In the eighteen months before July 2024, a family that ran a small rice stall on Hung Vuong Street in Vinh Thanh commune, Dong Nai Province, in southern Vietnam, buried or cremated one member after another. A husband died after months in and out of hospital. A grandfather died. A teenage boy died. A little girl collapsed during prayers for her grandfather and died the next day. A twelve-year-old boy collapsed after drinking from a water bottle and died the following day. Neighbors and relatives told reporters later that they had blamed bad luck, heart trouble in the family, or "trung tang," the folk belief that a death at an inauspicious hour brings further deaths to the same house.
Then, on June 22, 2024, a seventeen-year-old high school student in the same house collapsed. Doctors at Le Van Thinh Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City kept him alive, and a test of his stomach fluid found cyanide. Within two weeks his aunt, Nguyen Thi Hong Bich, was under arrest. In November 2025 the People's Court of Dong Nai Province sentenced her to death for murdering her husband and two young relatives with cyanide and for trying to kill the boy who survived.
The Vietnamese press names her in full, as is usual there. In most court reporting the children appear only by their initials.
Nguyen Thi Hong Bich was born on January 2, 1986, in Dong Nai, according to the account of the trial published by the People's Court Journal (Tap chi Toa an nhan dan), the official magazine of Vietnam's court system. She married Nguyen Thoai Thanh The in 2009. They had two children: a son, born in 2010, and a daughter, born in 2015.
The household was large. According to the indictment as reported by Tuoi Tre, Bich, her husband and their two children lived with her father and with the family of her older brother in Son Ha hamlet, Vinh Thanh commune, Nhon Trach district. (After Vietnam's 2025 administrative reorganization the area became part of Phuoc An commune, and later reports use that name.) The house fronted Hung Vuong Street. The extended family made its living selling cooked rice meals. Saigon Giai Phong (SGGP) reported in July 2024 that the stall had operated for years, that several generations had moved into the house to run it, and that Bich also sold about 200 meals a day to companies in the nearby Ong Keo Industrial Park.
Her older brother and his wife, Than Thi Nhieu, had two sons: N.H.B.T., born on July 19, 2006, and N.H.N., born in 2012. Bich's younger sister, Nguyen Thi Thuy Trang, born in 1990, lived nearby with her own family, including a daughter, N.K.D., born in 2017.
Neighbors described Bich to reporters as articulate and sociable. VietnamNet, in a July 2024 report built on police sources, said she often posted pictures of a happy family on social media and that neighbors had lent her money when she was short.
The court and prosecutors traced the case to money. According to the People's Court Journal's summary of the evidence, Bich's husband ran up debts gambling online in 2022. Bich then used her phone to find a seller on Facebook, an address she said she could not remember, and bought about one kilogram of cyanide for 1,000,000 dong. It came in a white plastic bottle with a red cap, marked "TP05" on the bottom. She hid it in an aluminum cabinet under the washbasin in the bathroom attached to her bedroom.
Bich told investigators and the court that she bought the poison to kill herself because of her husband's debts. At trial, VnExpress reported, she said she told the seller it was "for washing gold," which was why she was able to buy it. She did not take it. The indictment says that as conflicts grew between Bich, her husband and other members of the household, she decided to use it on them.
The question of how a private buyer could obtain a kilogram of cyanide online became a public issue in its own right. In July 2024 SGGP quoted an official of the Dong Nai Department of Health saying that cyanide was a poison outside his department's oversight and that its open sale online showed loose control of banned substances. A Dong Nai lawyer, Do Van Vinh, told the paper that the sale of cyanide was governed by the 2007 Law on Chemicals and Decree 113/2017, but that in practice it was advertised widely online at low prices. The government inspectorate's newspaper, Thanh Tra, made the same argument and recalled two earlier Vietnamese cyanide cases: a woman in Thai Binh sentenced to death in 2020 for poisoning milk tea, and a young woman in Ba Ria-Vung Tau sentenced to life in 2022 for poisoning her father.
