Sweet Baba

Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want, for a little bonus content and conversation. Not again, no, not another night of his raging, his drunken bellowing, his hot breath in her face, the stink of rickiza betraying where he's been. What is it this time, she thinks frantically, what did I do?

She ducks, his fist colliding instead with the wall, his other hand grabbing a fistful of her hair and yanking her backward. No, no, no, no. Tomorrow she'll do it, she'll go to the old woman, the one they call Baba. She has the money now and Baba will help, she is seen with her own eyes. Just what Baba can do. And then they got a small beam of light again.

Have you ever had food poisoning? Oh, it's miserable. There's a reason why the word poison is in the name. Stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, fever. It's super common today with about 600 million people per year worldwide getting sick from contaminated food. Over 400,000 of those people don't survive it. 5,000 of those deaths occur right here in the US.

And that's with all of the modern technology we have at our disposal. Refrigeration, preservatives, pasteurization, sterilization, even smart packaging. That's a package that incorporates nanotechnology to detect chemical or physical microbial changes in food. Whoa, Star Trek. And just a few years ago, food scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst began developing an app for your phone that will let you check for E. coli or salmonella before you bite into that burger or chicken wing or Caesar salad.

That app hasn't hit the market yet. Now, go back in time a bit before modern food safety protocols and technologies were invented. Listen, it was only about 100 years ago that milk pasteurization became widespread in America. That was considered a massive breakthrough in public health. Even basic sanitation when handling food is really a modern invention.

Just the simple act of washing your hands before cooking. It's pretty new for humanity. Heck, even doctors didn't routinely wash their hands before treating patients until about the mid 1800s. Physicians back in the day would deliver a baby, then do an autopsy, then maybe go eat lunch, all without stopping to wash up and disinfect.

Ew. It wasn't that humans were filthy animals back then. They just didn't know about germs and bacteria. They didn't know how easily disease could spread from hand to hand and hand to mouth. People got sick all the time from contaminated drinking water and food. They didn't always make the connection, though, between their symptoms and their menu, which sucked for them, but was super helpful to anyone with poison on their mind and murder in their heart.

Arsenic. It's a naturally occurring element found all over the world. One guess who figured out first that it could be useful, and your guess better be the ancient Egyptians because, as usual, it was the ancient Egyptians. They used it in the process of gilding metal. Centuries later, during the Ming Dynasty in China, arsenic was used as a pesticide in the rice fields.

Two perfectly legitimate uses, right? But the history of arsenic is mostly a dark one. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, arsenic was considered the king of poisons. And why not? It was easy to get. And since the effects of arsenic poisoning mimicked a slew of common ailments, it was also fairly easy to get away with murder.

Until a chemist named James Marsh ruined every poisoner's good time by inventing a test in 1836 that could detect arsenic in the body. Not surprisingly, deaths by arsenic poisoning dropped sharply after that. But didn't end because human nature and all that. People continue to cheerfully poison each other with arsenic, even though Dateline, 48 Hours, 2020, and the Investigation Discovery Channel are out there doing the Lord's work of demonstrating over and over and over that you will get caught, especially if you happen to be the spouse, romantic interest, or spurned lover of the victim.

Just this past March, 2023, a dentist in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife by poison. Not only is the man evil, he's genuinely too stupid to walk amongst decent people. Why such a harsh judgment on Dr. Toothy McWife killer? Two reasons. One, his internet search history was choked with phrases like undetectable poison and will arsenic show up in an autopsy?

And two, he purchased the crystalline metalloid arsenic used in the crime from Amazon.com. My 80-year-old mother has a sharper understanding of how the internet works than this guy. How do you make it through college and dental school without stumbling across the fact that there's no such thing as delete online? Anyway, there's more.

When his wife was discharged from the hospital after being treated for symptoms consistent with arsenic poisoning, the devious dentist promptly ordered another toxin, this time a plant-derived poison called Oleandra. Good grief, you murderous freak. Just get divorced already if you're that unhappy and let your wife live.

Thankfully, FedEx intercepted the package containing the Oleandra and didn't deliver it. But our man here was no quitter. He promptly ordered potassium cyanide from a company called Midland Scientific and even paid for overnight shipping. Sure enough, his wife landed back in the hospital where she suffered a severe seizure and was unable to receive medical support.

She died on March 18, 2023. That very day, Dr. James Tolliver Craig was arrested for the crime of first-degree murder. In October 2023, he entered a plea of not guilty in the death of his wife, Angela Craig, and is expected to stand trial in the spring of 2024. Oh, for the good old days, when a troublesome spouse could be eased a bit early into the afterlife with a bowl of poison soup and no one the wiser.

Or so Ana DePistogne thought. Ana was born in 1838 in Romania and moved with her family to the Serbian village of Vladmirovac as a child. The village was located in the former Yugoslavia. When Ana was 20, she was wooed and seduced by an officer in the Austrian army. Ana, from all accounts, thought it was love. But her suitor was not a good or honorable man.

He was what they used to call a bounder, a rake, a scoundrel. And when he left Ana, he left her with a permanent souvenir to remember him by. A case of syphilis. Heartbroken and cursed with a disease for which there was neither treatment nor cure at the time, Ana retreated from society. She didn't trust people and she didn't like people.

