Poison has always been the weapon of the household. It requires no strength, no struggle and no noise. It works across a dinner table, at a bedside, in a hospital corridor at the end of a long shift. For most of history it left a death that looked like illness, and the people best placed to give it were the people trusted to give care: wives, mothers, nurses, physicians, landladies and keepers of homes for the old. The cases that follow run from a Prussian widow in 1801 to a Spanish mother in 2004. Some ended on the scaffold; some ended in a hospital for the insane; some ended in nothing at all. In nearly every one, the deaths were noticed late, and the first clue came from someone outside the family: an insurer, a doctor who asked for an autopsy, a reporter counting obituaries, a pathologist with one more test to run.
Berlin knew her as the wife of a senior court official. Born Sophie Charlotte Elizabeth Weingarten, the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, she married a wealthy and much older Berlin privy counselor in 1779, according to the biographical encyclopedia Women in World History. He died in 1800. Other deaths followed, among them that of her aunt in 1801. Investigators linked her to several, but the encyclopedia says only the murder of the aunt could be proven. The Berlin daily taz, in a 1996 walk through the city’s old crime scenes, remembered her as the poisoner of Poststrasse and asked why the court councillor’s widow, despite three arsenic murders, was spared execution "wegen Schwachheit des Geistes," on account of weakness of mind.
She was sent instead to the fortress at Glatz. There, by the encyclopedia’s account, she lived in comfort and entertained the local nobility. She died in 1836, and her funeral was well attended.
For years the city of Bremen called her its angel. Gesche Margarethe Timm was born in Bremen on March 6, 1785, the daughter of a master tailor, and she had a twin brother, according to the city’s tourism portal. She married twice, first the saddler Johann Miltenberg, then the wine merchant Michael Christoph Gottfried, and she was admired across the city for the way she nursed sick relatives and friends through their last illnesses.
Those she nursed included both husbands, her mother, her father, her twin brother and her three children. The dealer Paul Thomas Zimmermann died, and so did a music teacher, a neighbor, her friend Beta and Beta’s three-year-old daughter, and a farrier in Hanover. Writing in 2022, the German news portal WEB.DE dated the killings from 1813 to 1827. The end came when a man to whom she had sold her house found poison in his food. She was arrested on her birthday in March 1828 and confessed to 15 killings and to many more poisonings that did not kill. The taz has reported that 19 people survived her poisonings; the author Peer Meter, quoted by WEB.DE, put the number at 20 or more.
A Bremen court sentenced her to death by the sword for 15 murders. She was held for almost three years before the sentence was carried out. On April 21, 1831, she was beheaded on the Domshof before a crowd estimated at 35,000, the last public execution in Bremen. A stone set in the pavement marks the spot. People still spit on it.
Wainewright was a painter and a man of letters before he was a convict. Born at Richmond, near London, in October 1794, he trained under John Linnell and Thomas Phillips, wrote for the London Magazine under pen names and exhibited at the Royal Academy, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. His spending ran ahead of his income, and he forged signatures to reach his own capital.
He insured the life of his sister-in-law, Helen Abercromby, for about 16,000 pounds. She died ten months later after a short illness. The insurers refused to pay, and when the matter reached court in 1835 the verdict went to the companies. Writers ever since have suggested that he poisoned his uncle, his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law. The Dictionary of Biography is blunt about that tradition: no known evidence shows that any of the three died of anything but natural causes.
He was never charged with a killing. On June 9, 1837, he was arrested for trying to defraud the Bank of England with a forged power of attorney. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to transportation for life, reaching Hobart aboard the convict ship Susan on November 21, 1837. In Van Diemen’s Land he worked on a chain gang and at the Hobart hospital, and after receiving a ticket of leave he painted portraits of the colony’s families, small works in pencil and watercolor that the University of Tasmania’s Companion to Tasmanian History praises for their draughtsmanship. A conditional pardon came on November 14, 1846. He died of apoplexy at St Mary’s Hospital, Hobart, on August 17, 1847.
William Palmer was a surgeon in his home town of Rugeley, Staffordshire, who had drifted into horse racing and deep debt. In November 1855 his racing associate John Parsons Cook, 28, died at Rugeley. Palmer was charged with his murder, and local feeling ran so strongly against him that Parliament passed a new law, the Central Criminal Court Act of 1856, so that he could be tried in London. The House of Lords took up the bill in February 1856, and it was known ever after as Palmer’s Act.
At the Central Criminal Court a jury found him guilty on May 27, 1856, of the wilful murder of Cook. Coroners' juries had already returned verdicts of wilful murder against him in the deaths of his wife, Anne, who died in September 1854, and his brother Walter, who died in August 1855; both had been insured for large sums. A Stafford grand jury found a true bill for Anne’s death and threw out the bill for Walter’s. Neither case was ever tried. Later writers have also laid at his door the deaths of his mother-in-law, a racing companion, four of his infant children and an infant born to a housemaid, but no court or inquest ever made a finding against him in any of them.
The Crown said the poison was strychnine, yet Dr. Alfred Swaine Taylor of Guy’s Hospital, the leading toxicologist in England, found none in Cook’s body. He reasoned from the symptoms instead, and James R. Voelkel, writing for the Science History Institute, has argued that the conviction rested on that reasoning rather than on chemical proof. Palmer never confessed. He was hanged outside Stafford prison on June 14, 1856, aged 31, before a crowd estimated at about 30,000.
