Is This Woman Our Latest Serial Killer?

Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel allegedly poisoned people at a Thanksgiving dinner. Two of them were her daughters. When investigators checked her address history, the story got much worse.

Editor’s note: Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel’s first court appearance is scheduled for April 30. She has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. All characterizations of the evidence in this article reflect publicly available court filings, probable cause affidavits, and primary source news reporting. The investigation is ongoing.

She put the wine in the refrigerator the night before.

At a Thanksgiving gathering in Hendersonville, North Carolina, on November 30, 2025, the bottle was already open when she brought it to the table, already missing a small amount, as though someone had tasted it first. The host, Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel, reminded her guests that she was allergic to grapes. She poured herself blackberry wine instead.

53-year-old Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel

Three people drank from the bottle she had prepared. Leela, Gudrun’s oldest daughter, had a full glass, then finished what was left. Her boyfriend, Evan, joined her. Twenty-eight-year-old Maija, Gudrun’s youngest and Leela’s half-sister, raised it to her lips. Something doesn’t taste right, she thought. A fly landing in her glass quashed any thought of giving the wine a second chance. Two small children sat at the table, a nine-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. Two men were also present, both described in subsequent police reports as the host’s boyfriends.

By midnight, three dinner guests were sick. By morning, one of them was dead.

Leela Livis was 32 years old.

32-year-old Leela Livis

Maija and Evan left around 8:30 that evening. By midnight, Evan was nauseated, weak, and his chest was tight. By eight the next morning, Maija called 911. Paramedics transported them both to AdventHealth in Henderson County. Blood tests would eventually reveal that Evan had a cyanide level of 10 in his system. The typical threshold for a lethal dose is 2.

Maija survived because she had consumed roughly a shot glass worth of wine before putting her glass down. Evan was lucky.

On that same morning, December 1, 2025, Gudrun called the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office to request a welfare check on Leela, who wasn’t answering her phone. She drove to Leela’s home in Jackson County to meet the deputies there. They found Leela dead inside.

Toxicology would later show that Leela’s blood contained five times the lethal dose of acetonitrile, a chemical the body converts into hydrogen cyanide over two to twelve hours. She would have felt fine when she drove home.

At the hospital that same day, Gudren visited Evan. She was very helpful, explaining to the attending physician her theory of what had happened. It must have been the wine. She had stored the bottle in a closet near the barn, she explained, next to chemicals, including rat poison. The children played back there sometimes. Maybe they had gotten into it.

Travis Peterson, Leela’s father, flew in from Wisconsin for the funeral and stood next to Gudrun at the graveside. He tried to offer comfort.

Leela and her father, Travis Preston

“I’d go to give her a hug,” he said later, “and it was like hugging a plank of wood.”

Gudrun’s mother wept. Gudren did not.

It would be weeks before investigators understood what they were dealing with. The answer was in Gudrun’s house in a brown bottle still sitting on a shelf.

Leela Was Planning to Build a House

Leela Jean Livis grew up with two fathers: Travis Peterson, her biological father in Wisconsin, and Stacey Shelton, who married her mother when Leela was three and adopted her. She gained a half-sister, Maija, and kept both relationships intact long after the family fractured, which it did, as Gudrun’s families tended to.

She earned a bachelor’s degree, then went back for an MBA from Western Carolina University. She worked as a human resources and payroll specialist at the university. She lived in Jackson County, about thirty minutes from her mother’s house in Hendersonville. Her half-sister Maija, four years younger, had gone in a different academic direction, earning a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of South Carolina. Two daughters, two different paths, both building lives.

By the fall of 2025, Leela was looking at land. She wanted to buy a piece of it and build on it. She had talked to her mother about constructing the house. Whatever complicated history existed between them, Leela was moving toward a future that included Gudrun.

When Gurdrun called him on December 2nd to say Leela was dead, Travis Peterson described it as a gut punch. He flew in for the funeral. He stood beside Gudrun at the graveside and tried to offer comfort to the woman now charged with his daughter’s murder.

“Seeing the brightest, most lovely person lying cold,” he said afterward, “watching them lower the lid, and then seeing her lowered into the cold earth tore my heart out.”

