Antoinette Scieri was born in Italy and worked as a nurse in and around Saint-Gilles in the Gard, in southern France, after service in the First World War. She was known simply as Nurse Scieri. Her birth year is not established: the figures in circulation range from 1890 to about 1900 and none rests on a primary record.
Between 1924 and 1925 she poisoned patients in her care with Pyralion, a commercial herbicide, given in food and drink. At least six died and estimates run to twelve. She took money, linen and small valuables from the houses, and in several cases persuaded the dying to alter their wills.
She was liked and much recommended. Rural France in the 1920s had no district nursing service, and a woman who would sit with the dying and lay them out was sent for by whole villages.
She was arrested in 1925 and tried at Nimes in 1926, in a case the French press covered as an example of the empoisonneuse. She was convicted and sentenced to death on April 27, 1926, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, women not being guillotined in France at that period.
The published reference literature records that she was released from prison in 1960 and died in 1968. This archive previously stated that she died in prison, which nothing in the record supports. The accessible material is thin: French press reporting from the trial, and the twentieth-century reference encyclopedias that draw on it.