A prolific poisoner who undertook her work as much from sympathy as for the minor fees she charged, Madame Popova was an advocate of women's liberation long before the cause was recognized. A native of Samara, Russia, she was so distressed by the travail of peasant wives held "captive" by their brutish husbands that she volunteered an inexpensive, lethal remedy. For thirty years before her ultimate arrest, in March 1909, she ran a small disposal service for her female neighbors, picking up spare change and executing her commissions with dispatch. A client, suddenly remorseful, turned her in to the police, and Madame Popova confessed to "liberating" some 300 wives in her career. In custody, she boasted of the fact that she "did excellent work in freeing unhappy wives from their tyrants." In her own defense, Madame Popova told her captors she had never killed a woman. Czarist soldiers saved her from a mob that sought to burn her at the stake, and she was unrepentant as she stood before the firing squad . [ReadOn]