Le Thanh Van was born in 1956 and lived in District 10 of Ho Chi Minh City. She had two convictions behind her: in 1990 the district court of the city's fifth district sentenced her to eighteen months for fraud, for impersonating an official rank and for forging state certificates.
Between January 1998 and August 2001 she killed thirteen people in Binh Duong, Dong Nai, Binh Phuoc and Ho Chi Minh City. The method was the same each time. She made the victim's acquaintance, offered to find them work, built up trust and affection, in several cases took them on as foster children, and then invited them out to eat and put cyanide into the food or the drink. Afterwards she took their money and their property. The court put the total at close to 242 million dong along with a cassette player and a mobile telephone; other accounts give figures from 286 million to over 311 million dong, and five hundred American dollars.
Some of her victims were her own relatives.
One killing gives the character of the rest. While a man was away from the table she put cyanide into his glass of spirits. He came back, drank it, and said he felt unwell. She then took him to a pagoda in Binh Duong, and while she was talking to the monks he collapsed and died beside a tree in the temple grounds. When the monks came to tell her, she ran out and sat by the body weeping.
Three victims are named in the Vietnamese accounts. A man named Son died on April 14 after she cooked him a bowl of noodles. Nguyen Van Dong and Tran Thi Xinh, both of Binh Duong, died of poisoning in late June 2000; after Xinh's death Van produced for the family a handwritten note stating that Xinh had sold her a passenger bus, registration 53L-3259, for two hundred million dong.
The reason the series ran for three years is that the poison could not be found. Cyanide paralyses respiration at the cellular level and kills an adult in a dose of about a fifth of a gram; the victims lost consciousness, stiffened, and stopped breathing. Investigators did not detect it in any of the bodies, and the deaths were recorded as sudden illness.
She had in fact been arrested once before, in July 2000, on suspicion of murder and robbery. A search of her handbag produced 2.8 grams of cyanide, enough to kill about twenty people. There was not enough evidence to hold her for the killings, so she was detained on a fraud investigation instead.
She was arrested again in August 2001. The trial at Binh Duong ran for eight days. She denied everything and said her statements to the investigators had been extracted from her under duress; she collapsed during the proceedings, and on August 30 doctors reported that the cause was psychological. On September 1, 2004 the court convicted her of murder, robbery and unlawful possession of poison and sentenced her to death. Her lover, Diu Danh Quang, thirty-one, was convicted of murder and robbery and sentenced to twenty-one years.
The Supreme People's Court upheld the sentence on appeal on February 2, 2005. She petitioned the President for clemency, and on October 4, 2005 the petition was refused.
Beyond the thirteen she was convicted of, Vietnamese reporting sets out eight further poisonings involving sixteen people, of whom three died and thirteen survived because they were treated in time. Those cases were not charged, and the figures are kept separate above.
Two corrections to this entry as it stood. It said she obtained the cyanide through contacts in the gold trade, where it is used in processing. That explanation appears in no source consulted here and has been removed; how she obtained it is not established. And it gave her motives as inheritance, property and the settlement of debts and disputes, which reads as a series of family quarrels; the pattern in the Vietnamese record is the deliberate cultivation of strangers who were then robbed.
She is described in Vietnamese writing on the case as the country's first female serial killer, and by the press as the cyanide witch.