Anna Margaretha Zwanziger

Anna Margaretha Zwanziger (née Schönleben ; * August 7, 1760 in Nuremberg ; † September 17, 1811 in Kulmbach ) was a German serial killer .

Life

Anna Zwanziger's husband, a notary , died in 1796 of complications from his alcoholism and left her penniless. In 1808, in order to be able to feed her two children, she took a job as a housekeeper for a clerk named Glaser. On August 26, 1808 , she poisoned the landlady with arsenic . Nobody suspected. The motive for the act is assumed that the housekeeper hoped to marry her employer and take the place of the murdered landlady. However, this plan failed, so she preferred to change jobs.

Her next employer was also a clerk named Grohmann. The bachelor tended to be ailing anyway, but died on May 8, 1809 after a brief and severe illness that showed all signs of arsenic poisoning. Shortly before, his plans to marry another woman had become known, although Zwanziger had hoped for a marriage with the employer this time as well. Again, no suspicion fell on her, although she had previously publicly expressed her affection.

With her next employer, the judge Gebhard, his wife died on May 20, 1809 in childbed . Before she died, she suspected she had been poisoned. Gebhard himself as well as numerous visitors and servants, a total of ten people, fell ill. Then Zwanziger received the notice.

But it was only when two maids and the youngest child in the family fell ill that the food was analyzed in a pharmacy . Large amounts of arsenic were found in the salt stores. This ultimately led to the exhumation of the previous victims, all of whom could already be recognized as arsenic victims by external signs: the corpses had an unusually low degree of decomposition, the bodies had hardened like mummies .

In October 1809 she was arrested on urgent grounds of suspicion. When she was arrested, Anna Margaretha Zwanziger had three packages of poison with her: two packages with "Mückenstein" ( arsenic ) and one with arsenic .

The trial took place on April 16, 1810, in which she finally admitted that she had administered poison. She claimed that she had no intent to kill. Her death sentence was passed in July 1811 and she was beheaded on September 17, 1811 .

literature

• Baierische National-Zeitung 1811: News of the execution of the death penalty on September 23 , p. 920; Text of the death sentence in Supplement No. 33 of 7 October.
• Peter Murakami, Julia Murakami: Lexicon of serial killers. 450 case studies of a pathological type of killing ; Munich: Ullstein, 2001 ⁷ ; ISBN 3-548-35935-3 (source, unless otherwise stated)
• Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach: Actual representation of strange crimes, Volume 1, Giessen 1828, p. 1 .
• Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach: Everyday Life in Old Bavaria. The cheeky-sexy reports by the old knight von Feuerbach from Bavaria from 1730-1830. Introduced, selected and retold by Gerold Schmidt ; Norderstedt: Books On Demand, 2006; ISBN 978-3-8334-6060-9 . Review: Wilfried Küper, in: Goltdammer's Archiv für Strafrecht 155 (2008), pp. 584–586.

Web links

• The poisoner Anna Zwanziger