Missouri's Murderous Matrons: Emma Heppermann and Bertha Gifford

By Victoria Cosner and Lorelei Shannon

Two notorious female serial killers from the Show Me State share the spotlight in this true crime history.

At the turn of the twentieth century, people in Missouri experienced unexpected and horrible deaths due to arsenic. Two different women in two different areas of Missouri, and for two different reasons, used arsenic as a means to get what they wanted. Emma Heppermann, a black-widow killer, craved money. Bertha Gifford, an angel of mercy, took sick people into her home and nursed them to death. Follow the trails of these women who murdered for decades before being tried and convicted. From Wentzville to Steelville, Emma left a trail of bodies. And Bertha is suspected of killing almost 10 percent of the population of the little town of Catawissa. Authors Victoria Cosner and Lorelei Shannon offer the gruesome history of Missouri’s murderous matrons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439666289

Book preview

1

Introduction to Two Murderesses

The gods have sent medicines for the venom of serpents, but there is no medicine for a bad woman. She is more noxious than the viper, or than fire itself.

—Euripides

When people think of the Missouri of the past, they often think of bucolic farmlands as far as the eye can see; a landscape of green and gold dotted with charming farmhouses and sparkling ponds. This is the land of Tom Sawyer, where fish await catching in gurgling creeks and winding rivers. Woods and caverns beg to be explored by adventurous children. Men protect and provide for their families, but women are the heartbeat of the household. This is a wholesome place, the heart of small-town America. People were generally seen as being honest in Missouri—open, plain folks who worked the land and looked out for their neighbors.

In early twentieth-century Missouri, small-town America was everywhere. Tucked into hills, hollows and bends in the river were little communities that hummed with life. Main streets, where you could buy groceries and hardware at the general store and catch up on the latest gossip, were busy. Some folks lived in town, some on farms. During the day, farm families would pour in, selling their produce and stocking up on supplies. Townie or farm boy, everybody knew each other in these small Missouri towns, for better or worse. But sometimes, the townspeople did not know someone as well as they thought they did.

Sometimes there were secrets. Some were ordinary secrets—babies born too soon after the wedding, families struggling with debt, the unhinged uncle who always made a scene when he drank too much. But there were darker secrets. People who appeared to their friends and neighbors to be friendly, helpful members of the community. People who were trusted, even loved and relied upon. People whose secrets were more than scandalous; they were dangerous. Deadly.

In two small towns in rural Missouri, towns that appeared to be just like all the others, something was very wrong. People kept dying. The deaths were centered on two women, respectable matrons both. Bad luck and sorrow followed these women wherever they went. Loss was at the center of their lives. So much loss.

Early on the morning of August 25, 1928, fifty-three-year-old housewife Bertha Gifford was arrested at her new home outside of Eureka, Missouri. Bertha had fancied herself to be a nurse for the local community of Catawissa, fifteen miles from Eureka. But she had no medical training and a horrifyingly high mortality rate. Stories had been circulating for some time about the people whom Bertha took to her farmhouse to nurse back to health, about the ones who never got better and left the Gifford house in a pine box, about how many times the coroner wrote acute gastritis on death certificates. As many as seventeen souls in her care never recovered. To put a finer point on it, up to seventeen people in the care of Bertha Gifford died horrible, painful deaths as she watched their every agonized spasm and cry.

Emma Stinnett lived in the small town of Steelville, about fifty-six miles from Bertha Gifford. In 1928, when newspaper accounts of Bertha Gifford’s arrest flooded Missouri, Emma had just gotten started; her husband, Charles, died on July 15, 1925. Emma had bad luck with husbands—they just kept dying on her. She would lose five (six if you count the one who disappeared) of seven husbands in the coming years. Emma also had bad luck with the families of her husbands, who had a habit of falling horribly ill and sometimes dying. Years apart, both of these women would eventually end up at the Union, Missouri courthouse on trial for murder.

Between these two women, they killed more than twenty people. Friends, relatives and neighbors were not safe. Nobody was. Bertha alone killed about 10 percent of the population of her small town of Catawissa for inexplicable reasons that may have amounted to nothing more than her own amusement. Emma used her husbands, mostly hardworking, honest men, as disposable sources of quick cash. But neither Bertha nor Emma was suspected for the longest time. In some ways, the early twentieth century was a more innocent, or at least trusting, time. The evidence of foul play was glaringly obvious by the time Bertha’s and Emma’s neighbors finally started whispering their suspicions.

New Franklin County Courthouse. Courtesy of Franklin County. Author’s collection.

When at last Bertha and Emma were arrested, town elders exchanged knowing looks and nodded solemnly. When poison is involved, they said, it is always a woman who did the crime. (Well, not always. More on that later.)

