Many serial killers have left their imprint on history. They all have distinct qualities and stories to tell. However, Baba Anujka’s narrative is a little different. Because she is the world’s oldest female serial murderer. So let’s go through Baba Anujka’s narrative together.
The world’s oldest serial murderer, Baba Anujka, is also known as the Witch of Banat or the Witch of Vladimirovac. Baba Anujka was a convicted killer from the Yugoslav town of Vladimirovac. She was a successful amateur chemist called Ana di Pitonja. A lady who poisoned at least 50 people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and perhaps 150 at most.
Human adversary
Because documents are fragmentary, nothing is known about Anujka’s childhood. According to some historians, she was born in 1838 in an affluent Romanian neighborhood and relocated to Vladimirovac in the Austrian Empire’s Banat Military Frontier region in 1849. He claimed, however, to have been born in 1836. In Panevo, he attended a private school. He grew up with the children of wealthy families before moving into his father’s house.
Anujka set up her laboratory in a wing of her house after her husband’s death and gained a reputation as a healer and herbalist in the late 19th century. She is said to have been popular with farmers’ wives seeking help for their health problems and earned a respectable income that allowed her to live comfortably. He produced medicines and concoctions to make soldiers sick enough to avoid conscription, and sold poisonous concoctions he called ‘magic water’ or ‘love potions’. He sold the so-called ‘magic water’ to women whose husbands behaved very badly. The women would give it to their husbands, who would usually die after eight days.
‘Love potion’
Anujka’s ‘love potion’ contained small amounts of arsenic and some plant toxins that were difficult to detect. When told of a marital problem, Anujka would ask her client, “How severe is this problem?”, which meant, “What is the body mass of the victim?”. Anyway, she could then calculate the required dosage. Anujka’s victims were usually, you guessed it, men, and they were usually young and healthy. Her clients claimed in her lawsuit that they did not know that her ‘magic water’ contained poison, but that they believed they had some kind of supernatural power to kill people using magic. But it is a fact that Anujka’s potions have killed between 50 and 150 people.
The woman made it so big that in the 1920s Anujka had her own ‘sales representative’ whose job was to find potential customers and take them to Anujka’s house. The woman has officially taken on the mission of aunts who chase gossip in the neighborhood, find out who has what problem and say, “Sister, there is a fortune teller, let’s go there”. The price of Anujka’s “magic water” fluctuated between 2,000 and 10,000 Yugoslav dinars.
As every career has its downfall, Anujka’s downfall came thanks to one of her regular customers, a woman named Stana Momirov, who had once killed her husband with one of Anujka’s love potions and often bought herbal remedies from her. When this woman remarried and a wealthy relative of her new husband died under similar circumstances, Anujka was suspected, arrested and interrogated. This linked Anujka to two murders.
About a year later, a second death occurred after Anujka sold a potion to a woman to kill her husband’s father. After the man’s 16-year-old grandson was tricked into giving the poison, he fell ill and died. About 18 months later, Anujka was arrested along with six others involved in the two murders. The other defendants blamed her, claiming that they never knew the potions were poisoned and that they believed the deaths were caused by Anujka’s supernatural powers. I’d like to say a few words to the judge who ate this, but you know you don’t speak ill of the dead. Anyway, in the end, Anujka was sentenced to 15 years in prison for her role in the two murders. And what happened to Baba Anujka, he was released after serving eight years on compassionate grounds because he was too old. He died in 1938 in his house in Vladimirovac at the age of 100.
