Lady Killers Read online

  Seemingly unrelated was the fact that in early November, a house on nearby Makoris Street needed a new water and sewage system, and so the family that owned the house asked their nephew Ahmad to start construction. Ahmad had terrible vision, but he began the job gamely, digging beneath the floor of one of the rooms. Before long, his shovel hit something hard, and a disgusting smell seeped into the air. Since Ahmad’s eyesight was so bad, he reached over to pluck the offending object from the dirt—and realized to his horror that he was holding a human arm.

  The police tore over. (Well, knowing what we now know about these police, perhaps “ambled” is a better verb.) Ahmad informed them that the last person to live in the room was a woman named Sakina, who had been evicted about a month earlier. Meanwhile, other police officers were investigating the stench coming from Raya’s home, and when they found the source of the smell—multiple corpses buried under Raya’s floorboards—the sisters were suddenly people of interest.

  This wasn’t the first time Raya and Sakina had been hauled off to the police station for questioning. Over the past year, there had been numerous cases of missing women who were reportedly last seen with the sisters, but every time Raya and Sakina were brought into the station, they managed to convince the police that they had nothing to do with the case. Sakina had always been especially persuasive, and now, being interrogated about the body beneath her old apartment floor, she maintained her innocence. However, when the police informed Raya that corpses had been found in her room, too, the older sister broke down, and the two were arrested.

  All in all, seventeen female corpses were linked to the sisters, including corpses found in the room of their former landlady. Newspapers even published photos of the bodies, which leer from the dirt, nearly mummified but still visibly human. In some of the pictures, you can make out hair. Again, journalists bemoaned the lack of police attention: “Where was the police when these crimes were committed? Some of these bodies have turned into skeletons, showing that the victims were murdered a long time ago.” The decomposed state of the corpses was a slap in the face to people who believed the police had been looking out for them. If these women had been dead long enough for their bodies to turn into this, wasn’t that visible evidence that the authorities didn’t care who lived and who died in the streets of al-Labbān?

  Suffocation

  Two years earlier, one of the girls who worked for the sisters showed up wearing a new set of gold bracelets. The girl may not have noticed Raya staring at her jewelry, but Raya certainly noticed the gold—and grew paranoid, certain that this particular prostitute was keeping more than her fair share of the profits. A month later, the girl was dead.

  Today, the sisters’ crimes are retold as crimes done in pursuit of gold and gold alone. Raya and Sakina are remembered for the creepy way they haunted nearby marketplaces, looking for women who jangled with costly jewelry, luring them back to their apartments, and plying them with drugged wine before killing them and stripping their bodies of every gemstone, every anklet, every delicate filigree.

  The truth was, not all the victims were killed for gold, and plenty of them weren’t strangers, either. Many, if not most, were slain because they had crossed Raya, who may have been the decision maker of the group—the one who determined who to kill, and when. Raya was frequently plagued by suspicion, convinced she was being cheated left and right. For example, one of the squad’s few nonprostitute victims was a woman named Zannūba, a poultry saleswoman and friend of the sisters, who stopped by Raya’s house to collect a debt and was killed that same day. Raya was also merciless to sex workers who broke their agreements with her; at least twice, when one of her contractors disappeared for a while without properly excusing herself, she was murdered immediately upon her return.

  When they were ready to claim a life, the sisters would offer the unfortunate victim a glass of wine laced with drugs. As their prey grew dizzy and disoriented, the sisters and their husbands (and/or the fitiwwa) would go to work. They allegedly developed an efficient four-person killing system that took place with minimal noise and very little blood: someone crammed a wet cloth into the victim’s mouth; two others pinned her hands and feet; the fourth strangled her to death. (Who, exactly, was in the room when the murders happened? Though many within the sisters’ circles were interrogated, including their former landlady and numerous fitiwwa, eventually the court determined that the squad consisted of six people: the sisters, their husbands, and two fitiwwa named ‘Urābī Hassan and ‘Abd al-Rāziq Yūsuf.)

