Elfriede Blauensteiner

Elfriede Martha Blauensteiner (22 January 1931 – 16 November 2003), dubbed The Black Widow, was an Austrian serial killer who murdered at least three victims by poison. In each case, she inherited the victim's possessions.

Crimes

Blauensteiner was a compulsive gambler who sought out wealthy, elderly men through newspaper personal advertisements, took them into her care, and had her lawyer falsify their wills before poisoning them to inherit their estates. She gambled away the proceeds in casinos, losing 15 million schilling at one casino alone. She killed using the diabetes drug Euglucon in combination with an antidepressant, inducing fatal hypoglycemia. Investigators noted that she became practiced enough to predict when a victim would die, summoning emergency services only when death was imminent. Her former lawyer Harald Schmidt was jailed for seven years for being an accomplice to grievous bodily harm and for forging the will of Alois Pichler.

After serving less than seven years of her life sentence, Blauensteiner died from a brain tumour on 16 November 2003, in a Vienna hospital. She was cremated at Feuerhalle Simmering, where her ashes were also buried.