‘Black widow’, 56, who poisoned her 11 husbands faces death penalty
Twenty-five years since her serial husband-killing began, Kolsum Akbari is now facing the death penalty in her home country of Iran.
According to MailOnline, the 56-year-old made sport out of marrying elderly guys and bumping them off by administering blood pressure pills, diabetes drugs, sedatives and industrial alcohol, and suffocating them with towels or pillows.
Despite inheriting property after property across a 23-year cycle, the calculated murderer's behaviour went undetected due to her victims' age-related health issues.
Until a certain nonchalance snuck in, that is, when she murdered her eleventh husband Gholamreza Babaei when he was 82.
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In 2023, Gholamreza's son became suspicious of Kolsum after a friend of the family revealed his own parent was poisoned by a wife going by the same name.
He proceeded to phone the police and she was placed in handcuffs.
With over two decades of guilt eating away at her, Kolsum crumbled under interrogation and confessed her crimes to the officers, although she admitted: "I don’t know how many I killed. Maybe it was 13 or 15 people. I don’t remember exactly."
She was ultimately charged with 11 counts of premeditated murder and one count of attempted murder, and last week she doubled down on her confession at the Sari Revolutionary Court after a short-lived denial.
The families of the victims are demanding her execution, yet the court will only deliver a verdict once all 45 plaintiffs have had their say in the trial.
Kolsum's original nuptials date back to when she was just 18 years old, tying the knot for a short time with a man suffering from mental health problems.
She subsequently married a much older gentlemen who'd raised children from a previous marriage. Kolsum was allegedly beaten by him and her stepsons.
The serial killer would later befriend the daughters of lonely old men to pick her next targets.
In the majority of the cases, her other-halves died soon after their wedding: 69-year-old Mirahmad Omrani was killed merely a month later in 2013; 62-year-old Esmail Bakhshi two months later in 2016, and 83-year-old Ganjali Hamzei 43 days after the big day.
In 2020, Kolsum's tainted soup failed to finish off one of the men, yet for some reason he never reported the disturbing incident to the authorities even after kicking her out of their home.
News of the so-called black widow's imminent sentencing comes after Australian woman Erin Patterson was found guilty of murdering her estranged husband's family by deliberately serving them poisonous mushrooms.
On 29 July, 2023, Patterson sat down for a meal with her former in-laws Gail and Don Patterson, as well as Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson and her husband Reverend Ian Wilkinson.
The menu featured beef wellington, mashed potato and green beans with pre-sliced mushrooms and dried mushrooms, but the latter were actually death cap mushrooms which can kill a person who eats even a small amount.
All four guests quickly became unwell, with Gail, Don and Heather passing away in hospital while Ian Wilkinson survived thanks to a liver transplant.
Dan Seddon