In 1925 Emil Marek's left leg was cut off below the knee. He and his wife, Martha, told the insurers that the axe had slipped while he was felling a tree, and they claimed on a policy worth a reported thirty thousand dollars. The insurers' doctors looked at the wound and saw three separate blows, and refused to pay. The couple were prosecuted for attempted fraud, and the case ran through the Vienna courts for years and made them notorious. It was Martha Marek's first scheme to turn another person's body into money. It was not the last.
She was born Martha Löwenstein in Vienna. Most modern references give her birth as October 10, 1897; older accounts give 1904. She was orphaned young and brought up by a poor family. In 1919, working in a dress shop, she met Moritz Fritsch, a department store owner about fifty years older than she was, and became his mistress. He left her money when he died, and she married Emil Marek, an engineering student. Between them they ran through it.
Emil, never well after the amputation, died on July 31, 1932. The death was put down to tuberculosis. Within weeks their daughter, Ingeborg, died too, shortly after her mother had insured the children's lives. Sources disagree about the girl's age: some call her an infant of nine months, others a child of seven. Both deaths paid out. Martha played the part of the widowed and bereaved mother, and people gave her sympathy and money. An elderly aunt, Susanne Löwenstein, made her sole heir and died in 1934 with the same symptoms Emil and the child had shown.
When the inheritance was gone, she took lodgers into the house. One, Felicitas Kittenberger, a seamstress, was persuaded to take out life insurance in Marek's favor and then died after a short illness. Kittenberger's son was suspicious and went to the police. Marek, meanwhile, had tried the old trick again, reporting valuable paintings stolen and claiming on the insurance, and this time she was arrested.
The investigators ordered Kittenberger's body exhumed, and the pathologist found thallium. Emil, Ingeborg and Susanne Löwenstein were exhumed in turn, and thallium was in all of them. The police then found Marek's son living in a poor district of Vienna, sick with the same poison. He was taken to hospital and recovered. His mother, it turned out, had recently insured him as well. She had been a regular customer of a Vienna chemist, buying Zelio, a thallium rat poison sold as a paste.
She was tried in 1938 and maintained her innocence throughout. In court she appeared to suffer seizures and blindness and was carried in on a special chair. The jury convicted her and she was sentenced to death. Austrian practice had long been to commute death sentences passed on women, and hers might have been, but in March 1938 Germany annexed Austria and German law came with it. On December 6, 1938, the Bavarian state executioner, Johann Reichhart, guillotined her in Vienna. She is thought to have been the last woman executed in Austria for murder after an ordinary jury trial; around a hundred women went to German executioners in Vienna and Graz over the next seven years, most of them for political offenses.