Gulia Tofana was a gorgeous Italian woman and — perhaps — the most prolific serial killer of all time. If you were stuck in a toxic 17th-century marriage, she was your best bet to escape — but only if you were a woman.
Gulia Tofana just followed the family business
Gulia Tofana was born in Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily, and later settled in Rome. Gulia’s mother was executed for poisoning several men, including Giulia’s father. Her poison was named Aqua Tofana.
And while it would seem unwise to name your “secret” poison with your last name, Gulia had great success evading police — initially. It wasn’t Giulia’s initial aim to go into the family business. But she struggled to make a living through legal means. And the poison enterprise was extremely lucrative.
She traveled from town to town throughout Italy with her young daughter and had no shortage of clients. She eventually settled in downtown Rome.
Why women wanted to kill their husbands
Women were treated as objects even by their own father, who often pawned them off as part of broader business deals. It wasn’t uncommon to marry a daughter off to wealthy criminals. These daughters were beaten, raped and abused, and knew they had no way of leaving the marriage without becoming a social leper.
Keep in mind, that this was the 1600s, a time when most women could only make a living through marriage, joining a convent, or becoming a prostitute. Giulia got her business mostly through referrals — and the women arrived in droves.
Spousal murders were a symptom of a violent era rather than women being murdering psychopaths. Italy was rife with a criminal underground, assassins, alchemists, pimps, and self-proclaimed warlocks. Additionally, constant political assassinations laid the groundwork for a higher tolerance for violence.
For women, killing your husband was your ticket to a better marriage — and freedom. Giulia’s business was so popular that Abbe Gagliani, a famous gambler, said, “There was not a lady in Naples without some of it lying openly among her perfumes. She alone knows the vial, and can distinguish it.”
And though his assertion likely isn’t true in the literal sense, you do wonder how many women were waiting for one more ugly fight from spiking their husband’s evening ale.
But here’s the problem
Because murders were so common, authorities had evolved their means of catching criminals. Improvements in forensics allowed many culprits to brutally punished. Authorities could usually tell if your husband was poisoned through tests and by identifying causal symptoms. Paid assassins could be tortured into ratting you out. Witnesses would come forward for a paid reward.
This is what made Giulia’s method so brilliant
She’d spent years in apothecaries, studying how various chemicals and concoctions were created. She eventually synthesized her special poison, which was a crude mix of arsenic, lead, and the extremely poisonous plant belladonna.
The concoction was stored in a makeup bottle that had Saint Nicholas on the cover, to give the veil of virtue and innocence.
How the murders happened
The poison was typically liquid but could be mixed with powdered makeup, or lotions. Very often, a single drop or two was put into the husband’s food. Giulia taught her clients to spread the doses out and kill the husband in three rounds over one to two weeks.
The first made the husband sick with what appeared to be a fever or cold.
The second made him deathly sick and bedridden, with a doctor coming to visit and usually misdiagnosing him or being confused by the cause. The third dose surely killed the husband.
The chilling thing about this process is that it made absolutely sure the wife wanted her husband dead. She had to follow through, reaffirm her intent, and watch it happen in real-time. But going through with this method left no detectable poison during a post mortem.
It looked as though the husband had died of natural causes. The women got away scot-free — or so they thought. She was caught because of a client Giulia’s business prospered for more than 20 years. She apprenticed her daughter who began helping women poison husbands as well. In 1659, her run would come to an end.
Giulia counseled a young woman on how to poison her husband. This woman had poisoned her husband’s soup for dinner. As her husband sat down to eat, she ran in and yanked the spoon away from him, and began crying. In a fit of guilt, she co nfessed to nearly poisoning him because of her anger.Her husband was stunned and pressed her to figure out how she’d gotten poison.
The hunt for Gulia Tofana begins
Authorities panned out to find her, combing through Rome. A friend told Giulia learned that authorities were looking for her. She fled to a Roman church in the vicinity and begged for protection. They allowed her inside. But when priests learned she’d been poisoning people they turned her over to authorities.
At trial, Giulia admitted that she’d poisoned 600 men across 19 years. She also exposed a number of clients who’d murdered their husbands. In their trials, most played dumb and said they’d only bought the powder thinking it was makeup. The following month, Giulia was executed alongside her daughter while their employees were thrown in prison.
It’s hard to draw a tangible life lesson from such a morbid story. A gallows humor part of me wanted to say, “Don’t piss off your wife.” But as with many stories from darker times, there are no winners here.
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