He also learned something at the funeral about the land Leela had been planning to buy. She had wanted her mother to build the house on it.

Maija Lacey was 28 years old, four years younger than her sister. She survived because she put her glass down.

28-year-old Maija Lacey

Acetonitrile has a faint, sweet, ether-like smell, noticeable enough to make you stop. Whether Maija’s scientific training had anything to do with that instinct is something only she knows. What is documented is that she drank less than her sister and her boyfriend, and lived.

Evan spent six days in the hospital and nearly died. Although Maija’s blood level was significantly lower, she, too, got seriously ill. She lost her sister. She will also spend the rest of her life knowing the poison was meant for her too, that the woman who served it was her mother, and that the only reason she is alive is due to her taste buds and a fly.

Maija told them exactly where her mother had retrieved the wine, exactly who drank what, and exactly what her mother had been drinking instead. She is likely to be the prosecution’s most important witness. She will sit in a courtroom, look at her mother, and tell a jury what happened at that table.

The Address Had a History

On December 19, 2025, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office contacted the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office with toxicology results from Leela’s autopsy. The chief of toxicology, Dr. Sandra Bishop Freeman, had found acetonitrile in Leela’s blood. She told investigators the body converts acetonitrile into hydrogen cyanide over two to twelve hours. She also told them something else: in all her years running the toxicology office, she had never seen a case of acetonitrile poisoning before. Not one.

The Henderson County Violent Crimes Unit assigned Detective Tulloch to the case. His first move was routine: check the call history at that address.

Schmidt Terrace, Hendersonville, North Carolina. A residential property in the Big Willow community. Nearly seven acres. A single-family house built in 1986, currently assessed at close to half a million dollars. The address had a history.

Multiple calls over twenty years, most unremarkable. One was not. In October 2007, officers had responded to a death investigation at this same address. The decedent was a man named Mischa Schmidt. He had been found by the woman who lived in the house on the property. She told officers she was the last person to see him alive. They had been having drinks together, she said.

The woman’s name then was Linda Casper. She goes by something else now.

Tulloch pulled the 2007 file and kept reading.

The 2007 death was ruled accidental for the same reason the 2025 poisoning nearly succeeded. Acetonitrile is a clear, colorless liquid with a faint, sweet smell. The body breaks it down slowly, converting it over two to twelve hours into hydrogen cyanide. The cyanide starves cells of oxygen. Organs fail. The heart stops. Without specific toxicological testing, it can look like almost anything: a man in poor health, a hard drinker whose body finally gave out.

It puts distance between the poison and the death. The person who administered it can be elsewhere when the victim dies, or can be the one who finds the body, or can be at the hospital with an explanation ready before anyone has asked for one.

Dr. Bishop Freeman told investigators this was the first acetonitrile poisoning she had encountered since taking over the office in 2009. It had apparently happened twice at the same address.

The search of Gudrun’s home on January 13, 2026, produced what investigators were looking for and more. The labeled brown bottle was still there. Eighteen years after Michael Schmidt died with a level of 300 in his system. Six weeks after Leela Livis died with five times the lethal dose in hers.

She hadn’t thrown it away.

Also seized: swabs, syringes, unknown liquids, multiple electronic devices, flash drives, a leafy green substance, and paperwork. Among the paperwork: life insurance documents in Leela’s name. Among the electronics: Leela’s cell phone.

Leela had died in her own home in Jackson County, about thirty minutes away. Her phone was at her mother’s house. How it got there has not been made public. Whether Gudrun took it from the scene when she drove to Jackson County to meet the deputies, or whether Leela had left it at Gudrun’s house before the dinner, investigators have not said. What they have said, through their actions, is that they wanted it badly enough to seize it under a search warrant. That phone held Leela’s messages, her plans, her conversations about the land she wanted to buy and the house she wanted her mother to build. Whatever was on it, it was in Gudrin’s possession when investigators arrived.

She Arrived With an Alibi

Gudrun did not wait to be asked.

