The first was a girl of five months who would not stop crying at night. One afternoon in 1915, as she was bathing the child in a washtub in the flat at Bruksgatan 5 in Helsingborg, Hilda Nilsson laid a washboard across the baby's back, set a bucket of coal on top of it to hold it down, and left the room. When she came back the child was quiet. The idea came to her that afternoon, she told the court later, because the baby had been so fretful and so hard to look after.
Over the next two years she did the same to seven more. Of all the foster children taken into her care, only two lived. She was convicted of seven murders and one manslaughter, and the Swedish press named her the angel maker on Bruks Street.
She was born in 1876 in the Skåne countryside and came to Helsingborg at seventeen as a maid, and lived there for the rest of her life. As a teenager she had two children outside marriage; both died days after they were born. She married Gustaf Nilsson. When an eye injury forced him into a job that paid much less, the couple fell deep into debt and were in danger of being evicted from Bruksgatan 5.
The trade she turned to was legal and common. Having a child outside marriage in Sweden in those years was a source of deep shame, contraception information had been banned since 1911, and abortion was illegal. Mothers, many of them from middle-class and wealthier families, found foster mothers through newspaper advertisements and paid a single lump sum meant to cover the child's keep until the age of fifteen. If the child died, the foster home kept the money. Hilda Nilsson answered those advertisements. Mothers who visited her found a tidy apartment and a healthy foster son, and left their babies with her. The lump sums were too small to raise a child on, and she began killing the children soon after the money was paid.
Her trial opened on June 2, 1917, and included a mental examination. The prosecutor called her a monster of calculated greed and hideous lust for murder. The Helsingborgs Dagblad reported that she stayed calm when the death sentence was read and wept quietly on the way back down to her cell. The date of the judgment is given as June 13 in the Helsingborg city encyclopedia and the court history published by the Swedish courts, and as June 15 in English-language accounts.
The sentence was appealed. She was held in the women's prison at the citadel in Landskrona, and at half past five on the evening of August 10, 1917, she was found dead in her cell. The accounts differ on the details. The Helsingborg city encyclopedia says she hanged herself with a noose of linen cloth tied to the cell window; English-language accounts say it was tied to the cell door; a researcher working from the prison records has described a woolen scarf knotted around her neck, and notes that the prison doctor called it suicide while the prison director thought a stroke or other natural cause more likely. She was forty-one.
Several Swedish accounts say that on the same day the court, following newer practice, had converted the death sentence to life imprisonment, and that she died without knowing it. Other accounts describe her as the last person in Sweden sentenced to death whose sentence was never commuted. Sweden had carried out its last execution in 1910 and abolished the death penalty in peacetime in 1921. Either way she was the last woman in Sweden to be condemned to death.
Helsingborg's municipal records office still holds her death certificate, the child welfare board's register of foster children in the city, and the handwritten minutes of the board's meetings, the paper trail of a system that registered where the children went and did not notice that they were dying.