Lê Thanh Vân was sentenced to death by the Bình Dương Provincial People's Court in southern Vietnam on September 1, 2004, for poisoning thirteen people between January 1998 and August 2001 and taking what they owned. The court convicted her of murder, robbery and illegal possession of poison. The deaths took place in Đồng Nai, Bình Dương and Bình Phước provinces and in Ho Chi Minh City. Nearly all of the victims knew her: an elderly woman whose family had given her work, a landlord, the mother of the man she lived with, her own brother-in-law, a bus owner who had come to treat her as an adopted daughter, and an old friend. Tuổi Trẻ called her the first woman in Vietnam to kill in series, and Ngôi Sao, a VnExpress publication, wrote that no defendant in the country had before been prosecuted for killing as many as thirteen people.
The pattern prosecutors described was patient. She won people's trust, sometimes letting them treat her as a daughter or a relative, and poisoned them. She often took them to hospital herself under false names and false relationships, and afterwards she produced forged papers of debt or sale to claim their money, motorbikes, land and businesses. Doctors recorded the deaths as illnesses. Police arrested her in July 2000, held her for six months and released her for lack of evidence; four more people died before she was arrested again in October 2001. She was executed at Thủ Dầu Một on October 26, 2005.
Tuổi Trẻ reported in September 2004 that she was born on December 5, 1956, in Saigon, one of eight children. After her eldest brother died young she became the eldest daughter. Her father worked for the water supply and drainage service and her mother was a midwife. Her family described her to the paper as strong-willed and aloof from childhood. Her parents kept her in school, but she left in the twelfth grade without telling them first. VnExpress later gave District 10 of what is now Ho Chi Minh City as her birthplace, and court and police records gave her home as Ward 11, District 10.
After 1975, according to Tuổi Trẻ, she entered the dentistry program of a military medical school. She then left home, saying she had been posted to duty, and tried to leave the country by sea. She was caught before she boarded a boat and was sent to sixteen months of re-education for helping to organize the escape. When she was released she took odd jobs, was often away from home and contributed little money to her family. Her parents and siblings quarreled with her often, and the paper reported that her father was in hospital several times with high blood pressure. Her mother told Tuổi Trẻ she could not understand how her daughter had become what she was.
Her criminal record began years before the killings. VietNamNet's Infonet reported in 2021 that District 10 police arrested her in December 1979 for posing as an army captain to cheat people. In March 1990 District 5 police arrested her for forging ranks, positions, certificates and documents and for fraud, and she was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. On May 17, 1993, the District 10 People's Court sentenced her to four years for fraud. Tuổi Trẻ summed up the period as two prison terms between 1990 and 1993 for forging papers and taking citizens' property. At her 2004 trial the prosecution described her as a particularly dangerous offender with prior convictions and administrative violations.
By the late 1990s she had a persona she would use again and again. She told people she was a dental specialist trained in Germany who spoke seven foreign languages. Tuổi Trẻ reported that she did have some knowledge of dentistry, enough to make the story believable, and VnExpress described her as attractive, persuasive and medically literate. Police records cited by Người Lao Động listed two other names she used, Lee Ly Lan and Lâm Anh Đào. Before the hospital staff who treated her victims she was at different times a wife, a friend, a relative and a former military cadet.
Tuổi Trẻ reported that she married for the first time on December 22, 1984. Her husband was much older than she was; the prosecution at her trial gave his year of birth as 1929. The couple had two sons and later separated. He died in 1989, and Công Lý, the newspaper of the Supreme People's Court, dated his death to April 2, 1989. In 1991 she married again, without a formal ceremony, a man born in 1935. He died suddenly a little more than a year later; Công Lý gave the date as June 18, 1992. The prosecution told the court that investigators had suspected her in both deaths but lacked the evidence to act. Neither death was charged. Her two sons were raised by her parents.
In late 1997 she was being treated at Military Hospital 7A in Ho Chi Minh City, where she met a man whose family ran a dental business in Long Khánh, in Đồng Nai province. She introduced herself as a dentist recently back from Germany, and he hired her to manage the business, VnExpress and Người Lao Động reported. There she began living with one of the workers, Dìu Dãnh Quang, a man from Bù Đăng district in Bình Phước province. He was born in 1973, about seventeen years her junior, and the newspapers called him her common-law husband.