On December 1, 2025, while Evan was in a hospital bed with a cyanide level five times the lethal dose in his bloodstream, Gudrun came to visit. She introduced herself to Dr. Anna Sullivan, the attending hospitalist, and began talking. Her daughter had died in Jackson County, she said. She believed it was the wine from the Thanksgiving dinner. The bottle had been stored in a closet near the barn, she explained, next to chemicals including rat poison. The children played back there sometimes. Maybe they had gotten into it. A complete explanation, delivered voluntarily, before any doctor had asked her a single question.

There was a problem with the story. Maija had already told investigators a different one.

The bottle did not come from a barn closet. Gudrun had retrieved it from a storage closet adjacent to her master bedroom, inside the house, down the hall from where she slept. She had placed it in the refrigerator the night before the dinner and brought it to the table herself, already open. The story was designed to move the origin of the poison as far as possible from Gudrun’s own hands.

At the table, the seating arrangement had been precise. Leela and Evan drank from the open bottle Gudrun had prepared. Maija had a small amount before stopping. Jeffrey Bosch, one of the two men present that evening, did not drink wine. Gudrun drank blackberry wine. The only people who consumed significant quantities of the wine Gudrun brought to the table were the people who ended up poisoned.

Jeffrey Bosch and Landon Phillips were both present at Thanksgiving dinner. Maija described Jeffrey Bosch as her mother’s boyfriend. Gudrun described Landon Phillips as her boyfriend. Whether either man knew about the other, and in what capacity, has not been made public. Both had been Gudrun’s business partners. Bosch co-owned Bean Works Coffee with her, and Phillips was connected to Toliver’s Crossing, another bar Gudrun was associated with. Both businesses had collapsed or were collapsing. Bean Works had dissolved nine days earlier.

Neither man drank from the poisoned wine bottle.

The morning after the dinner, it was Landon Phillips who called the investigators and told them, “We still have the bottle.” He brought it to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office himself. A man who had been living with Gudrun at Schmidt Terrace handed detectives the primary piece of physical evidence in the case. Whether that was instinct, guilt, or the reaction of someone who had spent enough time around Gudrun to be suspicious is unclear. But without Landon Phillips walking that bottle in, detectives might have been looking for it for weeks.

The Google searches came after the dinner. After Leela was dead. After Maija and Evan were in the hospital.

What happens if I accidentally ingest acetonitrile?

Does wine turn into cyanide?

Panic doesn’t produce deliberate, specific queries about how a poison works inside the body. What these searches suggest is someone checking to see whether the mechanism of the poison would be traceable through the wine she had allegedly used to deliver it. Someone making sure the story she was already telling would actually check out.

But why would investigators find the murder weapon in a labeled brown bottle on the shelf when they searched the house six weeks after Leela’s death? Intact. Not disposed of. Well, she’d done it before, and it worked.

This time she was wrong.

The Same Poison, Eighteen Years Earlier

The property on Schmidt Terrace is named after the man who once owned it.

Mischa August Schmidt was born in Florida in 1965. He later changed his name to Michael Ray Schmidt, for reasons that have not been made public. By the time Gudrun arrived in his life in the early 2000s, he was living on his Henderson County property and struggling. A DWI conviction in 2003. License revoked multiple times. A worthless check to Walmart in 2004.

He owned the land, though. That part was clear.

At some point, Gudrun moved into the main house on the property. Michael moved into a camper on the same land. On March 2, 2006, more than a year before his death, Michael Schmidt transferred ownership of both parcels to Gudrun.

Michael Ray Schmidt died on October 29, 2007. He was 42 years old.

Gudrun found him. She told officers she had last seen him approximately two days prior, when they had been having drinks together. She described him as a drug user and an alcoholic. She mentioned he had been coughing for days before his death.

The toxicology report came back with an acetonitrile level of 300 in his system, thirty times what nearly killed Maija’s boyfriend, Evan, and one hundred and fifty times the lethal threshold. This was not an accidental exposure or a small unknowing ingestion. A level of 300 requires a large, deliberate dose.

The manner of death was ruled accidental.

