This was in 1808, when Glaser was residing at Pegnitz in Upper Franconia, but was living apart from his wife. Anna Schonleben (for she seldom seems to have taken her husband's name), having her own ends in view, adopting the rôle of friendship, effected a reconciliation between Glaser and his wife, who returned to his home, and within a month after was seized by a sudden and mysterious illness, of which she died in the greatest agony.
As there was no appearance of Glaser wishing her to take the place of the deceased, Anna quitted his service for that of the Herr Justiz-Amptmann Grohmann, who was unmarried and only in his thirty-eighth year. He was in delicate health; thus she had every opportunity for studying to please him, by care, attention, and an affectionate regard for his comforts; but age was against her; her apparently unremitting attention won her no favour from Herr Grohmann, who received all his medicines from her own hands, and among them some dose, suggested by revenge, as he died on the 8th of May, 1809, "his disease being accompanied by violent internal pains of the stomach, dryness of the skin, erbrechen," &c.
She acted her part so well, she appeared so inconsolable for his loss, and won among his friends a character so high and valuable as a careful and gentle sick-nurse, that she was almost immediately received into the household of the Kammer-Amptmann Gebhard, in that capacity. On the 13th of May, only five days after the death of Grohmann, Madame Gebhard was delivered of a baby. Both mother and child were doing well till the 16th, when the former was seized with precisely the same symptoms before named, and after seven days of agony—during which she frequently asserted that she had been poisoned—she expired.
The funeral over, the widower found himself unable to manage his household and family, and not unnaturally thought he could not do better than retain in his service, for that purpose, Anna Schonleben, who had nursed his wife, as she had done his deceased friend, in their last hours; so she remained in his house invested with all the authority of haushalterin, though some of his friends hinted at the inexpediency of having as an inmate one whom some fatality seemed to attend.
Gebhard laughed at this as superstitious; but there was one friend, in particular, who recurred to this matter again and again so pertinaciously—though upon what grounds he never precisely explained—that he came to the resolution of acting upon his advice, and to Anna he broke the subject of her impending dismissal, but as gently as possible, for she had acquired a certain ascendancy over him.
She merely expressed her surprise and regret, and the subsequent day was fixed for her departure to Bayreuth; but prior to that event she resolved on a terrible revenge. She arranged all the rooms as usual, and filled the salzfasten in the kitchen, saying the while, that "it was always the custom for those who left to fill it with salt for those who came in their place;" and when the droski for her conveyance came to the door, she took in her arms the infant child of Gebhard—the infant whose mother she had poisoned, and which was now five months old—and while feigning to caress it, she placed between "its boneless gums" a soft biscuit soaked in milk.
Then she drove away, but she had not been gone an hour, when the child and every servant in the house became seized with spasms, pains, and violent sickness. In this instance none, however, died; but Gebhard, recalling the advice of his friend, now became full of alarm and suspicion. The salzfasten, which Anna Schonleben had been seen so fussily to fill, was examined, and a great quantity of arsenic was found to be mixed with the salt. The barrel from which the latter was taken was also submitted to chemical analysis, and arsenic was found therein.
It now came suddenly to the knowledge or memory of the simple and confiding Kammer-Amptmann, that on one occasion, in the August of 1809, two gentlemen who had dined with him, were seized by the same symptoms as his servants ere the cloth was well off the table; that one of the servants, named Barbara Waldmann, with whom she had frequent quarrels, was seized in the same fashion after taking a cup of coffee from her hands; that she had once offered a lad named Johann Kraus a glass of brandy in the cellar, which he declined on seeing something white permeating through it; that on another occasion, the deliverer of a message to whom she had given a glass of white Rosenhourr, was sick and ill for days after, barely escaping death; and, though last not least, Herr Gebhard remembered that on the occasion of a dinner party, given on the 1st of September, after partaking of the wine which she brought from the cellar, he and all his guests, five in number, were seized by the usual spasms and sickness.
Gebhard and others were astonished now, that the series of sudden deaths and violent illnesses occurring to all who took anything from the hand of the woman Schonleben, had not excited their suspicions before. The bodies of those who had died were quietly exhumed; the contents of the stomach of each were subjected to chemical analysis, and the conclusion come to was that two of them at least had been poisoned by arsenic; and reports were drawn up and depositions made, while the culprit, all unaware of the Nemesis that was about to overtake her, was living at Bayreuth, from whence she had the hardihood to write to the Kammer-Amptmann more than one letter, in which she bitterly reproached him for his base ingratitude in dismissing from his service one who had been as a mother to his motherless child.
It is supposed that the object of these epistles was to procure her reinstatement in his household, but on the 19th of October, to her consternation, she was suddenly arrested, and on being searched, three packets of poison—two being arsenic—were found upon her person. After being brought to trial, she protested her innocence, and acted with singular obstinacy and ingenuity combined, till the 16th of April, 1810, when she fairly broke down, and admitted having murdered Madame Glaser by two doses of poison; but the moment the confession left her lips, according to Feuerbach, she fell as if struck by a thunderbolt, and in strong convulsions was removed to her dungeon, under sentence of death.