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Vietnamese Court Sentences Woman to Death for Cyanide Killings of Her Husband and Two Young Relatives

A Dong Nai court condemned Nguyen Thi Hong Bich for poisoning four family members from 2023 to 2024; her husband and two children died.

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Illustration: courtroom exhibit table with sealed bags and binders

At first, the family in southern Vietnam's Dong Nai Province believed its run of deaths was simply bad luck. On November 27, 2025, the People's Court of Dong Nai Province sentenced Nguyen Thi Hong Bich, 39, to death for murdering her husband and two of her young relatives with cyanide and trying to kill a third.

The court found Bich guilty of murder and gave her a further 15 years for possessing toxic substances; the combined penalty is death. The trial panel called her crimes deliberate, calculated and cold-blooded, said she had exploited the trust of victims who never suspected her, and ruled that she was beyond rehabilitation and must be permanently removed from society.

According to the indictment, Bich had bought about a kilogram of cyanide online, intending to kill herself. Over time, as conflicts with her husband and other relatives mounted, she turned it on them. On January 5, 2023, she mixed cyanide into one of the capsules her husband took for a stomach illness, blood pressure and gout. He fell ill again and again, and died on October 18, 2023.

On January 1, 2024, after a dispute with her younger sister, she mixed cyanide into a cup of water and gave it to her young niece, identified in court reporting only as D. The girl died the next day. On May 25, 2024, after an argument with her sister-in-law, she poisoned a drink given to a young nephew, identified as N. He died the following day despite being rushed to the hospital.

The last attempt failed. On June 22, 2024, she tricked a teenage relative, identified as T., into swallowing capsules she passed off as acne medicine. T. collapsed but survived after doctors found the toxin and alerted the family, and was left with a 23 percent bodily injury. That discovery, investigators said, was what finally unraveled the string of deaths.

At trial Bich admitted the poisonings and told the court she knew her actions were heinous. She said she had acted out of anger toward her sister and sister-in-law, and that the death of her own child had left her with harmful intentions toward other children in the family. She also confirmed that years earlier she had bought insurance for her husband and children and had received payouts after their deaths. "I truly regret everything and I don't know how to atone for it, so I can only apologise and ask for forgiveness," she said. In her final words she asked to see her 10-year-old daughter one last time.

The court found no evidence to pursue charges over the earlier deaths of Bich's father and child. It ordered her to pay 300 million dong in compensation and to cover T.'s hospital costs. The families, who had asked for the harshest penalty, said they could never have imagined that small household quarrels would end this way.

The children are identified only by initials in the court reporting, and their exact ages differ between accounts: one gives the niece as 6 and the nephews as 13 and 18, the other gives birth years of 2017, 2012 and 2006 and calls T. both a niece and a nephew. VnExpress names the husband as Nguyen Thoai Thanh The. No court or police document could be opened; this account rests on same-day reports by Viet Nam News and VnExpress International.

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