In the days after Schmidt’s death, an insurance investigator named Jack Gwyn contacted the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office. A $25,000 life insurance policy had been taken out on Mischa Schmidt five days before he died. The application contained two problems.

First: the physical description of the insured did not match the description provided by the medical examiner.

Second: the named beneficiary was listed as Nicole Schmidt, described as Schmidt’s wife.

Nicole Schmidt was not his wife. Public records identify her as a relative of Schmidt’s, not his spouse. Someone had taken out a life insurance policy on Michael Schmidt five days before his death, misidentified a relative as his wife, gotten his physical description wrong, and named that relative as the beneficiary. The insurance company flagged it for review.

Despite the 300 acetonitrile level, the suspicious insurance application, and two provable lies on that application, the case was closed as accidental. It would stay that way for eighteen years.

Then a detective checked the call history at Schmidt Terrace and pulled the 2007 report.

The same address. The same poison. A different victim.

She Changed Her Name After the House Burned Down

Linda Jean Casper was born on March 1, 1973, in Wisconsin. In October 2004, she filed paperwork in a North Carolina court and emerged with a new name: Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel.

She told people the Leinenkugel half came from family, the same family that operated the prestigious Leinenkugel Brewing Company. This Wisconsin institution was founded in 1867 and is now owned by Molson Coors. Its beer is distributed nationally. It was these roots that allegedly inspired the German-inflected first name, the hyphenated surname, and the German restaurant she would eventually open.

The Leinenkugel family had never heard of her. Sandra Riddle, the mother of Linda’/Gudrin’s ex-husband, Stacey Shelton, said it plainly: the stories about the brewing family were fantasies. Linda had never even been to Germany.

The name Gudrun is Old Norse, derived from elements meaning “battle” and “secret”. In Norse mythology, Gudrun is a figure defined by betrayal and calculated vengeance, orchestrating elaborate retribution against those who wrong her, killing her own children in the process. Whether Linda knew the mythology when she chose the name is unknown. What is known is the timing.

Linda filed the name change in October 2004, the same year her marriage to Stacey Shelton ended in divorce.

When Shelton decided to leave, he began moving his belongings out of the house they shared. He made multiple trips. He was in the middle of it, still returning to collect what remained, when the house burned to the ground in the middle of the night. He lost everything he hadn’t already moved out. No charges were ever filed in connection with the fire. Sandra Riddle described it: “We went back up to get the rest of the stuff, and the house had burnt down mysteriously in the middle of the night.”

Mysteriously. In the middle of the night. While he was still moving out.

Linda, now Gudrun, left Wisconsin and moved to North Carolina. She was thirty-one years old. She had left damage behind before. She would again.

Over the years, people who encountered Gudrun heard different versions of her professional background. She had been a pilot. A firefighter. An EMT. She claimed to have opened six restaurants and bars across the country. Former associates described a woman who told different stories to different people, and whose past changed depending on who was asking.

Each business venture ended badly for the people around her. A dry cleaning operation in 2006. Bean Works Coffee and Tea in Asheville, co-owned with Jeffrey Bosch, one of the two men present at the Thanksgiving dinner. Patton Public House, a German-themed restaurant on Patton Avenue in Asheville that opened in 2016 after several years of delays, closed in 2017.

In fact, employees at the restaurant had shown up for work one morning to find their direct deposits had been turned off. When they confronted her at a warehouse meeting, she screamed at them to shut up. She blamed the payroll company. A civil lawsuit alleged fraud, mismanagement, commingling of business and personal funds, and retaliation against employees who complained. No criminal charges were filed.

Frog Refunds LLC dissolved in 2025. Bean Works Coffee dissolved on November 21, 2025. Nine days before the Thanksgiving dinner.

Sandra Riddle told the Hendersonville Lightning that when Maija was small, Gudrun used the child’s name and personal information to open credit cards. Public records also indicate that she also opened credit cards in the name of another three-year-old child.

The pattern across thirty years was consistent: the people closest to her — children, employees, business partners — lost property, money, and identity to a woman who told different stories to different people and disappeared when the bills came due.

Gudren arrived in Henderson County in the mid-2000s with her new name, a fabricated heritage, and whatever she had taken from the life she left behind. Michael Schmidt had property. She was living in his house within a year.

