Poison isn’t just for the pages of mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels. From chronic poisoning over a long period of time, to rapid poisoning that can cause instant death, many serial killers throughout history have used poison as their main weapon. This is a list of notable murderers who used poison as their modus operandi and weapon of choice.
Famously known as America’s first serial killer, Holmes opened a hotel during the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and lured in as many as 200 victims, including his staff, hotel guests, and his lovers. He would fill guest’s rooms in what became known as the “Murder Castle,” with gas lines to asphyxiates his victims.
Holmes had two giant furnaces used to incinerate some of the bodies or evidence, as well as pits of corrosive acid, bottles of various poisons and even a stretching rack. Afterwards, he would make claims on their insurance policies. Holmes was hanged in 1896.
Donald Harvey claims to have murdered 87 people while he worked in various hospitals. Official estimates put the number from 37 to 57 deaths. He had many different methods of murder but frequently used poisons such as cyanide and arsenic, which were administered in food, by injection, or IV.
Harvey claimed he started out killing to “ease the pain” of patients. As he progressed in his murders, he began to enjoy it more and more and became a self–professed “Angel of Death.” He often insisted that he committed the murders out of empathy for terminally ill patients.
Harvey was apprehended in 1987, and is currently serving 28 consecutive life sentences.
A former licensed physician, Swango poisoned non–patients by putting arsenic in their food and drinks. With his patients, he administered overdoses of prescribed drugs or prescribed unnecessary and dangerous drugs.
Though he only admitted to four murders, it is estimated that he was involved in up to 60 fatal instances of poisoning. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, and is serving that sentence at the ADX Super Max Prison in Florence, Colorado.
From 1927 to 1954, Nannie Doss murdered 11 people. Using rat poison, she killed her family members, including her first four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, her grandson, and one of her nephews.
Nannie met and married her fifth husband in June 1953. In September he was admitted to the hospital with flu-like symptoms. He was diagnosed with a severe digestive tract infection, and released October 5th.
Nannie killed him that evening in her rush to collect the two life insurance policies she had taken out on him. This sudden death alerted his doctor who ordered an autopsy. The autopsy revealed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. Nannie was promptly arrested.
Nannie pleaded guilty on May 17, 1955, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The state did not pursue the death penalty due to her gender. She died of leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1965.
This notorious English serial killer poisoned several of his family members, including his stepmother (who he poisoned when he was only 14 years old), as well as 70 more victims. His poisonous secrets were discovered by his chemistry teacher when he found violent sketches of his family and several vials of poison.
He was taken to an insane asylum, where he stayed for several years until doctors released him in 1971. It wasn’t until Young found a job and several of his coworkers began dying and falling ill, that he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1990 in his cell.
While the official cause of death was a heart attack, rumor has it that he got a taste of his own medicine.
Thomas Neill Cream was a Scottish serial killer who lived in Canada and poisoned victims in the United States, Canada, and England. He was a physician and surgeon, known for his after-hours abortion clinic and killing at least five people with chloroform and strychnine. He was convicted in 1892 and hanged for his crimes.
During this time, another murderer, Jack the Ripper, was on the loose, and Cream was one of the suspects for being the infamous killer. In fact when the trap door released during his hanging, Cream shouted, “I am Jack . . .”
Stephen P. Ryder and John A. Piper, writers of an Internet biography of Cream said, “Most refute the theory on the grounds that Cream . . . was a poisoner, not a mutilator. It would make little sense for him to poison his (earliest) victims before 1888, then suddenly go on a murderous and vicious mutilating spree in that year, and then revert back to poisoning his women. His prison sentence adds only more fire to the arguments of skeptics.”
Known as the “Borough Prisoner,” Chapman, a Polish immigrant, was convicted and executed after poisoning three women with arsenic, all whom married Chapman shortly after meeting him and dying shortly after that. Chapman was arrested and hanged for his crimes in 1903. And while he filed insurance claims on all three of them, he received hardly any money.
Some believed Chapman to be the notorious Jack the Ripper, who viciously killed prostitutes in the fall of 1888 in London. Chapman worked as a hairdresser’s assistant just a few blocks from where the first Ripper murder occurred.
Additionally, one of the Ripper’s victims was named Annie Chapman – the same as one of Chapman’s wives and victim’s . However, there are several men suspected of being the infamous murderer, and evidence thus far as been inconclusive as to who was the real culprit.
