or disguise. | |
| cut up verb | To cut upward. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| open up verb | To open. | |
| pile up verb | To form a pile, stack, or heap. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was sentenced · was finally brought · was caught |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | prison, which was · women who live · woman who was |
| Past continuous was/were + -ing — an action in progress at a moment in the past | was probably saying · was sparing · was sprinting |
| Comparatives -er than / more … than — comparing two things | faster than · more lethal than · more people than |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 16 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, wasn't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: lethal /ˈliː.θəl/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, thrill /θɹɪl/, warmth /wɔɹmθ/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: suspicious /səˈspɪʃ.əs/, vanish /ˈvænɪʃ/, casually /ˈkæʒuəli/, unusually /ʌnˈjuːʒuəli/, confession /kənˈfɛʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: deliberately /dɪˈlɪb.(ə.)ɹət.li/, intimacy /ˈɪn.tɪ.mə.si/, disappearance /dɪsəˈpɪəɹəns/, unusually /ʌnˈjuːʒuəli/, notorious /nə(ʊ)ˈtɔː.ɹɪ.əs/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like twist, poison, sadly.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.