Image taken from Infoculture.
Would you have thought that such a sweet grandmother could kill a bee, let alone 150 people? She was arrested twice, escaping most charges due to lack of evidence, and is believed to have killed over 150 people.
The most feared murderer in Europe was a grandmother from Serbia, known as Baba Anujka. People from faraway places went to Anujka for medical treatment. She liked to boast that her treatments never failed and that even aristocrats bought her medicines.
What is necessary to mention is that she also offered a very special service. For a hefty sum, Grandma Anujka also prepared a cure to “get rid” of a person who had become annoying. Her victims were always men who passed away unnoticed a few days after taking the medicine, which was actually poison.
Every serial killer has a reason
Grandma Anujka, named Ana Draxin, was born in Romania sometime in 1837 as the daughter of a cattle trader, but since childhood, her family lived in Petrovasâla, in Banat, a place in Serbia.
At the age of 20, she was infected with syphilis by an Austrian soldier, forcing her to remain in isolation for some time, where she studied traditional medicine. At her father’s insistence, she married a 20-year-old landowner, with whom she had 11 children (10 of whom did not live to adulthood).
After her husband’s death, she opened a laboratory and began preparing her own medicines, reports abcnews.al. Grandma Anujka’s most famous cure was a combination of arsenic, mercury, and ethnobotanical seeds, which she said solved all of her clients’ concerns – material or marital.
She always asked her patients how serious the problem was that needed to be solved: with this, she referred to the weight of the person to be killed, so that she could adjust the dosage of the ingredients.
She promised her clients that their “worries” would disappear in 8 days and asked for 5,000 dinars for a bottle of the miracle potion. It is not known exactly how many people Grandma Anujka killed. Many times, the families who asked for her help refused an autopsy so that it would not be understood that it was a case of poisoning.
She managed to be released the first time she was arrested in 1914, but did not have the same fate 14 years later, when, for the first time, the authorities could prove her involvement in the death of a man.
The mistake was that in that case the drink had not been made by Grandma Anujka herself, but by a nurse. Since the cure was not strong enough, the victim managed to speak to a doctor before his death.
“I have never seen poison in my life. I have only prepared medicines, but they were completely harmless,” Baba Anujka told the court.
A woman who admitted to having paid 5,000 dinars for the miracle cure testified before the court. Baba Anujka, at the age of 92, stood up and slapped the witness.
A great fuss was created around the trial, with newspapers from Europe and the United States waiting for all the details. Baba Anujka was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but did not serve the full sentence, being pardoned in 1936 at the age of 100.
Reference
Balkan Academia 