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Poisoners obscure guilt through aggressive performance and deliberate deflection

During her 1918 trial for attempting to poison her mentor's wife with arsenic and phosphorus, Milica Vukobrankovics aggressively maintains her innocence. She frames her actions as harmless misunderstandings while attempting to frame the family's adopted son by having a schoolgirl hide chemical bottles under their sofa. When confronted with incriminating evidence, including a book on murder psychology found in her bag, she weaponizes indignation and charm. Her courtroom tactics reveal a calculated performative innocence designed to disarm judges and prosecutors.

Der erste Prozeß Vukobrankovics.

Serial poisoners rely on charm, planlessness, and total emotional detachment

In her 1923 trial for poisoning publisher Ernst Stülpnagel's family with lead white mixed into basic groceries, Milica relies on personal charisma to destabilize proceedings. Weiss compares her conduct to historical poisoners like Gesche Gottfried, noting how such offenders act without clear rational motives yet bewitch their surroundings. They demonstrate total coldness toward their victims' agony while offering fussing care. Her erratic courtroom antics and contradictory excuses expose a psychological detachment that evades standard legal categorization.

Der zweite Prozeß.

Prison writings reveal self-pity, moral inversion, and obsession with objects

Milica’s prison memoir, written in cell 321, reveals a mind filled with moral inversion and cold self-absorption. She fixates mournfully on her disrupted desk and damaged book bindings while showing no genuine empathy for her ruined mother or victims. Her narrative exposes a compulsive need to monitor the consequences of her crimes while adopting a righteous, philanthropic posture. She rationalizes her crimes through split consciousness and fatalism, demonstrating how poisoners build protective illusions of innocence.

Das Buch der Milica Vukobrankovics.

Poisoning is an incurable psychological drive requiring permanent institutional…

Weiss concludes that poisoners operate under an instinctual compulsion similar to pyromania rather than rational motivation. Because punishment fails to deter or reform figures trapped in a poison complex, imprisonment only delays future attacks upon release. Their preservation of bourgeois vanity, small neatness, and cold detachment makes them uncommunicative border cases for criminal law. Society can only safeguard itself by placing identified poisoners in lifelong, humane confinement within specialized psychiatric facilities.

Zusammenfassung.

Book

Der Fall Vukobrankovics

An analysis of a serial poisoner's trial transcripts, prison memoirs, and cold psychological mechanics.

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@spot #criminology #psychology #trials #crime
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