Johann Christoph Rumpff, a wheelwright in Bremen, grew suspicious of the deaths in his house and one day found small white grains on a ham in his house. His wife Wilhelmine had died in December 1826, nursed to the end by the woman who kept house for them, Gesche Gottfried. Rumpff took the grains to his physician, Gottfried Wilhelm Luce, who had already attended several of the people who had died around her, and Luce found they were arsenic. By then she had killed two more people in Bremen and one in Hanover. On the evening of March 6, 1828, her forty-third birthday, she was arrested and taken to the Stadthaus.
She was born Gesche Margarethe Timm in Bremen on March 6, 1785, the daughter of Johann Timm, a master tailor, and Gesche Margarethe Timm, who sewed wool, and she had a twin brother, Johann. She went to the parish school of St. Ansgarii and from 1798 to Lutheran instruction at the cathedral, took dancing and French lessons, and was thought orderly, industrious and a little vain. The family lived modestly. In 1806 she married Johann Miltenberg, a prosperous and dissolute master saddler whose wife had just died, and moved up into the respectable middle class. She had five children, three of whom survived infancy: Adelheid, Heinrich and Johanna.
About 1812 her mother gave her a paper bag of arsenic to deal with mice. With it she killed eight people. Miltenberg, who had squandered his father's fortune in taverns and brothels, died on October 1, 1813. In 1815 she killed her mother on May 2, her daughters Johanna on May 10 and Adelheid on May 18, her father on June 28, and her son Heinrich on September 22. Her twin brother died on June 1, 1816. Her longtime lover, the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried, married her on his deathbed and died on July 5, 1817; the child she was carrying was stillborn that year. The powder was used up.
Six years passed. Then she had her maid and friend Beta Schmidt fetch Mäusebutter from the apothecary, two parts clarified butter to one part arsenic, and she killed seven more. Her fiancé, the draper Paul Thomas Zimmermann, who had named her in his will, died on June 1, 1823. Anna Lucia Meyerholz, her music teacher and friend, died on March 21, 1825; Johann Mosees, a neighbor and adviser, on December 5, 1825; Wilhelmine Rumpff on December 22, 1826. Beta Schmidt's three-year-old daughter Elise died on May 13, 1827, and Beta Schmidt herself two days later. That summer she traveled to Hanover to see Friedrich Kleine, an old friend to whom she owed money she did not have, and he died on July 24. Throughout she also gave out small doses that sickened many people without killing them. Because she nursed the dying so tenderly, much of Bremen called her the Angel of Bremen.
She spent almost three years in the new detention house at the Ostertor, questioned regularly by Senator Franz Friedrich Droste, the examining magistrate, while the court secretary Johann Eberhart Noltenius took down her answers. She described the killings and the fears that tormented her. She smuggled Mäusebutter into prison and thought of taking it, but was too afraid of the suffering she had watched in her victims. She never gave a real reason. Her defender, Friedrich Leopold Voget, argued that she was driven by an inner compulsion and asked for a psychiatric examination, which the judges refused; in a biography published after her death he blamed selfishness and sin instead. The prosecutor, Johann Carl Friedrich Gildemeister, relied on the modern principle that the court could weigh the evidence freely, and the court rejected the insanity defense, one of the first ever raised, holding that she knew what she was doing and that it was wrong.
She was sentenced to death by the sword, and the appeal court in Lübeck confirmed the sentence. The day before, Droste told her that he had looked on her smiling all those months, but that on the scaffold he would have to look grave, as protocol required; it was not meant against her, and they would see each other again in heaven. At about eight in the morning of April 21, 1831, a horse cart took her, emaciated and aged beyond her forty-six years, to the Domshof, where some 35,000 people stood around the scaffold. It was the last public execution in Bremen. A stone in the square, the Spuckstein, marks the place, and people spit on it. Rainer Werner Fassbinder based his play and film Bremer Freiheit on her.