In the fall of 1922 a man named Joseph Klimek was taken to the hospital from his home at 1453 Tell Place in Chicago's Polish district, violently ill. His doctors suspected arsenic, and tests confirmed it. He had married Tillie Klimek the year before. She was his wife's fourth husband, and the police, looking at the other three, began digging.
She had been born Otylia Gburek in Poland, around 1876 by the most common account, and came to the United States as an infant. In 1895 she married Joseph Mitkiewicz; he died in 1914 after a short illness, and the certificate said heart trouble. She quickly married a neighbor, Joseph Ruskowski, who also died in short order, and so did a boyfriend who had jilted her. Her third husband was Frank Kupczyk. When he fell ill in their apartment at 924 North Winchester Avenue, she told the neighbors he would not live long. She greeted him in the mornings with "It won't be long now" and "You'll be dying soon," and joked that he had "two inches to live." She sat at his bedside knitting a mourning hat, and asked the landlady if she might keep a bargain coffin she had found in the basement. He died in 1921, and she collected on his life insurance, as she had on the others.
Those stories grew in the retelling into the legend that she could foresee deaths in her dreams. The more likely explanation, drawn from her own neighbors' testimony, is simpler: she was announcing what she already intended.
When the exhumed bodies of her earlier husbands were tested, they held lethal amounts of arsenic, though the soil around the coffins did not. She was arrested, and one officer later claimed that she told him, "The next one I want to cook a dinner for is you." Her cousin Nellie Koulik was arrested too. According to Klimek's statement, she had told Nellie she was tired of Frank; Nellie suggested divorce; Klimek said she would get rid of him some other way, and Nellie supplied her with a "goodly portion" of a rat poison sold as Rough on Rats.
Then the list began to grow. Two neighbors Klimek had quarreled with had fallen gravely ill after she gave them candy. A dog that had annoyed her on Winchester Street had died of arsenic. Cousins and relatives of both women had become sick after eating at her table, and a cousin, Harry Suida, told the state's attorney that his sister Rose had died after a dinner at Klimek's home. By the Chicago Tribune's count in November 1922 there were twenty suspected victims, fourteen of them dead, and the papers were calling her the high priestess of a Bluebeard clique in Little Poland. Other wives in the neighborhood were arrested and released. Joseph Klimek survived, though he was still in the hospital more than three months later, and became the state's witness.
The two women went on trial together in March 1923 before Judge Marcus Kavanagh, charged with Frank Kupczyk's murder and facing the gallows; no woman had ever been executed in Illinois. The jury voted guilty on its first ballot. On the second, four jurors wanted death before all twelve settled on life in prison. Reporters remarked that she was not like the attractive husband-killers Chicago juries had been acquitting, but a squat woman who spoke broken English despite a lifetime in the country. Life was the harshest sentence a Cook County court had ever given a woman.
Nellie Koulik was acquitted after a year in custody and a drawn-out trial. In prison, Klimek once convinced her that she was about to be taken out and hanged. Tillie Klimek died in the penitentiary at Joliet on November 20, 1936, and was buried in the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago. Only the one murder was ever proved against her.