She was born Mary Ann Robson in 1832 at Low Moorsley in County Durham, and over the next forty years she was also Mrs. Mowbray, Mrs. Ward, Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Cotton. She had worked as a nurse. Wherever she lived in the Durham coalfield, people around her died: three husbands, William Mowbray, George Ward and Frederick Cotton; her mother; her sister-in-law Margaret Cotton; and children and stepchildren of her several marriages. Many of them were insured. Later accounts have linked as many as 21 deaths to her. How many she caused is not known.
The case that ended her life began with a remark. In July 1872 a parish official in West Auckland asked her to nurse a smallpox patient. She said she could not, because of her stepson, and suggested she would not be troubled with him long. Within days the boy, seven-year-old Charles Edward Cotton, was dead, and the official went to the police. Charles’s body was examined, and so, after exhumation, were the remains of three others who had died in her West Auckland household that year: her lodger and lover Joseph Nattrass, her stepson Frederick Cotton junior and her own son Robert Robson Cotton. A Durham University Library summary of the case says arsenic was found in each.
She was charged with all four deaths but tried only for Charles’s. At the Durham Assizes in March 1873 the jury deliberated for 50 minutes before finding her guilty of murder. The case was raised in the House of Commons on March 4, 1873. She was hanged at Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, and buried within its walls. W. T. Stead reported the execution for The Northern Echo the next day. She was never tried for any of the other deaths, and her conviction remains the only court finding against her.
In 1886 Mary Ann Britland, a 38-year-old woman from Bolton who had married Thomas Britland at St Michael’s Church, Ashton-under-Lyne, in 1866, bought poison from a chemist, and because of what it contained she had to sign the chemist’s poison register. That signature would be remembered.
Her daughter Elizabeth died in March 1886. A doctor put the death down to natural causes, and a few days later her mother claimed ten pounds on a life policy. Her husband, Thomas, died next; his death was diagnosed as epilepsy, and she claimed again. The widow then moved in with her neighbors, Mary Dixon and her husband. According to Capital Punishment UK, which keeps a historical record of British executions, she had been having an affair with the husband. Mary Dixon became the third to die. Three deaths with the same unnatural signs in so short a time drew the attention of the police, an analysis of Mary Dixon’s body found both poisons, and Britland was arrested.
She came to trial at the Manchester Assizes on July 22, 1886, before Mr. Justice Cave. Her defense argued that she had no motive, since the insurance money was trifling beside the loss of a husband and a daughter. The jury took some time, but it convicted her of murder. "I am quite innocent, I am not guilty at all," she told the court. On August 9, 1886, she became the first woman hanged at Strangeways prison in Manchester. More than a century later the Tameside Reporter recalled that the town had made national headlines with her case.
Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow on May 27, 1850, raised in Quebec and graduated in medicine from McGill University in Montreal in 1876. He was twice convicted of murder, on two continents, ten years apart.
The first conviction came in Illinois. In 1881 Daniel Stott, a 61-year-old railroad stationmaster who had been taking a remedy Cream sold for epilepsy, died of strychnine poisoning. Cream wrote letters blaming the pharmacists who had filled the prescription, and the district attorney had Stott’s body exhumed; the analysis found strychnine. Cream and Stott’s wife were both charged with murder. She was freed after agreeing to testify against him, and a jury convicted him. He was sent to the state penitentiary at Joliet for life. Stott’s gravestone at Garden Prairie, the writer Dean Jobb has noted, says he was poisoned by his wife and Dr. Cream. Before Illinois there had been a death by chloroform in London, Ontario, which an inquest put down to a person unknown, and the death of a young woman in Chicago after a procedure he performed; neither was ever charged against him.
His sentence was reduced, and in 1891 he walked out of Joliet on parole after about ten years. Within months he was in Lambeth, south London, calling himself Dr. Thomas Neill. In October 1891 Ellen Donworth, 19, and Matilda Clover, 27, died of strychnine poisoning. In April 1892 Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell died the same way. Once again he wrote letters, accusing other men and demanding money, and the letters helped to hang him. He was charged with the deaths of all four women and with the attempted murder of a fifth, but he was tried only for Matilda Clover. In October 1892 a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty, and Mr. Justice Hawkins sentenced him to death. He was hanged at Newgate Prison by James Billington on November 15, 1892.
Scotland Yard tied him to the Lambeth letters by his handwriting. Only two deaths, Stott’s and Clover’s, ended in a conviction. Jobb, whose 2021 book on the case drew on records from Ontario, Quebec, Illinois and Britain, puts the toll at no fewer than ten, nine women and one man; that count is his, not a court’s.
Severin Klosowski was born in Poland in 1865 and reached London early in 1887. He worked as a barber in the East End and later ran his own business, married Lucie Baderski around 1890, and in 1891 took her to New Jersey. Back in England he lived under the name George Chapman.
Three of them died. Mary Spink died in 1897 and Bessie Taylor in 1901. Maud Marsh died on October 23, 1902. A Home Office post-mortem by Dr. Stevenson found tartar emetic, a compound of antimony, in her organs. Chapman was arrested for murder, and the bodies of the two earlier women were exhumed; according to an account published by Inside Croydon in 2024, the same poison was found in both. He was charged with three murders and tried at the Old Bailey before Mr. Justice Grantham. The defense called no evidence, and the jury took twelve minutes to return its verdict of guilty. The Home Secretary, Aretas Akers-Douglas, declined to intervene, and Chapman was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on April 7, 1903. He never confessed. "If I was guilty I would say," he wrote in his last letter.