One of the most notorious killers in Scandinavian history. Nesset worked as a nurse and as a nursing home manager in Norway. In 1983, he was convicted of poisoning at least 22 patients by using a muscle relaxer at a geriatric center where he was the director.
When he was arrested, he admitted to officials, “I’ve killed so many I’m unable to remember them all.” Police discovered that it’s possible that he killed up to 62 patients in three different institutions since 1962, though autopsies were useless by that point because tracing the drug in the victims’ bodies would be nearly impossible.
He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum legal amount under Norwegian law, of which he served 12 before he was released. He is believed to be living under an assumed name.
The “Prince of Poisoners,” Palmer was an English doctor who was publicly executed in 1855 by hanging for the murder of his friend, John Cook, and is known for being one of the most notorious murders of the 19th century.
Palmer poisoned Cook using strychnine and was also suspected of poisoning his brother, four of his own children, all of whom were infants, and his mother- in-law. He made money off their deaths by collecting on life insurance policies, but lost all of it gambling on horses.
Palmer was arrested on the charge of murder and forgery, and sentenced to death by hanging. Some 30,000 people were at Stanford Prison on June 14, 1856 to see Palmer’s public execution. William Palmer was buried beside the prison chapel in a grave filled with quicklime.
Also known as “Arsenic Anna,”German immigrant Hahn began poisoning and robbing elderly men who she was working as an in-home “nurse” for, in the 1930s. Hahn allegedly began poisoning and robbing elderly men and women in Cincinnati’s German community to support her gambling habit.
Hahn was convicted after a sensational four-week trial in November 1937. Sentenced to death, she went to the electric chair at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus on December 7, 1938. She was the first woman to be electrocuted in Ohio. She was buried in Mount Calvary Cemetery in Columbus.
Mary Ann Cotton is believed to be Britain’s first serial killer and she was convicted of killing three of her four husbands, apparently in order to collect on their insurance policies. She may have had as many as 21 victims, including eleven of her thirteen children. She chiefly used arsenic poisoning, which caused severe gastric pain and rapid decline of health.
Cotton was found guilty in 1873, and hanged for her crimes. A lot of sympathy grew for Cotton after her conviction as she began writing letters to the local newspaper, pleading her innocence. While she awaited execution in prison, she gave birth to a baby, who was immediately taken away from her.
Additionally, the drop beneath the trap door was too short, leaving Cotton to jerk about at the end of the rope. An official had to press down on her to ensure her death.
Vera Renczi allegedly poisoned 35 victims in the 1920s, including her husbands, lovers, and one of her sons, all with arsenic, and all likely out of jealousy. She kept them all in coffins in her wine cellar, labeled.
She told police that one day when her son had come to pay her a visit, he had accidentally discovered the coffins in her wine cellar and threatened to blackmail her. She subsequently poisoned him and disposed of his body. She also feared he would soon leave her to marry someone so she held him in her arms as he lay dying so she would be the last person to hug him.
Some have claimed the murders are a hoax, as many of the details of the murders, including their location, are inconsistent. She was convicted of 35 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment, where she subsequently died.
Francisca Ballesteros is a Spanish murderer. In 1990, Ballesteros suffered from postpartum depression and wanted to end her marriage. She had decided to kill her family and flee to Valencia. She poisoned her five-month-old daughter with Colme, a drug used to treat alcoholism. After the death of her baby, she decided to wait to kill the rest of her family.
In 2004, 14 years after murdering her daughter, Ballesteros decided to kill the rest of her family, flee to the city where one of the men she had met online was living, and marry him. On January 12, 2004, Ballesteros killed her husband, Antonio Gonzalez Barribino, with Colme and with the sedatives Zolpiderm and Bromazepam.
On June 4, 2004, Ballesteros killed her daughter, Sandra, with the same medications and attempted to kill her 12-year-old son, Antonio, who was admitted to the hospital with poisoning. The autopsy of her daughter Sandra revealed that she had been poisoned.
On June 7, 2004, Ballesteros was arrested and confessed to the murders. On September 26, 2005, Francisca Ballesteros was sentenced to a term of 84 years in prison.
