The Godeffroy trading empire's Pacific expansion placed it at the center of two of the nineteenth century's most consequential colonial dynamics: the extraction of island resources through blackbirding — the coercive recruitment of enslaved labor — and the supply of arms to warring factions in exchange for vast tracts of land. At its height, the network stretched from Hamburg to Samoa, Chile, and China, operating with a fleet of over a hundred vessels and the tacit backing of the German imperial government, which used the company as an instrument of colonial policy.

She operated for decades as a village herbalist and poisoner, supplying arsenic compounds to clients who sought to rid themselves of unwanted husbands, relatives, and neighbors — making her complicit in a network of domestic killings that spanned generations in rural Vojvodina. What distinguished her case was less the act of killing than the scale of facilitation: estimates of deaths linked to her trade run into the hundreds. She was tried and convicted in her nineties, having outlived most of her victims and, reportedly, most of her accusers.

Bittrolff drew renewed attention during one of the more complex unsolved serial murder investigations in recent American history, though he was ultimately convicted on two counts stemming from the deaths of Rita Tangredi and Colleen McNamee in the 1990s. The case against him was built largely on DNA evidence, and his conviction came more than two decades after the killings.

Wiese operated at the intersection of desperation and opportunity, exploiting the limited options available to women with illegitimate or unwanted children in late nineteenth-century Hamburg. Her crimes followed a pattern rooted in financial fraud — collecting fees for adoptions she never arranged — but escalated to systematic poisoning when the deception became unsustainable. The inclusion of her own grandchild among the victims marks a particular threshold in the case's history.