Because he had been a barber in Whitechapel in the late 1880s, his name was drawn into the Ripper inquiry. Some Scotland Yard detectives harbored suspicions. Others noted, by Inside Croydon’s account, that the Ripper killings in London stopped while he was in New Jersey. No hard evidence was ever produced.
Williamina McCulloch was born at West Greenock, Scotland, on September 2, 1844, and by the early 1860s was in Invercargill, New Zealand. As Minnie Dean she later lived with her husband, a farmer, near Winton, in Southland. From about 1889, by her own account, she took in infants and young children for payment from unmarried mothers and their families, a trade known then as baby farming.
In May 1895 two infants placed with her died: Dorothy Edith Carter and one-month-old Eva Hornsby. A coroner’s jury found that Eva had been wilfully murdered, without naming anyone. A third inquest, into the death of a boy, could not establish when, where or how he died; the jury believed he was Willie Phelan. Dean was charged with the murders of Dorothy Carter and Eva Hornsby and tried at the Supreme Court in Invercargill for Dorothy’s death. The jury convicted her on June 21, 1895. The charge over Eva was not proceeded with after the verdict.
The Court of Appeal refused leave to appeal on July 27, 1895, and the Executive Council declined to commute the sentence. She was hanged at Invercargill on August 12, 1895, and she remains the only woman ever executed in New Zealand. What became of other children who passed through her hands is not known.
Herman Webster Mudgett, born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, in 1861 and trained in medicine at the University of Michigan, spent most of his adult life as H. H. Holmes, a pharmacist, builder and swindler in the Englewood district of Chicago. His legend has grown with every retelling, and he belongs in any account of poisoners chiefly because of the way his business partner died.
Benjamin F. Pitezel was Holmes’s associate in an insurance fraud. He died in Philadelphia in September 1894, and the prosecution at trial argued that Holmes had killed him and staged his death as an accident. The scheme came apart because a jailed train robber, cheated of a promised 500 dollars, talked. Holmes was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894. A Philadelphia detective, Frank Geyer, then followed his trail and traced the fates of three of Pitezel’s children, Howard, Alice and Nellie, whose deaths were discovered in Toronto and at Irvington, near Indianapolis, in the summer of 1895. Investigators attributed their deaths to Holmes. He was never tried for them.
Holmes was tried in Philadelphia from October 28 to November 2, 1895, convicted of the first-degree murder of Benjamin Pitezel and sentenced to death. In April 1896 a newspaper published his confession to 27 murders, for which he was reported to have been paid; several of the people named in it were alive. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. Women who vanished from his Chicago building between 1891 and 1893, among them Julia Conner and her daughter Pearl, Emeline Cigrand and the sisters Minnie and Nannie Williams, have long been linked to him, but he was never charged with any of those disappearances, and the figure of 200 victims that clings to his name has no support in the record. Most of what is told about his Chicago building, the "murder castle," grew from a few weeks of newspaper reports in the summer of 1895. In 2017 his body was exhumed from Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania; tests confirmed that the grave was his, and he was reburied.
He went by a long list of names: Jacob Huff, Martin Dotz, Albert Huschberg, Count Otto von Kern, Henry Bartels. A German prosecutor identified him in 1898 as Jacob Schmidt, a merchant born near Bingen; a 2020 account published in Wheeling, West Virginia, gives his birth name as John Schmidt. In America he married a long series of women, most of them German-speaking widows or women living alone with some savings, many found through matrimonial advertisements. He took their money. Several of them died.
In 1895 Caroline Hoch, his wife in Wheeling, died; a Wheeling pastor later helped bring about his capture. In 1898 he was charged in Chicago with bigamy and fraud. On January 12, 1905, his wife Marie Walcker died in Chicago. Within days he married her sister, borrowed 750 dollars from her and disappeared. The sister went to the police, Marie Walcker’s body was examined, and arsenic was found. Hoch was arrested in New York and brought back to Chicago.
His trial opened on April 19, 1905, and a month later a jury found him guilty of murdering Marie Walcker, the only death for which he was ever tried. He was hanged at the Cook County jail in Chicago on February 23, 1906. The deaths of the other women he married remain suspected, and the numbers attached to him in the press of the day were never tested in any court.
She was born Honora Kelley in Boston to Irish immigrant parents and was placed as a bound girl in 1864 with Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell, Massachusetts, whose name she took, though she was never adopted. Lowell knew her as Jennie Toppan. She trained as a nurse and worked as a private nurse around Cambridge, and by the 1890s she was moving through the households of patients, landlords and friends.
In the summer of 1901 she was looking after the family of Alden P. Davis at their summer home on Cape Cod. Between early July and mid-August four members of the family died: Mrs. Davis, Alden Davis himself, and two daughters, Genevieve D. Gordon and Mary D. Gibbs. She was arrested that autumn. The Lowell Sun printed a list of deaths around her that ran from May 1895 to August 1901, and the Lowell Historical Society has published the names it gave: Israel Dunham and Lovely P. Dunham, her foster sister Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, Mary McNear, Florence M. Calkins, William H. Ingraham, Sarah E. Connors, the four members of the Davis family and Edna Bannister. Boston Magazine reported that she later said her foster sister’s death was the only one she caused out of ill will.