Nguyen Thoai Thanh The was Bich's husband of fourteen years and the father of her two children. Reports give his age at death as 38, 39 or 40 and his birth year as 1985 or 1986. He worked with the family in the rice business. He had stomach trouble, high blood pressure and gout, and took medicine for them every day.
According to the evidence summarized by the court, on January 5, 2023, Bich took one of his capsules from the table where he left them, carried it into the bathroom, emptied it, filled it with a little cyanide and closed it again. He took it at midday. That afternoon he had numbness in his hands and feet and high blood pressure, and Bich took him to Hospital 115 in Ho Chi Minh City. He was hospitalized several times over the following months and died on October 18, 2023.
Because he had existing illnesses, his death raised no suspicion, Mothership reported, citing VietnamNet. Police sources quoted by VietnamNet and VOH in July 2024 said Bich told neighbors he had suffered a stroke and had his body cremated quickly. At trial she said she had bought insurance for her husband and both children eight or nine years earlier and received 500 million dong when her husband died, VnExpress reported. Police had told reporters in 2024 that she received a total of 800 million dong in insurance after the deaths of her husband and son and used it to pay debts.
In court, Bich admitted the poisoning as charged but argued that her husband had died of illness, not cyanide, because "he died ten months later." The court rejected this.
The accounts given to the press by police in July 2024 placed the poisoning of her husband in October 2023, a few days before his death, rather than in January. The indictment and the verdict give January 5, 2023, and that is the date on which she was convicted.
Two other members of the household died in 2023. Bich's son, born in 2010, died in late March 2023, at about fifteen, according to Tuoi Tre's report of the indictment. VnExpress reported that he died suddenly and that his death was also covered by insurance. Her father, Nguyen Van Hai, died in late 2023; Dan Tri's English service, DTiNews, gave his age as 75.
When police first announced the case in July 2024, they counted five unexplained deaths in the family between October 2023 and May 2024 with similar symptoms, and they said they were investigating the deaths of the father and the son. SGGP reported that relatives recalled vomiting, sudden cardiac arrest and heart attack before the deaths. Bich denied any role in either death. "It was not the defendant who poisoned them," she told the court when the judge pointed to the similarities.
The indictment concluded that the investigation had found no documents or evidence that Bich used cyanide to cause the death of her father or her son. The trial court said it was lawful not to pursue her over those deaths. She was never charged with either, and nothing in the record shows that either death was a homicide.
N.K.D., the daughter of Bich's younger sister, was born in 2017. Court reporting gives her age at death as six; other reports say seven or eight. Her mother told the court her full name, and VnExpress named her mother.
According to the indictment, Bich fell out with her younger sister late in 2023. Several accounts, including VnExpress and the provincial investigation conclusion reported by VOH, say the dispute was over money and over Bich's new relationship with a man after her husband's death; her sister had refused to lend her money and told her not to spend it on him. At trial her sister said the trouble began when she learned their mother had mortgaged the house to give Bich money for her debts.
At about 6:30 p.m. on January 1, 2024, the family gathered at the house to pray for Bich's father, who had recently died. During the prayers, the court record says, Bich went into her bedroom and saw N.K.D. standing in the bathroom. She poured a little cyanide into a bottle of Aquafina mineral water, shook it until it dissolved, and gave it to the girl to drink. When the child collapsed, Bich washed the plastic cup she had used, went out to where the family was eating, and told the girl's parents that something was wrong with their daughter and that she was lying unconscious in Bich's bedroom. Her parents carried her to Children's Hospital 2 in Ho Chi Minh City. She arrived in cardiac and respiratory arrest and deep coma. She died on January 2, 2024.
N.H.N., the younger son of Bich's brother and his wife, was born in 2012. Reports give his age as twelve or thirteen. Police accounts quoted by VOH in July 2024 said the investigation began when a relative of his older brother connected the earlier deaths after the brother was poisoned.
Bich, who lived with her brother's family, had quarreled repeatedly with her sister-in-law. At about 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 25, 2024, according to the court record, Bich was burning incense for her own dead son in the family's altar room when she saw N.H.N. lying in a hammock playing a game. She asked him whether his mother was selling rice that afternoon. He told her that because it was Saturday his mother had the afternoon off to go to church. Seeing that no one else was home, Bich poured cyanide into an Aquafina bottle and gave it to him. He said it tasted bitter. "Why is it bitter, auntie?" he asked, according to the record. She handed him the bottle she was holding and he drank more.
