The Friendly Woman That Murdered a Cat and Close To 100 People
Here’s the chilling part…in her circumstances, you might be a serial killer, too
That friendly neighbour you can always count on to watch your kids or bring over a pan of soup when you’re sick, couldn’t be a serial killer, right? You know her! Sure, the body count in the hood keeps rising, but she would never hurt a fly: surely there must be some sort of mistake?
Such was the general sentiment in a small town in The Netherlands when in 1883 everyone’s favourite neighbour was arrested. She was a well-liked and trusted character in the quarter, and you would often see her on her way to this house or that, her bonnet with a ruffled border properly ironed and framing her wrinkled face. Everyone knew her as ‘Goeie Mie’, which translates to ‘Good Mary’.
Nope. No mistake.
That love soon made way for shock, followed by anger and grief: as it turned out, she had single-handedly murdered nearly 100 of her neighbours. And a cat. In plain daylight, right under their very noses, all while appearing as caring and friendly. It’s like watching The Good Nurse a century early.
Oh, and did I mention the insurance fraud? Yeah, there was that, too.
So how did it get to all this?
Mie’s world, you could say, was the dark side of the 19th century. A period of technological advance for sure, but also of poverty and pollution, of class inequality and rampant disease. Life in Leiden, where she was born, wasn’t easy. It might have been the place where Rembrandt was born and raised, but that was centuries ago and in a better part of town. The many stunning 19th century store facades that grace the city today are the result of profits made by a few — let me tell you, the rest of town led a grim life.
Like so many others, Mie, whose full name (that no one used except for the vicar and the judges she would encounter later in her life) was Maria Catharina Swanenburg, was one of many kids in a poor household. The family ended up in even greater poverty when they no longer could pay the rent on their house, and had to move to one of Leiden’s poorest quarters. Here, houses were small and packed with people. The streets were littered with dung, trash and rats scurrying about. Laundry would hang to dry outside on the streets: inside it was damp, dark, cold, and like I said, packed.
Mie married late: she was already 28 when she became the wife of a blacksmith. Now around the time she got married, cholera ravaged the poorer quarters of the city. Maps from that time show the deaths per quarter in town: it’s easy to spot where the poorer areas were, just by looking at the number of deaths. Imagine a town with open sewers, pig stables and dung heaps scattered around: just close your eyes and think of that stink! The total lack of hygiene, combined with the overcrowded rooms in which people lived alongside rats, mice and flees provided the perfect setting for several cholera epidemics to rage on unfettered. It killed two of their children at a very young age. In her grief, Mie took to the bottle.
Death as a business model
But with so many deaths occurring on a regular basis, Mie also began to see a way to earn herself a little extra income. Her townsfolk wished to be buried properly, but those costs were high: even in death, class inequality determined where you would end up buried. Enter a solution: a funeral insurance. Pay a little each month, and upon your demise, the insurance company would pay out the necessary funds.
But get this: in the 19th century, you could take out an insurance policy on someone else — and you could do so in secret. Yes, read that again, take your time…so with this insurance, all you had to do is wait for the insured to drop dead to collect your cash.
Or, you could help speed that process along.
Arsenic killed the cat — and everyone else
And that is what Mie did. Around 1877, she started to take out insurance policies and kill off her neighbours. Like so many serial killers, she started small: a baker’s wife here, a milkmaid there…It was too easy, actually: she was the one you would call to babysit your children for a few hours, but after a few weeks, they would be dead. Everyone trusted her. Mie used arsenic to mix through milk and other liquids. Like that pan of hearthy broth she would put in front of you, beaming with kindness and tut-tutting while scooping some more into your bowl.
The thing is that in her day and age, arsenic was chillingly simple to obtain.
Arsenic was readily available against vermin, and no one would think twice if you were a regular customer. Especially in the area where Mie lived, this raised no suspicions: everyone knew this was a rat-infested corner of town. Besides, she spread her purchases over several drugstores to avoid arousing suspicion. Over the course of months, more and more people died. Her sister-in-law. Her cousin. Another cousin. Complete families, kids and all.
But unbelieveably, even when a cat drank from poisoned milk destined for a little girl and dropped dead…still no one noticed Mie was in the centre of the body count.
That changed when one day a member of a family she had poisoned, actually did not die. The survivor recalled how the broth that Mie had so kindly brought over, had tasted….not quite right. When brought in for questioning, Mie was carrying the insurance policy for the family on her person — not a good look. And that’s when the pieces started to come together. Bodies were exhumed and examined, and Mie was convicted for 23 murders that could be proven — and remained a suspect in at least 90 cases.
Could it be you?
What drove a 19th century woman to commit mass murder? Did the cocktail of insurance fraud, the ready availability of arsenic, combined with an already high number of natural deaths, present an irresistible way to escape the deplorable circumstances in which so many lived? Or was it the other way around — did these circumstances provide the perfect cover for a person with mental problems? Mie’s story paints a dreary picture of a world where poverty and death are inescapable. She did collect the payout of her insurances, but still did not manage to build a better life for herself elsewhere. It had been suggested killing for her may have started as a way to escape poverty, but soon turned into an addiction — the only thing she had absolute control over, were other peoples’ lives.
Much like we saw in the pandemic of our century, people mistrusted actual doctors — they were too expensive, spoke an incomprehensible language, and did not want to come to these darker parts of town anyway. The ‘Goeie Mie’-case attracted attention throughout Europe, and was one of the factors to change legislation for drug stores — clearly arsenic and other toxic substances should not so easily be available.
In the end, her story is more than just a chilling story of one of the world’s most unknown female serial killers. It’s the story of a string of choices we could all make, if faced with the wrong conditions.
References
The Leiden cholera maps of the 19th century can be accessed here.
S. Glasbergen, Goeie Mie — Biografie van een seriemoordenares. Primavera Pers, Leiden, 2019
