Poisoning

17 cases · Violent Crime

Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)
closedConvictedHistorical

Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)

Convicted: Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)

'I won't be troubled long. He'll go like all the rest of the Cottons.' That was Mary Ann Cotton's assessment of her seven-year-old stepson Charles Edward, delivered to a parish official in West Auckland, County Durham, in the spring of 1872. Five days later, the boy was dead. It was the statement that finally brought her down. By the time investigators began pulling at the thread, they found two decades of bodies behind it: eleven of her thirteen children, three of her four husbands, her own mother, and a string of lodgers and stepchildren, each one dead of 'gastric fever,' each one insured, each one mourned briefly and then forgotten. The death toll, historians estimate, may have reached twenty-one. Mary Ann Cotton was a nurse, a mother, a wife. She was trusted by the sick she nursed and by the physicians who signed off on her victims' deaths. She understood, precisely, that Victorian medicine would not look twice at a working-class child dying of gastroenteritis. She killed for insurance money: modest sums, accumulated over years, in exchange for the lives of nearly everyone who had ever depended on her. She was only ever convicted of one murder. She was hanged in Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, in a botched execution that left her strangling at the end of a too-short rope. She was forty years old. The full story of what she did is both a portrait of individual evil and an indictment of a system that made it catastrophically easy.

serial killerVictorian era
Gu Kailai
closedConvictedHistorical

Gu Kailai

Convicted: Gu Kailai

On November 15, 2011, British businessman Neil Heywood was found dead in his room at a Chongqing hotel. Chinese authorities ruled it alcohol poisoning, cremated the body without an autopsy, and closed the file. It was, by every official measure, an unremarkable death. What the world did not yet know was this: November 15 is also the birthday of Gu Kailai, the wife of one of the most powerful politicians in China, a woman who had spent her life accumulating credentials, connections, and carefully constructed respectability. She had lured Heywood to that hotel. She had watched her aide carry his incapacitated body to the bed. And she had poured potassium cyanide into his mouth herself. The case that unraveled in the following months would expose a world of princeling privilege, illicit fortunes, cover-ups at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, and a murder so brazen that it triggered the largest political crisis in China since Tiananmen Square. This is the story of Gu Kailai: lawyer, author, power broker, and killer.

Gu KailaiNeil Heywood murder
Vera Renczi
closedConvictedHistorical

Vera Renczi

Convicted: Vera Renczi

Thirty-two men lay in zinc-lined coffins in the wine cellar beneath a Romanian chateau, each one poisoned with arsenic by the woman who had loved them. Or so the story goes. Vera Renczi, dubbed the 'Black Widow' and 'Chatelaine of Berkerekul,' is one of history's most notorious female serial killers: a wealthy beauty who allegedly confessed to murdering 35 people during the 1920s, including two husbands, dozens of lovers, and her own son. According to the legend, she laced their wine when she feared they might leave her, then kept their bodies in the cellar so they never could. Police reportedly found her sitting peacefully among the coffins. But here is where the story fractures. When the Guinness Book of World Records investigated in 1972, researchers found nothing verifiable: no arrest records, no trial transcripts, no regional newspapers, no prison files. Every account traces back to a single 1925 dispatch by an American journalist who cited no primary sources. Photographs circulated as Renczi's have been identified as a Russian actress dead since 1910. The Daily Mirror once published a photo of a living Spanish fashion model and called it Renczi, later apologizing unreservedly. Was Vera Renczi a monster, or a myth? The answer, it turns out, is more unsettling than either option alone.

serial killerblack widow
KM
appealedConvictedHistorical

Kimberly Michelle Hricko

Convicted: Kimberly Michelle Hricko

On Valentine's Day 1998, guests at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore laughed through a murder mystery dinner called 'The Bride Who Cried,' a campy audience-participation whodunit where everyone got to play detective. Somewhere in that dining room sat Kimberly Hricko and her husband Steven. By morning, one of them would be dead. Kimberly was a surgical technologist with direct access to succinylcholine, a muscle paralytic that stops breathing and metabolizes so quickly it leaves almost no trace in the body. She had spent months telling friends and coworkers, in precise and specific detail, exactly how she planned to kill her husband: inject him with the drug, set a fire, make it look like a drunken accident. She had even bought the cigars she intended to plant at the scene. When Steven's body was found burned in their hotel bed that night, Kimberly told investigators he must have fallen asleep drunk while smoking. But the autopsy refused to cooperate: no carbon monoxide in his blood, no soot in his airways, no alcohol in his system. Steven Hricko had already stopped breathing before the first flame was lit.

poisoningsuccinylcholine
MH
appealedConvictedHistorical

Masumi Hayashi (林 眞須美)

