Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (2 page)

It was a disaster from the start. Her husband spent all of his time away from home - when he was there he was downing cheap wine by the bottle. Anna was left alone to read the heavily dramatised and often woeful novels and plays of the day. She gave birth to two children - and one of them, her daughter, would spend time in prison as an adult for swindling and theft.

Anna herself was given to periods of increasing melancholy and twice attempted to take her own life. Psychologists say that most people who attempt
suicide
really want to kill someone else, in Anna’s case probably her penurious husband or a relative who had abused her. But for now her aggression was simply turned in on herself.

When her suicide attempts failed, Anna regrouped her defences and searched for a means to survive. Her husband kept spending all of the family purse and
begging
her not to leave him, so she took to prostitution to support her brood. At this time she was still an
attractive
woman who looked and sounded genteel. It was important to her to maintain a sense of status so she only slept with refined gentlemen and maintained an air of discretion. Anna was one of the successful
upmarket
escort girls of her day.

When she was thirty-three, her husband died
leaving
her even more penniless. She had various jobs and
at one stage gave birth to an illegitimate child which died in a children’s home. Increasingly unstable, she began to drift from one housekeeping and cooking job to the next. She became pregnant by another man who then left her. She had a miscarriage and thereafter attempted to drown herself. Her later life took on the pattern of men either ignoring her or leaving her and she flickered from one delusional relationship to
another
, as fragile as a candle in the wind.

Eventually at age forty-four Anna got a job as a
domestic
in Weimar but she ran off with one of her employer’s diamond rings, presumably an attempt to find financial refuge in a world that offered no social security. She then went to live with her grown up daughter and
son-in-law
. But her employer advertised her theft in the local paper, destroying any good name that Anna might have clung on to, and when the son-in-law saw the advert he threw her out.

Anna now determined to find herself a second
husband
who could offer her some stability. When a Bavarian judge, who was separated from his wife, took her on as a housekeeper/cook, she saw him as a
potential
candidate. Anna tempted the wife back into the marital home then duly poisoned her by putting large
doses of arsenic - which was widely available at the time - into her drinks. Arsenic is a particularly cruel poison whose symptoms include severe stomach inflammation, vomiting, bloody diarrhoea and extreme weakness, occasionally including temporarily
paralysis
. The later stages can include convulsions and coma. Poor Mrs Glaser died within three days, suffering an agonizing death.

Many of the Glaser’s guests also suffered from
stomach
complaints after eating Anna’s meals. When the newly widowed Judge Glaser still showed no sexual interest in her and expressed concern at how ill his
dinner
guests were becoming, she left his employ and became the housekeeper of another legal professional instead.

But this new employer, Judge Grohmann, already had a fiancee and had no intention of replacing her with the thin and sallow Anna. Rebuffed again, the woman put arsenic in his tea. He too died in terrible pain but as he had suffered from gout his death was put down to natural causes and Anna was free to kill again. More sympathetic sources suggest that Anna genuinely liked Grohmann and believed the arsenic would help cure his illness, for it was used in small amounts for medicinal purposes. Other sources say that she killed him out of jealousy after his marriage banns were read out.

The latter is more likely, for poisoners seem to
become addicted very quickly to their cruel powders, and she would later refer to arsenic as her truest friend. It’s also true that the poisoner takes a childish glee in administering her toxic substances and controlling the outcome. It would have pleased Anna to know that Grohmann would never live to consummate the
marriage
with his young fiancee. Criminologists believe that there is a psycho-sexual motive behind many
poisonings
, and it may well have aroused the
reluctantly-celibate
Anna to watch the man writhing in agony.

Her next choice of employer was a magistrate, Gebhard. It’s known that serial killers are often drawn to police and legal circles - Ted Bundy studied law, Ken Bianchi frequented police hangouts and pretended to be a policeman, Tim. Harris was a state trooper who carried out his fantasies of hanging women and Dennis Nilsen was a probationary policeman for almost a year. Female serial killers also share this interest. Karla Homolka,
profiled
later, wanted to be a detective and Myra Hindley, also profiled, actually applied to join the police.

Magistrate Gebhard wanted a nurse as his sick wife had just given birth. Anna again believed that the
magistrate
wanted a sexual relationship with her so she killed his wife with her beloved arsenic. As Mrs Gebhard’s health failed, she accused the new nurse of poisoning her, stating that her food tasted strange. Sadly no one believed her and she too died in terrible pain.

Once again Anna waited for signs of desire from her
newly widowed employer - and once again she was disappointed. Now she went into an arsenic-fuelled frenzy, poisoning anyone who visited the Gebhard’s household. She also poisoned Gebhard’s servants who all disliked her and when she was questioned about the pain that everyone was in she said that she must have over-spiced the meals. When Gebhard found a white silt at the bottom of his brandy glass he asked her to leave, little realising the revenge she would exact.

Going to the kitchen, she put large amounts of arsenic in the coffee, salt and sugar jars. (Some sources say that she just poisoned the salt - but the salient fact is that she poisoned a foodstuff she knew would be used daily by everyone in the household.) She also gave the baby a sweet or a biscuit as she left the house and it too became violently ill.