The business struggled, and the owner's mother, Võ Thị Lý, wanted Quang to stop working there. Vân resented it, and she had noticed that the older woman kept money. On January 3, 1998, Vân poisoned her in Long Khánh. Lý, whom Công Lý gave as eighty-one years old, died that night. The hospital attributed her death to illness. Vân took 900,000 dong from her bag and, by her own later account, gave 500,000 of it to Quang. At the trial six years later she said Lý had simply died of old age.
In June 1998 Vân, Quang and Quang's mother, Hín Vân Dính, rented the upper floor of a house in Tân Bình district, Ho Chi Minh City, for 500,000 dong a month. They lived there and made dentures, and Vân presented herself as Quang's wife. Their landlord, Quách Cẩm Minh, who was born in 1948, was poisoned on June 2, 1998, and died. According to Tuổi Trẻ, Vân took about 900,000 dong of her money.
About a month later Vân poisoned Quang's mother, and she took 2.8 million dong of the older woman's money. Hín Vân Dính died in hospital, and Vân told people she had died of old age. Afterwards Vân moved back into her parents' home. When she was first questioned, Quang told investigators he suspected Vân of killing his mother; at trial he said he had no such doubts, and that he and his mother had depended on Vân for money.
Lê Văn Cẩm, born in 1963, was Vân's brother-in-law, and the two had quarreled. On February 24, 1999, she poisoned him in District 10, and he died that afternoon in hospital. She later told investigators that he owed her 12.5 million dong and that she had meant only to disable him, Tuổi Trẻ reported.
Hồ Thị Mộng Đào, of District 11, was looking for work in 1999. Vân, presenting herself as a doctor lately returned from training in Germany, befriended her. Vân poisoned her, took her to a hospital under a false name, saying she was a friend, and Đào died that night. Vân kept Đào's motorbike, valued at about 9 million dong, and when the family asked about it she handed them a parking ticket. She then claimed Đào had sold her the motorbike to settle a debt, produced a photocopied IOU for 500 US dollars with a forged signature, and gave Đào's mother a forged hospital receipt for 500,000 dong. Police said Vân later admitted poisoning her.
Võ Hữu Khiêm, born in 1945, lived in Tân Bình district. On September 4, 1999, she poisoned him at Thủ Dầu Một in Bình Dương province, and he died the same day. Police arrived quickly, and Công Lý wrote that this put an end to her plan to profit from his death.
Nguyễn Thanh Sơn came from Phú Giáo district in Bình Dương province. According to Infonet, he traveled with relatives to Bù Đăng district in Bình Phước on April 6, 2000, to cut timber, and there met a woman who called herself Lee Ly Lan. She poisoned him there, and on April 14 his brother learned that Sơn was dead. Tiền Phong, in a report carried by VnExpress in July 2003, described him as a man who had lived with Vân as a partner for a long time and said he died in Bù Đăng district. Investigators found that his death matched the pattern of her other cases, and she later confessed to it.
Trần Thị Xinh owned a passenger bus that ran between Đắk Lắk province and Ho Chi Minh City. Vân rode it often, befriended her and called her "foster mother"; a Reuters report printed by ABC News in Australia in August 2004 listed a foster mother among the alleged victims. VnExpress reported that Vân wanted the bus and Xinh's money.
On June 28, 2000, Vân poisoned Xinh, who was treated in hospital and began to recover. Xinh's driver, Nguyễn Văn Đông, born in 1955 and from Bến Cát in Bình Dương province, stood in Vân's way; VnExpress, citing Tuổi Trẻ, reported in May 2003 that he had opposed the sale of the bus to her. She poisoned him too, and he died soon afterwards. On July 1, 2000, Xinh was poisoned again and died in hospital. The newspapers give slightly different dates for Đông's death, from the evening of June 28 to the following day.
After Xinh's death Vân gave the family a handwritten note, supposedly from Xinh, saying she had sold Vân the bus for 200 million dong a few days before she died. Vân said she held the vehicle papers and was arranging the transfer, and she demanded the bus at the funeral. VnExpress called it the most valuable property in any of the robbery killings attributed to her. Relatives said they knew nothing of a sale. Xinh's husband went to the Bình Dương provincial police.