Her life became increasingly solitary. So it was around 1858 that Ana contracted syphilis. The symptoms were painful and gruesome. Sores on the genitals and mouth, lesions and rashes on the skin, fever, pain, loss of vision, damage to the heart and brain, tumors, even death. Today, syphilis can be treated and cured with antibiotics.

But young Ana's diagnosis was nearly 70 years before the discovery of penicillin. And almost 90 years before that drug became the primary way to treat the disease. In Ana's day, mercury was the go-to remedy for syphilis. They made it into ointments, added it to baths, instructed patients to inhale it and even made it into a liquid to be used as a vaginal douche and for the gentlemen, a urethral douche.

Naturally, patients being treated with mercury suffered violent side effects. Vomiting, diarrhea, excessive drooling, extreme abdominal cramping. Physicians at the time were like, that's how you know it's working. But of course, we know that those side effects were the direct result of mercury being wicked toxic to humans.

The mercury cure did nothing to eradicate syphilis, but it did do lots of other things. It damaged the immune and nervous systems of those being treated, damaged their kidneys, liver and lungs. And fun fact, there's no antidote for mercury poisoning, even today. It takes only a very small amount of mercury to cause significant health problems.

And people back in the day were basically snorting it and bathing in it. Let's take a moment to marvel at the miracle of your own existence because damn, our ancestors were up against it at every turn. Maybe this explains Ana's decision to immerse herself in the study of chemistry and medicine. She was highly intelligent, and it's said that she was fluent in five languages.

And now she could add the language of plants and chemistry and anatomy to her resume. It seemed that Ana had chosen a spinster's life. But then, urged by her father, she relented and married a wealthy peasant. With her husband, Pishtov, Ana bore 11 children. Tragically, only one of those children survived to adulthood.

After 20 years of marriage, Ana's husband, 20 years older than she, died and left her a widow. On paper, it all adds up to a terribly sad and unlucky life. But Ana was a survivor. She was stoic. And so, not long after her husband's death, she resumed her study of herbs and chemistry. She even had a laboratory built in her home.

Ana soon earned a reputation for her skill as a healer. And with that, she earned the trust of the people, both in her village and beyond. Ana's medicines and tonics and salves earned her a good living. She was comfortably well-off and comfortably living entirely alone and on her own. But, because Ana specialized in certain very specific kinds of medicine, her reputation evolved.

Word of her Bajana Vodica, or miracle drink, spread. And she was soon known as the Witch of Vladimirovac, a person whose healing arts extended beyond mere illness. Her medicines could treat problems other healers couldn't touch. Problems like marital misery and property disputes. Young men hoping to dodge military service called on her.

She'd sell them a concoction that would make a man just sick enough to avoid conscription, but not so sick that he would die from his affliction. No one realized it at the time, but this was Ana's first foray into poisoning. Given the terrible betrayal by her first beau, the Austrian army officer, it's not hard to understand why Ana had no warm feelings for the military.

But given all that followed, it's a wonder that these young recruits lived to tell the tale of their doings with the Witch of Vladimirovac. By this point, Ana had earned a new title, one of respect and honor. The people called her Baba Anujka. Baba meaning grandmother or respected elder. She was widely considered to be kind and sweet and helpful.

Something that worked very much in her favor as Baba Anujka embarked on her new career. Serial killer. Helping young men avoid military duty was just her opening act. Baba Anujka began peddling love potions. These elixirs weren't meant to bring your true love running. They were meant instead to solve a very specific problem for certain women.

The problem of an abusive husband. Now the challenge for any entrepreneur developing a new product is identifying potential customers. Baba had help. An assistant named Ljubinka Milankov. The method was both diabolically clever and diabolically simple. Eljubinka made it her business to learn the personal secrets of the women in the village.

In the evening, when they would gather at the communal well to fill their water pails, Eljubinka listened carefully to the conversation. The women, glad for a bit of socializing, easily spilled their stories to their friends and neighbors. They revealed secrets. They whispered of pain. And Eljubinka heard it all. She learned whose husband could not keep his temper or his fists under control.

Whose husband became cruel and drunken. Whose husband let his gaze linger far too long on the newly blossoming curves of his own daughter. Eljubinka knew which women were just unhappy and which women nursed the kind of fury and bitterness that soured a person, shriveled their heart. She brought all this news home to Baba Anujka, of course.

To the women at the well, she was one of them. A sister. They spoke freely in her presence. They trusted her. And in time, Eljubinka began speaking too. She commiserated with the women. Nodded mournfully at their confessions of being beaten. Cursed at. Made to feel ugly and powerless. She was so very sympathetic. It was almost an afterthought.

The way Eljubinka would suggest is as if it had only just occurred to her that perhaps a woman in such a difficult position might call on Baba Anujka for help. Baba, she assured the women, would know just what to do in such a case. Baba had remedies that a woman might find extremely helpful. And so, a woman in need would pay a visit to Baba Anujka.

