Martha Wise

Martha Wise (née Hasel; April 18, 1883 – June 28, 1971) was an American poisoner and serial killer. After her husband died and her family forced her to end a relationship with a new lover, Wise retaliated by poisoning seventeen family members, of whom three died, in 1924. She was convicted of one of the murders, despite defense claims that she was mentally ill and that her lover had ordered her to poison her family. The case is considered one of the most sensational of the era in Ohio, where it occurred.

Early life Martha Wise was born in 1883 in Hardscrabble, Ohio, to Sophia Elizabeth Gienke and her husband Wilhelm Carl Hasel, both of whom were farmers. Three brothers and a sister were also born to the family, In 1906, Martha met the substantially older Albert Wise at a box social;

The marriage was not happy. Martha moved onto Albert's farm, but quickly discovered that he expected a farmhand more than a wife, and life was no less poor as a married woman than it had been when she lived with her parents. Even when pregnant, she was forced to do farm work that was generally male-oriented (such as plowing fields Four of the Gienke children were left partially paralyzed from the mysterious illness.

Investigation It was the devil who told me to do it. He came to me while I was in the kitchen baking bread. He came to me while I was working in the fields. He followed me everywhere. — Martha Wise The sheriff of Medina County, Ohio, Fred Roshon, soon discovered that Martha had signed at a local drug store for a series of purchases of large quantities of arsenic. An autopsy on Lily confirmed the presence of arsenic in her digestive tract. Brought in for questioning by the sheriff on March 19, 1925, Martha at first claimed she had obtained the arsenic to kill rats, but eventually confessed that she had used it to poison family members by putting it in water buckets and coffee pots the family drank out of. She told the grand jury that she was irresistibly attracted to attending funerals, and that when there were not enough funerals in the community, she was driven to create them by killing. Martha was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder on April 7, 1925.

Martha's trial for murder began on May 4, 1925. and that she was ordered to commit the murders by her former lover, Walter Johns. A number of setbacks plagued the defense, including the May 6 suicide of Martha's sister-in-law, Edith Hasel, and the subsequent collapse of her husband Fred Hasel, both of whom had been prepared to testify for the defense; the recantation of testimony by a man named Frank Metzger, who told the prosecution on cross-examination that the defense had asked him to perjure himself to support claims that Martha was insane; and her choice to take the stand on her own behalf.