He went to his mother's room, said "I feel unwell," vomited and fell to the floor unconscious. His father and a relative took him to a pharmacy about fifty meters away for first aid, then hired a car to take him to Children's Hospital 2. He arrived in cardiac and respiratory arrest and deep coma and died on May 26, 2024.
N.H.B.T., N.H.N.'s older brother, was seventeen and in his final year of high school. The Cong an Nhan dan (People's Police) newspaper described him, from the family's account, as cheerful and well liked, a young man who often helped others, and said his parents were certain he would never have harmed himself.
In June 2024 the family was renovating the house, and Bich and her sister-in-law argued about money and about the work. Police accounts mention a quarrel over buying a kitchen sink and over who would wash the dishes first. At about 1:30 p.m. on June 22, 2024, according to the court record, Bich saw the boy studying in his room. His face had acne. She told him she had had the same problem once and had cleared it with a liver-cooling, detoxifying medicine, and offered to buy him some. He agreed. She went to a nearby pharmacy and bought capsules sold for leg pain, locked herself in her bedroom, emptied two capsules, filled them with cyanide, closed them again and gave them to him. When he asked what the medicine was, she said it was what she had taken to clear her own skin. He swallowed both capsules with water from his desk. Bich then rode her motorbike, with her child, to her younger sister's house four or five kilometers away, so that, the court found, she would not be suspected.
He collapsed and was found by relatives. Dr. Nguyen Pham Cao Khoa of Le Van Thinh Hospital told VietnamNet that the boy was brought in at 6:20 p.m. on June 22 in a coma, having suddenly lost consciousness. He was intubated and put on a ventilator, and needed drugs to support his blood pressure and heart rhythm. The hospital considered transferring him but judged that he might die on the way, and after consulting Cho Ray Hospital it treated him on site with continuous blood filtration for twelve to fourteen hours. By the morning of June 23 he had begun to improve. A test of his stomach fluid by the Ho Chi Minh City Institute of Public Health found cyanide at 21.0 mg/L. The deputy director of the hospital, Dr. Kieu Ngoc Minh, said it was the hospital's first cyanide case in many years, and Dr. Khoa said the large hospitals in the city had no specific cyanide antidote, so the hospital had used a less effective substitute.
By July 5 he was off the ventilator, alert and able to recognize his family, but very weak, and imaging showed scattered damage to the cortex of his brain. He was later assessed with a 23 percent bodily injury (the People's Court Journal gives 24 percent). The trial court found that his survival was against Bich's intention.
Accounts differ on who went to the police. The People's Court Journal, summarizing the case file, says the boy's uncle, Than Van B., filed a report on June 25, 2024. Tuoi Tre, reporting the indictment, also names the uncle, aged 46. A senior officer quoted by VietnamNet in July 2024, Senior Lieutenant Colonel Vo Nhat Hong Phuc, head of the social-order crime investigation department of Dong Nai Provincial Police, said the boy's mother reported that her son had probably been poisoned. VOH reported that a relative put the five deaths of the previous eight months together with the boy's symptoms.
Police officers from the provincial department and Nhon Trach district examined the house and questioned neighbors. After several days of screening, Phuc said, they focused on Bich, who lived in the same house and showed "many suspicious signs." According to police accounts quoted by VietnamNet and Cong an Nhan dan, once the boy's parents went to the police, Bich carried the bottle of cyanide to a cemetery near the house and buried it.
On July 5, 2024, the investigation agency opened a criminal case, charged Bich with murder and took her into custody. Dong Nai Provincial Police said the case began with a tip from the public. At first, VietnamNet reported, Bich would not answer any questions. When investigators showed her the evidence they had collected, she confessed to poisoning the boy and asked for leniency. VOH reported that on July 7, two days after her arrest, she admitted poisoning her husband and the two younger children as well. A search led police to the buried bottle, by the wall of the cemetery of Bac Minh parish, containing about 700 grams of crystals that the provincial crime laboratory identified as cyanide. Tuoi Tre News later gave the amount recovered as 784 grams of potassium cyanide.
