Nilsson was born in 1876 and lived in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden. She advertised to take in children for a fee, taking a lump sum for permanent care from mothers who could not keep them, which was a recognised trade at the time and was known in Swedish as anglamakerska, angel-making.
Between 1915 and 1917 she killed at least eight infants placed with her, drowning them, and disposed of the bodies. The method she described was to hold them under water in a washtub weighted with household objects and to leave the room until it was over. Swedish reporting called her the angel maker on Bruks Street, after the address.
The case came to light in 1917 when a mother who had placed her child began asking questions that could not be answered.
She was convicted and sentenced to death on June 15, 1917. She hanged herself with a strip of cloth in her cell at Landskrona on August 10, 1917.
She was the last woman in Sweden to be sentenced to death. The sentence would in all likelihood have been commuted; Sweden had carried out its last execution in 1910 and abolished capital punishment in 1921.
This entry belongs with Minnie Dean in New Zealand and Lila Young in Nova Scotia. In all three the trade existed because unmarried mothers had no other option, the state had no provision and no oversight, and the figures are estimates rather than counts. The difference here is that Nilsson described what she had done.