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was an English serial killer widely believed to have been a multiple poisoner. In 1830, Wainewright insured the life of his sister-in-law, Helen Abercrombie, with various companies for a sum of £18,000, and, when she died in December of the same year, payment was refused by them on the grounds of misrepresentation
Wainewright retired to Boulogne in July Monarchy, France, where he was seized by the authorities as a suspected person and imprisoned for six months. He had in his possession a quantity of strychnine, and it was widely suspected that he had poisoned not only his sister-in-law and his uncle, but also his mother-in-law and a Norfolk friend, although it was never proved.
He returned to London in 1837, but was soon arrested on a charge of forgering, thirteen years before, and a transfer of stock. It would seem that the authorities used the tenable case of forgery to transport him for life for the unprovable murders. He was sent to Tasmania arriving November 21,1837.
Wainewright had an unconditional pardon granted November 14, 1846. He died of apoplexy in the Hobart Town Hospital on August 17, 1847. He is buried in an unknown grave.
Amy-Archer Gilligan was a Windsor, Connecticut nursing home proprietor and multiple murderer. She systematically murdered at least five people by poison; one was her second husband, Michael Gilligan, and the rest were residents of her nursing home. It is possible that she was involved in more deaths. Authorities found 48 deaths total from her nursing homes.
Between 1907 and 1917, there were 60 deaths in the Archer Home. Relatives of her clients grew suspicious as they tallied large numbers of it’s residents dying. Only 12 residents died between 1907 and 1910, but 48 residents died between 1911 and 1916.
As the deaths continued, the first of several articles on the “Murder Factory “ was published. A few months later, the police started seriously investigating the case, which took almost a year to complete.
Her husband, and four other border’s bodies were exhumed. All five had died of poisoning, either by arsenic or strychnine. Once evidence was found of Amy sending her own patients to the drugstore to buy quantities of arsenic, the police were able to arrest and convict Amy.
On June 18, 1917, a jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to death. Amy appealed and was granted a new trial in 1919. She pleaded insanity. Amy was nonetheless found guilty of second degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 1924, Amy was declared temporarily insane and was transferred to Connecticut Hospital for the insane in Middleton, where she remained until her death on April 23, 1962.
Genene Jones is a former pediatric nurse who killed somewhere between 1 and 46 infants and children in her care. She used injections of digoxin, heparin, and later succinylcholine to induce medical crises in her patients, with the intention of reviving them afterward in order to receive praise and attention.
Succinylcholine is a powerful paralytic that causes temporary paralysis of all skeletal muscles, as well as those that control breathing. A patient cannot breathe while under the influence of this drug. In small children, cardiac arrest is the ultimate result of deoxygenation due to lack of respiration.
Many children did not survive the initial attack and could not be revived. The exact number of murders remain unknown, as hospital officials allegedly first misplaced then destroyed records of her activities to prevent further litigation after Jones’ first conviction.
In 1985, Jones was sentenced to 99 years in prison for killing 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan with Succinylcholine. Later that year she was sentenced to a concurrent term of 60 years in prison for nearly killing Rolando Jones with heparin. She will be scheduled for mandatory release in 2017 due to a Texas law to prevent overcrowding. Jones is held in Dr. Lane Murray Unit.
Anna Maria Zwanziger was a Bavarian serial killer. She used arsenic, which she referred to as “her truest friend.” From 1801 until 1811, Zwanziger was employed as a housekeeper at the home of several judges in Bavaria.
Zwanziger would poison employers with arsenic, and then nurse them back to health to gain their favour. She poisoned three people, and attempted to poison several others. She killed four people, one of whom was a baby.
Zwanziger was judged guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Before she was beheaded, she said it was probably a good thing she was to be executed, as she did not think she would be able to stop.
Jane Toppan was an American serial killer. In 1885, Toppan began training to be a nurse at Cambridge Hospital. During her residency, she used her patients as guinea pigs in experiments with morphine and atropine. She would alter their prescribed dosages to see what it did to their nervous systems.
Toppan would administer a drug mixture to patients she chose as her victims, lie in bed with them and hold them close to her as they died. She began her poisoning spree in earnest in 1895 by killing her landlords. In 1899, she killed her foster sister, Elizabeth with a dose of strychnine.
On October 29, 1901, she was arrested for murder. By 1902, she had confessed to 31 murders. On June 23, in the Barnstable County Courthouse, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed for life in the Tauton Insane Hospital.
Janie Lou Gibbs was an American serial killer from Cordele, Georgia, who killed her three sons, a grandson, and her husband, by poisoning them with rat poison in 1966 and 1967. She inherited $31,000 from their deaths and tithed 10% to her church.