Baba was warm and gracious. Grandmotherly. Wrapped snugly in a woolen shawl. Her eyes twinkling. Her wrinkled skin and worn hands speaking to her long experience in harvesting medicinal herbs, in mixing tonics and unguents. After listening carefully to each woman's complaint, Baba Anujka asked the same question. My dear, how heavy is the problem?

This question, it was understood, was not metaphorical. Baba was looking for the size and weight of the poorly behaved husband in question. This was how she calculated the dose of love potion to prepare. And how she was able to give each customer a timeline of what to expect after administering the potion. Eight days, perhaps, until the problem was no longer a problem.

Eight days before the problem succumbed to the poison and died. Business was booming for Baba. When she wasn't throwing up a tonic to keep a man out of the military or solving the problems brought to her by unhappy wives. She was telling fortunes for the rich and powerful. Whether you believe in this sort of thing or not, there's no getting around the fact that Baba Anujka had a real gift for reading people.

Generals, politicians, prosperous merchants. Baba shrewdly assessed each, calculating both their financial resources and their desperation. Since many traveled great distances to consult with the renowned sorceress, Baba even had special accommodations available. Should her guests balk at the price of her prophecy, she would invite them to spend the night, would offer them food and hospitality.

After such a long journey and so much kindness from the sweet old woman, they nearly always came to see that her prices were more than fair. And despite her many gifts, look how humble she is, her visitors thought. In her heavy black dress and black headscarf, customary for widows in the rural countryside, she kept mostly to her rooms, though she was known to occasionally perch on the stoop of her home, taking the air and greeting passersby.

That's where 18-year-old newlyweds Tito and Maria Vakarescu found her one warm summer evening. The pair were returning to their home in the village of Vladmirovac after a party. Flushed from laughter and dancing, of course, the sultry summer heat, they greeted Baba and paused for a visit. Baba stood and kindly offered them a refreshment.

Lemonade, she insisted, so cooling in this weather. The couple gratefully accepted, downing the tart liquid and smiling their thanks. Seven days later, both Tito and Maria were dead. It was an unthinkable tragedy, breaking the hearts of both families. A tragedy and a shock and a mystery. Two healthy young people suddenly dead of no obvious cause.

But for Baba Anujka, it was no mystery at all. She knew what killed the newlyweds because she herself had mixed that poisoned lemonade. And why not? What did she care for young love after the way she'd been so terribly betrayed? Why should anyone know the kind of happiness that had been so cruelly snatched away from her in her own youth?

It's unknown how many casual encounters with the Baba ended in sickness and death, like the doomed newlyweds Tito and Maria. But the body count attributed to her love potions and magic waters, the killings for hire, that number is somewhere between 50 and 150 people. But how? Doesn't it seem like as few as a dozen husbands dropping dead in one village might draw attention?

Men dying with all the same symptoms? You'd think. But remember, this all went down in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. People got sick and died on the regular. Contaminated food and water, disease, primitive medical care. And who would ever suspect that the very person administering the medicine was actually the murderer?

Baba Anujka hid her crimes in plain sight. And her accomplices were the wives and family members of her victims. Such a perfect setup. You can see why it went on for so long. How Baba was able to rack up so many wins. And all the while she continued to ply her trade as an herbalist and healer. I mean, come on. It wasn't all about murder for the witch of Vladimirovac.

A girl likes to mix it up with a few headache remedies here. A cure for fever there. A handful of colicky baby soup. And every newly widowed customer helped keep Baba's secret. Until... Baba had a number of regular customers. Again, these were the days before urgent care and 24-hour pharmacies. A healer like Baba? A wise woman with a gift for compounding a cure?

That was a lucky resource. A woman named Stana Momirov frequently used the Baba's services. You know, your everyday sort of wellness needs. And Stana knew firsthand the power of Baba's love potions. She used one to kill her husband. You know how it is. You get married and he turns out to be a vile, nasty brute. You dose him with a love potion made of arsenic and other undetectable plant toxins.

He dies. You mope around wearing black. Everyone feels sorry for you. And then, after a while, you meet someone new and you get remarried. At least that's how it played out for Stana Momirov. This time, it wasn't her new husband that dropped dead unexpectedly. It was a very wealthy family member of her new husband that dropped dead unexpectedly.

When the man, his name was Gaja Prokin, abruptly fell ill, he went to his doctor. Several days later, Prokin passed away. The doctor ordered an autopsy to be performed. And those findings established that the man had been poisoned. His death caused an uproar. Suddenly, Stana found herself not the object of pity, but of suspicion.

She was arrested, interrogated, and broke under the strain. She confessed that she had purchased certain remedies from Baba Anujka. Though she acknowledged that this particular potion had been prepared by Baba's devoted assistant, Ljubinka Milankov, who caved under pressure and admitted to everything. Stana's story and Ljubinka's confession was enough to put Baba on the radar for the authorities, just not quite enough to shut her business down.

Rumors and gossip suggested dozens of deaths at the healer's hands. But rumors and gossip are not the same as facts and evidence. The authorities had no option but to watch and wait. They didn't have to wait long. Within the year, another man suddenly died. The person who administered Baba's potion to the victim was the man's 16-year-old granddaughter.