VietnamNet's police sources said that once Bich began to talk she recited her account fluently, as if she had prepared it, and that she showed no remorse during questioning. Asked about her father and her son, she said they had died of illness.
Police accounts in 2024 said the husband's body had been cremated quickly. According to the investigation conclusion reported by VOH in July 2025, forensic samples taken from the dead did not show poison, because the tissue had broken down, but investigators found that Bich's confession matched the rest of the evidence. That evidence included camera footage of her at the pharmacy and at the house, the bottle recovered from the cemetery, and expert findings that both the bottle and the surviving boy's stomach fluid contained potassium cyanide.
On December 31, 2024, the investigation agency and the provincial procuracy took Bich back to the house to re-enact each of the four poisonings, and then to the cemetery. SGGP reported that the reconstruction lasted until about 12:30 p.m. and that a crowd gathered outside.
On July 10, 2025, the investigation agency completed its conclusion and recommended that she be prosecuted for murder and for the illegal storage, transport and use of a toxic substance. It described her as beyond education and reform and said she must be "permanently removed" from society. In September 2025 the People's Procuracy of Dong Nai Province issued the indictment and sent the case to the provincial court. The murder charge was brought under points a, b, e, n and q of clause 1 of Article 123 of the Penal Code, and the poison charge under point b of clause 4 of Article 311.
The trial opened at 8 a.m. on November 27, 2025, at the People's Court of Dong Nai Province, before a panel of five chaired by Judge Dinh Thi Kieu Luong. Bich was the only defendant. Her brother and his wife and her younger sister sat behind her as representatives of the victims. A defense lawyer appointed under the law represented her; he accepted the charges and asked only for a sentence proportionate to her acts.
VnExpress reporter Phuoc Tuan described Bich looking out of the window from time to time and crying when the prosecutor read out the indictment, while her relatives behind her wiped their eyes. She told the court that the charges were accurate and that her statements to investigators had been voluntary and not coerced. Asked why she had poisoned her family, she said: "The defendant could not control herself." She called her own acts inhuman and said the motive for poisoning the children was resentment of her siblings. "After my son died, my mind was in turmoil," she told the court, as reported by VnExpress. "Every time I quarreled with my sister-in-law and my sister, the hatred rose up again, and I formed the intention to kill the children for revenge."
The judge asked what she thought her daughter would feel when she grew up and learned what her mother had done, and whether she had considered the grief of her daughter and her elderly mother. "The defendant truly regrets it and does not know how to atone, so I can only apologize and hope everyone forgives me," Bich said, according to Nguoi Dua Tin. Asked whether she agreed to pay the 300 million dong her brother had claimed, she said she did.
Her relatives spoke too. Her brother, the father of both nephews, said the quarrels in the house had been small. "For more than a year now I have not understood why Bich acted this way," he said. He and her sister told the court they had attributed the deaths to "trung tang" and had never suspected her, and they asked for the heaviest penalty. Her sister, the mother of N.K.D., said that although Bich was her own sister and the loss was unbearable, what she wanted most was a trial of the right person for the right crime, in accordance with the law.
The prosecutor told the court that Bich was fully lucid and responsible for her actions, that she had stored cyanide once, transported it once and used it four times, and that three people had died and one had been injured, two of the victims under sixteen and one under eighteen. The prosecution asked for death for murder and 15 to 17 years for the toxic-substance charge.
In her last words, Bich wept, turned to her brother's family and her sister to apologize, and asked the court for leniency and to let her see her ten-year-old daughter one last time. VTC News quoted her: "I know my crime is too great and caused losses that can never be made up. I made my family suffer and broke the hearts of my relatives. I apologize to everyone, I apologize to the children. I do not dare hope for forgiveness, I only ask to live to repent."
The court convicted her on both counts the same day. It found that she had acted deliberately and with calculation, exploiting the trust of victims who had no reason to be on guard, and that killing family members, including two children under sixteen and a young man under eighteen, showed cruelty and cold blood. The judgment called her conduct "inhuman, cunning and contemptible" and said she had broken every moral rule and family bond and could not be reformed, so she had to be removed permanently from society.