  The autopsies of the victims support this narrative, more or less. The pathologist determined that the victims were (a) all female, (b) between twenty and fifty years old, and (c) had all died of asphyxiation. He found no evidence of cutting or beating or bludgeoning, and guessed the women had all been plied with alcohol before being suffocated. The testimony of Raya’s daughter also supported this; the girl claimed she’d seen her father, Hasab Allah, spike glasses of alcohol with white powder before giving them to the victims, who would clutch their stomachs in agony before finally passing out. Even Hasab Allah himself eventually admitted that this was true.

  But Hasab Allah and the other accused men quickly faded into the background as a shocked, horrified nation zeroed in on Raya and Sakina, the deadliest sisters they had ever seen. In the eyes of middle-class Egypt, these sisters were so much more than criminals: they were a glaring symbol of everything that was wrong with a society where women walked, unveiled, through the streets.

  “Their Evil Was Transported Everywhere”

  It wasn’t long before the entire country had heard about Raya and Sakina. Until that point, the Egyptian press almost never focused on crimes committed by and within the lower class, but editors recognized just how titillating this story could be, and they pulled out all the stops reporting it. Murderous sisters who dealt in sex and violence? The headlines wrote themselves.

  Even Egyptians who couldn’t read knew about Raya and Sakina, not just because newspaper articles were often read aloud at coffee shops, but because the papers printed the sisters’ mug shots—quite possibly the first time the Egyptian press had ever published photos of criminals. “Newspaper boys on every street cry out ‘Raya and Sakina, Raya and Sakina for a piaster,’” ran the Cairo weekly al-Haqā’iq. “And thus their evil was transported everywhere, to the houses and to the kids in the schools and to the factory workers and in every neighborhood they took notice of this crime. And the hearts in people’s chests sensed it and its echo has reached even the dead in their tomb.”

  The fact that this case was scandalous, horrifying, and thus extremely exciting wasn’t the only reason it spread. The arrests of Raya and Sakina—and the realization that their victims were also women, many of whom were prostitutes—tapped into existing anxiety about the erosion of Egypt’s moral values, especially when it came to the changing role of women. See, by 1920, women were starting to patronize traditionally male spaces like markets, bars, and coffeehouses—and the fact that they were now getting murdered seemed, to some people, to be exactly what they deserved. The press blamed the victims for their own deaths, saying that if they hadn’t been walking about so shamelessly and/or working as prostitutes, they never would have encountered the deadly sisters. “What is the force that compelled these women to enter these whorehouses and bring about their own destruction at the hands of the murderers?” ran one editorial. “The answer is easily comprehensible . . . it is the loss of decency on the part of men and women.” Another editorial insisted on the moral failings of the victims: “Raya . . . found those with weak souls.”

  “Loss of decency” is an awfully weak hook on which to hang serial murder. The fact was that these victims were moving about in a newly “porous” society where women had to work to survive, prostitution was often the most lucrative offer on the table, and the police weren’t paying very much attention. It was partially this attempt to stay flexible in an unstable society that led to their downfall. Raya and Sakina them
selves had marinated in a similar cultural broth for a long time: trained in petty crime from childhood onward, they learned how to slip under the radar of the police and were forced to make alliances with very abusive, very dangerous men in order to live. This was the world they knew, and it led them to crimes so dreadful they were said to have “blackened the forehead of the twentieth century.”

  Given this anxiety about the dark potential of women’s increasing liberation, the media focused less on the sisters’ actual roles as murderers and more on their vice-ridden behavior, reasoning that their “greed and pursuit of pleasure were uniquely female traits that had grown out of control in the absence of male supervision.” The courtroom was shocked by Raya’s constant cursing and Sakina’s brash descriptions of her sex life, and there was a pervasive fear that, if released, Raya and Sakina would somehow manage to pervert other women. The specter of the sisters as hugely corrupting forces even spread its tentacles overseas. Papers in Arkansas and Wisconsin reported that some of the victims had been tourists who were “lured in on sightseeing trips,” implying that the sisters had managed to reach across the Atlantic and prey on innocent Americans. It was as if being murdered was contagious—something girls could catch from their peers, like a cold, or the desire to wear a miniskirt.

