Sorenson was born in 1897 and lived at Dannebrog, a Danish settlement in Howard County, Nebraska. Between 1918 and 1925 she poisoned relatives with what appears to have been strychnine or arsenic: Viola Cooper, her first husband's niece; her mother-in-law Wilhelmina Weldman; her first husband John Weldman; her own daughter Minnie; a neighbour's child; and others. Seven died and several more were made seriously ill. The deaths were recorded as illness at the time.
She was arrested in 1925 after a neighbour's children fell ill following a visit and a doctor pressed for an inquiry. She confessed readily and gave reasons that were, by any measure, trivial: she said she had wanted to get even, that a child had annoyed her, that she liked funerals.
She was examined, found insane, and committed to the state hospital at Lincoln rather than tried. She died there on June 24, 1941.
The record is entirely local Nebraska press coverage of 1925 and the summaries that descend from it, so the count of seven or eight and the details of the confession come from a period and a form of reporting in which both were freely embellished. There is no trial record because there was no trial.