News

Murder defendant is the mother of two alleged poisoning victims

Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel (left) is charged with the murder of Leela Jean Livis (center) and attempted murder of Maija Lacey (right).

By BILL MOSS & AMY B. MCCRAW, Published: January 16, 2026

The 52-year-old Hendersonville woman charged last week with two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder is the mother of two women investigators identified as victims in the case, the Hendersonville Lightning has learned.

Henderson County sheriff’s deputies on Friday charged Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel with a 2007 murder that had remained unsolved, and the murder of a woman and attempted murder of two more people last year.
Sheriff’s detectives charged Casper-Leinenkugel with the murder last month of Leela Jean Livis, 32, and the attempted murder of Livis’s half-sister, Maija Lacey, and Richard Evan Pegg. Casper-Leinenkugel is also charged with three counts of causing the “ingestion (of) a beverage which contained a poisonous chemical.”
The alleged poisoning of Livis, Lacey and Pegg happened in November, said Sandra Riddle, who is the mother of Casper-Leinenkugel’s ex-husband, Stacey Shelton, and grandmother of Maija Lacey,
“They were there to have Thanksgiving dinner at their mother’s house, and next thing, Leela was dead, and Maija and her boyfriend (Pegg) was in the hospital,” Riddle said in an interview Monday night. “I don’t know (why). That’s just the strangest part of it. What was to be gained?”
Facebook pages of both Livis and Lacey identify Casper-Leinenkugel as their mother while the social media biographical sketches name different men as their fathers. Casper-Leinenkugel is listed as Facebook friends of both Livis and Lacey.
During the course of the investigation, detectives turned up evidence linking Casper-Leinenkugel to the murder of Michael Schmidt in Henderson County in 2007, the sheriff’s office said in a news release issued Friday.
Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel appeared in Henderson County District Court on Tuesday. [AMY B. MCCRAW/Hendersonville Lightning]In court Tuesday morning, District Court Judge Abe Hudson ordered that Casper-Leinenkugel remain held without bond when she appeared before him through a video feed from Henderson County’s jail.
Hudson also set Casper-Leinenkugel’s next court date for Feb. 10 after she told the judge she intended to hire an attorney to represent her on the charges.
Presenting the case for no bond, Assistant District Attorney Robert Reeves confirmed the account Riddle gave of what happened to the victims in the case.
Livis, Lacey and Pegg were among 12 people who attended a Thanksgiving meal hosted by Casper-Leinenkugel, Reeves said. Hours after the meal, she received a text from her daughter, Leela, saying that she and Pegg were vomiting and feeling unwell. Maija also had gotten sick after the meal, he said.
Detectives later learned that the three victims drank from the same bottle of wine during the gathering.
Their investigation also determined that Casper-Leinenkugel had asked Google “what to do if I accidentally ingest acetonitrile?” after learning of the illnesses of the people who attended the meal. She also asked the internet “Does wine turn into cyanide?” Reeves said. Arrest warrants accuse the defendant of lacing the victims’ beverages with acetonitrile, and that chemical was found during a search of her home, the prosecutor said.
Blood tests revealed that five times the legal dose of the substance was later found in the blood of Leela, who died after the Thanksgiving gathering. Tests also confirmed the other victims had ingested the chemical, he said.
Investigators also believe Schmidt was poisoned, he said. Schmidt transferred his property at 15 Schmidt Terrace to Casper-Leinenkugel in 2006, Henderson County land records show. Schmidt’s death certificate, which a Lightning reporter reviewed on Tuesday, lists cause of death as “amended” and “pending autopsy.”
Detectives also are working to determine if there might be other victims associated with Casper-Leinenkugel, Reeves told the judge. He argued that the murder defendant should be denied bond because of her connections to other countries including Germany and parts of Central America.

‘House burnt down mysteriously’

Riddle says Casper-Leinenkugel has left a trail of destruction throughout the 25 years she’s known her.
“I met her as Linda Casper — that’s all she’s ever been to me,” Riddle said. “She’s the one that changed her name.”
When her son married Casper-Leinenkugel he adopted Leela, who was about 3 years old. The couple then had a daughter, Mia, whose name is pronounced My-uh. On Facebook, she spells it Maija. Riddle considers both Leela and Maija her granddaughters since Shelton adopted the older girl.
“I know when Maija was little, (Linda) would use Maija’s name and information to get credit cards,” Riddle said. Asked whether she had kept up with Casper-Leinenkugel, she said she had not.
“I don’t associate with Linda,” she said. “When her and my son broke up, he was moving out of the house, and we were helping him move and we went back up to get the rest of the stuff and the house had burnt down mysteriously in the middle of the night.”