Realising that a mass poisoning had taken place, the magistrate had the kitchen ingredients tested and white arsenic was found, a substance that is conveniently almost tasteless. The law now wanted to talk to Anna Zwanziger but the cook from hell had disappeared…

For the next few weeks the murderess travelled around seeking a place to live and work. Her son-in-law, now separated from his wife, refused to accommodate
her and she moved back to Nuremberg. In October 1809 she was arrested there with a packet of arsenic in her pocket. Still she continued to deny everything, even trying to blame Judge Glaser for his own wife’s death. She - like many of the other female killers featured in this book - was a plausible witness, able to answer all of the prosecutions questions convincingly. The trial dragged on for months.

Then the police exhumed the bodies of Fran Glaser and Judge Grohmann and found arsenic in their
systems
. (If arsenic has been used over some time it remains in parts of the victim’s body, including the hair and fingernails.) Anna then screamed out in court that she had killed them all and would have killed more if given the chance. When asked how she could cause such suffering to her acquaintances, she said that she couldn’t bear to look at their healthy, happy faces and wanted to see them writhe in pain. She added that if undetected she would have gone on poisoning men, women and children indiscriminately for many years, that she had a compulsion to kill. It was the law’s turn to take a life and she was beheaded by the sword in 1811.

Anna Zwanziger doesn’t qualify as a Black Widow style of killer because Black Widows mainly kill people
with whom they have a strong personal relationship. Conversely, Anna deliberately poisoned many strangers who came to dine at her employer’s house.

She at first fits into the Profit typology, in that she hoped to profit from a first wife’s death by becoming the second wife.

Later, she moved into the Revenge category, injuring or killing those who refused to become sexually
intimate
with her or who simply enjoyed a zest for life that she herself now lacked. Her motivation seems similar to that of the spree killer who decides that he hates life but will injure and annihilate as many others as
possible
before he shoots himself. The only thing that
distinguishes
her from other Revenge Killers is that they usually claim their first victim in their twenties whereas Anna was twice as old.

Was she a Question Of Sanity case as some
criminologists
suggest? It seems doubtful. After all, she took care to hide her poison in substances where it wouldn’t be detected. She left the area after poisoning the salt canister. And when brought to trial she denied the crimes for six whole months, only admitting to them when incontrovertible evidence was found in the
bodies
. (She might not have known that such forensic tests were possible as the method had only been perfected four years before.)

When she at last admitted some of the poisonings - she was tried for the deaths of two women and a child - Anna
was quite clear about her motives. She had hated the health and happiness of those around her, which contrasted starkly with her own faded looks. Misery likes company and Anna set about making everyone around her as miserable as she possibly could.

Anna Zwanziger was dealt a bad hand in life, losing her mother and father and then being passed around like a parcel between her indifferent relatives. Her route from educated teenager to young prostitute to menial housekeeper understandably engendered further
distress
and bitterness. But she lost the sympathy that she was entitled to when she turned that rage on innocent bystanders and made them die early and agonising deaths.

2 Lost in France

The dissolute life of Jeanne Weber

Jeanne was born in 1875 into a large impoverished family with the surname of Moulinet. Home was an
overcrowded
dwelling in a small fishing village in Northern France. Jeanne was plain, something which doubtless added to her childhood misery and she had no especial talents other than a native cunning and an innate acting ability.

Astrologers would later note that there was a
complete
absence of water in her birth chart, supposedly making her much harder and more ruthless than women born under a more balanced sign - but it’s more likely that the childhood struggle for food, clothing and affection is what made Jeanne hard.

Waterless signs apparently also find it easier to cut themselves off from their families, something that the teenage Jeanne certainly did. As soon as she turned fourteen she moved to the capital, Paris, hoping to gain her independence and to find work.

In Paris, Jeanne drifted from job to job, each of them menial. She did this for four years, until she met an
equally unhappy alcoholic called Weber. Soon she married him and started joining him in drinking large amounts of the local cheap red wine. Weber, a Parisian, had few prospects and even fewer ambitions, but Jeanne was glad to have him as she knew that she was a
physically
unattractive woman who held limited appeal for men.

The couple set up home in a tenement slum in the Passage de la Goutte d’Or in Montmartre. There Jeanne gave birth to three children. But two of them died whilst still babies, giving her a further excuse to down bottles of cheap drink. (She would eventually be
suspected
of killing both these children - only her son Marcel would live to age seven before she took his little life.)

Soon the persuasive Jeanne was babysitting for two children called Lucie Alexandre and Marcel Poyatos. Outwardly she looked like the ideal babysitter, always enquiring after her charges health. Yet both infants died suddenly in her care.

Meanwhile, her three brothers-in-law and their wives all lived in the same Montmartre passageway, for she had married into a family as large as the one she’d been born into. Her young relatives would provide
perfect
victims for her increasingly bloodthirsty bent.

In March 1905 she agreed to babysit for her eighteen-month-old niece Georgette and two-year-old niece Suzanne whilst their mother went out to do the
laundry. Shortly afterwards, a neighbour passing the door heard choking noises and hurried to alert Georgette’s mother that her baby was ill. Madame Pierre raced home to find Jeanne massaging little Georgette’s chest whilst the child lay on the bed. The little girl had a
blue-tinged
pallor, foam around her mouth and a tell-tale red mark on her neck.

Madame Pierre tended to the child and she quickly recovered. The woman then returned to her laundering - and when she came home she found the baby dead. No one suspected the distraught Jeanne Weber for a moment so nine days later she was asked to babysit the luckless survivor Suzanne. A few hours later the
parents
returned to find her dying in circumstances remarkably similar to those of her sibling. The doctor found the devastated Jeanne entirely plausible and put both cases down to convulsions. Jeanne carried on with her babysitting tasks.