Investigators found that Vân had a record of fraud and no money to buy a bus, and forensic examiners found the handwriting on the sale note was forged. On July 7, 2000, Bình Dương provincial police arrested her. A search of her handbag found a quantity of poison. Samples from the bodies of Xinh and Đông were sent for testing, but the tests did not find the poison, and the case remained unproved. Saigon Giải Phóng reported that she was first held only on a fraud charge, and that on October 30, 2000, more than three months later, police changed the charges to murder and robbery. When the legal detention period ran out without enough evidence, she was released on bail from January 15, 2001. Investigators later concluded that by the time of that first arrest she had already killed nine people.
The release became the most criticized point of the case. In a September 2004 series on the trial, Saigon Giải Phóng asked whether the killings could have been stopped sooner. Colonel Nguyễn Thế Bình told the paper that her first killing for robbery dated to 1993, but that the District 10 court had given her only four years for fraud.
About six weeks after her release she began killing again, Ngôi Sao reported. Nguyễn Trung Dzu, born in 1943 and living in Bình Thạnh district, was an old friend; VnExpress described him as a former lover. According to the confession reported in May 2003, Vân had asked him to pay officials to get the bus back, and he spent 14 million dong of her money instead. In March 2001 she poisoned him. She took his cash, which came to 74,000 dong, along with his telephone, identity card and vehicle papers. At the hospital she said she was his wife and used the name Nguyễn Thị Thu Hà. He died about five hours later, and the hospital recorded a stroke.
Vân arranged the funeral without telling his family, who learned of his death three days later. At the funeral she said she was his former wife. She tried to have the funeral home raise its bill from 5.1 million to 12.5 million dong so that his son would repay her, but the scheme was discovered, and she pawned his motorbike for 2.8 million dong. In court his son testified that while his father was missing, Vân answered his phone, said he was bathing or busy, and kept the family away. She told Dzu's children she had known him since 1974 and had a daughter by him living in Australia, an account that did not match her own official biography.
Đào Thị Có, of District 1, was staying in Trảng Bom in Đồng Nai province. Vân had given her gold to help obtain a dental practice certificate, and Có had not been able to get it. Vân poisoned her and took a dental filling machine Có had signed for, VnExpress reported. The date of her death has not been reported.
Trần Văn Khôi, born in 1960, lived in District 3 and earned his living with his motorbike. On June 8, 2001, he was with Vân and Quang in Ho Chi Minh City when he was poisoned, and he died the next morning. His motorbike, valued at about 12.5 million dong, was taken. His wife told the court she had searched for him for two years, because Quang had given her husband's name as that of his own brother.
Vi Thị Thanh lived in Nghĩa Trung commune, Bù Đăng district, Bình Phước. According to investigation findings dated August 17, 2001, and read in court, she had come to the couple's dental clinic for treatment, and Vân poisoned her there. Vân told no one, although Thanh's family lived nearby. Using the name Lâm Anh Đào, Vân then drew up a forged agreement that Thanh had transferred her clothing stall for 8.5 million dong, and a forged paper saying Thanh had sold her a plot of 450 square meters of land in Bù Đăng for 40 million dong, with a 13 million dong deposit received. When Thanh's children looked for their mother, Vân told them she had run away after a jealous quarrel. More than a year later police told them she was dead.
Vân was arrested again on October 15, 2001, and this time she was also charged with illegal possession of poison. Infonet reported that, confronted with the evidence, she confessed to the death of Vi Thị Thanh. The files from the different provinces were combined, but the case still lacked proof. In May 2002 Bình Dương police received further reports of suspicious deaths linked to her and asked for the case to be transferred to the Ministry of Public Security, and on June 26, 2002, the ministry's Criminal Investigation Police Department took it over, Saigon Giải Phóng reported.
Investigators built the case from circumstantial evidence. Each victim had fallen ill after meeting her. The illnesses looked alike. She had taken many of them to hospital herself, posing as a spouse, friend or relative, and afterwards produced debt or sale papers to take their property. The Southern Forensic Science Institute ran laboratory tests, and its deputy director, Colonel Phạm Ngọc Hiền, told Tuổi Trẻ that the results matched the victims' deaths and strengthened the prosecution, even though the poison was very hard to detect in a body. At first Vân told investigators she had used a dental preparation; when health officials found it harmless, she named the poison she had in fact used. On January 7, 2003, ministry investigators summed up the evidence and concluded there was enough to link her directly to a series of deaths, Infonet reported.