On June 23, 1902, she was tried at Barnstable for the murder of Mary D. Gibbs. The medical experts for both sides agreed that she was insane, and the jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for life. She was never convicted of anything. During her psychiatric evaluation, Boston Magazine reported, she confessed to 31 killings and to about a dozen more among patients from her nursing years; the Lowell Historical Society says the newspapers of the day carried figures as high as 100. After the trial she told a reporter that she had meant to be found insane so that she might one day be released. She never was. She died at Taunton in August 1938.
From 1907 Amy Archer ran a home for elderly lodgers in Windsor, Connecticut. Residents paid her a weekly fee or a lump sum for care for the rest of their lives. Between 1907 and 1916, sixty of them died, forty-eight in the years from 1911 to 1916. In February 1914 her second husband, Michael Gilligan, died. In May 1914 a 60-year-old lodger, Franklin Andrews, died.
A Hartford Courant correspondent noticed how many obituaries were coming from one Windsor house and went looking through the town’s drugstore poison registers, according to Connecticut History, the online magazine of Connecticut Humanities. The bodies of Andrews, Gilligan and others were exhumed. Archer-Gilligan was charged with five murders. At her 1917 trial for Andrews’s death, prosecutors offered evidence that three others, her husband and two lodgers named in the court record only as Smith and Gowdy, had also died of arsenic. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to hang.
On April 30, 1918, the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors found error in the trial and ordered a new one. At the retrial in 1919 she was convicted of second-degree murder in Franklin Andrews’s death, on her own plea by most accounts, and sentenced to life. The other deaths were never tried to a judgment, though a prosecutor said she had probably killed up to two dozen people. She was declared insane in 1924 and moved from the state prison at Wethersfield to the state hospital at Middletown, where she died in 1962. The case helped inspire the stage comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. In 2015 the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that her hospital records were exempt from public disclosure.
Fred Mors’s confession reached the papers in a wire report, printed in Utah, under the headline "Confesses Killing Eight." Mors, a former employee of the German Odd Fellows' home in Yonkers, New York, had walked into the district attorney’s office in New York several days earlier. He said he had killed eight aged inmates of the home "because they were old and a nuisance." By his own account, five died of an anesthetic and three of other drugs. The coroner, James P. Dunn, said he expected at least two indictments for murder. What became of those charges, and of Mors, is unclear.
Tillie Klimek kept a store in Chicago’s Polish quarter. In 1922 her husband, Joseph Klimek, fell violently ill, and the doctors at a West Side hospital found arsenic. He survived. The police turned back to the man she had been married to before him, Frank Kupczyk, who had died in 1921, and the reexamination of his death also found arsenic, according to Discover magazine.
She went on trial on March 6, 1923, with a co-defendant, before Judge Marcus Kavanagh in Cook County; the Chicago Daily News called the two women "the arsenic widows" of the Polish quarter. The jury convicted her of murdering Frank Kupczyk. At the sentencing, as described in a Chicago report printed by the Gunnison Valley News in Utah on April 26, 1923, she stood at the bar in a new black dress and the black silk hat she had worn to Kupczyk’s funeral. The judge denied a new trial and sentenced her to life. He said the testimony showed she had killed three husbands and tried to kill a fourth, and that if she were let loose she would kill another man. Those other deaths were never tried; the conviction covers one. She died in custody at the women’s reformatory at Dwight, Illinois, on November 20, 1936, aged 64, according to the Chicago Daily News, as quoted by the Chicago Sun-Times in 2020.
She was a farmer’s daughter from Keytesville, Missouri, who came to Idaho in 1912 and married Robert Dooley, settling on his brother’s ranch at Twin Falls. In 1915 her three-year-old daughter died, then her brother-in-law, and a few months later her husband, whose death was put down to typhoid fever. Over the next five years she married three more men: William Gordon McHaffie, Harlan C. Lewis and Edward F. Meyer. Each died within a few years, the deaths again blamed on typhoid. She had been named beneficiary on all her husbands' insurance policies, BoiseDev reported in 2025.
Meyer’s death made the insurers suspicious. An examination found arsenic, and by then she had left town. She was traced to Honolulu, where she had married a Navy chief petty officer, Paul Vincent Southard, and was brought back to Idaho. A jury convicted her of second-degree murder in Meyer’s death, and she was sentenced to ten years to life in the Idaho State Penitentiary, which she entered in 1921. Southard divorced her. The other deaths were never charged.
In May 1931 she escaped, helped by a former trusty who was out on parole, and made her way to Denver. There, Time magazine reported in 1941, she kept house for a widower, Harry Whitlock, whose mother died soon afterward of a gastric ailment; Whitlock married her and took out an insurance policy in her favor. When police found the man who had helped her escape, she fled again and was caught in Topeka, Kansas. Whitlock had the marriage annulled. In 1941 the Idaho board voted, over Governor Chase A. Clark’s objection, to release her on probation in the care of her sister in Nyssa, Oregon. The Old Idaho Penitentiary counts her time inside at 18 years, 7 months and 23 days. She died of a heart attack in 1958 and was buried in Twin Falls.
Bertha Gifford was known among her Missouri neighbors as a wonderful cook and a caring woman, and they called her the Good Samaritan. On August 25, 1928, she was arrested at Eureka, Missouri. The KMOS public television documentary Bertha Gifford: Sinner or Saint, broadcast in 2026, presents her as Missouri’s first suspected female serial killer and links her to 18 deaths over more than two decades; the historian Ross Malone, writing for Missouri Life, puts the number she is believed to have killed at seventeen, people of all ages. In that film historians and members of her family still argue over her guilt.