Despite the unusual coincidences of so many deaths in such a short period of time, she blocked insurance adjusters’ requests for autopsies. Gibb’s daughter-in-law demanded an autopsy of her husband, Roger. The autopsy found fatal levels of arsenic in the young man’s body.
The court ordered the rest of her family exhumed and each was found to have been murdered. Gibbs admitted methodically feeding rat poison to her family, one victim at a time, but did not give a motive. In February 1968, she was found to be insane and served time in a state mental hospital until 1976. She was then convicted of poisoning the five male members of her immediate family and received five life sentences.
Gibbs later suffered from Parkinson’s disease and was released April 1999, on a medical reprieve into the custody of her brother and sister-in-law, after being denied parole 17 times. She remained on parole and was required to check in once per year due to her deteriorating condition. She used a wheelchair and lived in a nursing home in Douglasville, Georgia, until her death on February 7, 2010.
Daisy de Melker was a trained nurse who poisoned two husbands with strychnine for their life insurance. And then she poisoned her only son with arsenic for reasons which are still unclear. Daisy was accused of three murders, but was only convicted of one, that of killing her son.
The charges of poisoning her husband’s were never proved in a court of law. She was sentenced to death and executed by hanging in 1932. She is the second woman to have been hanged in South Africa. Daisy was eventually buried in a prison pauper’s grave.
Caroline Grills was an Australian serial killer. Grills became a suspect in 1947, after the deaths of four family members. The family members were 87-year-old stepmother Christine Mickelson, relatives by marriage, Angelina Thomas and John Lundberg, and sister-in-law, Maryanne Mickelson.
Authorities tested tea she had given to two additional family members, Christine Downey and John Downey, on April 13, 1953, and detected the poison thallium. Grills appeared in court charged with four murders and three attempted murders ( the third being Eveline Lundberg) in October 1953.
Grills was convicted on October 15, 1953, and sentenced to death, but her sentence was later changed to life in prison. She became affectionately known as “Aunt Thally “ to other inmates of Sydney’s Long Bay Prison.
In October 1960, she was rushed to the hospital where she died from peritonitis from a ruptured gastric ulcer.
Rhonda Belle Martin was an American serial killer. Martin was a 49-year-old waitress in Montgomery, Alabama. She confessed in March 1956, to poisoning her mother, two husbands, and three of her children. She denied killing two other children.
Her fifth husband, formerly her stepson, was poisoned like the others, but survived only to be left a paraplegic. It was his illness that led authorities to look into the strange deaths surrounding Martin. She was convicted of murdering 51-year-old Claude Carroll Martin in 1951 by surreptitiously feeding him rat poison and was executed in Alabama’s electric chair on October 11, 1957.
Elfriede Blauensteiner
Elfriede Blauensteiner was an Australian serial killer. Known as the “Black Widow,” Blauensteiner murdered at least three victims by poison, inheriting their possessions. She claimed “they deserved to die. “ She was sentenced to life in prison in 1997, and died in 2003 from a brain tumor.
Gilbert Paul Jordan, known as the “Boozing Barber,” was a Canadian serial killer who is believed to have committed the so-called “alcohol murders” in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In 1965, Jordan was said to begin serial killing.
He is considered a serial killer as he was linked to the deaths of between eight and ten women, but was only convicted in the manslaughter death of one woman. Typically he would find women in bars, and buy them drinks for sex and encourage them to drink with him. When they passed out, he would pour liquid down their throats.
The resulting deaths were reported as alcohol poisoning and police paid little attention, because some of his victims were alcoholics. On October 12, 1987, Vanessa Lee Buckner was found naked on the floor of the Niagara Hotel after a night of drinking with Jordan. Jordan’s fingerprints were found and linked to Ms. Buckner’s death.
Jordan was found guilty of manslaughter in the death of Ms. Buckner. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but that was reduced to nine years on appeal. Jordan served six years for the manslaughter conviction. He died in 2006.
Gesche Gottfried was a serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hannover, Germany. The reasons behind Gottfried’s crimes remain unclear and widely debated. Gottfried’s victims included her parents, her two husbands, her fiancé, and her children.
Before being suspected and convicted of the murders, she garnered widespread sympathy among the inhabitants of Bremen because so many of her family and friends fell ill and died. Because of her devoted nursing of the victims during their time of suffering, she was known as the “Angel of Bremen” until her murders were discovered.
