Mother Allegedly Poisoned Her Own Daughters’ Wine at Thanksgiving Dinner

Mother Allegedly Poisoned Her Own Daughters’ Wine at Thanksgiving Dinner

Blog/DarkNews

Mother Allegedly Poisoned Her Own Daughters’ Wine at Thanksgiving Dinner

A family Thanksgiving gathering turned deadly when investigators say a North Carolina mother laced a bottle of wine with a chemical that slowly converts to cyanide inside the human body — and the investigation has now reopened an 18-year-old cold case.

Listen to “Mother Allegedly Poisoned Her Own Daughters’ Wine at Thanksgiving Dinner” on Spreaker.

A HOLIDAY MEAL TURNS DEADLY

Twelve people sat down for Thanksgiving dinner in November 2025 at a home on Schmidt Terrace in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It was a family gathering — the host’s two adult daughters were there, along with one daughter’s boyfriend and nine other guests. At some point during the meal, three of those guests shared a bottle of wine. The other nine people at the table did not drink from that particular bottle.

Hours after the dinner wrapped up, the host — a 52-year-old woman named Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel — received a text message from one of her daughters. Leela Livis, 32, was letting her mother know that she and her half-sister’s boyfriend, Richard Pegg, were both vomiting and feeling terrible. The half-sister, Maija Lacey, had gotten sick too. All three of them had been the ones drinking from that shared bottle of wine.

Leela Livis drove back to her home in Jackson County after the gathering. On December 1, 2025, she was dead.

The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office didn’t start investigating Livis’s death until December 30, about a month after the Thanksgiving meal. Once detectives started digging, they learned that the three people who got sick — Livis, her half-sister Maija, and Lacey’s boyfriend Richard — were the only ones at that twelve-person dinner who had drunk from the same bottle of wine. When investigators searched the home where the dinner had taken place, what they found there would eventually lead to murder charges spanning nearly two decades.

THE CHEMICAL IN THE WINE

According to arrest warrants filed in the case, that bottle of wine had been laced with acetonitrile. It’s a clear, colorless industrial chemical — the kind of thing most people would never encounter in their daily lives. It’s used as a solvent in pharmaceutical manufacturing, in spinning synthetic fibers, and as a component in lithium batteries. The EPA classifies it as highly toxic. What makes acetonitrile particularly dangerous — and particularly useful if someone wanted to poison another person — is what happens after it enters the human body.

The liver slowly converts acetonitrile into hydrogen cyanide. Not immediately, though. The conversion happens gradually, which is why medical researchers describe it as causing “delayed toxicity.” According to a case study published in the Postgraduate Medical Journal, victims of acetonitrile poisoning can appear completely fine for the first thirty minutes or even longer after ingesting it. Then, somewhere between three and eleven hours later, the symptoms start: mental confusion, vomiting, seizures. By that point, the cyanide has already been building up in their system.

The half-life of that conversion process is approximately forty hours, and harmful levels of cyanide in the blood can persist for more than twenty-four hours after exposure. So a person could drink something laced with acetonitrile at dinner, feel fine on the drive home, go to sleep thinking they just had too much to eat, and wake up hours later with cyanide coursing through their bloodstream. They might not even connect their symptoms to anything they consumed earlier.

Once the cyanide takes hold, it attacks the body’s ability to use oxygen at the cellular level. Chest pain, confusion, rapid pulse, convulsions, respiratory failure — that’s the progression. And because the onset is so delayed, victims often have no idea what’s happening to them or why.

Blood tests performed on Leela Livis after her death revealed acetonitrile in her system at five times what prosecutors described as the lethal threshold. Tests on Maija and Richard confirmed they had ingested the same chemical. The difference is that Maija and Richard survived. Livis did not.

THE MOTHER

On January 16, 2026, Henderson County sheriff’s deputies arrested the woman who had hosted that Thanksgiving dinner: 52-year-old Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel. They arrested her at her home in Hendersonville — and her home address is 15 Schmidt Terrace, the same location where the dinner had taken place.