Convicted: Masumi Hayashi (林 眞須美)

On a sweltering July evening in 1998, residents of a quiet Wakayama neighborhood lined up to ladle curry from a communal pot at their summer festival. Within hours, sixty-seven of them were fighting for their lives. Four never recovered: a local council president, his vice president, a ten-year-old boy, and a sixteen-year-old girl. Investigators would eventually determine the pot contained at least 130 grams of arsenic trioxide — enough poison to kill more than one hundred people. The suspect was a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four who had been seen loitering near the curry pots, alone, for over forty minutes. Before her arrest, a photograph captured her in her garden, smiling, hosing down a crowd of reporters. That image would follow her everywhere. Masumi Hayashi was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death on purely circumstantial evidence: no confession, no confirmed motive, no direct physical evidence. She has maintained her innocence ever since. Now sixty-three years old and still on death row, her case raises a question that haunts Japanese legal scholars: what if the evidence was never enough?

arsenic poisoningmass poisoning
Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano
closedConvictedHistorical

Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano

Convicted: Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano

At 7:08 on the morning of March 30, 1998, a correctional officer at Florida State Prison threw the switch on the electric chair. The woman strapped into it, asked moments earlier if she had any final words, had answered only 'No, sir,' and closed her eyes. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. Her name was Judy Buenoano, and she had spent the previous evening watching a hunting and fishing show, eating chocolates, and reading a Mary Higgins Clark murder mystery. The neatness of that detail feels almost unbearable: a woman convicted of poisoning her husband, her son, and her boyfriend with arsenic, spending her last hours absorbed in fiction about someone else's crime. Prosecutor Russell Edgar had a name for her. He called her the Black Widow, a woman who 'fed off her mates and her young.' The evidence bore him out. Across nearly two decades, Buenoano is believed to have poisoned at least three people and built a life on their insurance payouts. She never confessed. She maintained her innocence to the end, eyes shut, silent in the chair. This is the story of how she got there.

serial killerblack widow
Debra Lynn Baker
closedConvictedHistorical

Debra Lynn Baker

Convicted: Debra Lynn Baker

In June 1990, as Jerry Sternadel lay dying in a Wichita Falls hospital, he did something extraordinary: he told doctors and family members exactly who had killed him. He named two women. One of them, his bookkeeper Debra Lynn Baker, would eventually be convicted of first-degree murder for poisoning him with arsenic administered in his cran-apple juice. The other, his wife Lou-Ann, was never charged. Baker's trial ended on the fourth anniversary of Sternadel's death with a verdict that stunned the courtroom: guilty of murder, sentenced to just ten years' probation and a $10,000 fine. No prison time. Not yet. The case of Debra Baker is a story of loyalty twisted into something lethal, of a privileged life built on a dead man's money, and of a justice system that the victim's own family condemned as a catastrophic failure. His daughter called it a terrible injustice. His first wife wrote a book about it. And Debra Baker, who refused to implicate her best friend even at the cost of a life sentence, walked out of that courtroom a free woman.

arsenic poisoningfemale killer
Daisy Louisa C. de Melker
closedConvictedHistorical

Daisy Louisa C. de Melker

Convicted: Daisy Louisa C. de Melker

Daisy Louisa C. de Melker, commonly known as Daisy de Melker, was a South African nurse accused of poisoning two of her husbands with strychnine to claim their life insurance. However, she was only found guilty of poisoning her only son with arsenic, the reason for which remains unclear. De Melker was the second woman in South African criminal history to be executed.

murderpoisoning
GT
closedAllegedHistorical

Giulia Tofana (also spelled Toffana, Tophana, Tophania; possible true surname: Mangiardi, per modern scholarship)

Alleged Offender: Giulia Tofana (also spelled Toffana, Tophana, Tophania; possible true surname: Mangiardi, per modern scholarship)

A woman stands over a pot of soup, a small vial in her hand. The liquid she has just tipped into the broth is colorless, odorless, invisible. Then something breaks inside her. She pulls the bowl away from her husband and confesses everything. That single moment of conscience, recorded in court testimony from the 1659 Roman poison investigation, may have unraveled one of the most elaborate criminal networks in early modern history. At its center, at least according to legend, stood a Sicilian woman named Giulia Tofana, creator of a poison so perfectly engineered it mimicked natural illness, so cleverly packaged it passed as a devotional product bearing the image of a saint. Traditional accounts credit her with over 600 deaths, mostly husbands of women with nowhere else to turn. But modern scholarship tells a different story entirely: the woman behind the myth may have died quietly in her sleep around 1651, years before the trial that made her famous. Her real surname may not have been Tofana at all. And the network eventually prosecuted by Roman authorities may have been run by someone else. This is the true story of Giulia Tofana: part documented history, part deliberate mythology, and wholly extraordinary.