Gottfried used a rat poison called “mouse butter,” very common at that time, which consisted of small flakes of arsenic mixed in animal fat. She mixed small doses into her victims food, eventually they started to get sick and Gottfried offered to take care of them during their convalescence, while continuing to poison them.
Gottfried was arrested on March 16, 1828. She was sentenced to death by decapitation. She was publicly executed on April 21, 1831. It was the last public execution in the history of Bremen.
Tillie Klimek was a Polish American serial killer, active in Chicago. According to legend she pretended to have precognitive dreams, accurately predicting the dates of death of her victims, when in reality she was merely scheduling their deaths.
The crime for which she was eventually tried, was the murder of Frank Kupczyk, her third husband. Bodies of her other husbands were soon exhumed and found to contain lethal doses of arsenic. After her arrest, it came to light that several relatives and neighbors had died.
A dog that annoyed Tillie in her Winchester Street house, had died of arsenic poisoning. Several of Tillie’s cousins and relatives were found to have become gravely ill shortly after eating at Tillie’s house. In all, the list stretched to twenty suspected victims, fourteen of whom had died.
It was found that she had taken out life insurance policies on her husbands, from which she profited greatly. Tillie was sentenced to life in prison, the harshest sentence that had ever been leveled against a woman in Cook County. Tillie died in prison on November 20, 1936.
A nursing home worker, Frederick Mors murdered eight elderly patients with arsenic and chloroform in New York City. He claimed he was “putting them out of their misery,” and others began getting suspicious after an unusually high number of patients were dying. Seventeen in total in four months.
He told how he killed his victims: “First I would pour a drop or two of chloroform on a piece of absorbent cotton and hold it to the nostril of the old person. Soon my man would swoon. Then I would close the orifices of the body with cotton, stuffing it in the ears, nostrils, and so on. Next I would pour a little chloroform down the throat and prevent fumes escaping the same way. “
Frederick was found insane and committed to an asylum, from which he escaped in the late 1920s, and has never been heard from again.
This case led to a method of identifying of arsenic poisoning in the early 1800s. Ursinus was a German serial killer, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after believing to be responsible for poisoning her husband, aunt, lover, and attempting to kill her servant,
Ursinus was sentenced to 30 years in prison, though was occasionally allowed to throw parties with guests and fine clothing, along with having other niceties. She was pardoned in 1833 and rejoined the upper class of Glatz until she died in 1836.
Velma Barfield was an American serial killer, convicted of one murder, but she eventually confessed to six murders. She confessed to using poison when authorities discovered arsenic during the autopsy of her lover who she had killed to hide that she was forging checks to feed a drug addiction.
Velma was imprisoned in the Central Prison for escape-prone prisoners and mentally-ill prisoners prone to assault. This is because there was no designated area for women under death sentences at the time, since she was the state’s only female death row inmate.
A death row unit for female inmates in North Carolina was subsequently established at the North Carolina Correctional Institute for women. She was the first woman to be executed by lethal injection. She was executed on November 2, 1984 at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. Velma was buried in a small, rural North Carolina cemetery near her first husband.
Minnie Dean, a baby-farmer who took in illegitimate children from mothers, and profited by putting them up for adoption, was executed after being found guilty of infanticide. Having poisoned one victim with laudanum in the late 1800s. She was hanged in 1895. Dean was the only woman to receive the death penalty in New Zealand.
In February 1886, Mary Ann Britland is said to have had some mice infest her home. To eliminate these, she went to the nearby chemists and bought some packets of “Harrison’s Vermin Killer.” As this contained both strychnine and arsenic , she was required to sign the poison register.
Britland’s first victim was her eldest daughter, 19-year-old Elizabeth Hannah, in March 1886. Mary Ann Britland then claimed £10 on Elizabeth’s life insurance policy. Her next victim was her husband, Thomas, aged 44. His death on May 3, was diagnosed as epilepsy, and once again Mary claimed on the insurance.
Mary also poisoned the wife of her lover, Mary Dixon. The three deaths, all with their identical and somewhat unusual symptoms, raised suspicion. Mary was charged with the murder of the three victims. It took the jury some time to convict her, although eventually they found her guilty.