Anna Marie Filser was born in Bavaria in 1906 and came to the United States in 1929, at 23. In Cincinnati’s German community she befriended elderly men, looked after some of them and took their money. In August 1937 a hotel in Colorado Springs reported 305 dollars' worth of diamond rings missing; an elderly Cincinnati cobbler, George Obendoerfer, who had traveled there with her, died the next day of poisoning, Time magazine reported. By August 20 the Cincinnati prosecutor had at least eleven deaths under investigation, according to an Associated Press report printed in The Michigan Daily.
She was indicted for two deaths and tried for one: that of Jacob Wagner, 78. A jury of eleven women and one man deliberated for about three hours and found her guilty of first-degree murder by arsenic poisoning, with no recommendation of mercy. Judge Charles S. Bell sentenced her to death in November 1937. At the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus she was the only woman among some 4,200 prisoners, WOSU reported in 2006. She was electrocuted on December 7, 1938. The author Diana Britt Franklin told WOSU that a confession to four killings was found in her cell after her death; it was never tested in court.
Daisy Louisa de Melker was born in 1886 near Grahamstown in the Cape Colony and had hospital and nursing experience. Her first husband, William Alfred Cowle, died on January 11, 1923. Her second, Robert Sproat, died in 1927. In January 1931 she married a third time. A little over a year later her son, Rhodes Cecil Cowle, 20, her only surviving child, fell ill and died.
His death led the police to exhume him, and then the two husbands she had buried before him. In October 1932 she went on trial in Johannesburg for all three deaths. The court convicted her of murdering her son by arsenic poisoning. On the deaths of her two husbands it found the charges not proved and acquitted her. She was held at the Women’s Jail on Constitution Hill and hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on the morning of December 30, 1932. She never confessed. Her case was retold in 2023 in Ted Botha’s book Daisy de Melker, an extract from which ran in the Mail and Guardian.
Dr. Robert Clements had been Medical Officer of Health for Blackburn, Lancashire. He married four times, and he came to be suspected of murdering each of his wives. In 1947, in Southport, he took his own life, in circumstances that were themselves treated as suspicious. No charge was ever brought, and no court ever ruled on the deaths of his wives. The Atkinson, Southport’s arts and heritage center, has presented the case in lectures by Dr. Tom Preston; the listing for one of them says Clements was also complicit in the suicide of a local pathologist.
Caroline Mickelson was born, probably in 1888, at Balmain in Sydney, and her extended family knew her as Aunty Carrie. In the early 1950s Sydney was living through a run of poisonings with thallium, a rat poison. Two of her in-laws in Redfern, a sister-in-law and the sister-in-law’s daughter, fell ill with thallium poisoning after visits at which she brought tea and cakes; they recovered only when the visits stopped. On May 11, 1953, she was arrested.
Police charged her with four murders and two attempted murders, alleging that the poisoning had begun in 1947 with the death of her stepmother. They proceeded on one count only. In the Central Criminal Court on October 15, 1953, she was found guilty of the attempted murder of her sister-in-law and sentenced to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed her appeal in April 1954, and the sentence was commuted to life. None of the murder charges was ever tried. She spent about six and a half years in the State Reformatory for Women and died of peritonitis at Prince Henry Hospital, Sydney, on October 6, 1960.
Nancy Hazle was born in 1905 at Blue Mountain, in Calhoun County, Alabama, one of five children in a hard household. She grew up devoted to romance magazines and their lonely-hearts columns, the Encyclopedia of Alabama says, and several of her husbands came to her through them. She married five times. Her second husband, Frank Harrelson of Jacksonville, Alabama, died in September 1945. Her third, Arlie Lanning, died at Lexington, North Carolina, in 1952. Her fourth, Richard L. Morton Sr., died at Emporia, Kansas, in May 1953. Her fifth, Samuel Doss, who worked for the state highway department in Tulsa, Oklahoma, died in October 1954.
An autopsy found poison in his body. It was Nannie Doss herself, Tulsa’s county attorney said, who had given permission for it. She was arrested in Tulsa at the end of November 1954, and after long questioning she admitted poisoning Samuel Doss and then three of the husbands before him. Murder charges or warrants followed in Alabama, North Carolina and Kansas, and she was also charged in North Carolina with the death of her mother, which she denied. The press called her Grandma Doss, and later the Giggling Granny.
She was tried in none of those states. In Oklahoma a jury found her legally sane, and in May 1955 she pleaded guilty to the murder of Samuel Doss. The county attorney asked for death. Judge Elmer Adams sentenced her to life imprisonment on June 2, 1955. Other deaths in her family, two sisters, a grandson and two children of her first marriage among them, have been laid at her door, and officials have speculated that the total may have been as high as twelve. None was ever charged. She died of leukemia on June 2, 1965, while serving her sentence at the state prison in McAlester.
Rhonda Belle Thomley was born in 1907 at Perdido, Alabama, and was working as a waitress in Montgomery when her past caught up with her. Late in 1955 her stepson Ronald Martin, who was also her husband, fell ill with severe stomach pains. Doctors at the Veterans Administration hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi, sent samples of his hair to a laboratory in Washington, and the laboratory found arsenic. Investigators then found six deaths in her family, treated by different doctors, with the same symptoms. In March 1956 the grave of her earlier husband, Claude Carroll Martin, was opened, and arsenic was found there too.
