A North Carolina woman fatally poisoned her daughter in a 2025 slaying that eventually connected the suspect to a cold case murder from 2007, authorities said Wednesday.
Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel, a 52-year-old resident of Hendersonville, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted murder and three counts of distribution of prohibited food or beverage, according to an arrest warrant.
“After an extensive and comprehensive investigation, the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crime Unit has charged Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel of Hendersonville in connection with the 2025 murder of Leela Livis and the attempted murder of Richard Pegg and Mia Lacey,” according to a North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation statement.
Hendersonville, with a little less than 16,000 residents, is in western North Carolina, just south of Asheville.
“It is believed the poisoning took place last November just before the death of the female victim,” North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Chad Flowers said in statement to NBC News on Wednesday. “The female victim is the daughter.”
County and state authorities declined to reveal how they connected Casper-Leinenkugel to the previously unsolved death of Michael Schmidt, who perished in a fire in October, 2007 in Hendersonville.
She was being held in Henderson County Jail on Wednesday and it wasn’t immediately clear if she had been assigned a lawyer or hired one to speak on her behalf.
Nicole Duarte contributed.