Background searches show Linda at a Rapid City, South Dakota address between approximately 2018 and 2021, three years with no public explanation and no identified business venture. For a woman with Linda’s documented history of moving between places and leaving damage behind, three unaccounted years in a new state are a gap investigators are presumably aware of.

Not a woman who snapped. A decades-long pattern of deception, financial predation, and, if the charges hold, murder.

Gudrun Linda Casper-Leinenkugel has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Her attorney says he has heard nothing that implies guilt. Only theories.

The labeled bottle was still on her shelf when investigators arrived.

Elroy Lund’s Daughters Always Suspected

Elroy A. Lund Jr. had served in the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve, played in the National Guard band, and performed at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1963. He spent most of his life in Exeland, Wisconsin. When he died in May 2017 at 72, his obituary listed the cause as natural causes. He was old. He had a heart condition. He had cirrhosis.

His two adult daughters did not accept it.

They told investigators immediately: test his blood. They believed Gudrun had poisoned him. The coroner, Dave Dockerstool, drew blood as they requested. That sample was later accidentally destroyed before it could be tested.

Gudrun had apparently known Elroy since childhood, though he was 28 years older than her. What is documented is the timeline. Gudrun’s restaurant in Asheville failed in 2017. The civil lawsuits were accumulating. On March 10, 2017, she traveled back to Wisconsin and married Elroy Lund.

Two months to the day later, he was dead.

She told investigators she had gone out to get food on the afternoon of May 10th. When she returned to the trailer on Polish Road where they lived, she found him dead. Nobody raised an objection except his daughters, who were already doing so. Elroy was cremated.

Cremation is the single most effective barrier to forensic investigation in a suspected poisoning. Blood cannot survive it. Whether cremation was Elroy’s wish or Gudrun’s decision, the practical effect was the same. The most direct evidence of how he died was gone.

The Sawyer County investigation that reopened in early 2026 is working with what remains: hair, saliva, and other biological material recovered during a February 2026 search of the Polish Road trailer, nearly nine years after Elroy’s death.

The autopsy photographs showed that Elroy’s face and upper chest were distinctly blue at the time of death. Cyanosis, the bluish discoloration that happens when the body stops getting oxygen. Cyanide poisoning produces exactly this. So can a heart attack, which is what the autopsy listed. The overlap is not something investigators are inclined to dismiss.

When deputies arrived at the trailer, the room was boiling, with several small space heaters running throughout. Elroy had poor circulation, Gertrude told them. He always wanted the heat set to 80 degrees. She volunteered this before anyone had asked about the temperature.

Detective Dansman, who later reviewed the case, noted two things. Heat speeds up decomposition. It can make it much harder to pin down exactly when someone died. And despite Elroy’s reported intolerance for cold, he was found wearing only boxer shorts and athletic socks.

A man who was always cold. Found barely dressed. In a room heated to 80 degrees.

Gudrun arrived with the explanation before the deputies had formed their questions. The same thing she did at the hospital after the Thanksgiving dinner. The same thing she did when Michael Schmidt died, and she described his history of alcohol and drug use to officers who hadn’t yet asked.

Friends of Elroy in Exeland were pleased to hear, at the time of his death, that a baby Elroy might be on the way. Gudrun was believed to be pregnant. Some of those friends had since met the boy, now nine years old, and described him as a smart kid. These were people who had believed for eight years that Elroy died of natural causes. They are now watching a murder investigation unfold that may tell them their friend was poisoned by the woman who carried his son.

A nine-year-old boy appears in news accounts of the case, present at the Thanksgiving dinner, present at Leela’s funeral. Credit union statements addressed to Elroy Lund were still arriving at the Schmidt Terrace address in early 2026, nearly nine years after his death. Investigators opened them under a search warrant. The accounts contained $1,079.94.

A dead man’s name, still being used.

In Wisconsin, the Sawyer County investigation into Elroy Lund’s 2017 death continues. Forensic analysts are working with biological material recovered from the Polish Road trailer in February 2026. If those samples support a poisoning conclusion and charges follow, Gudrun would face a third murder count in a second state.