On March 12, 1956, according to an account by the genealogist James Pylant for the GenealogyBank blog, she confessed to killing six relatives: her mother, two husbands, George Garrett and Claude Martin, and three daughters. She denied killing two other daughters. Ronald Martin survived, paralyzed. Her trial for murder opened in Montgomery on June 4, 1956. She pleaded insanity; one psychiatrist found schizophrenia and another found nothing wrong, and she was sentenced to death. Her appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court failed, and Governor James E. Folsom, after a short reprieve for a sanity test, refused clemency. She died in the electric chair at Kilby Prison on October 11, 1957. Reporters came from around the world to cover the execution, the Atmore Advance recalled in 2014, and filled the local motels and the hotels of Mobile.
In Cordele, Georgia, Janie Lou Gibbs was a grandmother and a respected member of her church. In 1965 her husband died suddenly after a home-cooked meal, and she gave part of the insurance money to the church. Three of her sons and a grandson also died. On December 24, 1967, she was arrested on charges of poisoning all five, her husband, three sons and a grandson, to collect on their life insurance, according to a retrospective by Scott McCabe for the Washington Examiner in 2009. How the Georgia courts disposed of the charges is unclear.
Graham Young was 14 when, in July 1962, the Central Criminal Court in London convicted him on three counts of causing grievous bodily harm by administering poison: the victims were his sister, his father and a schoolfellow, all of whom recovered. The court found him to be suffering from psychopathic disorder and sent him to Broadmoor under a restriction order. His stepmother had died that spring; he was never charged in connection with her death.
In February 1971 he was conditionally discharged and took a job at a firm in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire. Within months men he worked with began to fall ill, and two of them died, one of them named in reports as Fred Biggs. On June 29, 1972, a jury at St Albans Crown Court convicted him of murder and other offenses, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. That same afternoon the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, told the House of Commons that of more than 300 patients released from Broadmoor in a dozen years, Young was the only one to kill again while still under supervision, and he announced two inquiries into how such patients were released. Young died in his cell at Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight on August 1, 1990. The recorded cause was a heart attack.
Margie Velma Bullard was born on October 23, 1932, on a tobacco and cotton farm in South Carolina and grew up in Robeson County, North Carolina. For years she depended on prescription drugs. Her second husband, Jennings Barfield, died in March 1971. Her mother, Lillie McMillan Bullard, died in December 1974. In 1977 two elderly people in whose homes she worked, Dolly Taylor Edwards and John Henry Lee, died. In February 1978 her fiance, Stewart Taylor, a farmer from St. Pauls, died after he discovered that she had forged checks on his account.
An autopsy found arsenic. On March 13, 1978, she gave statements to sheriff’s officers confessing to the poisoning deaths of Edwards, Lee and her mother. She was tried only for Stewart Taylor’s death. A Bladen County jury convicted her of first-degree murder, and on December 2, 1978, she was sentenced to death. The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed on November 6, 1979, and the federal courts denied relief. Governor Jim Hunt refused clemency on September 27, 1984, and the Fourth Circuit turned down her last appeal on November 1. She was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh on November 2, 1984, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first anywhere in the country to die by lethal injection. Her sentence had been pronounced as death by asphyxiation; she chose the needle herself.
James E. Goodyear, an Air Force sergeant, died on September 16, 1971. His death was put down to heart and kidney failure, and no one questioned it for thirteen years. His widow, who later took the name Buenoano, collected insurance. In Colorado, in January 1978, her partner Bobby Joe Morris died. On May 13, 1980, her son Michael Goodyear, 19, drowned in a river in Santa Rosa County, Florida. In 1982 and 1983 her fiance, John Gentry, survived a poisoning and then, on June 25, 1983, a bomb in his car in Pensacola.
The car bomb brought the investigators. A Santa Rosa County jury convicted her on March 31, 1984, of first-degree murder in Michael’s death and of grand theft from an insurer, and she was given life. An Escambia County jury convicted her that October of the attempted murder of John Gentry. Investigators exhumed James Goodyear and found arsenic, and an Orange County jury convicted her of his murder on November 1, 1985; she was sentenced to death on a ten-to-two jury recommendation. Morris’s remains, exhumed in Colorado, showed acute arsenic poisoning, but that death was never tried. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence in 1988, and the federal courts denied relief. On March 30, 1998, she was executed in Florida’s electric chair, the first woman executed in the state since 1848.
From 1976 Arnfinn Nesset, a trained nurse, managed the nursing and old people’s home at Orkdal, in central Norway. The deaths that later brought him to trial fell between May 1977 and November 1980, United Press International reported. Under questioning that ran, by later accounts, close to a thousand hours, he confessed to 27, 30 or 31 killings, by differing accounts, and then withdrew every confession before trial.
In March 1983 a jury at the Frostating Court of Appeal, sitting in Trondheim, found him guilty of murdering 22 elderly residents, whose ages United Press International gave as 67 to 95, with the muscle relaxant Curacit, and of one attempted murder. It acquitted him on two further murder counts and found him guilty of taking money from patients. He was sentenced to 21 years, the maximum under Norwegian law, plus ten years of preventive detention. He was moved to supervised release in 1993, after twelve years, released in 2004 and took a new name.
He never stopped denying the killings. In 2024, at 87, he told the Norwegian legal magazine Advokatbladet that he wanted the case reopened. He died in a nursing home in December 2025, aged 89; his lawyer confirmed the death on December 3, the news agency NTB reported. Doubts about the conviction, which rested heavily on retracted confessions, have grown in Norway in recent years.