Casper-Leinenkugel is the mother of both Leela Livis and Maija Lacey. The two daughters share the same mother but have different fathers, according to information listed on their Facebook profiles. So investigators are alleging that a mother poisoned her own daughters and her daughter’s boyfriend at her own Thanksgiving table.

Sandra Riddle is Maija Lacey’s grandmother — she’s the mother of Casper-Leinenkugel’s ex-husband, Stacey Shelton. After the arrest, Riddle spoke to the Hendersonville Lightning because she felt the public needed to understand the family connection.

“They were there to have Thanksgiving dinner at their mother’s house, and next thing, Leela was dead, and Maija and her boyfriend was in the hospital. I don’t know why. That’s just the strangest part of it. What was to be gained?”

During Casper-Leinenkugel’s bond hearing, prosecutors revealed something else that caught investigators’ attention: her internet search history. After she learned that the guests from her Thanksgiving dinner had fallen ill, Casper-Leinenkugel had typed a very specific question into Google: “What to do if I accidentally ingest acetonitrile?” She had also searched: “Does wine turn into cyanide?”

Those searches raise an obvious question. If she didn’t know what acetonitrile was or that it could cause cyanide poisoning, why would she search for information about it right after her dinner guests got sick? And if she did know what it was, why would she have it in her home in the first place?

Deputies answered that second question during their search of the property. They found acetonitrile in the house.

A COLD CASE REOPENS

The investigation into Leela Livis’s death led detectives somewhere they hadn’t expected to go: eighteen years into the past.

While working the case, investigators cross-referenced Casper-Leinenkugel’s address on Schmidt Terrace with case reports involving deceased persons at that location. That’s when they found Michael Schmidt.

Schmidt was 42 years old when he died on October 29, 2007. According to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office incident report from that time, his death occurred at 15 Schmidt Terrace — the same address where Casper-Leinenkugel now lives, and the same address where the Thanksgiving dinner took place. Some reports indicate that Schmidt died in a fire involving a travel trailer on the property.

The address itself tells part of the story. The street is literally named Schmidt Terrace. Henderson County land records show that Michael Schmidt had transferred the property at 15 Schmidt Terrace to Casper-Leinenkugel in 2006 — one year before his death. So a man signed over his property to this woman, and then died at that same property twelve months later.

For nearly two decades, nobody made that connection. Schmidt’s death was never solved.

Sheriff Lowell Griffin told the Hendersonville Lightning that investigators now believe Schmidt was poisoned with the same substance that killed Leela Livis in 2025. A reporter for the paper reviewed Schmidt’s death certificate and found that the cause of death is now listed as “amended” and “pending autopsy” — meaning the case has been reopened and the original determination is being reconsidered.

Assistant District Attorney Robert Reeves revealed something else at Casper-Leinenkugel’s bond hearing: she is connected to additional deaths that are currently under investigation. He didn’t say how many or provide details.

Sheriff Griffin was more direct about what his department suspects.

“We believe there’s possibly other victims. There’s possibly other deaths associated with this suspect from over the years.”

Griffin said his detectives are “going to try to turn over every rock and tie up every loose end” to determine if there are more cases connected to Casper-Leinenkugel. The investigation has involved multiple agencies — the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, and the North Carolina Department of Insurance. That last agency’s involvement suggests investigators are looking into whether Casper-Leinenkugel may have had financial motives, though the sheriff’s office has not confirmed whether she held life insurance policies on any of the alleged victims. Griffin acknowledged that this is one of the areas his detectives are examining.

THE RESTAURATEUR

Before her arrest made headlines, Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel was known around the Asheville area as a businesswoman and restaurateur. She had a public profile, gave interviews to local media, and cultivated an image as someone with deep roots in the food and beverage industry.