  When they weren’t being portrayed as “uniquely female” deviants, the press compared the sisters to animals: vipers, tigers, snakes, and wolves. The paper al-Rashid published an illustration of Raya as a beast with claws, towering over a trembling girl and hissing, “There is no escape for you from my talons.” One editorial screamed, “Raya, you are not human . . . you are a beast in the desert, a fox that embraces deception, a treacherous wolf.”

  This rhetoric was surprisingly effective. At one point, a rumor spread around Alexandria that Raya and Sakina were being displayed at the zoo. People dashed over to catch a glimpse of the infamous duo, but found only animals in the cages.

  “Women’s Crimes Generally Demand an Element of Mercy”

  The criminals went on trial in May 1921. People crowded around the Alexandria courthouse for a glimpse of the ticketed event, and the newspaper al-Ahram published the full trial transcripts every day to a captive readership. Police monitored the crowds in fear of a riot, but the audience was of one mind that week. “There is not one person asking for a drop of mercy for Raya and Sakina and the rest of the individuals in the gang,” ran the paper al-Muqattam.

  There was, however, some controversy over the appropriate punishment for the sisters’ crimes. No woman had ever been given a death sentence, but the prosecutor, Suleiman Bek Ezzat, was willing to fight for it. He sketched out a brief history of female criminals to demonstrate that Raya and Sakina were different: “Firstly, women’s crimes generally demand an element of mercy and compassion, such as crimes in which women are driven to kill their husbands’ second wives or in which they poison someone who has brought them harm. Secondly, the death penalty [used to be] executed publicly.” That is, the awful sight of a woman being executed publicly was reason enough to avoid it. Nobody felt Raya and Sakina had earned the right to mercy or compassion—opportunism was a much less sympathetic motive than jealousy or self-defense—and death sentences were no longer performed outside the prison, so Ezzat argued that any social hesitation to execute a woman was no longer relevant.

  The trial was spotted with vague statements, inconsistencies, and sketchy behavior. During Sakina’s testimony, she wolfed down a large meal that had been set in front of her, implying that perhaps she’d been starved in jail as a means of extracting a confession. The two fitiwwa declared outright that they were starved and verbally abused. The criminals’ statements were all over the place: Raya and Sakina insisted they hadn’t been present at the times of the murders; the fitiwwa expressed their innocence; Raya and Sakina pointed at the fitiwwa; their husbands declared that the fitiwwa hadn’t done a thing. The defense had little to go on, and mostly just tried to shift the blame around from defendant to defendant—not Raya, but Sakina; not Sakina, but Hasab Allah; and so on and so forth.

  Witnesses came forward to give chilling testimonies. One neighbor said she’d seen the husbands deliver Zannūba, the unfortunate poultry saleswoman, to Sakina’s house. For hours, the neighbor overheard the group drinking and carousing, but at dawn she was stopped cold by a terrible scream. “When I asked Sakina about it in the morning she said it was nothing,” said the neighbor. Another witness explained that Zannūba “knew too much about their activities . . . they killed her to silence her once and for all.”

  Though the judges ultimately decided that Raya and Sakina were accomplices, not perpetrators, it didn’t lessen their sentences. Supposedly Ezzat overheard Sakina saying that she planned to be released in fifteen to twenty years, at which time she’d start working as a prostitute again. Upon relaying this information to the court, Ezzat demanded that the judge “sever these two corrupt members from the nation.”

  The court did just that. When the magistrate handed down six death sentences for Raya, Sakina, their husbands, and the fitiwwa, fifteen minutes of sheer pandemonium broke out in the courtroom. A new precedent had been established: women without mercy would receive no mercy.