Genene Jones, one of four children adopted by a San Antonio couple, became a licensed vocational nurse and from 1978 worked in the pediatric intensive care unit of the Bexar County hospital in San Antonio. In 1981 and early 1982 so many children died or collapsed on her evening shift that staff came to call it the death shift, the journalist Peter Elkind reported in Texas Monthly and later for ProPublica. The hospital eased her out without calling the police and gave her a letter of recommendation. She found work at a new pediatric clinic in Kerrville.
On September 17, 1982, Chelsea McClellan, 15 months old, died after an injection at the Kerrville clinic. In February 1984 a jury in Georgetown, Texas, convicted Jones of her murder and sentenced her to 99 years; the Court of Appeals in Austin upheld the conviction on August 13, 1986. In October 1984 a Bexar County judge convicted her of injury to a child for heparin overdoses given to a four-week-old infant who survived, and sentenced her to 60 years, concurrent.
A Texas law of 1977 meant to ease prison crowding set her release for March 2018. Bexar County prosecutors raced to stop it. In 2017 they indicted her for the murders of five more children from her years at the county hospital. On January 16, 2020, she pleaded guilty to murdering Joshua Sawyer, 11 months old, who had died on December 12, 1981, and Judge Frank J. Castro sentenced her to life, with 20 years to serve before she could seek parole. The four other murder indictments, for Rosemary Vega, Richard Nelson, Paul Villarreal and Patrick Zavala, were dismissed under the plea agreement. Officials have estimated the number of children she harmed at anything from more than a dozen to as many as 60. As of 2021 she was held in the Texas prison system.
Donald Harvey grew up in Booneville, in eastern Kentucky, and from 1970 to 1987 worked as a hospital orderly and nurse’s aide in Kentucky and Ohio. In March 1987 a patient at Drake Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, John Powell, 44, died, and a pathologist in the Hamilton County coroner’s office found cyanide at the autopsy. On April 6, 1987, Cincinnati police charged Harvey with Powell’s murder. Nurses on his ward then called a local television anchor, who asked on air whether there had been other deaths.
There had been many. Facing a possible death sentence, Harvey confessed. In August 1987 he pleaded guilty in Hamilton County to 24 murders, four attempted murders and one felonious assault; further pleas in October 1987 and February 1988 brought his Ohio total to 28 counts of aggravated murder. In Kentucky, in November 1987, he pleaded guilty to eight murders and one voluntary manslaughter at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, in 1970 and 1971. News reports total his convictions at 37 killings. Most of the victims were older or chronically ill patients; others were people in his own life, among them a neighbor, Helen Metzger, and his partner’s father, Henry Hoeweler, 82. His own claims ran as high as 87.
He was sentenced to life terms in both states. On March 28, 2017, he was found beaten in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution, and he died two days later, at 64. A fellow inmate, James D. Elliott, pleaded guilty to his aggravated murder in 2019 and was sentenced to life.
Michael Swango was a physician trained at Southern Illinois University whose career took him through hospitals in the United States and Africa. On January 14, 1984, Cynthia Ann McGee, 19, a University of Illinois gymnast recovering from injuries after a car struck her bicycle, died at Ohio State University Hospitals in Columbus, where Swango was an intern. Later that year, as an ambulance worker in his home town of Quincy, Illinois, he poisoned co-workers with arsenic; in May 1985 a jury convicted him of six counts of aggravated battery, and he was sentenced to five years.
He lied about that conviction to win medical posts in South Dakota and New York. At the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Northport, on Long Island, George Siano, 60, died on July 26, 1993; Aldo Serini, 70, on September 23; and Thomas Sammarco, 73, on October 4. Swango moved on to Mnene Mission Hospital in Zimbabwe, where patients also died and where he was later charged, never tried, over five deaths. On June 27, 1997, he was arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on a federal fraud warrant, on his way to a hospital job in Saudi Arabia.
He was serving that fraud sentence when, in July 2000, days before his release, federal prosecutors charged him with the three Northport murders. On September 6, 2000, he pleaded guilty to murdering Siano, Serini and Sammarco and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole. On October 18, 2000, he pleaded guilty in Franklin County, Ohio, to the aggravated murder of Cynthia McGee. Estimates of the deaths around him, none of them findings by any court, have run from 35 to 60. As of October 2026 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed him at the maximum-security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of life.
Gilbert Paul Jordan was a retired Vancouver barber, described in court as an alcoholic since the age of 16, who spent years drinking with women. Several of them died of alcohol poisoning after drinking sessions with him. One was Vanessa Buckner, 27.
In 1988 a court convicted him of manslaughter in her death. The judge called him a predator who used alcohol as his "deadly instrument of choice." He was sentenced to 15 years, cut to nine by the British Columbia Court of Appeal, and served six. Evidence in the case linked him to the alcohol-poisoning deaths of at least six other women, the CBC reported. Among the women whose deaths were tied to him was Mary Johns, who died in 1982; in 2017, 35 years later, her family testified before the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. He was never charged with any death but Buckner’s. After his release he was jailed more than a dozen times for breaching probation by drinking with women, the CBC reported. He died in 2006.
Elfriede Blauensteiner grew up one of six children in the Favoriten district of Vienna. A widow with a gambling habit, she used newspaper personal ads to find elderly people who needed care, took them in and, the courts found, killed them with medication for their money and property. In November 1995 a retired man, Alois Pichler, died in Lower Austria. A relative who felt cheated of his inheritance went to the authorities, and she was arrested in January 1996, at 64.