She'd been tricked by her own mother into giving her grandfather the fatal drink. And the girl, Olga Sturza, was swift to implicate Baba in the crime. Eighteen months later, Baba Anujka was arrested for these two killings. Because police feared that the peasants who revered Baba might interfere with the arrest and try to save her, they came to her cottage after midnight to take her away.

Six other defendants joined her on the docket for their part in the crimes. To a one, they all claimed that they bought the potions in good faith, with no knowledge that what they were buying was a deadly poison. Each insisted that they took the deaths to be a sign of Baba's extraordinary supernatural powers. After all, wasn't she the witch of Vladmirovac?

Baba's defense was simple. She denied everything. Denied even selling the women the potions. She maintained her innocence throughout and argued that the real killers were simply blaming her, a kindly old widow who kept to herself and wouldn't harm a soul. She was a healer, she said. Foolish superstition. This nonsense about witches and deadly potions.

Please. The case went to trial. Stana Momerov was sentenced to life in prison. Ljubinka Milankov was given eight years for her role in the deaths. And Baba Anujka, age 90, was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison at hard labor. The verdict made news around the world. Though some papers incorrectly reported that Baba was a man and others got her age wrong, saying she was 93 years older.

All the news stories declared that Baba had been convicted of poisoning to death a dozen relatives and friends. Now, not that we're trying to nitpick with ye old journalists about getting the facts wrong. All of this went down in a village in Yugoslavia. And while the Associated Press wire service had been up and running for 80 years, the term serial killer wasn't even coined until sometime in 1974.

Maybe the people of the time couldn't quite wrap their heads around the idea of an old lady deliberately poisoning as many as 150 people. Maybe that's why some of the newspapers identified Baba Anujka as a man. Plus, think about the timing of it all. Baba Anujka stood trial for the second time in June 1928. Charles Lindbergh had become the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic only a year earlier.

Penicillin had just been discovered by Alexander Fleming. A discovery that might have changed the entire course of Baba's life had it been available to her as a young woman, newly infected with syphilis. The armistice that ended World War I wasn't even a decade old. People were still reeling from the toll that war had taken.

More than 9 million dead, 21 million wounded. And then there was the very creation of Baba's homeland, Yugoslavia itself. Though it wasn't called that until 1929. Its first name was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, or KSCS. It was formed as a multi-ethnic state in 1918, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

So, you can understand how life in the village of Vladmirovac and everywhere else in the kingdom was chaotic and unsettled. Amid so much grief and geopolitical jockeying, it was clearly easy for one tiny old lady to perpetrate murder after murder after murder. The war, the 1918 global Spanish flu pandemic, and the strong belief held by citizens of the newly formed kingdom that ethnic injustice was rampant cast shadows deep and dark enough to hide Baba's monstrous and murderous medicine for years.

But wait, what was that about standing trial for a second time? Yup, this wasn't Baba's first rodeo. She'd been charged with providing poison to commit murder back in 1914, but was acquitted. There was no proof. Was she crazy or cocky to keep going after that brush with the justice system? You could say both, but throw in calculating too.

Possessed a powerful intellect, and had literally been getting away with murder for years. Why stop now? If she had stopped, we wouldn't know this story at all. Baba would have disappeared into the slipstream of time, taking her sins and secrets with her. But she didn't stop. And now she would have plenty of time in her small cell to ruminate over that decision.

Off Baba went to prison. She served eight years of her 15-year sentence before being released due to old age. Not once did she admit guilt or take any responsibility for the deaths caused by her remedies. She maintained that it was her assistant, Ljubinka, who'd done it all. That she had been helpless to prevent the younger woman from carrying out her deadly agenda.

And on that note, Baba Anujka serenely served her time. She lived another two years after her early release, dying in 1938 at either 100 or 104 years old, depending on the source. Šimon Đarmati, a chemist and author of the book, Baba Anujka, a sorcerer from Vladimirovac, writes that she died of dementia at age 100 and had possibly been practicing her sinister craft right up until the bitter end.

No one knows for certain if this is true or not. It's just one of the many mysteries that enveloped Baba like a shroud. What we do know is that Baba Anujka's career as a serial killer spanned 40 to 50 years. That as many as 150 men died after drinking one of her elixirs. Why did it take so long for these deaths to come to the attention of police?

Well, most of her victims, the young, healthy and in the prime of life, were peasants. They had no social capital, no power, and while their sudden deaths were unfortunate, they also went largely unnoticed outside of their immediate families. The life of a peasant was a hard one, and life expectancy at that time was about 35 years.

If that seems shockingly low, get this. Life expectancy dropped to age 32 during the 1918 pandemic and didn't start creeping up again until the 1940s. No wonder Baba could poison so many with impunity. Dropping dead in your 30s wasn't unusual. It wasn't until a handful of prominent men, men of means and position, died that the alarm was raised.

Like a wealthy restaurant owner named Geibel and the mayor of nearby Novo Selo. It's appalling that the lives of the poor had so little value that their deaths failed to register on the collective radar. But then, can we honestly say that things have changed all that much for the better in our own time? As for motive, it does seem almost painfully simple, doesn't it?