On the morning of August 9, 1886, Mary was in a state of collapse and had to be heavily assisted to the gallows by two female wardens. They held her on the trap doors while she was prepared for execution. The trap door released and Mary dropped. She was the first woman to be executed at Strangeways Prison in Manchester.
Bertha Gifford was known for her cooking skills and caring nature for sick neighbors and relatives. She was charged with first-degree murder of three people, her husband’s best friend and two distant relatives, in Franklin County in 1928.
Bodies of her victims were found to contain high levels of arsenic. After a three day trial, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to a mental institution until she died in 1951 from complications from a stroke.
Authorities and family members agree that Gifford actually poisoned up to 20 people between 1906 and 1928. And in modern-day terms, have diagnosed Gifford as a paranoid schizophrenic.
Judy Buenoano murdered her husband, James Goodyear, with arsenic in 1971, in order to collect insurance money. She was also found guilty of drowning her paralyzed son in 1980, in a river, as well as trying to firebomb her boyfriend in 1983.
Judy received about $240,000 from killing another husband, son, and a common-law husband, all with arsenic in Colorado in 1978. Police said she used the money to live the high life, buying a new car, a diamond ring, and opened a nail salon.
Judy was finally caught when she botched the bombing of her boyfriend in 1983. She was executed in 1998 at the Florida State Prison, the first woman in 150 years to be executed in the state, and the first to die by electric chair.
Robert George Clements, a physician who had three wives who all had unusual and suspicious deaths, was courting a fourth lover when her father died unexpectedly, and she inherited £22,000. They married soon afterwards.
Seven years later, in 1947, Clements brought his wife into a nursing home in a coma, and she died the next morning. Though a post mortem was carried out saying she had died of myeloid leukemia, Clements had suggested to his friend who carried out the post mortem, that that’s why he suspected she died.
Police became increasingly suspicious of Clements. They went to his house to investigate, only to find that Clements had overdosed on morphine, and died shortly thereafter. A second post mortem was then performed on his fourth wife, showing that she also had died from a morphine overdose. Police searched Clement’s house to find dozens of bottles of tablets.
John Oho Hoch, “The Bluebeard Murderer, “ was found guilty and hanged for murdering his wife, but may have killed fifty more women after marrying them, taking their money, and poisoning them with arsenic.
Sometimes he would just marry, steal, and split, without poisoning his wives. Hoch, the name of one of his victims, was the name used just with police. Once he was captured he said, “Marriage was purely a business proposition for me,”
As soon as the murder he was hung for, the death of Marie Wakker occurred, Hoch turned around and proposed to her sister, marrying the following week within hours, disappearing and pocketing $1250. Amelia, his brand new wife, went straight to the police.
Hoch’s freshly dead wife was found chock full of arsenic. They captured Hoch in New York, and when they found him he had a hollow pen full of arsenic. Hoch was known as one of America’s most notorious mass murderers. He was executed in 1906.
Lyda Southard was known for boiling fly paper, extracting the arsenic from it, and using it to kill her family members to collect on life insurance policies. It started when she convinced her brother-in-law to take out a life insurance policy and name her and her husband as beneficiaries.
Lyda convinced her husband of the same, and shortly afterwards, they both died. It happened again with three more marriages. Her fourth husband died just a month after the two got hitched, and police got suspicious of the situation.
After digging up the graves, and exhuming the bodies, they found arsenic and accused her of murder. In 1921, Lyda was sentenced from 10 years to life in prison at the Idaho State Penitentiary. After 20 years she was released and married a seventh husband, who disappeared two years later.
When she died of a heart attack in 1958, she had no hair left on her body, a common symptom of someone who has prolonged exposure to arsenic.
Hamburg resident, Elisabeth Wiese, operated an “orphanage” offering child care services for women who could not raise their own children or for illegitimate children. She charged a one-time fee to the mothers giving their children away. But when parents came to adopt the children, Wiese didn’t hand the money to them, causing them to return the babies and leaving Wiese with a surplus.
Though she told the mothers their babies were being adopted by rich families in distant countries, she was actually poisoning them with morphine and burning their bodies in her apartment oven. She was convicted of five murders and was executed by guillotine in 1905.
Most of these murderers used poison to get rich on insurance policies. But the fact that they killed family members, children, and their spouses is extremely greedy. It’s also a bit unnerving to know that most of these poisonings were overlooked and resulted in mass murdering before any suspicion was aroused. Luckily these poisons were still detectable after the victims were exhumed so that justice could be served.
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