Gesche Margarethe Timm was born in Bremen on March 6, 1785, a twin, and married the saddler Johann Miltenberger at twenty-one. She was a striking woman who enjoyed being admired, and she developed a habit of nursing the sick relative through their final illness, which made her locally famous for her devotion and earned her the name the Angel of Bremen.
She used Mausebutter, mouse butter, a household preparation of fat and arsenic sold for killing rats, which she spread on bread and stirred into soup and beer. Between 1813 and 1827 she poisoned her first husband, her parents, all three of her own children, her twin brother, her second husband Michael Christoph Gottfried, and a succession of friends, creditors, servants and neighbours. Fifteen died and several more survived.
Her motives were mixed and none of them was large: inheritances that were mostly debts, escape from creditors, irritation, and a good deal of what she got out of the attention paid to a woman nursing the dying. She once poisoned a family who had taken her in out of kindness.
She was caught in 1828 when a man named Rumpff, in whose household she was living, noticed white grains in his meat and had them examined. She confessed to everything, in detail, over months. She was beheaded with a sword in the Domshof in Bremen on April 21, 1831, in front of a large crowd, the last public execution in the city. The paving stone marking the spot, the Spuckstein, is still there and people still spit on it.