GBRLIFE Transmissions

She Healed Them… Then Killed Them | The Bertha Gifford Story

• Kaitlyn • Season 2 • Episode 39

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They said her pies could fix a bad day. Her soups could warm your bones in winter. But graves don’t lie.

In a quiet Missouri town, Bertha Gifford was known as the neighbor who baked, prayed, and cared for the sick. But when the sheriff ordered the first coffin raised, everything changed.

How many did she “help” to die?

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, Kaitlyn steps into the farmhouse kitchen where faith, trust, and arsenic mixed together — and explores the psychology behind one of America’s earliest female serial poisoners.

 

🎧 In this episode:

• How Bertha Gifford’s kindness hid something darker
 • The rise of a small-town angel turned silent killer
 • Why arsenic was the poison of choice for women in early America
 • The courtroom drama and insanity defense that shaped her legacy
 • The psychology behind caregiving turned control

This is more than a murder story — it’s about care as control, and how trust can become the most dangerous weapon of all.

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They used to say her pies could cure a bad day, that her soups warmed bones in winter, that her hands were steady and her smile was soft and her front porch was always open. They used to say she was goodness, but graves don't lie. And on a hot morning in rural Missouri, when the sheriff ordered the first coffin raised, the town's favorite neighbor became something else entirely. A whisper, a rumor, a suspicion dressed in a floral apron. People started asking a question that you never wanted attached to your grandmother or her friend. How many did Bertha Gifford help to die? Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them. Today, we step into a quiet farmhouse kitchen to meet a woman who baked, nursed, and prayed, and who may have poisoned more people than anyone in her county's history. This is the story of Bertha Gifford, the small-town angel of death. Bertha was born in the Midwest in the late 19th century. Fields and fences and a sky so wide it could swallow you whole. Life out there was simple and relentless. And planting was truly in the spring. And there was that harvest in the fall. And you'd bury your dead in the churchyard and keep on marching. In a place like this, reputation is currency. You show your worth with casseroles when a baby comes and quilts when winter bites and a steady shoulder when sorrow visits. And by those rules, Bertha was rich. She married young, kept a tidy home, and showed up for everyone. She'd sit with a feverish neighbor and spoon broth them until their fever broke. She would wipe the brows and hum hymns and pray the illness away. She was the kind of woman you trusted with your house keys and your children and your life. Time blurred, a string of seasons, a list of names. Some lived, some did not. And when people died, as people do in rural places where medicine is far and luck is fickle, the community mourned, but then they moved along. After all, who suspects kindness? But kindness can be a costume. And sometimes, costumes fit way too well. The first stories were small with Bertha. There was a young relative who took sick after a plate of cookies and an elderly boarder whose stomach burned after tea and a neighbor whose belly cramped and wouldn't stop. But they called it gastritis, a summer complaint. God's will. There was no reason to question a woman who brought warm biscuits and stayed to sweep your floor. But certain deaths linger in the room like a smell you can't place. Doctor after doctor wrote natural causes, and yet the pattern returns. Like a song that you wish you could forget, with nausea and vomiting and diarrhea and a terrible gnawing pain, then dehydration, and then quiet. Arsenic does its work in a slow, invisible, cruel way. It travels through your body like a rumor with perfect timing. In those days, poison was easy to come by, too. Rough on rats. It could sit beneath a sink beside the lye and lamp oil, looking as ordinary as flour. In a place where illness and death were familiar, a prisoner didn't need to be brilliant. She only needed to be patient. Hembersa? Was very patient. Neighbors remembered her tonics, little bottles with handwritten labels bitter to the tongue, comforting in mind. This will help, she'd say. Tucking blankets up to the chin, smoothing their hair and pressing the spoon to their poor lips. And for a while, it did help, right up until it didn't. It is this that allows us to realize the hand at your bedside is the hand that may have laid you there. And to understand that care can be another word for control. That a warm kitchen can be a trap with curtains. And in small towns like this, gossip runs faster than any river. But gossip alone does not open graves. For that, you need a question heavy enough to bend a sheriff's back. And it started with a child. It often does. A boy who fell ill and fell silent, but whose mother swore he was healthy before afternoon with Aunt Bertha. A husband remembered a sudden bitterness in supper. Not the unusual savory comfort, but the taste of coins. A cousin complained of burning. Doesn't this sound familiar? And another neighbor's old father, who had been low but living, suddenly crossed that line, that thin border between groaning and stillness, while a doctor, weary and suspicious, took note of the cluster. Why so many here? he asked. Why so many around one kitchen? When the first body was exhumed, the town stopped breathing. Tissue was tested with the crude tools of the time. And remember, it really just wasn't much. But it was enough to tell an honest man that he's been lied to. And the verdict was not a number. It was an element. are sick. You can measure arsenic in ounces, but what you can't measure is what it does to trust. Relatives began to remember the small little things, that chalky sip, a metallic note, a stomach that rolled and turned itself inside out, and some women whispered that they had been saved by the grace of vomiting, as if their bodies had known to say no. Others did not get that chance. And all through it, Bertha baked. She stood on her porch, and she loved them through it all. She said God called them home. She cried when it was expected. She wore grief like a shawl. Draped just so, but she was caught. And they brought her into jail. She went willingly, and they put her on trial. The courthouse? It smelled