Tillie Klimek

Who was Tillie Klimek?

Ottilie "Tillie" Klimek was a Polish American serial killer, active in Chicago. According to legend, she pretended to have precognitive dreams, accurately predicting the dates of death of her victims, when in reality she was merely scheduling their deaths. Actually, while contemporary accounts tell her cheerfully telling her husbands that they were going to die, there is no record of her claiming to be a "psychic."

Born Otillie Gburek in Poland, and coming to the United States as an infant with her parents, Tillie married her original husband John Mitkiewicz, c. 1890. In 1914, he died after a short illness. The death certificate listed the cause of death as heart trouble, and she quickly remarried one Joseph Ruskowski, who lived nearby. He, too, died in short order, as did a boyfriend who had "jilted" her.

The crime for which she was eventually tried was the murder of Frank Kupczyk, her third husband. He had taken ill in their apartment at 924 N. Winchester, where Tillie had previously lived with a boyfriend under the name of Meyers and she began to tell neighbors that Frank "would not live long.". She would mock Frank himself, greeting him in the morning by saying "It won't be long now," and "You'll be dying soon," and joking with neighbors that he had "two inches to live.". She even knitted her own mourning hat as she sat at his bedside, and asked for the landlady's permission to store a bargain coffin she'd found for sale in the basement. This may have been what sparked the legends of her claiming to "predict" deaths.