The Coldest Killers: Is Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel a Black Widow?
The one-time North Carolina restaurant owner is accused of poisoning three people and an additional homicide 19 years ago
Leela Jean Livis was 32 when she died on December 1, 2025. A 2015 graduate of Western Carolina University, Livis died a few days after Thanksgiving dinner with members of her family. On January 16, 2026, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation announced that Livis’s mother, Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel, had been arrested for the murder of Livis and the attempted murders of Mia Lacey and Richard Pegg. The release also said that investigators found “evidence linking Casper-Leinenkugel to the murder of Michael Schmidt that occurred in Henderson County in 2007.”
NBC News reports that investigators charged Leinenkugel “with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted murder and three counts of distribution of prohibited food or beverage.” Leinenkugel, who once owned a restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, allegedly poisoned the trio with a substance called acetonitrile, which, based on a description of how it works, is a particularly cruel and perhaps clever choice. It is a clear substance with a sweet, fruity scent—but it converts into cyanide once inside the body, and according to the CDC, exposure symptoms include “asphyxia; nausea, vomiting; chest pain; lassitude (weakness, exhaustion); stupor, convulsion.” LabPro Inc. states that acetonitrile has multiple legitimate uses, including liquid and gas chromatography. It can also be used to degrease and cleanse “surfaces and equipment in a variety of industrial settings.”
In a 2013 LA Times piece about physician Robert Ferrante, then charged with poisoning his wife using creatine tainted with cyanide, science journalist Deborah Blum wrote that she believed “poisoners are the coldest of killers.”
“They plan ahead,” Blum wrote, and “they plot out their poison and delivery methods in advance, they entice their victims to consume the poison, and they often stay to watch the poison do its work.” Poisoners, Blum continued later, “believe that careful planning will allow them to escape detection. We also know—or think we do—that ‘poison is a woman’s weapon.’”
In her 2023 Substack article titled “The Sneaky Serial Killer,” forensic psychologist Joni E. Johnston did a deep dive into this most aggressive of passive-aggressive crimes:
[Poisoners] tend to operate behind the scenes. Behind that pleasant façade lurks an immature personality determined to get their way and using emotional and verbal manipulation to do so. Guilt, gaslighting, and playing the victim are the weapons poisoners tend to use before they become deadly.
Additionally, according to Johnston, most “poisoners kill someone they know; a child, spouse, friend, or acquaintance.” Motives vary. They can be the classic life insurance windfall, but sometimes it’s simply a matter of convenience. For some, Johnston writes, it’s also about “ego (belief in mental superiority).”
For now, North Carolina investigators aren’t releasing much additional information due to the ongoing investigation. Newspaper articles from years ago, however, seem to hint at elements of Leinenkugel’s past that are much more intriguing in light of her arrest.
In July of 2006, Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel, going by Gudrun Casper, acquired a license for “Casper’s On-Site Drapery Cleaning and More,” a dry-cleaning business. While acetonitrile isn’t used on textiles, it isn’t a big leap to think she had deep knowledge of cleaning agents and solvents.
Then there’s the restaurant Leinenkugel opened in Asheville in 2016 (after several delays—the article was published in 2014)—the Patton Public House. While Joni Johnston notes that poisoners often focus on victims known to them, it’s unsettling to consider that Leinenkugel was in charge of any kind of eatery or bar. It might be interesting to find out what the pub’s local reputation was like, though it didn’t seem to last long.
Finally (for now), there’s this—on her Facebook page, Leela Livis listed two family members: mother Gudrun Linda Casper (Leinenkugel’s full name, according to public records, is Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel), and father, Robert Van Der Burgh. A check of Van Der Burgh’s profile shows the final post there was made on Sept. 10, 2019. It read:
Dear all, our dear son, brother, uncle and dear friend Robert vd Burgh died suddenly in his sleep on Monday morning at the age of 65. We are shocked and very sad. As he wished, Robert will be cremated in a private circle this coming week.
It appears that Van Der Burgh was from the Netherlands, and many condolence posts are in German and Dutch. It may be that he had been out of contact with Leela Livis’s mother for a long time.
Noting this, however, it’s worth quoting another passage from Joni Johnston’s article:
Experts believe the number of poisoners who elude justice is twenty to thirty times higher than those behind bars. Still, we can make some educated guesses about the personalities of poisoners by studying the nature of convicted poisoners and the crimes they commit.
In addition to Leela Jean Livis, surviving victims Mia Lacey and Richard Pegg, and alleged 2007 victim Michael Schmidt, it isn’t reaching to suggest that Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel might have more than a handful of premature deaths connected to her. At the moment, it’s just a matter of waiting to see what else turns up.