She was sentenced to death for murder and to 15 years in prison for the illegal storage, transport and use of a toxic substance, with death as the combined sentence. The court ordered her to pay her brother's family 300 million dong for the surviving boy's treatment. Regarding the deaths of her father and son, it held that the investigators' decision not to pursue her was lawful because there was no evidence.
Cong an Nhan dan's An ninh The gioi (World Security) edition published parts of letters Bich wrote after the trial to her mother, her family and her father-in-law, apologizing and saying she would accept the highest sentence. To her ten-year-old daughter she wrote: "Mother did wrong. I did not fulfill my responsibility to you. Please forgive this sinful mother. I hope you are always safe and healthy."
The November 27, 2025, judgment was a first-instance verdict. The trial reports do not say whether Bich appealed, and by October 2026 no appeal hearing, decision on review or execution had been reported in the Vietnamese press. When Cong an Nhan dan ran its feature on the case on November 30, 2025, she stood sentenced to death at first instance. VnExpress reported that after the verdict she was led back to the detention camp.
Proven by conviction at first instance: that Bich poisoned her husband on January 5, 2023, her niece N.K.D. on January 1, 2024, and her nephew N.H.N. on May 25, 2024, causing their deaths, and that she tried to kill her nephew N.H.B.T. on June 22, 2024; and that she illegally stored, transported and used cyanide.
Admitted by Bich: the four poisonings, though at trial she maintained that her husband died of illness and not of the cyanide.
Investigated and not charged: the deaths of her son in March 2023 and her father in late 2023. Police in 2024 counted them among five unexplained deaths in the family, and the press noted that she received insurance money after her son's death. Prosecutors and the court found no evidence that she caused either death. Any suggestion that she killed them is speculation.
Disputed in the record: the date of the husband's poisoning (January 2023 in the indictment and verdict; October 2023 in early police accounts), the order and grouping of the children's poisonings (the court record describes two separate events five months apart; one early police account, carried by VietnamNet and repeated by Cong an Nhan dan, describes both children being given a sweet drink at the same time), the children's ages, and the amount of insurance (500 million dong for the husband by her own testimony; 800 million in total by the police account). Where the early reports and the indictment differ, the verdict follows the indictment.
January 2, 1986: Nguyen Thi Hong Bich born in Dong Nai.
2009: Marries Nguyen Thoai Thanh The; a son is born in 2010 and a daughter in 2015.
2022: Her husband falls into gambling debt; she buys about one kilogram of cyanide on Facebook for 1,000,000 dong.
January 5, 2023: Puts cyanide in a capsule of her husband's medicine; he is hospitalized at Hospital 115.
Late March 2023: Her son dies, at about fifteen. Not charged.
October 18, 2023: Her husband dies.
Late 2023: Her father, Nguyen Van Hai, dies. Not charged.
January 1, 2024: During prayers for her father, gives cyanide in water to her niece N.K.D., born 2017; the girl dies on January 2.
May 25, 2024: Gives cyanide in water to her nephew N.H.N., born 2012; he dies on May 26.
June 22, 2024: Gives two cyanide-filled capsules to her nephew N.H.B.T., born 2006; he survives at Le Van Thinh Hospital; cyanide is found in his stomach.
June 25, 2024: The boy's uncle reports the poisoning to police, according to the case file.
July 5, 2024: Dong Nai Provincial Police open the case and arrest Bich; the buried bottle of cyanide is recovered from the Bac Minh parish cemetery.
July 7, 2024: She admits the earlier poisonings.
December 31, 2024: Re-enactment at the house and cemetery.
July 10, 2025: Investigation concluded; prosecution recommended.
September 2025: Indictment by the People's Procuracy of Dong Nai Province.
November 27, 2025: Convicted by the People's Court of Dong Nai Province; sentenced to death.
November 30, 2025: Cong an Nhan dan publishes a feature on the case. No appeal hearing or execution had been reported by October 2026.