After her arrest she confessed to five murders, one of them as an accomplice, then withdrew the confessions. A court in Krems convicted her in 1997 of Pichler’s murder and sentenced her to life. In 2001 a Vienna court convicted her of two more murders, of her neighbor Franziska Köberl, who had died in 1992, and of her companion Friedrich Döcker, and Austria’s Supreme Court upheld those verdicts on December 17, 2001. Three further deaths she had first confessed to were never charged. She served her sentence at the women’s prison at Schwarzau and died of the effects of a brain tumor on November 16, 2003. The Austrian weekly profil, looking back in 2016, counted the case among the country’s legendary crimes; in January 2026 a new book revisited the excuses she had offered.
Francisca Ballesteros Maravilla, known as Paqui, was a homemaker in Melilla, the Spanish city on the North African coast. In 1990 her infant daughter, Florinda, died. In January 2004 her husband, Antonio González, a state customs official, died; his death was put down to a heart attack. Five months later, on June 4, 2004, her daughter Sandra, 15, died of poisoning, and her 12-year-old son was taken to the hospital with the same illness. He survived.
She was arrested and sent to Melilla prison in June 2004, the newspaper Diario de León reported. That month, the Catalan broadcaster 3Cat reported, she admitted that she had also poisoned the daughter who died fourteen years earlier. On September 26, 2005, the Audiencia Provincial of Málaga, sitting in Melilla, sentenced her to 84 years in all for the murder of her husband, murder, with other charges, of her two daughters, and attempted murder, with other charges, of her son, with loss of parental rights and compensation to the boy. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence. In June 2024, twenty years after the deaths, the local paper MelillaHoy reported that she was serving her sentence in a prison far from Melilla.
Read together, these cases share a few hard facts. Most of the victims were people who trusted the poisoner absolutely: a husband, a child, a patient, a lodger who had paid for care until the end of life. Most deaths were first certified as illness. In case after case the break came from outside: an insurer who refused to pay, a doctor who asked for an autopsy, a pathologist who found cyanide, a correspondent counting obituaries, a hotel that reported missing rings. And the courts, for all the totals in the newspapers, convicted most of these poisoners of a single death. Mary Ann Cotton was hanged for one child. Nannie Doss was sentenced for one husband. Velma Barfield, who confessed to three other deaths, was executed for one. The rest of the dead were left, in law, as suspicions.
• 1801: Charlotte Ursinus’s aunt dies in Berlin; only that death is proven against her.
• 1813 to 1827: Deaths later confessed by Gesche Gottfried in Bremen.
• April 21, 1831: Gottfried is beheaded on the Domshof, Bremen’s last public execution.
• June 9, 1837: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is arrested for forgery; he reaches Hobart on November 21, 1837.
• November 1855: John Parsons Cook dies at Rugeley.
• June 14, 1856: William Palmer is hanged at Stafford.
• March 24, 1873: Mary Ann Cotton is hanged at Durham.
• 1881: Thomas Neill Cream is convicted in Illinois of murdering Daniel Stott.
• August 9, 1886: Mary Ann Britland is hanged at Strangeways.
• November 15, 1892: Cream is hanged at Newgate after his conviction for the murder of Matilda Clover.
• August 12, 1895: Minnie Dean is hanged at Invercargill.
• May 7, 1896: H. H. Holmes is hanged in Philadelphia.
• June 23, 1902: Jane Toppan is found not guilty by reason of insanity at Barnstable.
• April 7, 1903: George Chapman is hanged at Wandsworth.
• February 23, 1906: Johann Otto Hoch is hanged in Chicago.
• 1917 to 1919: Amy Archer-Gilligan is convicted, wins a new trial and is convicted of second-degree murder.
• 1921: Lyda Southard enters the Idaho State Penitentiary.
• 1923: Tillie Klimek is convicted in Chicago and sentenced to life.
• August 25, 1928: Bertha Gifford is arrested at Eureka, Missouri.
• December 30, 1932: Daisy de Melker is hanged in Pretoria.
• December 7, 1938: Anna Marie Hahn is electrocuted in Ohio.
• 1947: Dr. Robert Clements dies in Southport.
• October 15, 1953: Caroline Grills is convicted of attempted murder in Sydney.
• June 2, 1955: Nannie Doss is sentenced to life in Tulsa.
• October 11, 1957: Rhonda Belle Martin is executed at Kilby Prison.
• December 24, 1967: Janie Lou Gibbs is arrested in Georgia.
• June 29, 1972: Graham Young is convicted at St Albans.
• March 1983: Arnfinn Nesset is convicted of 22 murders.
• February 1984: Genene Jones is convicted of murdering Chelsea McClellan.
• November 2, 1984: Velma Barfield is executed in North Carolina.
• 1987 to 1988: Donald Harvey pleads guilty in Ohio and Kentucky.
• 1988: Gilbert Paul Jordan is convicted of manslaughter in Vancouver.
• 1997 and 2001: Elfriede Blauensteiner is convicted of three murders.
• March 30, 1998: Judy Buenoano is executed in Florida.
• September and October 2000: Michael Swango pleads guilty to four murders.
• September 26, 2005: Francisca Ballesteros is sentenced to 84 years.
• January 16, 2020: Genene Jones pleads guilty to the murder of Joshua Sawyer.
• December 2025: Arnfinn Nesset dies, still denying the killings.