The confessions came in stages. In May 2003 VnExpress, citing Tuổi Trẻ, reported that she had admitted killing six people in Ho Chi Minh City, Bình Dương and Đồng Nai to take their property: Nguyễn Văn Đông, Trần Thị Xinh, Nguyễn Trung Dzu, Đào Thị Có, Trần Văn Khôi and Vi Thị Thanh. Investigators of the Tiền Giang provincial police said there were signs of more victims. In July 2003 Tiền Phong reported that she had admitted seven more, most of them her own relatives or members of her household, among them Nguyễn Thanh Sơn, Lê Văn Cẩm and Hín Vân Dính. She told investigators she had killed to raise money for her own heart treatment, including 56 million dong for an operation at the end of 2001. Investigators had not reached an official finding on her motive.
In March 2004 Người Lao Động reported that the Investigation Police Agency of the Ministry of Public Security had finished its work and recommended that Vân be prosecuted for murder, robbery and illegal possession of poison, and that Dìu Dãnh Quang be prosecuted as her accomplice in some of the killings. Police said she had taken nearly 287 million dong in all.
The trial began before the Bình Dương Provincial People's Court on August 25, 2004. A Reuters report printed by ABC News in Australia two days earlier described her as 48 years old, said she had reportedly confessed to poisoning thirteen people to steal their possessions, and noted that the charges against her and her boyfriend carried the death penalty by firing squad. The indictment came from the Supreme People's Procuracy, and the case at trial was argued by Châu Thị Nga of the Bình Dương provincial procuracy. Công Lý and Infonet named Trần Văn Tong as the presiding judge. The prosecution's case ran from January 1998 to August 2001 and covered thirteen deaths and more than 240 million dong in money and property.
Vân rejected the indictment from the first day. She said investigators had forced her confessions and that she had only accompanied the victims and taken them for emergency care. She refused the lawyer appointed for her, Phạm Hữu Tình, saying she had never met him during the investigation and would clear her own name. He told the court he had been appointed only five days before the trial, two of them non-working days. She disputed witness evidence and forensic findings and threatened to sue journalists over their reporting. Asked about the poison found in her handbag, she said a doctor had given it to her to be tested for investigators in Bình Thuận province, and that she did not know what it was. The prosecution rejected the story.
On the afternoon of August 27, after the panel challenged her denials, she fainted in court. The hearing was adjourned to August 30. By then the court had examined the deaths of eleven of the thirteen victims. When it resumed, Quang no longer backed her. On Khôi's death she said Quang had telephoned her to pay a taxi fare at the hospital and that she had never met Khôi before. Quang said she was lying, that he knew nothing of the death, and that Vân had given him the motorbike. A witness contradicted both of them and placed all three together. Vân also claimed that she and Quang had coordinated their statements during the investigation by talking through a water pipe between two floors, which Quang denied. Faced with the contradictions she collapsed again and was taken to Bình Dương General Hospital, where a doctor found no heart disease and said the cause was psychological.
On Vi Thị Thanh she said the dead woman had taken her own life after a jealous quarrel, and she argued that investigators could not have compared the handwriting on the land paper with Thanh's, since Thanh was dead. Thanh's eldest son testified about the family's search for their mother. The presiding judge put it to Vân that all thirteen people had dealt with her and all had died unexpectedly, and that after her release four more people who came into contact with her had died in the same way. She stayed silent. For the first time, she admitted she had done wrong in not returning the victims' property to their families or reporting it to the police.
On August 31 the prosecutor asked for the death penalty for Vân on all three charges, and for 21 to 24 years for Quang for murder and robbery. She told the court Vân's statements to other investigators, not only to the officer Vân accused, Phạm Tấn Ca, recorded the same admissions, and that the victims among Vân's own circle included Quang's mother, her brother-in-law and a former lover. Phạm Hữu Tình, who represented Quang, said he was shocked by the case and argued that police had not made clear Quang's part in Khôi's death. Vân, wiping away tears, argued that the law punished people who failed to help those in danger, while she had helped and was accused of murder. She said she had two children and asked the court to correct any mistakes. Khôi's widow asked whether Vân had thought about the thirteen victims and their families, and relatives of the other victims told the court that only a death sentence would ease their grief.
