Catawissa, Missouri is the site where Bertha Gifford poisoned at least three and as many as seventeen people between 1911 and 1928. The house where most of the murders took place is still standing on Old Bend Road about one mile from the Meramec River

MORSE MILL HOTEL - MORSE MILL, MO - AUGUST 6, 2009 Morse Mill Hotel was built by John H. Morse in the 1870s. The Hotel is a three-story frame house, built of maple and limestone, with a New Orleans-style balcony on the second floor, and a "widow's walk." There is an abandoned mill dam down the road on the Big River. Its use as a hotel began sometime in the 1920s, and saw the likes of Al Capone, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplain, and Jesse James and his gang. However, this is not what gives the Hotel its infamy. No, that would be Bertha Alice Williams Graham Gifford. Bertha Gifford was married to her second husband, Eugene Gifford, and lived her life at the Morse Mill Hotel as a simple housewife during the early 1900s. She loved to cook for people and make candy for children. Unfortunately, she also liked adding arsenic to her recipes. She was accused of murdering 17 people over 20 years, including her first husband, Henry Graham. She was arrested in 1928, had a three-day trial in Union, MO, and was found guilty by reason of insanity. She was commited to the Missouri State Hospital #4, where she died in 1951.

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