September 9, 1839 - Maria Swanenburg
Her community reputation — warm, helpful, trusted with the sick and the elderly — was precisely what made her so dangerous for so long. Operating in Leiden over roughly three years, she used arsenic to poison more than a hundred people, killing at least twenty-seven, with financial gain through insurance payouts and inheritance as her consistent motive. The gap between her confirmed convictions and the full suspected scale of her crimes reflects both the difficulty of detection in the era and the cover her social role provided.
From Wikipedia
Maria Catherina van der Linden-Swanenburg (9 September 1839 – 11 April 1915) was a Dutch serial killer who murdered at least 27 people and was suspected of killing more than 90 people.
Early life
Maria Swanenburg was the daughter of Clemens Swanenburg and Johanna Dingjan. After Swanenburg's first two daughters died at a young age, she married Johannes van der Linden on 13 May 1868. The result of this marriage was five sons and two daughters. The marriage lasted until 29 January 1886.
Her nickname was "Goeie Mie" ("Good Mie"), bestowed because of her amiable, neighbourly assistance with babysitting and taking care of the poor, sick, and elderly in Leiden, where she herself lived.
Murders
Her first victim was her mother Johanna, in 1880; not long thereafter, she poisoned her father, Clemens.
It was established with certainty that Swanenburg poisoned at least 102 people with arsenic between 1880 and 1883. Twenty-seven of her victims died, of whom 16 were her relatives. The investigation included more than 90 suspicious deaths. 45 survivors sustained chronic health issues after having ingested the poison.
Swanenburg's motive was the payout of her victims' insurance or their inheritance. She had secured most of the insurance policies herself.
Capture and imprisonment
Swanenburg was caught after she poisoned the Frankhuizen family in December 1883. Her trial began on 23 April 1885. Swanenburg was found guilty of having killed at least three victims, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment in a correctional facility, where she died in 1915.
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