Giulia TofanaAqua Tofana
Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)
closedAccusedHistorical

Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)

Accused: Ranavalona I (born Rabodonandrianampoinimerina; also known as Ramavo, Ranavalo-Manjaka I, and Ranavalona reniny)

In a single year, 1838, an estimated 100,000 people died by her command, forced to swallow poison from the tangena nut and then prove their innocence by vomiting chicken skin. She ruled Madagascar for thirty-three years, expelled every Christian missionary on the island, mounted the skulls of approximately twenty-one Europeans on pikes along her coastline, and oversaw a population collapse that cut her island's people nearly in half. Her name was Ranavalona I, and for three decades she was the most feared sovereign in the Indian Ocean world. Western contemporaries called her the 'Mad Monarch of Madagascar,' the 'Bloody Mary of Madagascar,' the 'Female Caligula.' Revisionist historians see something else entirely: a pragmatic anti-colonial strategist who kept her island free from European domination at any cost. Both portraits carry weight. Born a commoner around 1778, she seized absolute power through a palace coup, eliminated the legitimate royal heir and his entire family, and never looked back. She died quietly, in her own bed, in her own palace, at approximately eighty-three years of age. France did not colonize Madagascar until 1896, thirty-five years after her death. The full story of her reign is one of blood, genius, and the terrible arithmetic of survival at the height of empire.

Ranavalona IMadagascar
Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)
closedAllegedHistorical

Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)

Alleged Offender: Belle Sorenson Gunness (born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth)

They came to La Porte, Indiana, one by one, with their life savings tucked in their coat pockets and her letters folded in their hands. A warm heart waiting, she had promised. A fine farm. A future. Belle Gunness wrote those letters for years, placing matrimonial advertisements in Norwegian-language newspapers across the Midwest, casting for men who were lonely and solvent and, crucially, willing to tell no one where they were going. When investigators finally dug up her farm in May 1908, they found the answer to where those men had gone: butchered, dismembered, folded into gunny sacks, and buried in shallow graves near the hog pen. More than forty victims lay scattered beneath the Indiana soil. Then the farmhouse burned, a headless torso was found in the ruins, and the question of whether Belle Gunness had died alongside her crimes or simply escaped them has never been definitively answered. One of the most prolific female serial killers in American history, she was never charged with a single murder. This is her story.

serial killerfemale serial killer
Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss
closedConvictedHistorical

Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss

Convicted: Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss

She sat across from Tulsa police Captain Harry Stege in November 1954 and giggled. She giggled when she described stirring rat poison into her husband's coffee. She giggled when she confirmed she had poisoned four of her five husbands. She giggled when the officers pressed her about the grandchildren, the sisters, the mother. The laughter never quite left her face. Nannie Doss was 49 years old, soft-featured, grandmotherly, and by the time she was arraigned on November 29, 1954, the prime suspect in at least eleven deaths spanning four states and nearly three decades. Her weapons were domestic and unremarkable: stewed prunes, corn whiskey, a slice of prune cake, a cup of morning coffee laced with arsenic. Her victims were the people closest to her, the ones who ate at her table and slept in her bed. Investigators called her 'The Giggling Granny.' The press added 'The Black Widow,' 'Lady Bluebeard,' and 'The Lonely Hearts Killer.' Each nickname captured a piece of her; none captured all of her. Because behind the laughter sat something more complicated and more chilling: a woman who had dreamed her whole life of storybook romance, and who killed, methodically and repeatedly, every time reality fell short of the fantasy. This is the story of Nancy Agnes Hazel Doss, born in rural Alabama in 1905 and buried in a prison cemetery in Oklahoma in 1965. In between, she made sure a great many people never made it out alive.

female serial killerblack widow killer
Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan
closedConvictedHistorical

Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan

Convicted: Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan

Between 1911 and 1916, forty-eight elderly residents died inside the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in Windsor, Connecticut. The Jefferson Street Home in Hartford housed seven times as many residents and buried a similar number in the same period. The math was damning. The woman behind those numbers was Amy Archer-Gilligan, known to her congregation as 'Sister Amy,' a woman who donated a stained-glass window to St. Gabriel's Church and whom neighbors described as compassionate and devout. She was also a poisoner of breathtaking audacity. She had purchased more than ten ounces of arsenic from a local drugstore, enough to kill over a hundred people. She had forged a dead man's will. She had taken out life insurance policies on her husbands and encouraged her elderly boarders to name her as their beneficiary. When Connecticut state police exhumed five bodies, every single one tested positive for poison. The case scandalized the nation, inspired one of Broadway's most beloved dark comedies, and forced Connecticut to overhaul its elder care laws entirely. It also left behind questions the courts never fully answered: how many people truly died at Amy's hands, and how long had she been killing? This is the story of Sister Amy.

