Some Moms Get Flowers, Some Get Death Row — Here Are A Few Of The Scariest Mothers Of All Time

There’s no better time to marvel at all of the wonderful things about moms than Mother’s Day, which arrives on Sunday, May 9 this year. The annual celebration evokes images of comforting hugs and warm slices of apple pie.

But some moms are different. Instead of giving embraces they hire hit men. Instead of serving sweet treats they lace drinks with poison. Storybook moms? Not so much. Oxygen moms? Definitely.

Murderous moms are front and center throughout this Mother’s Day weekend on Oxygen in episodes of true crime shows including “Snapped,” “Killer Couples,” “An Unexpected Killer,” and “Mastermind of Murder.” In honor of the holiday, here are the scariest moms of all time, who you can learn more about by watching Oxygen.

In small town Texas, the discovery of a dead body led to a mom facing the death penalty. Kimberly Cargill was accused of slaying her son’s mentally challenged babysitter — but why did she do it? “Snapped” takes a deep dive into a crime involving a custody battle, abuse allegations, and a homicide victim doused in lighter fluid and set ablaze.

This elderly woman who ran a Sacramento boarding house had two daughters in the 1940s, so she knew the immensity of giving life. But that didn’t stop Dorothea Puente from taking the lives of vulnerable residents in order to seize their government checks and then burying their bodies in her backyard. Oxygen's two-part special "Murders At The Boarding House" follows the unsettling life of the "Death House Landlady."

Who fatally shot 68-year-old former race car champion Joe Sturdivant in the back of his head while he slept in 2008? Prosecutors argued it was his wife of nearly four decades. Her defense team, meanwhile, tried to pin it on her estranged son from a previous marriage. “Snapped” traces a case fueled with dark family secrets and a murderous matriarch.

Mother of the Year was not in the cards in 2007 for then-38-year-old Kelly Sifuentez. She shocked people when she asked Christian Olsen, a teenager her daughter dated in middle school, to live with her. In 2009, Sifuentez admitted that she enlisted Olsen to kill her mother, who was buried in her backyard. “Killer Couples” digs into the heinous mom-on-mom homicide that prosecutors maintained was motivated by greed.

When 51-year-old Missouri mom Diane Staudte felt trapped in her unhappy life, she came up with a scary solution: She searched the internet to learn how to kill people with antifreeze. She targeted her husband and a son and a daughter with poison-laced soft drinks. You can learn more about her on “Snapped,” which tells the tale of extreme and deadly family dysfunction.

There was nothing maternal about the way Brenda Nicholas, a supposed palm reader, bilked an elderly woman out of more than $1 million and helped nearly decapitate a veteran with a valuable coin collection. So when she played the mom card at her sentencing and tearfully brought up her sons by saying, “The boys are waiting for me,” the judge was unimpressed. “Mastermind of Murder” exposes the deadly fraudster.

Hope Schreiner, who was convicted in 2006 of beating her 78-year-old husband to death, already had five children of her own when she married him in the 1960s. One of those kids, daughter Stephanie Streit, testified that when she asked her mom how her dad died, her mother “looked right through me and said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ That actually did tell me something.” Learn more about the case on "Snapped."

A hit man whose last name is “Tickles”? It’s true. So is the fact that Emilia Raras was convicted of soliciting Tickles to kill her 35-year-old daughter-in-law, Sara J. Williamson Raras, who was in the process of getting a divorce. The motive? A “lack of respect for her on Sara’s part” was one reason Emilia cited. See what happened on "An Unexpected Killer."

For more murderous mothers, tune into the Mother's Day weekend marathon on Oxygen from Friday, May 7 to Sunday, May 9.