Anna Göldi was a Swiss domestic servant who had spent her working life in other people's houses. In 1782, employed in the household of a physician and magistrate in the canton of Glarus, she was dismissed after a dispute, and shortly afterwards pins were found in the milk and bread given to a daughter of the house. She was pursued, taken, questioned under torture, and beheaded.
The date is what makes the case notorious. This is 1782. Mozart was writing operas. The American revolution was ending. Enlightened Europe had spent two generations congratulating itself on having left witch trials behind, and here was a Protestant canton executing a servant over pins in a child's food.
The authorities knew how it looked, and the paperwork shows them managing it. The word witchcraft was kept out of the formal charge. She was condemned as a poisoner, on a charge framed in ordinary criminal terms, though the substance of the accusation, the harm worked invisibly by a dismissed servant, was exactly what a witchcraft accusation had always been. Contemporaries were not fooled. The case was denounced across German-speaking Europe almost at once, and it is from this episode that the term judicial murder entered wide circulation.
She confessed under torture, as people do, and retracted afterwards, as people do.