Elroy’s daughters are still waiting. They have been waiting since May 10, 2017.

The FBI Has a Word for What She May Be

How does a mother poison her own daughter?

Not in a moment of rage. Not in a crisis that got out of hand. With premeditation: obtaining the chemical, preparing the bottle the night before, making sure she herself drank something different, sitting at the table, and watching her daughter finish the glass.

Poison is the method most consistently associated with female killers, and some reasons make sense once you understand how this kind of person thinks. It requires no physical confrontation. It allows the killer to be present afterward, to comfort, to grieve, to plan the funeral. It puts distance between the poison and the death, since victims typically die hours later, elsewhere, in circumstances that can be attributed to illness or accident. And it requires something that impulsive violence does not: patience, planning, and the ability to sit across a table from someone you intend to kill and behave as though nothing is wrong.

Being able to act normally while planning something like this means you experience other people’s pain differently than most of us do. Not necessarily feeling nothing, but missing the specific things that would otherwise make this impossible: guilt, empathy, the gut-level resistance to watching someone you love die.

Travis Peterson hugged Gudrun at their daughter’s graveside and felt nothing come back. Her own mother wept. Gudrun did not. Most people who bury someone they love fall apart. Gudrun planned the funeral, attended it, and hugged people like a plank of wood.

Children whose identities she used to open credit cards. Employees whose paychecks she diverted. Business partners she left holding debt. A man who signed his property over to her and was dead within two years. A husband she married in March and buried in May. A daughter whose life insurance paperwork was found in her mother’s home.

Sheriff Lowell Griffin, when asked what drove this case, used one word: greed.

Plenty of people want money badly enough to do dishonest things. Very few are willing to kill for it, and fewer still can kill people they are supposed to love. Female predatory killers who kill for money tend to have something else going on, too: an unshakeable belief that the rules other people live by simply don’t apply to them.

The fabricated Leinenkugel identity fits. The invented credentials fit. A woman who legally renamed herself after a Norse figure associated with vengeance and secret power, who claimed connection to a brewing dynasty that didn’t know her, who told people she had been a pilot, a firefighter, an EMT — this is someone who had constructed a self that bore little relationship to observable reality and expected the world to accept it. When businesses failed and money ran out, she found another way.

If Linda Casper-Leinenkugel is convicted of killing both Michael Schmidt and Leela Livis, she will meet the FBI’s established definition of a serial killer: two or more murders committed in separate events with a cooling-off period between them. The events are separated by eighteen years. The cooling-off period was long enough that the first murder was ruled accidental, the evidence degraded, and the file closed.

Researchers have documented hundreds of female serial killers across dozens of countries. They tend to kill people they know. They tend to use poison. They tend to operate within domestic relationships where access to victims is normalized, and behavior is shielded by the way we think about women as caregivers. They are, on average, harder to catch than male serial killers, precisely because the method and the setting make individual deaths easy to explain away.

Female serial killers who kill for financial gain typically target intimate partners, elderly victims, or people in their professional care. Killing an adult child is rare, even within this group. It tells you something about where Gudrun’s head was by November 2025: that Leela’s life insurance policy had been weighed against her life and found to outweigh it.

Leela was planning to buy land. She wanted her mother to build the house. She was actively involving Gudrun in her plans for the future in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. She had no idea she was being evaluated as a resource.

What Linda Casper-Leinenkugel’s history shows, across thirty years, across multiple states, across the people closest to her, is someone who sees other people as means to an end, who treats relationships like transactions, and who can plan something like this calmly and patiently, even when the target is someone they’re supposed to love.

A labeled bottle of acetonitrile found in her home. Google searches conducted after her daughter’s death, asking about the poison’s effects. Life insurance paperwork in her daughter’s name. Her daughter’s cell phone at her house. And an eighteen-year-old cold case involving the same poison at the same address.

Not a woman overwhelmed by what she had done. A woman who believed she was still in control of the situation.

Elroy Lund’s investigation is ongoing, his biological material now in a forensic lab.