A man hurt Baba in her youth, lied to her, made promises he never meant to keep, infected her with a disease that at the time had no cure, and then he abandoned her. Was that enough to warp her, to turn her into a killer? We can speculate, because we do know that every human handles the heartaches and disappointments that come with being alive differently.

Some are more resilient than others. Some are broken way down deep, and a blow that might leave you reeling leaves them shattered. Most chilling of all is the possibility that there was no cause for her evil, no explanation. She simply acted without remorse or regret, with no conscience to keep her awake at night. We shy away from this truth.

We don't want to know that all around us are people who have no more care for the preciousness of your life than they have for the life of an insect. Better to pretend such people don't exist. It's easier to move through the world that way. As for Baba Anujka, after a very long life, a life lived almost entirely on her own terms.

She died in 1938, taking her secrets with her. She had the help of a community that kept her in business. A community that took little care with any sort of post-mortem investigations. A community that looked away, conspired with her, in keeping the ugly things that sometimes happen behind closed doors, hidden. Baba Anujka wasn't the world's most prolific serial killer, nor was she the most violent.

You could even argue that she was more a vigilante than a thrill killer. Because Baba had a grudge, a cause, a crusade even. But no matter how righteous she felt, as she measured and mixed and stirred her concoctions, how deserving one or more of those victims may have seemed, no one gets to play God. None of us have the right to decide who lives and who dies.

Not even a sweet old lady who means well, who just wants to help, and who's just offered you a nice cool glass of lemonade. Next time on True Weird Stuff. It was a roadside motel in a tiny midwestern town, a place you'd blink and miss, until the night a carload of guests pulled in and made the Red Crown Tourist Court notorious.

Y'all pay no mind to that no vacancy sign, there's always a spot for you on the next True Weird Stuff. Oh my gosh, I could not wait to get to this episode. This one was just for you, Max. I appreciate that. Max and I go way back in our... Fascination is probably not the exact right word for how we are about serial killers.

I don't know what the word is. But both of us have an unimaginably large amount of curiosity and enthusiasm. And people do think that the serial killer is like a modern invention, as though the stresses and strains and pressures of modern life where we're separated from family and community and living alone in these isolated urban environments without any connectivity, it just drives us mad and we become killers.

Actually, serial killers are not a new invention. What's new is the term serial killer, which is coined in 1974, I think. Right, in that area, yeah. Yeah, and our ability to, you know, gather news information, like news and these stories from all over the world. People have been doing this serial murder for a very long time.

In this case, the Baba Onishka story is a great example of it. Because we know that she killed 150. But we know that that number is not accurate because those are the ones we know. And as you heard in the episode, she was very skilled at mixing potions using arsenic and plant toxins that mimicked the symptoms of ailments and diseases at the time.

And, you know, there weren't antibiotics and there weren't urgent cares. And, you know, people got sick and died all the time. And you just had to assume it was natural causes, right? Because what else were you going to assume? Unless you could see a pattern to what was happening. Apparently, that's what happened. She's kind of like Dexter.

Dexter meets a hit man, you know? Yeah. Because she's a serial killer, but there's a there's a thread of, but this is justified in it because this guy is a bad guy in somebody's estimation. And then she's not just doing it. She's getting paid to do it. The thing about Baba that and that I wanted to make sure we put in the episode, because it's really easy if you cherry pick the story.

It's really easy to go. You know what? She was a vigilante. Like these guys were tools. They were hitting their women. They were inappropriate with their children. But the truth about Baba Anujka was a lot more complicated than that. How about the newlywed couple that she gave the poisoned lemonade to? Yeah, she killed them for I think.

So this is just me, but I think they were murdered for sheer spite. Because she saw if you remember, she was about that age when her love betrayed her, gave her syphilis and disappeared, abandoned her. And syphilis at the time was a degenerative disease with no cure, no treatment. I mean, they were making douche out of mercury, urethral douche for the men, and then vaginal douche for the women out of mercury.

So listen, you didn't want to get syphilis in the day. So she was about the age of that young couple when this terrible thing happened that completely derailed and transformed her life. I think she saw them and was like, no, if I can't have it, no one can have it. I think that was of all the crimes she committed for me.

I think that one, that one might be the worst. Yeah, because there was no justification in there that you can't rationalize that one at all. I mean, that's true serial killer stuff. I mean, that's one of my favorite parts of the story was, by the way, congratulations on all these really complicated pronunciations, because when we recorded it, she was breezing through them.

There were a couple that tripped it up, but not many. She was breezing through them. I went, wow, that was amazing, because these are Serbian and they're not easy. You know, I loved how the woman that was her assistant then said, no, no, it's Baba's fault. And Baba turns around and goes, no, no, no, it's the assistant's fault.

And I went, oh, this is true criminals. You know, it turned on each other in the end. The cops or the gang that couldn't shoot straight, for sure. Yeah, the pronunciations. In a lot of these episodes, I don't speak like most Americans. I don't speak multiple languages. And unless it's French or maybe Spanish, Italian, I'm lost.