Poisoning is viewed as a passive, nonviolent method of murder. But domestic poisoning is stunningly cold-blooded and cruel. How hard-hearted must a person be to give that initial dose, watch the victim grow ill and then sit by the bed of their loved one, whispering comfort and spoon feeding them death? What kind of a person spends days, weeks, even months slowly murdering the people who trust them?

Human monsters are rarely frightening to the eye. Photographs and contemporary accounts of Bertha and Emma describe women of an efficient, matronly demeanor. Whatever horrors may have lurked in their hearts, they did not show on their faces. They both wore the facade of respectable women, the kind of sturdy Midwestern matriarchs who were the pillars of their families, the hearts of their households. They were both good cooks. Very good cooks. Bertha was known for her biscuits. Emma made potato soup to die for. But both of them used a special secret ingredient: arsenic.

2

A Brief History of Arsenic

Arsenic has a long and disreputable pedigree;

its very name seems to condemn it as something unspeakable.

—John Emsley

When you hear the word arsenic, what comes to mind? Most people immediately think of murder. The movie Arsenic and Old Lace, perhaps. Powerful medieval families poisoning their enemies, or Victorian layabouts speeding up the process of inheritance... nothing good. Arsenic has been so commonly used for murder over the years that it is known as the King of Poisons. From 1750 to 1914, arsenic was featured in 237 cases that came before the British courts. But arsenic is not just a poison.

Despite the danger, people have been using arsenic for various purposes for thousands of years. Arsenic compounds were mined by the early Chinese, Greek and Egyptian civilizations, which used them in dyes and cosmetics. Pure arsenic is a gray metallic powder found naturally in the earth, air and water. Impurities can lend it a beautiful color. Realgar arsenic is ruby red, orpiment arsenic is a vibrant yellow. Both have been used in cosmetics and dyes in the past. But pure, realgar and orpiment arsenic are not generally used to commit murder.

Arsenic trioxide, also called arsenic oxide, is the fatal compound with the fancy name. According to legend, Albertus Magnus obtained arsenic trioxide in AD 1250 by heating soap together with orpiment. Arsenic trioxide is colorless, odorless and has no taste. It completely dissolves in liquids, making it invisible. A person can die from a single fatal dose of arsenic, but it is a cumulative poison administered in small doses over a long period of time that can cause prolonged suffering before death.

Symptoms of arsenic poisoning include skin sores, swelling of the eyelids and face, burning around the lips, a tightening of the throat and increasing difficulty with swallowing, intense stomach pain, diarrhea, headache, blurred vision and muscle cramping. The higher the dose, the more intense the pain becomes before the victim dies in agony.

Arsenic kills by inhibiting the uptake of sulfhydryl enzymes, a protein group that is essential for the body to function. The victim’s skin, liver, stomach, intestines, kidneys, respiratory system and peripheral nerves are all affected. Major organs start failing. Eventually, the heart or lungs will shut down, and the victim dies.

The symptoms caused by arsenic poisoning are generic enough to have been mistaken for common ailments in the past. It can mimic food poisoning, dysentery, cholera, peritonitis and gastritis. The length of time it takes to kill depends on the victim’s age, size and general health. Some of the more notorious arsenic poisoners of history include:

Pope Alexander VI and his son Cesare Borgia, who poisoned their political enemies in medieval Italy. (Although Cesare’s sister Lucretia has become synonymous with poisoning, she was innocent of her father’s and brother’s crimes.)

Toffana, a seventeenth-century Italian woman who invented and sold a dead-white, arsenic-based face paint called Aqua Toffana. Arsenic-based cosmetics were not uncommon at the time, but Toffana’s makeup came with special instructions for women who wished to use it to get rid of their husbands. Some estimates say Toffana’s wares may have been responsible for up to six hundred poisoning murders.

Mary Ann Cotton, whose three husbands and at least ten children died of gastritis between 1852 and 1872. Eventually hanged for murder, Mary Ann inspired this charming children’s rhyme: Mary Ann Cotton, / Dead and forgotten / She lies in her bed, / With her eyes wide open / Sing, sing, oh, what can I sing, / Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string / Where, where? Up in the air / Sellin’ black puddens a penny a pair.

Mary Archer Gilligan, a nursing home owner who killed anywhere from five to forty-eight people for profit in early twentieth-century Connecticut. Mary Gilligan is rumored to be the inspiration for the play Arsenic and Old Lace.

Nannie Doss, the Giggling Granny who killed husbands and family members alike in the 1920s.

Velma Barfield, a black widow who killed multiple husbands in the 1970s and in 1984 became the first woman in the United States to be executed by lethal injection.

Arsenic was ridiculously easy to obtain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in England and the United States. All one had to do was to walk into a pharmacy and ask for rat poison. People know that arsenic poisonings happened frequently, but the substance was unregulated.

Charles Dickens once wrote in his magazine Household Words:

A thin, respectable-looking man