"They bothered me, so I decided to kill them." That, reporters in Omaha were told at the end of April 1925, was the only explanation Della Sorenson had offered the authorities in Howard County, Nebraska. Ten days earlier, on April 19, she had confessed to poisoning seven or eight people over as many years, most of them children and most of them her own relatives. She was twenty-eight. The county attorney announced almost at once that she would probably never be tried, and she never was.
She lived at Dannebrog, a village about ten miles from Grand Island founded in 1871 by Danish settlers from Milwaukee and named for the Danish flag. She was born in February 1897. Her name appears in the papers of the time as both Sorenson and Sorensen, and at least one researcher gives her full name as Della Sidel Sorensen. Her first husband's surname is spelled Weldman, Weldam and Weldaum, and his first name appears as John and as Joe or Joseph.
The first death came on July 23, 1918. Viola Cooper was the infant daughter of her husband's sister, and she was poisoned during a visit. Then Sorenson's mother-in-law, Wilhelmina, died; she later said the old woman had been feeble and childish and a burden, and that she wanted her out of the way. The order of the next deaths is uncertain. By one account her husband and her daughter Minnie died within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1920, and her husband's death followed a quarrel between them; other accounts put Wilhelmina's death before his, in 1918. Some lists of her victims leave the mother-in-law out altogether, though she confessed to that death too.
About four months after she was widowed she married Emmanuel Sorenson and settled in Dannebrog. In August 1922 her former sister-in-law, Mrs. Cooper, came to visit with another baby, a four-month-old boy named Clifford, and Sorenson gave him a piece of candy. He died. Mrs. Cooper, who still suspected nothing, came back in October with another of her children, Bessie; this time the poison failed and the girl lived. Early in 1923 Sorenson killed her own infant daughter, Delia, on the child's first birthday. On February 20, 1923, a week or so later, a friend, Christina Brock, brought her baby daughter Ruth to the house, and Ruth died too. Sorenson said she had done it because she felt sorry for the child, whose mother did not care for it.
Her second husband was poisoned as well and recovered. Another baby, Lillian Knott, was saved by a doctor. By then people had begun to connect the deaths, and in April 1925 two young relatives fell ill after eating candy she had given them, laced with strychnine. They survived, and the investigation that followed took her in. She confessed readily and without apparent regret. "After the death of my little daughter, Minnie," she told the authorities, "I had a feeling of elation and happiness. Then, after I got to thinking about what I had done, I was afraid and tried to hide it. I had the same feeling after the death of every one of those I poisoned." A later retelling has her saying that she liked to attend funerals and was happy when someone was dying.
Newspapers at the time reported seven deaths and later eight; accounts since have given anywhere from seven to nine people poisoned, counting the survivors. The figure depends on whether the mother-in-law and the third of her own children, sometimes mentioned, are included. Every version comes from her own confession and the press coverage of April 1925, and none of it was ever tested in court.
Doctors found her insane. She was committed to the Hastings State Hospital, the state asylum at Hastings, Nebraska, and she died there on June 24, 1941, at the age of forty-four.