When you look at a sentence written in Serbian on the page in front of you, you've got nothing. You don't even know where to begin. And even even words that like, you know, it's spelled out and you think, well, let me sound that out. And then you go find out how it's really pronounced. And you realize, oh, God, no, I couldn't have been further away from that if I tried.

Sometimes my husband will walk in. I'll be sitting at the kitchen island and I'll be saying to myself over and over again, Rakija, Rakija, Novo Selo, Novo Selo, because the way that we pronounce things in English, when we see a certain combination of vowels and consonants, we think it's a certain way, right? Oh, well, that probably sounds like this.

No, those pronunciations are a challenge. And the other thing about this episode, Baba Anujka, it's amazing to me that people still kill each other with arsenic. We've had a really solid test to detect it since the 1800s. And it accumulates in your hair. You can kill your spouse with arsenic and get away with it. I can exhume the body and run a test on the hair of the corpse and prove that you killed them with arsenic.

How do people not know this, Max? I think they get so blind with rage that it clouds their judgment so much. I mean, they're the same people that would be hiring a hitman that turned out to be a New Jersey state trooper. I mean, I think people think I'm not going to get no one would suspect me of doing this. I'm the grieving spouse.

Which brings us to the dentist, the dentist that I decided needed to be named Dr. Toothy McWife Killer. Let's talk about the dentist in this episode, Max. Max, first of all, all he does all day long is Google ways to kill his wife with poison. Then he buys the arsenic from Amazon.com. What? You have to figure if he's smart enough to get through dental school and work on people's teeth.

He's smart enough to know that Google leaves electronic footprints and you can track whatever you've purchased from Amazon. He bought arsenic from Amazon.com to murder his wife. Thank God FedEx flagged it. Then he got the other thing from Oleandra, the plant based toxin. That's a very serious poison. He got that from Midland Scientific, duped in the overnight shipping and ended up successfully murdering his wife.

His name is Dr. James Tolliver Craig and he'll go on trial next spring. We'll follow that trial. We may do a follow up episode on that. But can you believe the balls on this guy that he's Googling arsenic and then buying it on Amazon? How many times have we heard this through the years? You would think that he would know somebody is going to find out that it was you.

I mean, you would think that if he's going to do that, he would at least go to a computer in a library or something. But even then, that's trackable. I mean, it's all trackable. I mean, have we become so casual about it that we go, eh, we'll get caught? Sometimes if I'm watching like a marathon, three episodes back to back of Dateline Secrets Uncovered, my husband will be like, woman, I don't know, man.

You chill out with murder. You make me so nervous. I'm like, no, you listen. You need to thank these shows because there's no way I could get away with it even if I wanted to. And I don't. I love them. I don't want to murder. I know for a stone cold fact, I'm not going to get away with it. The arrogance that these people have in thinking that they can Google arsenic poisoning, buy it from Amazon.com and then somehow skate.

That took my breath away. That guy. I'm always fascinated with the idea of poisoning somebody. And it seems like it's women who do it to men more than vice versa. Men usually will do it in some quick, violent way rather than women who will poison. So you have somebody who is not just dying. They're dying slowly over the time, weeks even.

And you're watching them suffer and get worse. How do you do that? Isn't that so interesting? Because I suspect that poisoners and Baba Anujka would fall into this category of people who feel that I'm not a violent person. I could never lift a hand to another human being, but to watch someone and especially when it's a spouse or a parent or a child to watch someone suffer and slowly wither away.

And it's an agonizing death. It's not it's not peaceful. It's agonizing. You have to be some kind of sadistic to be a poisoner. I think it's just the opposite of, oh, I'm just not the violent type. Yeah, you might not be the violent type girl, but but you're sadistic and cruel in the extreme. Can we make a blanket statement?

Don't ever drink a sports drink that your spouse starts giving you like out of the blue that you're suspecting that the things aren't working out because what is it always? It's antifreeze. That's what it is every time. And antifreeze has such a distinctive color that the only way that you're going to get it down somebody's throat is by mixing it with that chartreuse colored Powerade, which do not do.

That was not a tip, by the way. That was a warning. That was a warning. How many times I have to tell you people not to murder each other crying out loud? Well, I heard on this podcast, your honor, on the podcast, the true weird stuff podcast, I heard this is how you murder. The other fascinating thing for me about Baba Anujka and it ties back into this dentist in Aurora, Colorado.

She was a healer by profession. He's a doctor and there's an extra dark, profoundly unsettling twist. When we see a healer take a life or lives. I mean, we've had a number of medical professionals that are serial killers like that one. Well, there's been a couple of nurses, actually, that have. Oh, there was a guy who was a nurse who worked in a lot of different places.

And because it's a portable career, you can take it to a lot of different places and you're not they don't they don't pick up on it until later. You know, you think about what that means to choose a profession where people come to you at their worst, you know, maybe maybe teetering between life and death. And you've chosen a profession to care for those people and to hopefully nurse them back to health.

But what you really are is a killer. God, that's a betrayal of every imaginable kind of trust, isn't it? People at their most vulnerable when they have health concerns. So let's talk about so, you know, Baba Baba's life, Baba Anujka's life. So interesting. You know, this heartbreak is a young woman, syphilis, lifetime diagnosis, you know, and yet she lived such a long life, even even at the end in her 90s, being sentenced to prison and hard labor, she still came sailing out of that like a boss and lived for several years after that.