serial killerfemale serial killer
Locusta
closedConvictedHistorical

Locusta

Convicted: Locusta

Locusta, also known as Lucusta, was a notorious poison maker in the 1st-century Roman Empire. She was active during the final two reigns of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and is believed to have been involved in the assassinations of Claudius and Britannicus. Emperor Nero favored her and had her train other poisoners in his service. After Nero's death, Locusta was executed by his successor, Galba.

poisoningassassination
Laren Renee Sims (alias: Elisa McNabney, also known as Elisa Redelsperger, Elisa Barasch, Shane Ivaroni, and 34+ other aliases — total 38 documented aliases)
closedAccusedHistorical

Laren Renee Sims (alias: Elisa McNabney, also known as Elisa Redelsperger, Elisa Barasch, Shane Ivaroni, and 34+ other aliases — total 38 documented aliases)

Accused: Laren Renee Sims (alias: Elisa McNabney, also known as Elisa Redelsperger, Elisa Barasch, Shane Ivaroni, and 34+ other aliases — total 38 documented aliases)

On Easter Sunday 2002, a jail officer in Brooksville, Florida found a woman dead in her cell. She had braided strips from her pillowcase into a rope and fastened it to an air duct in the ceiling. She was thirty-six years old, and she had been, at various points in her life, at least thirty-eight different people. Her FBI criminal rap sheet ran to one hundred and thirteen pages. Her real name was Laren Renee Sims. Most people knew her as Elisa McNabney, the glamorous, horse-loving wife of Sacramento trial attorney Larry McNabney. In the fall of 2001, she and her twenty-one-year-old legal secretary administered horse tranquilizer to Larry at a show in Los Angeles County, stored his body in a garage refrigerator for three months, buried him in a vineyard, liquidated over $500,000 in assets, and fled across the country in a red Jaguar. She was a former straight-A student with a reported IQ of 140. She was a mother who kept her teenage daughter by her side through the whole gruesome flight. She was a con artist, a forger, and a fugitive. When detectives finally traced her to a Florida beach, she looked up and said simply: "I'm the one you're looking for." This is the story of Laren Renee Sims: a woman who spent thirty years constructing false identities, fell into a marriage that may have saved her and ultimately destroyed her, and chose suicide over a courtroom. It is one of the most bizarre, cold-blooded, and strangely human cases in California criminal history.

poisoninghorse tranquilizer
KM
appealedConvictedContemporary

Kristin Margrethe Rossum

Convicted: Kristin Margrethe Rossum

When paramedics arrived at the San Diego apartment on November 6, 2000, they found Gregory de Villers lying in bed, unresponsive, his body blanketed in red rose petals, a wedding photograph pressed against his chest. His wife, Kristin, stood nearby in tears, telling them he had taken his own life. It looked like a scene from a movie. It was, in fact, staged to look like one. Kristin Rossum, 24 years old and a trained toxicologist with access to the county medical examiner's controlled substance supply, had poisoned her husband with seven times the lethal dose of fentanyl — then arranged his corpse in a tableau lifted from her favorite film, American Beauty. She was sleeping with her married boss, secretly using methamphetamine she stole from her own workplace, and her husband had just threatened to expose everything. The rose petals were the detail that haunted investigators, the detail that made the case famous, and the detail that ultimately helped convict her. This is the story of how a summa cum laude graduate with a drug habit, a secret affair, and a dangerous job became one of California's most notorious poisoners.

fentanyl poisoningAmerican Beauty murder
Dorothea Helen Puente
closedConvictedHistorical

Dorothea Helen Puente

Convicted: Dorothea Helen Puente

On the morning of November 11, 1988, police began digging up the yard of a blue-and-white Victorian boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. By the end of the day, they had found seven bodies. The woman who owned the house, a stout, silver-haired grandmother type named Dorothea Puente, stood nearby in a housecoat and watched. Detectives didn't consider her a suspect yet. They let her walk to a nearby café to get coffee. She never came back. For years, Puente had presented herself to social workers and city officials as a saint: a warm, generous landlady who took in the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless, the people no one else would accept. She cooked elaborate meals and sent tenants to bed with warm milk. She also drugged them, buried them in her yard, and cashed their Social Security checks. Prosecutors would later allege she collected over $87,000 this way, spending some of it on a facelift. The Death House Landlady, as the press called her, was eventually convicted of three murders and died in prison in 2011 at age 82, still insisting she was innocent. The full story of how Dorothea Puente became one of America's most prolific female serial killers is a portrait of survival twisted into something monstrous.

serial killerfemale serial killer