On September 1, 2004, the court sentenced Lê Thanh Vân to death for murder, robbery and illegal possession of poison. Dìu Dãnh Quang was sentenced to 21 years for murder and robbery. The prosecution had told the court that every victim had been in contact with Vân or in her company before dying, and that there was sufficient basis to find she had directly killed all thirteen, for their property or for revenge.
Both defendants appealed. In her appeal to the Appellate Court of the Supreme People's Court in Ho Chi Minh City, Vân said she was innocent, denied taking part in the twelve poisoning cases in which the first court had found thirteen people died, and called the death sentence too severe. She admitted one fault: keeping the victims' property, which she said was because she did not know where their families lived. Quang asked for a reduction of his 21-year term.
The appeal was heard over two days. Early in the hearing Vân asked for the prosecutor to be replaced, saying she had met him before. Her lawyer asked for a psychiatric evaluation, and the presiding judge asked her directly whether she suffered from paranoid delusions. The panel refused the evaluation, finding that she had answered questions clearly and had herself said she had no mental illness. Ngôi Sao reported that about ten representatives of the victims attended. In her final statement she asked for a chance to live again and to raise her children. Late in the afternoon a teenage boy, one of her sons, went up to the dock and kissed her before a guard drew him away.
On February 2, 2005, the court rejected Vân's appeal and upheld the death sentence on all three charges, finding that the first court had convicted the right person of the right crimes. Quang's sentence was reduced from 21 to 17 years.
Vân petitioned the President of Vietnam for clemency. On October 4, 2005, the President signed Decision No. 1159 rejecting the petition. On the morning of October 26, 2005, the Bình Dương provincial enforcement council carried out the sentence at the execution ground of the cemetery in Thủ Dầu Một. Dân Trí, reporting the next day from Công An TP.HCM, the Ho Chi Minh City police newspaper, gave the total she had taken from the thirteen victims as 500 US dollars and property worth 311,039,000 dong.
In 2012 Nguyễn Dũng, a veteran judge of the Bình Dương Provincial People's Court who sat on the execution council, described the morning to Công Lý. He arrived at the prison before 4 a.m. When she was told her petition had failed, she cursed and struggled, then wept. She refused her last meal. Asked whether she had a final wish, she asked that her blindfold be removed before the shots so she could see her relatives and the world around her one last time, and he promised it. At about 5 a.m. she was taken to the execution ground in a closed van, calm by then. He said he kept his promise.
The case prompted debate in the Vietnamese press about how she had gone undetected for so long. In its September 2004 series Saigon Giải Phóng drew four lessons: that people should be wary of strangers who press food and drink on them, and that hospitals should check identity papers before releasing bodies; that investigators should not wait rigidly for direct evidence, and should keep close watch on suspects they have to release; that forensic laboratories needed better tools to detect poisons that break down quickly; and that the trade in poisons, although regulated, was still open. Dr. Nguyễn Thanh Tuyền, chief forensic examiner of the city's forensic institute, told the paper that some hospitals had handed victims' bodies to Vân without checking that she was related to them, and that unclaimed bodies should have been reported to the local police.
In Tuổi Trẻ, the writer Lê Minh Tiến described the case as the first of its kind in Vietnam and classed her as a serial killer under the FBI's scheme. He noted that the indictment gave robbery as her motive and argued that in-depth interviews might reveal other motives. He expected the authorities to pay closer attention to how toxic substances were controlled. An unnamed lawyer told Tuổi Trẻ that Vân did not appear to be mentally ill and attributed her actions to a hard upbringing, greed and repeated imprisonment. Vietnamese newspapers gave her the nickname "phù thủy", the witch, and in 2012 VnExpress included her in a survey of Vietnamese poisoners under that name.
The thirteen deaths are the only ones for which she was convicted. Investigators linked her to eight further poisoning cases involving sixteen people, three of whom died and thirteen of whom survived after emergency treatment. They did not find enough evidence to charge her, and VnExpress reported in 2004 that those cases would be handled separately; no outcome was reported.
