On April 20, 1926, in a black dress and a violet scarf, Antoinette Scieri took her place in the dock of the Gard assize court at Nîmes, charged with six poisonings. The investigation had ended with a mass exhumation and autopsy in the cemetery of Saint-Gilles, watched by reporters from the local papers, from Paris and even from the United States. "I do not believe the history of our justice holds more than a dozen criminals of your type," the presiding judge told her. "You are possessed by every vice."
She was born in Italy, about 1890 according to most accounts, though no birth record has been published, and came to France as a child. During the First World War she trained as a nurse at Doullens, in the north, and began stealing there: money and jewelry from wounded soldiers, and letters forged in their names asking their families for money. She was jailed for fraud and theft in 1915 and released in 1916. In 1920 she moved to Saint-Gilles, on the edge of the Camargue, with a violent partner and began working as a private nurse.
Rural France in those years had no district nursing service, and a woman who would sit up with the sick and lay out the dead was sent for by whole families. Scieri was liked and much recommended. Between 1924 and 1925 her patients began to die. She gave them Pyralion, a commercial herbicide, in their food and drink, and took money, linen and small valuables from their houses. Suspicion grew as the deaths went on, the dead were exhumed, and the autopsies found the poison. In custody she confessed.
She was tried for six deaths, and on April 27, 1926 the court sentenced her to death. Some English-language reference works say she was convicted of twelve poisonings; the charge sheet reported by the French press was six. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; France did not then guillotine women. She was released in 1960 and died in 1968, according to the reference literature.
The six people she was tried for killing are not named in the published French reporting of the trial.