FULL TEXT: Nauplion, Greece – A Greek woman has been sentenced to death four times for murdering her aged mother, her brother and two other close relatives.
The prosecutor in this Peloponnesian town alleged that the woman, Ekaterini Dimetrea, intended to poison the entire village.”
“She hated everybody,” one witness said.
The announcement of the four death sentences – one for each victim – was greeted in the criminal court here with shouts of “bravo.”
No one testified in defense of the 40-year-old “monster,” as the prosecution called her.
From May to September last year [1962], she poisoned her 80-year-old widowed mother, brother, aunt and five-year-old nephew.
In addition to the quadruple death sentence, she was given the 15-year sentence for attempting to poison a four-year-old girl.
The court listened in stunned silence as the murderess told how she poisoned her victims with an insecticide which she had put in their food and coffee.
Ekaterini said she had tried to poison her brother once before, but did not us enough to kill him. So she trued again and succeeded, just 10 days after he returned home from the hospital.
She told the court that her mother died after she had eaten food she had prepared for her brother. Her aunt drank the coffee she had also prepared for her brother.
The murderess, dressed in black and her head shrouded in her shawl, looked indifferent as the verdict was announced.
[“Greek Poisoner of Four Gets 4 Death Sentences,” syndicated (Reuters), The Washington Post (D.C.), Jul. 4, 1963, p. A14]
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