Like, you just have to look at somebody like this and go, damn, what are you made of? Yeah, I mean, that was the thing that was kind of surprising when we first heard of this story, Chris, you you had written it, you knew what was going to happen. But I was really surprised that she lived that long, especially with the health concerns you have with syphilis.

It is the kind of thing that can cause all kinds of health problems if it's left untreated. My guess is that because she was she was actually quite brilliant. And as a young girl, she'd been educated, which was not, you know, she was born in Romania and then her family moved. It was not common for a young girl in the countryside to receive an education, but she and she had a really fine mind and a natural talent for chemistry, which is not, you know, something everybody has, right?

Like chemistry. So she had a tremendous advantage over your average person with syphilis back then. I suspect that she, through luck or chance or skill, managed to find ways to treat the disease because you treat syphilis now with antibiotics, with penicillin, right? Right. But there are a number of plants and plant compounds and combinations that can function as kind of a natural antibiotic, not as strong, not as quick, maybe as penicillin, but maybe just enough.

What do you think about that? Can I tell you a weird story about syphilis? They used to treat it by giving people malaria in the hopes that the malaria would knock out the syphilis. How kooky is that? Can I just ask, how are any of us alive? How did our ancestors claw their way through the madness that any of us are even alive?

And if you want to know how I know that, I know that because it was discussed on a mass killer podcast called Father Wants Us Dead. Which is great. Take our recommendation. That is a great podcast. It really is. It's a great podcast. It's one of my favorites. So that's how I know the syphilis story. So I'm sorry. I don't mean to derail us too much.

Oh, no, no. One of the things so I fall down rabbit holes and go off on tangents all the time when I'm writing an episode. So there were two tangents that I disappeared on with this one. One of them was syphilis because it's always it's I don't know. I guess I must just be naive or whatever. But it's always shocking to me to and there's a disease.

We don't have any cure. Like I know we can't cure cancer yet. Most kinds of cancer. And there's a lot we can't cure. But like the fact that syphilis would eat your brain and wipe you out just was fascinating. So I ended up going on a long rabbit hole tangent of all the different ways that they treat syphilis, the business of inhaling mercury.

And if you were a dude pumping it into your urethra, that just sounds horrible. It really does. And then the other tangent rabbit hole that I went down was trying to understand how Yugoslavia was formed, how all these the kingdom. It was so overwhelming and difficult and confusing, but it was an important part of the story because like with every serial killer and especially one who successfully murdered people for decades.

How did Baba escape notice? Well, think about it. People, this was people were just coming out of World War One. There were so many dead. There was so much death in World War One. So many wounded, so much disruption. And Baba, where Baba lived, what we called Yugoslavia wasn't even created until 1929. And they formed it when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918.

So 1918, you had this global Spanish flu pandemic. You had people staggering from the hellscape that was World War One. And you had this entire geopolitical situation where the Austro-Hungarian Empire just collapsed like a cake left out in the rain. And so we got this little old lady in a village working as a healer and a lot of people are dying, but a lot of people were already dying.

Do you see how she got away with it? That it was the timing, it was the place and the time. At least that's what I think. I could be wrong. No, I think you're right. I think the combination of the Spanish flu and the fluidness of what was going on politically with the formation of the country had a lot to do with that because people were otherwise preoccupied.

And so she could just be selling poison. Here, I'll take care of this divorce. It's so messy. There's lawyers here. I'll take care of this for you. And the other thing that you need to know about Baba is the patience of a spider. Because her serial murder career spanned so many years, you can't kill them all at once because that's going to get noticed.

You have to heal as many or more as you take down. Right? Yeah. And she did. So it wasn't all like Aljabinka coming back to the cottage and going, so-and-so's husband's a drunk and he hits her. That was not the bulk of Anujka's days. The bulk of her days were spent fever, colic, rashes, childbirth, injuries, burns, sprains, fractures, all of the gazillion big and small things that can go wrong with the human body.

And she's your village healer. So she probably, for every one person she killed, what would you say, Max? Healed 30? Yeah, perhaps. Yeah. And that's how you get away with murder. You find yourself at a unique place and time in history where all hell is breaking loose all around you and nobody could possibly think to look at you.

And you bide your time and you're strategic about which lives you take. When you compared her to Dexter, that's the right comparison, I think. Dexter, the fictional serial killer from cable TV. There was a thread of rationalization for doing this. And you know, because this happened in Yugoslavia when she went to trial and this whole story came out, of course it made the news in America and other parts of the world.

But we didn't have, back then, you didn't have breathless day-by-day trial coverage. You know, we didn't have the true crime industrial complex back then. So it's, and I cannot read the original Serbian. It's even with Google Translate. It's like, ah, what is happening here? So it's hard to know everything that came out in court.

But she was not sorry. Let me tell you that. No, no, you never got, there was any sense that she had any remorse about what she did because she had it all rationalized in her own mind. And she was a tiny apple-cheeked grandma and serenely denied everything and then trotted off to do her time till they released her due to her age.

