She asked her clients only one question before naming her price: how heavy was the problem. She meant their husband's body weight. She needed it to calculate the dose.
A Privileged Start, A Hard Turn
Ana Drakšin, later known as Baba Anujka, was born around 1836 to 1838, likely in present-day Romania, to a wealthy cattleman. Her family moved to Vladimirovac, then part of the Austrian Empire's Banat Military Frontier and now in Serbia, while she was still a child. She was educated alongside other wealthy families in nearby Pančevo and reportedly became fluent in several languages.
By most accounts, a relationship in her early twenties with an Austrian military officer changed the course of her life — she was reportedly abandoned and left with a sexually transmitted infection, an experience said to have deeply shaped her toward suspicion and isolation afterward. She went on to marry a much older landowner, Jožef di Pištonja, with whom she had eleven children; only one survived to adulthood. After roughly twenty years of marriage, her husband died, and Ana — now known locally as Baba Anujka, "Grandmother Anujka" — built a small home laboratory and began developing a reputation as a folk healer and herbalist.
A Business Built on Desperation
Anujka's herbal remedies earned her a substantial, paying clientele across the region, charging anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 Yugoslav dinars depending on the request. Alongside legitimate folk medicine, she developed what she called "magic water" — sold primarily to women in difficult or abusive marriages who wanted a way out.
The mixture contained small, carefully calibrated amounts of arsenic along with plant-based toxins that were difficult to detect using the forensic methods of the time. When a client came to her describing a "marriage problem," Anujka would reportedly ask how much the problem "weighed" — a coded way of asking the target's body weight so she could determine an effective dose. Victims, typically young, healthy men, would fall ill within days of being given the mixture and often die within roughly a week.
Anujka eventually built something close to a referral network, working with a local woman, Ljubina Milankov, who acted as something like a sales agent, connecting prospective clients to her. Many of her clients later claimed at trial they hadn't known the "magic water" was poison at all — believing instead that Anujka possessed some kind of genuine supernatural power capable of causing death on its own.
A Trial in 1914, Then Decades More
Anujka's activities weren't entirely unnoticed during her lifetime. She first stood trial in 1914 in Bela Crkva, accused of supplying poison used in a murder, and was acquitted. Her operation continued for more than another decade afterward.
Her downfall began with a repeat client, Stana Momirov, who had used Anujka's "magic water" to kill her first husband and was later questioned after a relative of her second husband died under similar circumstances. Momirov implicated Anujka under questioning. A second case, involving a 16-year-old granddaughter unknowingly used to administer poison to her own grandfather, added a further murder charge.
Arrested at Ninety
Anujka was arrested on May 15, 1928, at the age of 90, alongside six co-defendants connected to the two specific murders prosecutors were able to build a case around — those of Nikola Momirov and Lazar Ludoški. Authorities exhumed both victims' bodies for autopsy at the University of Belgrade, where forensic analysis confirmed arsenic poisoning in both cases.
Her trial opened in June 1929 at the District Court in Pančevo, drawing crowds of curious spectators. Anujka maintained her innocence throughout, insisting she had never sold poison, only harmless herbal remedies, and claiming the entire case had been fabricated by Milankov to deflect blame for her own actions. At one point during the proceedings, she reportedly said through tears, "I'm not satisfied, I'm completely innocent. Kill me, I can't take it any longer."
The court wasn't persuaded. On July 6, 1929, Anujka was convicted as an accomplice in both murders and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Her co-defendants received a range of sentences — two of the women involved received life imprisonment as the primary perpetrators, while two others were acquitted. Both the prosecution and the defense appealed; a second trial in November 1929 upheld and in some cases increased the original sentences, with Anujka's own 15-year term reaffirmed, this time with hard labor.
A Long Life, Ending Quietly
Anujka served her sentence at a women's prison in Požarevac. In 1936, after eight years behind bars, she was released at around age 98 due to her advanced age and declining health. When journalists visited her after her release, she continued to deny any involvement in the poisonings.
She died on September 1, 1938, in her home in Vladimirovac, at roughly 100 years old.
A Case That's Stayed Strange Decades Later
Investigators and historians have continued debating the true scope of Anujka's activities. While she was only ever formally convicted in connection with two deaths, period reporting and later research have suggested her "magic water" may have been connected to somewhere between 50 and as many as 150 deaths across the wider Banat region over several decades — figures that, if accurate, would make her one of the most prolific poisoners in recorded European history, operating largely undetected for the better part of a lifetime in a remote, rural area with limited forensic capability at the time.
Sources
Baba Anujka, One Of The World's Oldest Serial Killers — All That's Interesting
The Story of Baba Anujka, the World's Oldest Serial Killer — Vintage News Daily