  Things Even Men Can’t Do

  The guards brought Sakina out of her cell on the morning of December 21, 1921. Her hands were shackled.

  “Toughen up,” said one of the guards. “Be strong.”

  Upon hearing this, Sakina turned on him. “I am a strong woman,” she snarled. “If I can take on a hundred, I can take on a thousand.”

  Say what you will about Sakina, but she certainly knew herself. “Be strong”? What was Sakina if not strong? She worked horrible jobs as a child. She moved away from home years before her sister could work up the courage to do so. She demanded a divorce. She sold rotting horse meat in order to survive. She held her tongue at the police station while her older sister cracked and confessed everything.

  Something in Sakina must have been loosened after hearing the guard lecture her, because she spoke again and again during her final moments. “I murdered,” she cried when her death sentence was read aloud. “I murdered, but it’s okay because I fooled the government of al-Labbān.” (In another account, she says, “I fooled the police.”) As she was being handed off to the executioner, she thundered, “This is the place where strong people stand. I’m a strong woman, and I’ve done things that even men can’t do.”

  It’s an epic final monologue on her part, full of fire and defiance, and when her words were published in the papers, Sakina—the slut, the alcoholic, the corrupter of respectable women—suddenly looked like an antiestablishment hero. After all, fooling the absentee police was exactly what she’d done; she’d been dragged into the station for questioning numerous times, and every time she convinced the police to let her go. She may have even gotten away with it one last time if it weren’t for her sister. Now, the media was giving Sakina grudging glances of admiration. The paper al-Ahrām lauded her as “one of the craziest and most courageous people to stand at the scaffold.”

  After the sisters were hanged, they entered into public mythology almost immediately. Six months after their death, a traveling troupe of actors debuted a play about the sisters, declaring that one of its core themes was the “rage of women.” More art followed: commentary from famous contemporary writers, books, films, a 2005 TV show. The 1953 film Raya and Sakina portrays a battle between the heroic police and the evil sisters, who—in the film—are captured right before they kill again. This was nothing like the real case, which shed a harsh and unflattering light on Alexandria’s police force. “Where were the police? How could this happen in the twentieth century?” mourned one journalist—continuing the mournful refrain that had played alongside the case from start to finish.

  (It happened again in the twentieth century, actually, a mere twelve years after Raya and Sakina swung from the gallows. In 1933, another pair of killer sisters rose out of the lower classes in France.
The two Papins also had a rough childhood and an abusive mother. When they brutally claimed two victims from the middle class, they too turned into bizarre symbols of a revolution against the bourgeoisie. Alas, poor journalist—the twentieth century was only going to get worse.)

  Today, separated from Raya and Sakina by a century of violence, it’s tempting to pore over their mug shots and look for glimmers of their personalities, their innermost thoughts, or even their merciless hearts. After their death, the poet and literary critic Abbās Mahmūd al-Aqqād warned observers against this tendency. There was nothing intrinsically barbaric in the faces of Raya and Sakina, he said, nothing that screamed “murderer.” If you saw evil in their faces, it was merely a projection.

  But even the poet himself fell victim to the fallacy he was trying to warn the public against, admitting that there was a degree of “insensitivity” apparent in their faces, though “insensitivity, by its very nature, does not catch the eye.” See? It’s impossible not to look, and we see what we seek there. In the photos, the sisters stare back at us forever: upset, afraid, defiant.

  The sisters’ faces—and everything we project onto those faces—still terrify people today. Their very names have fallen out of favor with young Egyptian parents. Raya, Sakina: these are now the phonetics of evil. Tourists trudge around al-Labbān to gape at a house that may or may not have belonged to them. And so their myth lives on, clinging to the streets where they used to hustle, hovering behind people’s shoulders, and beckoning to the respectable women who head outside, who can’t help peering into the shadows. Even in death, the sisters wield power. Now and then a mother, irritated at her young daughter, will tell the girl that if she doesn’t start to behave, Raya and Sakina will find her.