FULL TEXT: BERLIN, Aug. 26. — A new “woman Bluebeard,” who, it is charged, maintained a regular “man trap” to which she lured victims through an extensive marriage advertisement campaign and then killed them in order to inherit their possessions, has been arrested by Berlin police. Police Commissioner Trettin, who has charge of the investigation, asserts that the evidence against her is so overwhelming and her denials so conflicting that he expects a complete confession in a short time.
The formal charge against her is that she murdered three husbands. Her name is Marie Krueger. She is 55 and lived at Hammer, a small town near Berlin. According to Trettin, her victims were old but wealthy men on whom she exerted a fatal fascination in spite of her age. Rendering them willing tools in her hands, she soon separated them from their relatives, induced them to change their wills in her favor, and then murdered them.
Her first victim, according to the police, was her own foster father, whom she married after the death of her foster mother. Her career, although she is, the owner of a palatial villa, has been traced by the police to the darkest recesses of the underworld. It is the study of the untrammeled play of her one dominating passion—greed.
~ On Way to Church ~
In her answers to the police she was sometimes very cynical. When she was arrested she was “on her way to church.”
Born as a “love child” she knew poverty in her youth until she was adopted by wealthy foster parents named Deckel at Sonnenburg. When she was 18 she ran away from home and started a reckless career at Hamburg.
At Hamburg she was soon able to buy a hotel which became one of the most notorious of the busy harbor town. When her foster mother died, however, she returned home and married her foster mother. But she continued there her reckless life.
Inhabitants recall the wild orgies at her home with soldiers quartered there during the war to whom she was known as “Aunt Mary.” Her husband died within a few months and she became his sole heir.
[“Lady Bluebird Is Arrested in Murder Charge,” The Evening Independent (Massilon, Oh.), Aug. 26, 1924, p. 2]
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For links to other cases of woman who murdered 2 or more husbands (or paramours), see Black Widow Serial Killers.
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More Lonely Hears Rackets
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