The deaths of her two husbands, in 1989 and 1992, were suspected but never charged. The Tiền Giang provincial investigators said in 2003 that they were examining the death of her first husband, after whose death she quickly sold their shared house, according to Tiền Phong. A Reuters report in August 2004 said police were investigating whether she had killed her husband.
She was also suspected in the death of a neighbor in District 10, Bùi Chung, in late 1992. Infonet reported that members of the household fell ill after a meal on October 24, 1992, and that Bùi Chung died a few days later; Công Lý gave the date of death as November 15, 1992. Infonet reported that the District 10 court convicted Vân only of fraud for lack of evidence. That death was never charged as a killing.
The published figures vary. In July 2003 Tiền Phong reported a total of twenty-one victims, eight of whom survived; later reports gave thirteen convicted killings and sixteen further victims in eight uncharged cases. The total she took was given as more than 240 million dong (Người Lao Động and Tuổi Trẻ, 2004), nearly 250 million (VnExpress, 2004), 286,589,000 dong (Tuổi Trẻ, 2004) and 500 US dollars plus 311,039,000 dong (Dân Trí, 2005, and Công Lý, 2012). Accounts of her relationship with Nguyễn Trung Dzu differ between old friend and former lover, and accounts of Nguyễn Thanh Sơn differ between a man she met in April 2000 and a long-term partner.
Vân herself denied the killings at both trials, said her confessions had been forced, and claimed that some victims had died of illness, old age or suicide. Both courts rejected those claims.
December 5, 1956: Lê Thanh Vân is born in Saigon.
After 1975: enters a military medical school's dentistry program; later caught trying to leave Vietnam by sea and sent to sixteen months of re-education.
December 1979: arrested by District 10 police for posing as an army captain.
December 22, 1984: first marriage.
April 2, 1989: her first husband dies (suspected, never charged).
March 1990: arrested for forgery and fraud; sentenced to eighteen months.
1991: second marriage.
June 18, 1992: her second husband dies (suspected, never charged).
Late 1992: a neighbor, Bùi Chung, dies after falling ill (suspected, never charged).
May 17, 1993: sentenced by the District 10 People's Court to four years for fraud.
Late 1997: meets the family that hires her at its dental business in Long Khánh, Đồng Nai; begins living with Dìu Dãnh Quang.
January 3, 1998: Võ Thị Lý is poisoned in Long Khánh and dies.
June 2, 1998: Quách Cẩm Minh is poisoned in Tân Bình district, Ho Chi Minh City.
Mid-1998: Hín Vân Dính, Quang's mother, is poisoned and dies.
February 24, 1999: Lê Văn Cẩm, her brother-in-law, is poisoned and dies.
1999: Hồ Thị Mộng Đào is poisoned and dies in Ho Chi Minh City.
September 4, 1999: Võ Hữu Khiêm is poisoned at Thủ Dầu Một and dies.
April 14, 2000: Nguyễn Thanh Sơn dies in Bù Đăng district, Bình Phước.
Late June 2000: Nguyễn Văn Đông is poisoned and dies.
July 1, 2000: Trần Thị Xinh dies.
July 7, 2000: Bình Dương provincial police arrest Vân.
October 30, 2000: charges changed to murder and robbery.
January 15, 2001: released on bail.
March 2001: Nguyễn Trung Dzu is poisoned and dies.
2001: Đào Thị Có is poisoned and dies.
June 8 to 9, 2001: Trần Văn Khôi is poisoned and dies.
August 2001: Vi Thị Thanh is poisoned and dies.
October 15, 2001: Vân is arrested again and charged with illegal possession of poison.
June 26, 2002: the Ministry of Public Security's Criminal Investigation Police Department takes over the case.
January 7, 2003: ministry investigators summarize the evidence.
May and July 2003: her confessions to six and then seven more killings are reported.
March 2004: investigators recommend prosecution.
August 25, 2004: the trial begins at the Bình Dương Provincial People's Court.
September 1, 2004: sentenced to death; Quang sentenced to 21 years.
February 2, 2005: the Appellate Court of the Supreme People's Court in Ho Chi Minh City upholds the death sentence and reduces Quang's term to 17 years.
October 4, 2005: clemency refused by Presidential Decision No. 1159.
October 26, 2005: executed at Thủ Dầu Một, Bình Dương province.