Martha Wise

In the winter of 1924–1925, a tight‑knit farm community outside Medina, Ohio, watched one family gather for holiday dinners and then, in horrifying sequence, gather again for funerals.

First, 72‑year‑old matriarch Sophie Hasel died after a sudden, agonizing stomach illness in December 1924. Doctors wrote it off as “stomach inflammation.”^[1][2] Weeks later, her relatives Fred and Lillian (Lily) Gienke and several of their children were laid low by the same kind of pain. Lily died in early January 1925. Fred followed on February 9.^[1][2]

By then, as many as seventeen relatives had fallen violently ill, and some of the Gienke children would never walk properly again.^[2] Only when an autopsy revealed arsenic saturating Lily’s organs did the pattern snap into focus.^[1]

The person at the center of that pattern was a farmer’s widow named Martha Wise — born Martha Hasel — who, by her own reported words, liked funerals a little too much.^[1][2]

From Poor Farm Girl to Farmer’s Wife

Martha Hasel was born in Hardscrabble, Ohio, likely in the early 1880s, into a poor farming family.^[1][2] She had at least three siblings, including two brothers, Frederick and Paul, and a sister, Emma.^[2] Life centered on work: later accounts describe her plowing fields and tending hogs even while pregnant.^[2]

The Younger Man Next Door

Within a year of Albert’s death, Martha began keeping company with a neighboring farmhand, a much younger man named Walter Johns.^[1][2][3] In a place as small as Hardscrabble, that alone was enough to stir talk.

Her mother, Sophie, then 72, disapproved of the relationship and fought with Martha over it.^[1] An aunt — Lily Gienke — also opposed the romance and wanted it ended.^[2] According to some accounts, relatives ridiculed Martha for “cradle‑snatching.”^[3] Gossips said Sophie even threatened to disown her daughter if she didn’t give Walter up.^[1]

The family pressure worked. One version of events says the affair lasted only about five months before being broken off.^[3] Another notes that by the end of 1924 the relationship had ended and Walter had moved to Cleveland, cutting off contact.^[2] In at least one telling, Martha vowed revenge after the breakup.^[3]

Even before anyone died, the fissures inside the Hasel‑Gienke clan were deep.

Thanksgiving Illness

The first serious illness came on Thanksgiving 1924.

Martha agreed to her mother’s demand to end the affair with Walter and showed up at the family dinner alone.^[1] That night, Sophie and several other relatives were suddenly stricken with severe stomach problems.^[1][2]

Sophie did not recover. Over the next weeks her condition worsened until she died on December 13, 1924. Doctors attributed the death to stomach inflammation.^[1][2] No one ordered an autopsy. No one yet suspected that someone might be poisoning the family.

New Year’s and the Gienke Deaths

If Sophie’s death seemed tragic but ordinary, what happened around New Year’s did not.

After the 1925 New Year’s celebration, Fred and Lily Gienke and six of their children, ages 9 to 25, were seized with terrible belly pain. Several were hospitalized.^[1] Lily died first, in early January 1925. Fred, who had also been gravely sick, died on February 9.^[1] Another account phrases it slightly differently — the Gienkes began suffering stomach pains on New Year’s Eve 1924, with both adults dead by February — but the outline is the same: a family party followed by multiple, similar, life‑threatening illnesses.^[2]

In all, reports later tallied seventeen relatives who had endured near‑identical symptoms in the fall and winter of 1924–1925.^[2] Four of the Gienke children were left partially paralyzed.^[2]

One retrospective article claimed that Fred and Lily drank water from buckets Martha had doused with arsenic.^[3] What was certain, once doctors began digging, was that something more than “stomach inflammation” was going on.

Rumors, Fires, and Arsenic

The question of exactly what brought law enforcement fully into the case has never been pinned down with certainty.

Some accounts say a string of mysterious fires in and around Hardscrabble pushed Medina County authorities to look more closely at the troubles shadowing the Hasel‑Gienke circle.^[1][2] Others describe the investigation as a reaction to the obvious pattern of illness and death after the Gienke cases — and to surviving victims voicing suspicions that what they’d suffered was not natural.^[2]

Either way, by early 1925, Medina County Sheriff Fred Roshon was scrutinizing the family and, in particular, the widowed Martha Wise.^[1] One discovery made that focus hard to ignore: Martha had signed her name to large purchases of arsenic at a local drugstore.^[1]

The Autopsy That Changed Everything

Sheriff Roshon ordered an autopsy on Lily Gienke’s body.^[1] The findings were unequivocal: Lily’s stomach and intestines were saturated with arsenic.^[1] This was not food poisoning or a winter bug. Someone had administered a classic homicidal poison.

Roshon brought Martha in for questioning.^[1] His wife, Ethel, was present and would become an unusual, and controversial, figure in the interrogation.^[1]

At first, Martha denied any wrongdoing. She acknowledged buying arsenic but said she used it to kill rats.^[1] It was not an implausible farm chore — but investigators already knew the quantities involved were far more than a typical household might need.^[1]

As the questioning wore on, Ethel confronted her. At one point, she is quoted as telling Martha: “The rain — it is the Voice of God.... It says, ‘You did, you did, you did.’”^[1]

Under this pressure, Martha changed her story. She admitted that after her mother’s death she had put arsenic into the water buckets at the Gienke home.^[1] Newspapers seized on the confession with lurid headlines, including one that described a "brain monster" warping the soul of the "Medina killer."^[1]

The question that remained was why.

