Tillie Klimek was convicted in Chicago in 1923 of murdering her husband Frank Kupczyk with arsenic. She was a storekeeper in the city's Polish quarter, and the case against her began in 1922, when her next husband, Joseph Klimek, became violently ill and doctors found arsenic. Police then looked again at the men she had married before him. A Cook County jury found her guilty of Kupczyk's murder, and Judge Marcus Kavanagh sentenced her to life in prison. She died in custody in November 1936.
The trial drew heavy coverage. The Chicago Daily News, looking back at her death in 1936, called it one of the most sensational murder trials in the city's history. Part of the attention, as the Chicago Sun-Times noted in 2020, came from the prosecution's claim that she had not acted alone. Only one killing was proved against her in court. The other deaths linked to her in the press and in the judge's remarks were never tried, and they remain suspected or attributed, not proven.
Frank Kupczyk was the husband whose death led to her conviction. Contemporary reports and later accounts call him her third husband; the Daily News, in its 1936 report on her death, called him her second and spelled his name differently. He died in 1921.
Discover magazine, in a 2022 article on the history of arsenic poisoning, described what happened in the months around his death. In 1921, it reported, she asked her landlord whether she could store a casket in the building's basement. She had bought it on sale, expecting that she would soon need it for Frank. He fell ill and died, as her two earlier husbands had. She collected his life insurance.
Little else is known of Frank Kupczyk as a person: not his age, his work or his family. He is remembered mainly through the court case that followed his death, and through the description of his widow wearing, at her own sentencing, the black silk hat she had worn to his funeral.
According to Discover, she met Joseph Klimek at Frank Kupczyk's funeral in April 1921 and married him in July. By November 1922 she held a new insurance policy on his life. He then became violently ill, and physicians found arsenic. Police suspected that she had poisoned his food.
He was taken to a hospital on Chicago's West Side. A report printed in April 1923 said he had fought for his life there. Discover reported that the police expected him to survive, and that this was the point at which they began to reexamine the deaths of her earlier husbands. No separate charge or trial over Joseph Klimek's illness is on record.
Investigators turned to Frank Kupczyk's death. Discover reported that arsenic was found when his death was reexamined. Within six months of the investigation's start, the magazine said, she had been tried and sentenced.
The Chicago Daily News grouped the two of them as the "arsenic widows" of the Polish quarter. Prosecutors claimed that the two women had worked together. That claim made the case far larger in the newspapers than a single poisoning would have been, and it helped turn the two defendants into objects of curiosity in the city's press.
Tillie Klimek was charged with the murder of Frank Kupczyk. The prosecutors were Assistant State's Attorneys William McLaughlin and Thomas Peden; the Sun-Times, quoting the Daily News, spells the second name Penden. According to the Daily News, as quoted by the Sun-Times, the prosecutors' theory was that the women had killed Kupczyk for his insurance money and had then married and poisoned other husbands. That theory went beyond the single charge at trial. The other deaths it described were not separately charged against Tillie Klimek.
Both defendants faced the maximum penalty under Illinois law at the time, death by hanging, according to the Daily News report on the opening of the trial.
The trial began on March 6, 1923. That day the Chicago Daily News reported that Klimek and her co-defendant, "the so-called 'arsenic widows' of the Polish quarter," had gone on trial for murdering one of their husbands. The case was heard in the courtroom of Judge Marcus Kavanagh in Cook County.
The testimony survives only in outline. The prosecution's case, as summarized in the report on her sentencing, was that she had put arsenic in Frank Kupczyk's food and drink. Her lawyer was John Prystalski.
The jury found her guilty of murdering Frank Kupczyk. The jury did not impose the death penalty. The date of the verdict and the course of the jury's deliberations are not known. Discover described the speed of the case: within six months of the investigation, a jury had sent her to prison for life.
What became of her co-defendant has never been established.
The sentencing hearing took place before Judge Kavanagh. A Chicago report printed in the Gunnison Valley News on April 26, 1923, described the scene. Tillie Klimek, described as a short Polish storekeeper, stood at the bar in a new black dress and the black silk hat she had worn to her third husband's funeral. She showed no emotion as the judge sentenced her to life in prison, the report said, and then she looked up and smiled before guards led her back across the covered passage known as the "bridge of sighs" to her cell.
Before the sentence, her lawyer, John Prystalski, argued a motion for a new trial. McLaughlin answered for the state, and the judge denied the motion.
Judge Kavanagh then spoke at length. He called the case "one of the most remarkable cases in the history of criminology." He described the defendant as a woman of average intelligence, a model housewife and a good cook, who was affectionate with women and was said to be the most popular woman in the jail. He said that the testimony showed she had killed three husbands and tried to kill a fourth "without feeling or remorse." He warned the court: "If this woman was let loose today she would kill another man." He also suggested that more husbands might have been poisoned in the community than the authorities knew, and said he hoped her conviction would deter others.
The judge's statements about three husbands went further than the verdict. The jury had convicted her of one murder, that of Frank Kupczyk. The other deaths the judge described were not tried.
The report said she was sentenced to life in the Joliet penitentiary. No appeal of the conviction is known.
Tillie Klimek spent the rest of her life in the Illinois prison system. The Sun-Times, writing in 2020 and drawing on the Chicago Daily News archive, said she had been sent to prison for life in 1923.
She died on November 20, 1936. The Chicago Daily News reported her death on its front page that day, saying she had died at the woman's reformatory at Dwight, Illinois. She was 64, according to that report. The Daily News described her as the woman convicted thirteen years earlier of poisoning a former husband in one of Chicago's most sensational murder trials. Discover reported that she died of natural causes.
Accounts differ on where she died. The sentencing report said she was sent to Joliet, while the 1936 Daily News report placed her death at Dwight. When she was moved is not known.
In the decades since, Tillie Klimek has been linked to many more deaths than the one for which she was convicted. Those links rest on the prosecutors' claims in 1922 and 1923 and on the judge's remarks at sentencing, not on any verdict.
The prosecutors said the two defendants had married and poisoned other husbands for money. Judge Kavanagh said the testimony showed three husbands killed and a fourth attacked. Discover reported that Frank Kupczyk had died as her two earlier husbands had, and that police reexamined those earlier deaths after Joseph Klimek fell ill.
None of those other deaths was tried in court against her. The husbands before Frank Kupczyk are attributed to her by the prosecution and the judge, but no charge is known to have been filed over them, and the 1923 verdict covered only his death. Later retellings, including the claim that she could predict deaths in her dreams, rest on popular accounts rather than the court record.
1921: Frank Kupczyk, her husband, dies; she collects his life insurance (Discover).
April 1921: She meets Joseph Klimek at Frank Kupczyk's funeral, according to Discover.
July 1921: She marries Joseph Klimek (Discover).
November 1922: Joseph Klimek is violently ill; physicians find arsenic, and police suspect her (Discover).
March 6, 1923: Her trial with a co-defendant opens before Judge Marcus Kavanagh in Cook County (Chicago Daily News).
1923: A jury finds her guilty of murdering Frank Kupczyk.
April 1923: Judge Kavanagh denies a motion for a new trial and sentences her to life in prison (report printed April 26, 1923).
November 20, 1936: She dies in custody at the women's reformatory at Dwight, Illinois, aged 64, according to the Chicago Daily News.
November 19, 2020: The Chicago Sun-Times revisits her death in its history column.