Then there is Robert Van Der Burgh.

Leela believed he was her father. She listed him as family on her Facebook page and traveled to the Netherlands to see him multiple times over the years. Van Der Burgh died suddenly in his sleep in September 2019 at 65 and was cremated privately within days. His family announced it on his Facebook page: their son, brother, uncle, and friend had died suddenly. They were shocked and very sad.

Gudrun has apparently never been to the Netherlands. No evidence connects her to his death. But the question is worth naming directly: if Gudrun convinced Leela that Van Der Burgh was her father, whether to obscure Leela’s actual paternity or to extract something from him, he was another person whose place in Leela’s life may have been built on a lie. Whether investigators have looked into his death is not publicly known. What is known is that he died suddenly, was cremated quickly, and that the woman who may have inserted him into Leela’s life had a documented pattern of using people and watching them die.

Henderson County investigators said in January 2026 that they were working to determine whether there might be additional victims. They are still looking.

The Bottle Was Still on Her Shelf When They Arrived

When investigators asked Linda about the labeled brown bottle found in her home, she had an explanation for that, too. She told them she hadn’t ordered the acetonitrile herself. She had forgotten her passwords, she said. So she had texted a co-resident, someone who lived with her at Schmidt Terrace, and that person had ordered it for her via eBay.

The probable cause affidavit refers to this person only as “a subject that lived in the same house as her.” Public databases show a man named James Wilson who shared the Schmidt Terrace address for over 12 years, beginning in March 2006, the same month Linda acquired the property. He appears in those databases under the alias James Casper, the same surname Linda was born with. Who he is, what he knew, and what investigators have learned from him are questions the court proceedings have not yet answered. What the detail reveals is characteristic: Linda, even for this, used someone else’s account.

Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel is being held without bond in the Henderson County Detention Center. She has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Her attorneys, Paul Bidwell and Dustin Dow of Asheville, have said publicly that nothing they have seen implies guilt. “I just heard theories,” Bidwell told reporters after a February 2026 hearing.

Her next court appearance is April 30, 2026, in Henderson County Superior Court. The district attorney will not seek the death penalty. In North Carolina, a first-degree murder conviction that is not capital carries mandatory life without parole. There is no middle ground.

The state’s physical evidence is specific: acetonitrile confirmed in the victims’ blood, the same compound found in her home, her internet searches asking about that compound after the poisonings. The circumstantial evidence is extensive: two decades of documented financial predation, the insurance paperwork, the cold case at the same address with the same poison. The witness testimony is direct: Maija Lacey, who survived, told investigators exactly where her mother retrieved the bottle and watched her pour wine for a table of people while drinking something different herself.

Maija lost her sister at that table. She nearly died at it. She will almost certainly be the prosecution’s most important witness.

The South Dakota Years. The eBay Order. The Insurance Payout. What We Still Don’t Know.

This case goes to trial eventually. When it does, documents will be unsealed, testimony will be given under oath, and some of what follows will be answered. Until then, here is what the investigation has not yet made public, and what to watch for as it develops.

Who is James Wilson? He appears in public databases as a longtime resident of Schmidt Terrace, with over 12 years of residency beginning when Gudrun acquired the property in March 2006. He carries the alias James Casper, the same surname Gudrun was born with. He may be the person Gudrun told investigators placed the eBay order for acetonitrile on her behalf. Whether investigators have interviewed him and what he knows about what happened at that address over 18 years have not been made public.

What happened in Rapid City, South Dakota, between 2018 and 2021? A background search (Truthfinder) places Gudrun at a Rapid City address for approximately three years. No business filings, no news coverage, and no publicly identified associates from that period have surfaced.

Who collected the $25,000 insurance payout on Michael Schmidt’s life? The application named a relative as his wife and contained two documented misrepresentations. Whether the payout was ultimately made, who collected it, and whether that person has been interviewed is not publicly known.

What does Leela’s life insurance policy say? Investigators seized life insurance paperwork in Leela’s name from Gudrun’s home. The coverage amount, the beneficiary, and when the policy was taken out have not been made public.

