Ana di Pištonja, known as Baba Anujka, was a serial killer from the village of Vladimirovac, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). She is believed to have poisoned at least 50 people and possibly as many as 150 between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Baba Anujka was born in 1838 in Romania to a wealthy cattleman, although she claimed to be born in 1836. She attended private school in Pančevo and later married a landowner with whom she had 11 children. After her husband’s death, she became an amateur chemist and established a reputation as a healer and herbalist.
Baba Anujka made a laboratory in one wing of her house and earned a good income from producing medicines and mixtures for people with health problems. However, she also sold toxic substances, which she marketed as “magic water” or “love potions”. The “love potions” contained small amounts of arsenic and other poisonous plant substances, making them difficult to detect, and were mostly sold to women with abusive husbands. She also had a “sales agent” who helped find clients for her “love potions”.
Her crimes came to light in the 1920s after one of her regular clients, Stana Momirov, was arrested for killing her husband and implicated Baba Anujka in the murder. Another death occurred after a woman purchased a potion from Baba Anujka to murder her husband’s father, which resulted in the man’s death. Baba Anujka was arrested along with six other people involved in the two killings, but her co-defendants claimed that they did not know the potions were poison and blamed her for the deaths.
Despite her denials, Baba Anujka was sentenced to 15 years in prison for her role in the two murders. She served eight years before being released on compassionate grounds and died in 1938 in her home in Vladimirovac at the age of 100. Although the exact number of her victims remains unknown, Baba Anujka is considered one of the world’s oldest serial killers and her case is still remembered as a dark chapter in Yugoslavian history.
