In May 1921, Raya Bint Hamam and Sekina Bint Hamam were sentenced to death for murdering seventeen women. The sisters became the first women to receive the death sentence in modern Egypt (Takla, 2016). They also managed unlicensed brothels in Alexandria before their arrest. Active historical amnesia of petty criminals, sex workers, and murderers is typically a pillar of nationalist narratives (Baron, 2005). But Raya and Sekina remain ubiquitous in Egyptian collective memory. They are canonical historical figures who continue to evoke fear and horror in national memory. Why did these women gain such notoriety and infamy? Was this case an anomaly as it appears in over a century of popular representations? Why and how did Raya and Sekina become such a national sensation? What can these two women and their lasting legacy reveal about the nationalist upheaval of 1919, the shaping of “new” Egyptian womanhoods, and the construction of crime as a national crisis? Once demystified, Raya and Sekina reveal a fabric of sexualities and divergent family structures that the homogenizing claims of nationalism erased. I explore these questions through a close reading of Raya and Sekina’s court records as well as the popular press. The tension between the extraordinary and the mundane punctuates my search. The most “criminal” aspect of Raya and Sekina’s case was not their serial murders but their “deviant” sexualities. This story is, above all, about the criminalization of Egyptian “sexual subcultures” (Hammad, 2016; Walkowitz, 1980) at a critical nationalist episode. I read their lives beyond the grids of murder, criminality, and most importantly extraordinariness. Raya and Sekina’s lives before the murders were part of an existing subculture among urban poor women in early twentieth-century Egypt. I argue that the “moral panic” that their case induced is not about its exceptionalism but its banality. Rather than reflecting pre-existing homogeneous “Egyptian values,” this moral panic reveals the production of these values through increased surveillance and policing of subaltern sexualities and their exclusion from definitions of Egyptianness. The extraordinary memory of Raya and Sekina is indicative of how their subculture shifted from a marginal position to an impossible mode of personhood.