Early in 2003, in a detention center in southern Vietnam, a woman who had refused for more than a year to answer investigators' questions was asked about one death only, that of a woman named Vi Thị Thanh. Lê Thanh Vân admitted it. Then, to the surprise of the officers in the room, she kept going. By the time her statements were complete, detectives from three provinces had a single case of thirteen murders, every one of them carried out with cyanide slipped into food or drink, and every one of them recorded at the time as a sudden illness, a stroke or a death in the emergency room.
She was born on December 5, 1956, in Saigon, the second of eight children of a drainage worker and a midwife; an older brother died young, leaving her the eldest of seven. Family accounts describe a difficult, cold child who fought with her siblings and beat the family pets. She left school partway through the twelfth grade, enrolled in 1975 at a military medical school of dentistry, and was later sent to a re-education camp for sixteen months for trying to cross the border illegally. In December 1979 she was arrested in District 10 for impersonating an army captain. In March 1990 a District 5 court sentenced her to eighteen months for forgery and theft.
The first death connected to her came in 1992. Working as a caretaker for the Chung family, she served them chicken noodles on October 24, and the whole family went to the hospital; Mr. Chung's wife, Bùi, died. An autopsy at Chợ Rẫy Hospital found she had died in a state of poisoning, but there was not enough evidence for a murder charge, and Vân was convicted of fraud instead and given four years. By then she had been married twice. Her first husband, Nguyễn Quang Mễ, the father of her two children, died in 1989 of causes never made public; her second, Lê Văn Minh, died suddenly at Nguyễn Tri Phương Hospital a year after their wedding. Neither death was charged.
The killings for which she was convicted began at a dental clinic in Long Khánh. Late in 1997, at Military Hospital 7A in Ho Chi Minh City, she met Đinh Văn Khảm, told him she was a dental specialist trained in Germany who spoke seven languages, and was offered a job at his family's clinic. There she married another employee, Dìu Dãnh Quang. When the business faltered and Khảm's elderly mother, Võ Thị Lý, suggested letting Quang go, Vân gave the old woman a glass of lemonade laced with cyanide on January 3, 1998. Lý collapsed within half an hour and died at the hospital. On the way back Vân took about 900,000 dong and Lý's personal belongings.
The victims who followed were people who trusted her or had something she wanted. Quách Cẩm Minh, a security guard in Tân Bình who rented her space for a dental practice, died on June 2, 1998, after she gave him poisoned alcohol; she went through his house while he was dying and took 900,000 dong. A month later her mother-in-law, Hín Văn Dính, died after drinking tea Vân had poisoned, and Vân took about 2.8 million dong from the estate. On February 24, 1999, her brother-in-law Lê Văn Cẩm asked her to treat a broken finger, and she put cyanide into the medication; he died that day at Gia Định People's Hospital. She later told investigators he owed her 12.5 million dong and insulted her, and that she meant only to cripple him, then denied the whole thing in court.
Hồ Thị Mộng Đào accepted Vân's offer of a health check and a ride to apply for a job at the city's health department. At a roadside noodle stall Vân poisoned her bowl. Đào was treated at a hospital and survived, was released that night into an acquaintance's care, and was poisoned again the same night and died. Võ Hữu Khiêm, a company director, died because Vân wanted his motorbike. In 2000, working under the alias Lee Ly Lan for Nguyễn Thanh Sơn in An Linh, Bình Dương province, she cooked him rice vermicelli; he died on April 14 after a lingering illness. At the end of June two more acquaintances, Nguyễn Văn Đông and Trần Thị Xinh, were poisoned, and after Xinh's death Vân gave the family a handwritten note claiming Xinh had sold her a passenger bus, registration 53L-3259, for 200 million dong.
One killing stayed with the Bình Dương judge who later helped carry out her sentence. While a man was away from the table, she put cyanide in his glass of spirits. He drank it, said he felt unwell, and she drove him to a pagoda in Bình Dương. While she talked with the monks he collapsed and died under a tree in the temple grounds, and when the monks came to tell her she ran out and sat weeping beside the body.
The police came close in 2000. After the Đông and Xinh deaths she was arrested on suspicion of murder and robbery, and her handbag held 2.8 grams of cyanide, enough by the investigators' estimate to kill about twenty people. It was not enough to hold her. Tests on the cyanide did not match what was found in the two victims' organs, and she was kept on a fraud charge until her release on bail on January 15, 2001. Two months later she poisoned an old friend, Nguyễn Trung Dzu, with cyanide in a glass of soy milk while he repaired his motorbike; he died five hours later of what was certified as a stroke. She took 74,000 dong and his phone, tried to inflate the funeral bill so his son would owe her, and pawned the motorbike for 2.8 million dong. In Trảng Bom she killed Đào Thị Có, who had not been taken in by her forged dental certificate. Between June and August 2001 she killed Trần Văn Khôi for his motorbike, then Vi Thị Thanh; under the name Lâm Anh Đào she took over Thanh's clothing shop and sold land Thanh owned in Bù Đăng for 40 million dong.
Investigators had been watching her and asking, without success, to interview her. To stop her they charged her with illegal possession of poison, and she was arrested in the village of Đức Liễu on October 15, 2001; earlier Vietnamese reporting put the arrest in August. In July 2002 detectives from three provinces merged their unsolved deaths into one file, and on August 14 Quang was arrested for failing to report a capital crime. Khôi's body had still not been found when the case was reviewed in January 2003, witnesses were few, and Vân was feigning illness. The decision to question her about Thanh alone produced the confession that opened the rest. She said she had bought the cyanide at a chemical shop on Tô Hiến Thành Street in District 10.
Her trial opened at the Bình Dương Provincial People's Court on August 25, 2004. It was the first time a defendant in Vietnam had been charged with thirteen murders, and foreign reporters called it the country's first serial-killer trial. She withdrew her confessions, said the police had forced them, and claimed she had only been present to rush the victims to the emergency room. On August 27, as the court reached the killing of Khôi, she said she felt faint, asked for medicine and collapsed, and the session was adjourned; a doctor later found the cause was psychological. Quang, who had helped her in Khôi's killing, no longer followed her lead, and the two blamed each other in court. On September 1, 2004, the court found that the evidence established she had poisoned all thirteen to rob them and sentenced her to death. Tuổi Trẻ reported the three offenses as murder, fraud and possession of poison; Thanh Niên and the prosecution gave them as murder, robbery and illegal possession. Quang received twenty-one years for murder and robbery.
Both appealed. At the hearing on February 1, 2005, she admitted possessing the poison and two of the murders and robberies, but denied the rest. The appeals court of the Supreme People's Court in Ho Chi Minh City upheld her death sentence the next day and reduced Quang's term to seventeen years. President Trần Đức Lương refused her petition for clemency by decision of October 4, 2005.
She was executed by firing squad at the Thủ Dầu Một cemetery on October 26, 2005, aged forty-eight. Nguyễn Dũng, the former judge who sat on the execution council, recalled that she cursed and fought the guards when they came for her, wept when told her petition had failed, and left her last meal untouched. At the end she asked the soldiers to take off her blindfold so she could see her relatives and the world outside one last time.
The thirteen were not the whole of it. Investigators set out eight further poisonings involving sixteen people, three of whom died and thirteen of whom survived because they were treated in time, but found too little evidence to charge them. Vietnamese newspapers called her the cyanide witch. A senior official of the Ministry of Public Security drew four lessons from the case: be wary of strangers who press invitations to eat, keep closer watch on suspects, bring in modern investigative methods, and control the sale of poisons.