Like, she really did. I'm sorry, even though she went to prison for a handful of years, I think it's really hard to argue that this woman did not get away with those murders. Yes, she did. Yeah. I mean, she got caught, but after a fashion. And you're right. She really wasn't in prison that long considering how monstrous this is.

And it's nothing less. I mean, it's, it's unspeakable. It is unspeakable. And we don't even know how many of those men in that, not just in her village, but the word of her abilities did spread by word of mouth. You know, it's not like she had a TikTok, but it did spread. And people, including powerful people, traveled many miles to take advantage of Baba Anujka's healing powers.

And hey, it was peasants she was dealing with, you know, okay, peasants die, you know. Hey, there's a lot of disease. Nobody cares. But when money gets involved, all that gets people's attention. No, all those men that she killed, because they were, for the most part, peasants, illiterate, unknown, anonymous laborers.

Nobody gave a damn. And the creepiest thing, and it's hard to pick the creepiest thing in this story. I'm looking forward to this. Okay, like, how can a mother have a favorite? But for me, the creepiest thing was she would say to each of these women, how big is the problem, dear? And the answer would be, well, he's six foot, about 190 pounds.

And then she would do the calculation. And she could tell you, here, make this into a tea. And your problem should be solved in seven, eight days. That's about as cold blooded as it gets. Well, you watch him slowly die. I've never, you know, I've had a husband or three. I love this one. The first two, please. But I didn't.

I let them live. Yeah. Not that you get credit for that. Not that anyone goes, not that anyone goes, oh, girl, you let them live. Hang on. I'm having a trophy made. But, Sherry, considering how badly you got screwed over financially, Baba Anujka might have been the better route. Oh, listen, there but for the grace, right?

Because you just don't, that's the other thing. Like, these women, do you know how freaking desperate you have to be to go to the well and ask for poison to murder your husband and the father of your children? I think that speaks to the complete despair some of these women felt. Like, there were a couple of them, you know, as you go through the trial stuff and the law stuff with Baba Anujka, there were a couple of them that were like, oh, I'm tired of him next.

But for the most part, these women were desperate, desperate to kill these husbands. And women had a lot less, they had a lot less options back then, too. I'm not saying that justifies getting it, but you can see where somebody gets so desperate, they wind themselves into a mental state where they think that this is a viable option.

Oh, it's just terrible. So we have to do better. This is the year 2023. Um, we know, well, not all of us know that you can't Google poison and buy it on amazon.com. Not all of us know that. Do you know what I love about Sherry? I always put this out. It's not the criminal activity that bothers her. It's the sloppiness that bothers her.

It really ticks me off. Like, you, first of all, first of all, you deserve to get caught. You deserve it. You're too stupid to live if you think that you can have repeated Google searches on detectable poison. How do you poison someone with arsenic? How long does arsenic poisoning take? How did you get your dental school?

How do you write your own name if you're that stupid? So we have to reiterate, listen, you can't, you can't be killing each other. I don't care how pissed off you are. You cannot be killing each other. And we live in different times. This is not the day of Baba Anujka. This is the day of the internet and DNA and forensic criminology.

You're going to get caught. Hey, you're going to get caught. I think that, I think you're saying that covers us in case anybody wants to blame us for going ahead and murdering somebody and saying that we told them how to do it. Oh, listen, if I ever got hauled into somebody's murder trial, I'm going to take the oath, climb on that stand.

And I'm going to say, Your Honor, in the episode called Baba's Love Potion, I clearly and distinctly told the audience, you can't be killing each other. One, it's wrong. And two, you're just, you're not going to get away with it. Not anymore. We, we were talking not in True Weird Stuff, but just amongst ourselves. There's a project underway, a research project underway, where they are establishing whether or not you can use cat hair, the DNA that you identify in cat hair to tie a victim, to tie a perpetrator to a crime scene.

And here's the thing about cat hair. And I know some of y'all think you're genius murderers out there. Here's the thing about cat hair. Good luck. Pet roller, duct tape, hydrochloric acid. Once a piece of cat hair gets on your black pants, it's with you for the rest of time and eternity. And if they can take that piece of cat hair and pull out the mitochondrial DNA and run it through that process where they make a gazillion copies of it until they have a sample big enough to prove that you were in the owner of that cat's house the night he or she lost their life, you're going down.

So if we can use a single strand of cat hair to convict you, let me ask you again, Dr. Toothy McWife killer. Did you really think buying arsenic on his Amazon was going to be something you were going to get away with? What a dumb ass. In fact, they're going to he's going to get convicted. And by the way, if you're listening right now, Dr. James Tolliver Craig and Nana Nana Boo Boo, you're going down.

And I think that he should get some sort of extra sentence for just gross stupidity. I think you should be punished for being that dumb. How about you? Yep. All right. Well, that wraps up this episode on that high note. Don't be stupid and don't try to kill each other. You will get caught and it's wrong. We will thank you so much for listening to your weird stuff and hope you learned a little something along the way.

We can't wait to join you on the next episode. We'll see you then. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website.

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