What is on Gudrun’s phone and devices? The data extraction was returned to investigators in March 2026 and has not been described in any public filing. Gudrun’s phones held the Google searches, her text messages, her communications with the co-resident who allegedly placed the eBay order, and her conversations with Leela in the weeks before the dinner. What else they hold, nobody outside the investigation yet knows.

Will Elroy Lund’s biological material yield results? Nine years after his death, forensic analysts are working with hair, saliva, and DNA recovered from the Polish Road trailer. Whether those samples are intact enough, and whether they will confirm what his daughters have believed since the day he died, is the question Sawyer County is trying to answer. If the answer is yes and charges follow, Gudrun would become a triple murder defendant in two states.

Are there other victims? Henderson County investigators said publicly in January 2026 that they were working to determine whether there might be additional victims connected to Gudrun. The South Dakota years. The deaths in her orbit that have not been examined. The open question of Robert Van Der Burgh. By their own description, the investigation is still expanding.

Two Daughters Went to Thanksgiving Dinner. One Came Home.

Leela Livis was looking forward to building a house. She had asked her mother to help her build it. She was trusting her mother, making plans, building toward a future that included the woman now charged with her murder.

That trust is what killed her.

Sandra Riddle, who has known Gudrun since her son brought her home decades ago, said: She has left a trail of destruction throughout the 25 years I’ve known her.

Twenty-five years. Two murder charges. Two attempted murder charges. One investigation pending in a second state. One cold case solved after eighteen years. Two daughters who went to Thanksgiving dinner. One came home.

Over three decades, the people around Gudrun saw different versions of the same performance: the entrepreneur, the restaurateur, the devoted mother with the elaborate German name, and the stories about the brewing family. Convincing enough in each new place that nobody looked too hard at where she had come from.

Underneath it, if the charges are true, was something simpler: a person who looked at the people closest to her and calculated what could be taken.

She put the wine in the refrigerator the night before.

She had been planning it longer than that.

Timeline of Events

This case spans more than thirty years across three states. Here is the chronology to keep in mind as the article moves backward and forward through Gudrun’s life.

• 1973 — Linda Jean Casper is born in Wisconsin.

• Late 1990s–early 2000s — Marries Stacey Shelton. Daughter Maija is born.

• 2004 — Marriage ends. The house she shared with Shelton burns to the ground as he moves out. She legally changes her name to Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel and moves to North Carolina.

• 2006 — Michael Schmidt signs the Schmidt Terrace property over to her.

• October 2007 — Michael Schmidt dies of acetonitrile poisoning. Ruled accidental.

• March 10, 2017 — Marries Elroy Lund in Wisconsin.

• May 10, 2017 — Elroy Lund dies, exactly two months later. Ruled out natural causes.

• 2018–2021 — Possibly lives at a Rapid City, South Dakota address—three years with no public record of business activity.

• November 30, 2025 — Hosts Thanksgiving dinner at Schmidt Terrace. Serves poisoned wine.

• December 1, 2025 — Leela Livis dies of acetonitrile poisoning.

• January 13, 2026 — Search warrant executed at Schmidt Terrace. Arrest follows three days later.

• April 30, 2026 — Next court appearance scheduled.

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoyed it, please pass it along to one of your true-crime-following friends. See you next week!

References

Harrison, M. A. (2023). Just as deadly: The psychology of female serial killers. Cambridge University Press.

Santos-Hermoso, J., González-Álvarez, J. L., López-Ossorio, J. J., García-Collantes, Á., & Alcázar-Córcoles, M. Á. (2022). Psychopathic femicide: The influence of psychopathy on intimate partner homicide. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 67(4), 1579–1592. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.15038

Tracy, S. K., & Brooks, T. R. (2025). Staying under the radar: Poison and the female serial killer. Archives of Women’s Health Care, 8(3), 1. https://doi.org/10.31038/AWHC.2025833

https://www.hendersonvillelightning.com/news/16004-timeline-of-casper-leinenkugel-poison-murder-case.html

https://www.facebook.com/ncsbi/posts/-multiple-murder-arrest-after-an-extensive-and-comprehensive-investigation-the-h/1266395575519542/