According to a 2016 profile published in the Mountain Xpress, an Asheville arts and culture newspaper, Casper-Leinenkugel’s family operates Wisconsin’s Leinenkugel Brewing Company. That’s a significant claim — the Leinenkugel brewery is the seventh oldest in the United States, founded in 1867 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The company has been run by six generations of the same family. (After founder Jacob Leinenkugel died in 1899, his son-in-law Henry Casper served as company president — a detail that makes the “Casper” in Casper-Leinenkugel’s name seem less coincidental.)

In the Mountain Xpress interview, she said she had grown up splitting her time between Germany and the northern border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. She claimed to have opened six restaurants and bars across the country before arriving in Asheville.

In 2013, she began planning Patton Public House, a European-inspired pub that would occupy the building that had previously housed the Barbecue Inn on Patton Avenue in West Asheville. The vision was ambitious — a traditional public house in the European style, with German comfort food, an extensive beer selection, and a large outdoor patio where guests could play cornhole and giant Jenga. The building itself was a 60-year-old structure that required extensive repairs to bring it up to code. Getting the first electrical permit alone took six months.

The restaurant finally opened in June 2016, nearly three years after the project began. Casper-Leinenkugel told the Mountain Xpress she wanted to revive what public houses used to be before England shortened the term to “pub” in the 1930s and 1940s. “We’re actually trying to bring back what a public house used to be. It’s a place for friends, family and neighbors to come and spend the day.”

The menu featured German-style comfort food: schnitzel, sauerbraten, and what Casper-Leinenkugel called Reuben fritters — all the ingredients of a Reuben sandwich rolled in bread crumbs, battered, and deep-fried. The establishment offered 89 beers at launch, with plans to eventually stock 120 varieties. There was a back patio with games and live music on weekends.

The positive press didn’t last long. Within weeks of opening, Patton Public House was in the local news for very different reasons. In July 2016, WLOS television reported that several employees had quit the restaurant, claiming they weren’t being paid on time. One cook discovered that her direct deposit had been turned off without explanation. Employees showed up at the restaurant demanding their paychecks; one waitress and hostess named Maci Holt told the station her second check was late and her third hadn’t arrived at all. “I mean, it’s ridiculous. I come up here, and I bust my butt off day-by-day and get nothing?”

Another employee, a woman named McKnight who said she had 30 years of experience working in restaurants, told the station she had never seen a restaurant operate the way Patton Public House did. She quit and said she was still owed two weeks’ pay.

Casper-Leinenkugel blamed the problems on a payroll company and described the issues as “standard new business bologna.”

The restaurant is no longer in operation. According to investigators, Casper-Leinenkugel has been a Henderson County resident for the past two decades. She was previously known as Linda Casper before changing her name.

FACING TRIAL

Gudrun Casper-Leinenkugel now faces the most serious charges the state of North Carolina can bring. She has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder — one for Leela Livis’s death in 2025, and one for Michael Schmidt’s death in 2007. She faces two counts of attempted first-degree murder for the alleged poisonings of Maija Lacey and Richard Pegg. She has also been charged with three counts of distribution of a prohibited food or beverage — a statute that makes it a felony to knowingly distribute any food or drink containing a poisonous chemical that might cause death or serious injury.

According to court documents, authorities allege she killed both Livis and Schmidt with “malice aforethought” — legal language meaning the killings were premeditated and intentional.

At her bond hearing, a judge denied her request for release. Prosecutors indicated she faces the possibility of the death penalty if convicted. When the judge asked about her legal representation, Casper-Leinenkugel said she intended to hire an attorney to represent her.

She is currently being held in the Henderson County Detention Center. Her next court appearance is scheduled for February 10, 2026.

The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office is still actively investigating and has asked anyone with relevant information to come forward — particularly people who had personal interactions with Casper-Leinenkugel or who witnessed anything suspicious in their dealings with her. The Violent Crime Unit can be reached at 828-694-2938.

Sandra Riddle, whose granddaughter Maija Lacey survived and whose granddaughter’s half-sister Leela Livis did not, is still trying to understand why any of this happened. The question she asked the Hendersonville Lightning is the same question that hangs over this entire case: “What was to be gained?”

Investigators are still working on the answer.

REFERENCES

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

Views: 18