Caspar Syeboldt worked nights at J. B. Campbell's bakery in Chicago. At five in the morning on Saturday, June 10, 1882, he came home to 401 South Clark Street and his wife met him at the door. Mary Syeboldt, thirty-five, was wearing a new chemise trimmed with lace and blue ribbon, bought for the occasion, and could barely stand. "Come in, Casper, come in," she said, waving her hand, "and see our little children. They are all dead, gone to heaven, Casper. See how pretty they are. Every one has got nice flowers for the angels."
He found the four of them in the bedroom, laid out as for burial, dressed in white trimmed with blue ribbon, with bouquets of fresh flowers in their hands: Matilda, twelve; Anton, seven; Annie, two and a half; and Agnes, about three and a half months. Three were dead. Matilda was still breathing. He ran across the street to a grocer named Martin, who fetched Dr. Moore, but the doctor could do nothing for her.
His wife had followed him into the room and said she had sent them all to heaven because God wanted them. She was by then in convulsions, and managed to tell the doctor that she had given the children the poison first, laid them out, then prepared herself and taken what was left of a large dose of strychnine. She died in great pain shortly after seven and was laid out beside them.
Letters left in the house showed that Matilda had known. One, addressed "Dear Papa," asked his forgiveness. In another she set out the reason and the order. Her mother had always been ill and thought often about dying, and about how the children would be treated if she were dead, and so had decided it was best that they all die at once, and had bought something to do it with. The baby would go first, then Annie, then Tony, then Matilda, then her mother. They had not suffered much, she wrote, and were now out of trouble.
The newspapers that carried the story across the country called it one of the most remarkable crimes in the police annals of Chicago and compared it with the Borgias. They presumed that domestic troubles had driven her out of her mind, and reported that her husband was too distraught to answer questions. The explanation in the child's own letter was her mother's illness and her fear of what would become of them after her death.
The deaths were recorded at the 22nd Street police station as four homicides by strychnine administered by the mother, who killed herself at the same time and place. No charge was possible. It was a single act, not a series of killings.