On Thanksgiving evening 1924, several members of the Hasel family of Hardscrabble, near Valley City in Medina County, Ohio, came down with a violent stomach ailment. The others recovered. Sophie Hasel did not, and she died on December 13. On New Year's Eve the same sickness struck the household of her brother-in-law and sister, Fred and Lily Gienke: both parents and several children were taken to the hospital, and by February 1925 Fred and Lily were dead. In all, seventeen relatives fell ill that fall and winter, and four of the Gienke children were left partly paralyzed. The woman who had been doing it was Sophie's daughter and the Gienkes' niece, a forty-one-year-old widow named Martha Wise.
She was born Martha Hasel on April 18, 1883, in Hardscrabble, to Wilhelm Carl Hasel and Sophia Elizabeth Gienke, both farmers. In 1906 she met Albert Wise, much older than she, at a box social, and married him; he never gave her a wedding ring. On his fifty-acre farm she found he wanted a farmhand more than a wife, and she plowed and slopped hogs even when pregnant. Their first child, Walter Austin, died in infancy; four others, Everett, Gertrude, Kenneth and Lester, lived. Her one diversion was funerals. She seldom missed one in or near Hardscrabble, whether or not she had known the dead, and after Albert died suddenly in 1922 she began weeping and lamenting at them no matter who was being buried.
Within a year she had taken up with Walter Johns, a farmhand on a neighboring property. Her mother and her aunt Lily made no secret of wanting it ended, and by the reporting of the time her mother threatened to disown her. By the end of 1924 Martha had given him up. Johns moved to Cleveland, and they lost touch.
Accounts differ on what first made the authorities look at her: a run of unexplained fires, in one version, or reports of foul play from relatives who had recovered, in another. Sheriff Fred Roshon found that she had signed a local drugstore's register for a series of large purchases of arsenic, and an autopsy found arsenic in Lily Gienke's digestive tract. Questioned on March 19, 1925, she said at first that she had bought it for rats, then confessed to putting it in the water buckets and coffee pots the family drank from. "It was the devil who told me to do it," she said. "He came to me while I was in the kitchen baking bread." The Ohio papers called her the Borgia of America.
Four days later she pleaded not guilty before the grand jury weighing her indictment for Lily's murder, and told it she was irresistibly drawn to funerals and, when there were not enough of them, was driven to make more. She was indicted for first-degree murder on April 7. At trial, which opened May 4 with Joseph Pritchard defending and Joseph Seymour prosecuting, the defense argued she was criminally insane and that Walter Johns had ordered the poisonings. It went badly for her. Her sister-in-law Edith Hasel, a defense witness, killed herself on May 6, and Edith's husband, Fred Hasel, collapsed; a witness named Frank Metzger told the prosecution under cross-examination that the defense had asked him to lie about her sanity; and she chose to testify herself. Her son Lester and three of the Gienke children testified against her, one of the children carried into court on a stretcher.
The jury deliberated for an hour and on May 12, 1925, found her guilty of first-degree murder, with a recommendation of mercy, and the judge sentenced her to life, from which only executive clemency could free her. She was held at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville and was a model prisoner. In 1962 Governor Michael DiSalle commuted her sentence to second-degree murder and she was paroled at seventy-nine, but her family refused to take her in, a Union County rest home turned her away because she had not lived in the county for a year, and a home in southern Ohio balked at her reputation. Within three days, with nowhere else to go, she was back in prison, and the parole and commutation were revoked. She died at the reformatory on June 28, 1971, aged eighty-eight, its oldest inmate.