How Dana Gray became one of the most feared women in America

An old photograph shows her as a athletic, smiling child.

But the woman she became would shock a generation. Unlike most female killers, who turned to poison or guns, she hunted her victims up close, hands-on, strangling elderly women across Southern California in the early 1990s.

Her story is a haunting reminder of how darkness can sometimes hide behind the most ordinary faces.

Her mother was a former Hollywood starlet

We all have a fairly clear image of what a serial killer looks like: usually a man, a loner, filled with hatred toward women. The person we’re focusing on today defied that stereotype. She was impeccably dressed, meticulously groomed, and spared no expense on herself.

Yet beneath her polished exterior lurked a chilling truth: a serial killer who preyed on elderly women, murdered them violently, and then used their credit cards to fund extravagant post-murder spending sprees.

Born in California in the late 1950s to a glamorous but volatile mother and a father she would soon lose touch with, she entered the world after several miscarriages had already shaken her family.

Her mother, a former beauty queen and former Hollywood starlet, was aggressive and vain, and their home was far from nurturing.

After her parents’ divorce when she was just two, she struggled to connect with others, acting out in increasingly dramatic ways — stealing money for candy, lashing out in fits of anger, and forging notes to skip school.

Athletic and hard-working

At 14, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Watching nurses care for her ailing mother planted the idea of becoming a nurse herself, a career that promised purpose and control.

High school friends remembered her as athletic and a daredevil, always chasing the next adventure. In her yearbook, she wrote that her favorite pastime was “Getting into trouble” and that her favorite place to be was “free fall.”

She studied hard, driven by her ambition to become a nurse, and achieved her goal in just five years, according to New York Daily News. By the early 1980s, it seemed as her life took a promising turn.

She had also become an expert skydiver and showed remarkable skill in windsurfing and golf, often traveling to Hawaii to indulge her passions. In October 1987, she married a longtime admirer, Tom Gray, in an elegant Temecula winery ceremony.

The couple made some good money, but they spent their earnings just as quickly. They bought three cars, an ultralight airplane, several boats, and silk-screening equipment. It wasn’t long before the money ran out.

Fired from the hospital

A bitter dispute over an aunt’s will left her estranged from her family. At the same time, she continued working as a labor and delivery nurse while managing several business ventures in the gated California community of Canyon Lake.

Soon, her marriage had fractured. She moved out, became involved with a close friend, and even filed for divorce while navigating financial turmoil, including a bankruptcy filing to prevent foreclosure on her Canyon Lake home.

Around the same time, her professional life took a dramatic turn, she was fired from her nursing position due to misappropriation of prescription medications.

Following her divorce, she lost her Canyon Lake home to foreclosure.

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