“I Like Funerals”

People in Hardscrabble already knew that Martha liked funerals. She reportedly told acquaintances exactly that: “I like funerals.”^[1] Once she was under arrest, the way she talked about death only made the public more uneasy.

On March 23, 1925, she appeared before a grand jury considering whether to indict her for Lily Gienke’s death. She entered a plea of not guilty.^[2] Yet she also offered a disturbing explanation for her behavior. According to reports, Martha said she was irresistibly drawn to funerals and that when there were not enough funerals in the community, she was driven to create them by killing.^[2]

Other narratives would soon compete with that one.

Some accounts, especially later retellings, argued that her motive was revenge: that after relatives forced her to give up Walter Johns and mocked her for the relationship, Martha resolved to strike back at those who had criticized or humiliated her.^[3] She allegedly targeted the very relatives — including her mother Sophie and her aunt Lily — who had tried hardest to end the affair.^[2][3]

After her conviction, Martha would offer yet another version: that Walter himself had somehow ordered or compelled her to kill.^[1][2]

By the time the case reached trial, the community was left to sort through clashing stories — a morbid fascination with funerals, simmering family resentments, and the shadowy influence of the younger man next door.

The Trial of Martha Wise

On April 7, 1925, a Medina County grand jury indicted Martha Wise on a single count: first‑degree murder for the death of Lillian (Lily) Gienke.^[2] She was not tried for Sophie’s or Fred’s deaths, nor for the non‑fatal poisonings that had crippled several children.

Her trial opened on May 4, 1925.^[1] In the courtroom, she faced prosecutor Joseph Seymour and was represented by attorney Joseph Pritchard.^[2]

The prosecution built its case on patterns and survivors. Family members — including Martha’s own 14‑year‑old son, Lester — and three of the Gienke children testified against her.^[1][2] Three of those children were described as crippled by the poison; one had to be carried into court on a stretcher.^[1] Their presence underlined the human cost of what had happened in the Gienke household.

Lester’s testimony cut particularly close to home. He told the jury he had overheard his mother talking about poison with a male friend, and that she had warned her children never to drink from the water buckets at the Gienke home.^[1]

Medical evidence established arsenic in Lily’s body.^[1] Records linked large arsenic purchases to Martha.^[1] Her own admission about dosing the Gienke water buckets loomed in the background.^[1]

Martha’s defense did not contest that the poisonings had occurred. Instead, her attorneys argued she was insane and therefore not legally responsible for her actions.^[1][2] They also tried to shift some blame onto Walter Johns, claiming he had ordered her to commit the poisonings.^[2] Walter denied having any romantic interest in Martha and rejected the suggestion that he had directed any murders.^[1]

The defense’s insanity strategy suffered a blow when a man named Frank Metzger recanted earlier testimony, stating that the defense had asked him to perjure himself to bolster claims that Martha was insane.^[2] The case turned increasingly on whether the jury believed she understood what she was doing when she laced those water buckets.

The proceedings were not without collateral tragedy. During the trial, on May 6, 1925, Martha’s sister‑in‑law, Edith Hasel — who, along with her husband, had been prepared to testify for the defense — died by suicide.^[2] The loss added another funeral to a case already steeped in them.

Verdict and the Shadow of Walter Johns

By mid‑May, the jury returned its decision. Martha Wise was found guilty of first‑degree murder.^[1] The jurors, however, recommended mercy. That spared her from the death penalty and instead brought a sentence of life imprisonment.^[1]

Only after the verdict did Martha fully turn on Walter Johns in public. She claimed he had convinced her to murder her family.^[1] Walter, for his part, insisted he had never been romantically interested in her. He was arrested and questioned, but police reported finding no evidence to support Martha’s accusation, and he was not charged.^[1]

Whatever role Walter had or hadn’t played in her life, the law’s judgment was clear: responsibility for Lily Gienke’s death rested with Martha.

Life Inside, and an Unwanted Freedom

Martha was sent to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville to serve out her life sentence.^[2] There she lived for decades, aging behind prison walls while the sensational headlines faded.

In 1962, at about 79 years old, she was granted parole.^[1] Freedom, though, required somewhere to go. Her remaining family refused to take her in.^[2] Plans to move her to a rest home in nearby Union County collapsed when officials pointed out she had not been a resident there for the required year.^[2]

The End of Martha Wise, Questions Intact

Martha Wise died on June 28, 1971, still a prisoner of the state of Ohio.^[1][2] By then, nearly half a century had passed since Sophie, Lily, and Fred fell ill around family holiday tables in Hardscrabble.

The legal record leaves little doubt about what happened to at least one of them. An autopsy showed Lily Gienke’s body saturated with arsenic.^[1] A jury concluded that Martha Wise had put it there.^[1] Many more relatives were sickened in ways strongly consistent with the same method.^[2]

What has never been resolved, and likely never will be, is why.

Martha herself offered shifting stories: a morbid hunger for funerals^[1][2]; rage and humiliation after relatives ended her romance with a younger man^[2][3]; later, a claim that that same man had somehow ordered the killings.^[1][2]

The people whose bodies bore the evidence — Sophie, Lily, Fred, and the injured Gienke children — did not get to tell the story on their own terms. What remains are the traces they left in medical reports and courtroom testimony, and the bleak fact that in one rural Ohio family, over the course of a single winter, there were far more funerals than anyone should ever see.