Bloody Elfrida: the trade of an insidious Austrian widow (7 photos)

Age is not a barrier to love. Therefore, no one was surprised by an advertisement in the newspaper from an elderly Austrian woman who wanted to meet a respectable man and become his friend and companion.





At that time, no one could have imagined that Elfriede Blauensteiner would remain in the history of criminology as the “Black Widow.”



She was born in 1931. She lived in Vienna and worked as a nurse in a hospital. After an unsuccessful marriage, Elfrida was left with the child and experienced all the difficulties of life as a single mother.

And then the idea of making money without dust came. A woman got a job as a nurse for an elderly man. Otto Reinl suffered from diabetes. And the nurse was supposed to give him medicine.





Elfrida experimented on the unfortunate man, gradually exceeding the dose of the drug. To make death look natural. In 1991, the woman married again. But she did not remain in the status of a wife for long: 60-year-old Rudolf Blauensteiner died less than a year later, leaving the widow quite wealthy: according to her will, she was given a bank account and two houses.

Elfrida plunged headlong into gambling, methodically squandering her inheritance. The money quickly ran out. And she, with the support of her lawyer friend Harald Schmidt, decided to act according to a proven scheme. Blauensteiner took an advertised job as a nurse and gave her charges a mixture of antidepressants and drugs that lowered blood sugar levels. Schmidt helped draw up wills for property.



In 1992, she received 170 thousand in a will from Franziska Köberl. In 1994 she got married again. 65-year-old Friedrich Döcker died a year later, but his death did not cause suspicion - age, heart problems.

However, the “Black Widow” did not grieve at all. There were still so many lonely wealthy people around. It would be a sin not to take advantage of the chance. Among all the applicants, the widow liked Alois Pilcher more than others, the owner of a house whose cost was about 400 thousand dollars.

The killer acted according to the old scheme: a forged will, a cocktail of drugs, pneumonia, death. But Alois’s relatives suspected that something was wrong with the medical widow, who buried her husbands with enviable regularity.



The nephew, who was to receive the inheritance, initiated legal proceedings and demanded the exhumation of the body. At the trial, Elfrida was simply a star: she shook her crucifix and shouted that she was almost a saint and was simply helping her unfortunate sick husbands.



In the last episode, she was found guilty. After the sentence of life imprisonment, the remains of previous victims were exhumed. And, although this didn’t really affect anything, in 2001 the killer received another life sentence.



Still from the TV series "Mantis"

“Black Widow” died in 2003 from cancer. Her atrocities formed the basis of the Mantis series.