Klimek was born Ottilie Gburek in Poland in 1876 and lived in the Polish district of Chicago's north-west side. Between 1914 and 1921 three of her husbands died, along with relatives, neighbours' children and, reportedly, a number of dogs in the neighbourhood.
She was arrested in 1921 after her third husband, Frank Kupczyk, died and arsenic was found in his body. Exhumations followed and arsenic was found in others.
She was convicted in 1923 of the murder of Kupczyk and sentenced to life imprisonment: the first woman in Cook County to receive a life sentence rather than an acquittal in a poisoning case, which is why the trial mattered locally. Only that one murder was proved. She died at the Joliet women's prison on November 20, 1936.
The reputation attached to her is that she foretold the deaths, telling neighbours when a person would die and buying mourning clothes in advance, and that she made her own coffin arrangements before Kupczyk died. Those details come from the Chicago press of 1922 and 1923, which covered the case as a sensation and gave her the name the Poison Widow.
One conviction and a range of one to six or more is the accurate state of this case. It sits alongside Louise Vermilyea and Lydia Sherman in this archive as an American poisoning case whose count was assembled by newspapers from a woman's list of dead relatives.