Bertha Alice Gifford was born in Missouri in 1872 and lived near Catawissa, in Franklin County, west of St Louis. She was known throughout the district as the woman who came when somebody was ill, and she nursed neighbours and their children through their final illnesses for years.
Between about 1909 and 1928 a considerable number of the people she nursed died, with symptoms of violent stomach pain and vomiting that country doctors of the period recorded as gastritis or as bad food. She bought arsenic openly at the local store, and the storekeeper's ledger, produced later, showed regular purchases.
Three deaths were eventually charged: two young brothers, Elmer and Lloyd Schamel, and a man named Edward Brinley. Seventeen or more have been attributed to her, including her first husband.
The bodies of the Schamel boys were exhumed in 1928 and both contained arsenic. She was tried in Union, Missouri, that November. The defence was insanity, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity after about an hour.
She was committed to the Missouri State Hospital at Farmington and remained there until she died on August 20, 1951. She never gave any account of why. The case is one of a set of American rural poisoning cases of the period in which the killer was the person everyone sent for.