Mary Syeboldt was thirty-five and married to Caspar Syeboldt, a baker, at 401 South Clark Street in Chicago.
He worked nights. At five in the morning on Saturday June 10, 1882 he came home and she met him at the door. She was wearing a new lace-trimmed chemise with blue ribbons, bought for the occasion. She could barely stand. She told him to come in and see the children, that they were all dead and gone to heaven, that they looked pretty and each had 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, under four months. Three were dead. Matilda was still breathing. He fetched a doctor, who 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 was able to say 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.
What makes this case unlike the others of its kind is what the eldest child had written. Letters left by Matilda showed that she and her mother had arranged the poisoning together. In one she set out the reason and the order. Her mother had always been ill and thought often about dying, and had thought 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 bought something to do it with. The baby first, then Annie, then Tony, then Matilda, then her mother. They had not suffered much, she wrote, and were now out of trouble.
An earlier version of this entry attributed the killings to destitution and to her husband's circumstances. That is not what the source says. The reason given, by the twelve-year-old who helped plan it, was her mother's chronic illness and her fear of what would become of the children after her death.
The report that carries this account is from The Standard of Albert Lea, Minnesota, of June 22, 1882, and is written in the register of its time, comparing the case to the Borgias. The children's ages are recorded slightly differently in different summaries; the newspaper gives Annie as two years six months and Agnes as under four months.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.