Alois Pichler was seventy-seven when he died in Rossatzbach, in Lower Austria, in November 1995. He had met the woman who looked after him through a personal ad she had placed, and when his estate was settled, a man Pichler had treated as a nephew found that he had been cut out of it. He went to the authorities. At 6:40 on the morning of January 11, 1996, detectives rang the doorbell of a sixty-four-year-old widow in Vienna. "I staggered out of bed and opened the door," Elfriede Blauensteiner later wrote in her memoirs. "I was arrested." Over the next few days she astonished the investigators by confessing to killing people one after another in order to inherit from them.
She was born in Vienna on January 22, 1931, and grew up poor in the working-class district of Favoriten, one of six children. Her first husband divorced her after their daughter was born, and she later told investigators that she had hated men ever since. As she grew older she took to gambling and was always short of money. In the end she lost fifteen million schillings at a single casino.
Her method began with the classified pages. She placed and answered contact ads to find people who were well off, elderly and in need of care, took them into her home, and had her lawyer falsify their wills. Then she mixed large doses of Euglucon, a drug that lowers blood sugar in diabetics, with the antidepressant Anafranil into their food. Once they were unconscious she laid ice-cold towels on them and let them die slowly of cold, and at what she judged the right moment she called the emergency services. The victims died in the hospital within hours. Investigators found that she had become practiced enough to predict when a death would come.
From 1982 she cared for an elderly childless couple she called her chosen parents, "Muttili" and "Vatili." After the wife died she took the husband, a retired bank employee, into her apartment, and he died in 1986. Her own husband, Rudolf Blauensteiner, died in 1992. Right after her arrest she admitted poisoning both men. She later withdrew every confession, her husband had been cremated, and the banker's death was too long past for experts to find usable evidence, so neither case was ever tried. Another man, Erwin Niedermayer, also died in her care. In the first days of questioning she confessed to five murders in all, one of them as an accomplice; a later account puts her confessions at six men. Austrian police came to believe she may have killed at least ten people.
Toxicology by Walter Vycudilik proved three deaths. Franziska Köberl, a widow who lived next door and whom Blauensteiner called her "Sorgenmutterl," died in 1992; Blauensteiner wanted her savings books. Friedrich Döcker, her companion, whom she called "Fritzerl," and Alois Pichler, her "Burli," both died in 1995. Döcker, like Pichler, had come to her through a personal ad.
Her trial for the Pichler murder opened at the regional court in Krems on February 10, 1997, and she played it as theater, confessing to murders and then taking the confessions back. At one hearing she raised a golden crucifix and quoted Pontius Pilate: "I wash my hands in innocence." "No man is a loss when he dies" was another of her lines. On March 7, 1997, she was found guilty and sentenced to life, and she told the reporters in the courtroom to take good pictures of her, because she was famous now. Her former lawyer, Harald Schmidt, went to prison for seven years for forging Pichler's will and as an accomplice to grievous bodily harm.
A second trial, in Vienna, dealt with Köberl and Döcker and ended on April 20, 2001, with two guilty verdicts. On December 17, 2001, an appeals panel of the Supreme Court upheld them, and its presiding judge, Johann Rzeszut, later president of the court, spoke of a scale of wrong "that is really too great for an earthly court." When the verdict was confirmed she told the court: "Lock me up! Let me stay in prison until I die!" She had been held at the women's prison at Schwarzau since 1997. She died of a brain tumor on November 16, 2003, at seventy-two, and was buried at the Feuerhalle Simmering in Vienna. A 2001 television film, Die Gottesanbeterin, told her story with Christiane Hörbiger in the lead, and the Landestheater Linz staged an "operette criminelle" about her in 2007.