like paper and sweat. This was a long time ago. Farmers sat on benches, hats in their hands, waiting to hear the question that was going to turn into a verdict. Was Bertha Gifford a caregiver or a killer? It's difficult to try a woman that's considered the town's little angel. You're not just weighing evidence, you're weighing memory. And memory is tender and protective. And if you want it to tell you the truth, you have to let it fly. So witnesses told their stories. Doctors admitted how little they'd known, and pharmacists shrugged and said anyone could buy what they sold, no questions asked. Families cried, some fainted, and the heat pressed on. But the defense spoke of nerves, of breakdowns, of a woman who did not understand what she had done. They painted a picture not of a monster but a mind unwell, a sickness softer than murder, a fog more than a blade. The prosecution counted the many names and asked a harder question. How many coincidences up to intent? Law bends under the weight of doubt, but insanity is a door that desperate will open if it keeps hell out. And in the end, Bertha Gifford was judged not as a schemer with malice, but as a woman broken by her own mind. She was sent not to a prison, but to a hospital. Bars either way, locks, technically all the same. But was it justice? Here's the thing. To understand her, we have to stand in her kitchen at dusk. and feel what she felt. Not the thrill of blood, but the calm of control. Poisoners historically are planners. They prefer distance, ritual, and repetition. They pick victims who cannot fight, like children, the elderly, or the sick. They move in spaces where trust is unguarded. Nurseries, bedrooms, sick rooms, supper tables, and the instrument is always the same. It's a spoon. The wound is invisible, and Bertha fit the pattern. But she also complicates it. Was she a sadist and someone who gained quiet satisfaction from watching a life fade under her hand? Was she an opportunist? Someone killing for convenience, inheritance, or simply the relief of being the one who decides who suffers and who sleeps? Or was she something harder to name? A woman whose identity required being needed so desperately that she manufactured the need. And there is a phrase psychologists use, psychological caregiving. It describes a person who builds self-worth by creating situations where they alone are essential. Think the beginnings of Munchausen by proxy. And imagine the power of brewing both the poison and the antidote, of starting a fire and then owning all the water. If the patient suffers, you're the angel who stays. You're their everything. And if the patient dies, you're the widow of the town draped in shared sorrow. Either way, you're at the center. Another framework is dependent personality traits gone dark. A woman raised to equate goodness with service to find value in being indispensable. Take that to the extreme and you get someone who cannot tolerate being unnecessary. Death in that twisted algebra keeps you necessary. But there's also the cold, arrhythmic of antisocial personality traits with lying without... Any empathy, manipulating without conscience, hurting without heat. Bersa's steadiness, the way she sat, the way she stirred, the way she comforted, may have been more than routine. It may have been performance, but without feeling. And what makes Bersa terrifying is not just the possibility that she lacked empathy. It's that she could imitate it so beautifully. She could hum a hymn with perfect pitch while the glass cooled on a bedside table. And then there's the historical context we cannot ignore. Early 1900s rural America was a place where women were expected to be silent, tirelessly nurturing, endlessly persistent, and present. If her inner world was empty or turbulent, there was no words for it, no therapy for it, and no exit door in her culture that didn't read wife or nurse or mother. Sometimes evil is a choice. Sometimes it's collapse, and the choices after the collapse are evil. We can't know exactly what lived inside of Bertha, but we can see the outline, a need to be central, a hunger for control, a fascination with boundary between relief and release, and a willingness to step over again and again. The hospital where Bertha lived the rest of her life was clean and plain. Because back then, when you went to a hospital for mental illness, there really was no getting back out. Time there, it was soft, slow, dull, unrelenting. She aged in white halls, floated through routines and said soft prayers, and eventually she passed away as quietly as she lived. And the death certificate did not mention the word that hung in the air around her name. Poison. Back in the town, recipes, though, they were rewritten. Women washed the same serving spoons three or four times. Mothers sniffed milk before pouring it in, and men, not used to it, began asking what was in their food. That trust... Was gone. And at the cemetery, the wind has the last word. Some of the dead who passed under Bertha's care have stones with dates now that don't make sense. Too close together, too early for the health they had. Too many under one woman's porch light. If you stand there at dusk, you can almost hear the town recalculating itself, deciding what to remember and what to forget, and what the children, who may ask why Miss Gifford's name, makes the grown-ups look at their hands. Either way, Bertha Gifford forces us to confront one of the hardest truths in human nature, that appearances are the easiest things to forge. Evil does not always announce itself. It's not going to be fists and shouting every time. Sometimes it's a baked pie. Sometimes it's a whisper that everything will be all right. And her psychology matters because it explains the mechanism, but it doesn't erase the choice. Whatever wound she carried, whatever emptiness she fed, she made decisions that ended lives. You want to protect your community from people like Bertha. The lesson isn't to stop trusting. It's to learn the difference between care and control, between comfort and compliance, between the person who sits with your suffering and the one who needs you to suffer so they can sit there. This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions, and I'm Kaitlyn reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light. Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought we knew about the criminal mind.

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Kaitlyn Bracey

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