Her fortune wasted, her prospects blasted, she became filled with a hatred of mankind, and with rage and bitterness at her fate. All the better sympathies which her nature may have possessed in girlhood faded out, and their place was taken by a stern and grim resolution to better her now destitute condition at all risks and hazards.
It does not seem to be clearly known when the idea of systematic poisoning occurred to her, but it was eventually suspected that she had disposed of her husband by this means, and before she was received as housekeeper into the family of Herr Justiz-Amptman Glaser. She had then spent many years as a wanderer, was fifty years of age, and without a trace of her former charms.
This was in 1808, when Glaser was residing at Pegnitz in Upper Franconia, but was living apart from his wife. Anna Schonleben (for she seldom seems to have taken her husband's name), having her own ends in view, adopting the rôle of friendship, effected a reconciliation between Glaser and his wife, who returned to his home, and within a month after was seized by a sudden and mysterious illness, of which she died in the greatest agony.
As there was no appearance of Glaser wishing her to take the place of the deceased, Anna quitted his service for that of the Herr Justiz-Amptmann Grohmann, who was unmarried and only in his thirty-eighth year. He was in delicate health; thus she had every opportunity for studying to please him, by care, attention, and an affectionate regard for his comforts; but age was against her; her apparently unremitting attention won her no favour from Herr Grohmann, who received all his medicines from her own hands, and among them some dose, suggested by revenge, as he died on the 8th of May, 1809, "his disease being accompanied by violent internal pains of the stomach, dryness of the skin, _erbrechen_," &c.
She acted her part so well, she appeared so inconsolable for his loss, and won among his friends a character so high and valuable as a careful and gentle sick-nurse, that she was almost immediately received into the household of the Kammer-Amptmann Gebhard, in that capacity. On the 13th of May, only five days after the death of Grohmann, Madame Gebhard was delivered of a baby. Both mother and child were doing well till the 16th, when the former was seized with precisely the same symptoms before named, and after seven days of agony--during which she frequently asserted that she had been poisoned--she expired.