Chemical converts to cyanide

An arrest warrant said Casper-Leinenkugel “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously did knowingly distributed or otherwise caused to be placed in a position of human accessibility or ingestion a beverage which contained a poisonous chemical, acetonitrile, which might cause death or serious physical injury.”
A common industrial organic solvent, acetonitrile when ingested “is slowly converted to cyanide, resulting in delayed toxicity,” the National Institutes of Health said in a report on the “deliberate self-poisoning by a 39-year-old woman” that resulted in cyanide poisoning 11 hours later. (Doctors saved the woman’s life by administering concentrated doses of sodium nitrite and thiosulphate.)
Riddle says Casper-Leinenkugel now has two more children with a man she currently lives with.
“She has a little boy about 9, and the little girl looked to be about 3,” she said of the woman’s two younger children. “The last time I saw them was at the funeral (of Leela Livis). Somebody needs to check into her mental state. She wasn’t grieving. The people she worked with grieved more for her than her mother did. I just thought, maybe she’s in a shock or something.”
When she was talking with a reporter Monday night, Riddle said she would not be able to attend her ex-daughter-in-law’s first appearance in Henderson County District Court on Tuesday. Why? She was calling from her hospital room. That’s where she was on Friday, too, when she got word that Casper-Leinenkugel had been charged with killing Leela and trying to kill Maija.
“I found out about it on the Henderson County Sheriff’s Department website when I was in the hospital bed,” she said. Her reaction: “What in the world?”
The alleged poisoning was served at the large Thanksgiving gathering that Casper-Leinenkugel tried to make convivial.
“Wine,” Riddle said when asked what contained the chemical. “Maija told us the only thing they had in common was they drank some wine.”
“Evan — he almost died,” she said of Maija’s boyfriend. “When they got him to the hospital, nobody knew what was wrong with him. A doctor did a quick assessment, so they started treating him for poison and got him over it.”

‘Leela will surely be missed’

Livis, who died on Dec. 1, had earned an MBA from Western Carolina University and was an employee at the school at the time of her death, according to online information from the school and online employment records.
“Leela was such a joy to talk with,” a coworker wrote in a tribute on the website of Moody Connolly Funeral Home in Brevard three days after her death. “Leela had such a joy for knowledge and learning, it was always fun to hear what information she had about some new obscure topic, and to share my own as well. Always full of questions, a surprising joke, and a helpful, supportive nature, Leela will surely be missed in all the halls of her life.”
Maija Lacey is a 2016 graduate of West Henderson High School who lives in Hendersonville. Her Facebook page lists family members that include her father, Shelton, who lives in Hendersonville; and a grandmother, Sarah Casper, a Wisconsin native who lives in Crystal River, Florida.
“Her parents live in Florida,” Riddle said of Casper-Leinenkugel. “They’re good people, as far as I know, when I met them years ago. I can only imagine what they’re going to go through when they hear this.”
In announcing the arrest, Sheriff Lowell Griffin thanked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the North Carolina Department of Insurance, the District Attorney’s Office and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office for their assistance and collaboration throughout the investigation. Leela Livis died at her home in Jackson County after leaving the Thanksgiving dinner at her mother’s home.
Griffin did not respond to a phone call from the Lightning on Monday requesting an interview. The sheriff’s public information officer said on Friday that in order “to preserve the integrity of the ongoing investigation,” the agency would release no further details “pending adjudication in court.”
The sheriff’s department on Tuesday provided two incident reports with some information concerning the two investigations into the deaths of Livis and Schmidt.
The report on Livis death indicates that the sheriff’s department in Henderson County began investigating her death on Dec. 30.
She died at her home in Jackson County on Dec. 1 after attending the gathering at Casper-Leinenkugel’s home in Hendersonville a day earlier, officials said.
An investigation into Schmidt’s death began after Oct. 29, 2007, after his death earlier in the day at Casper-Leinenkugel’s home at 15 Schmidt Terrace. The report shows Schmidt as having the same address and lists Casper-Leinenkugel in the “others involved” section of the report
Riddle said she felt the need to set the record straight when she read in a Lightning account of the murder charges that her ex-daughter-in-law and her granddaughters were friends on Facebook.
“The world needs to know it was not just a friend on Facebook,” she said. “She was the mother of these girls she tried to kill.”

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Anyone who has information relevant to the case was encouraged to contact the sheriff’s Violent Crime Unit at 828-694-2938.