News

Woman charged with two murders, two attempted murders

Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel

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

Henderson County sheriff’s deputies have charged a woman with a 2007 murder that had remained unsolved, the 2025 murder of a woman and the attempted murder of two more people.

The sheriff’s Violent Crime Unit detectives charged Gudrun Linda Jean Casper-Leinenkugel of 15 Schmidt Terrace in Hendersonville with the murder last year of Leela Livis and the attempted murder of Richard Pegg and Mia Lacey. During the course of the investigation, the investigators turned up evidence linking Casper-Leinenkugel to the murder of Michael Schmidt that occurred in Henderson County in 2007, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
Casper-Leinenkugel, 52, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder and has also been charged with three counts of distribution of certain food or beverage prohibited. She is being held in the Henderson County Detention Center.
Livis, 32, died on Dec. 1, according to an obituary posted by Moody Connolly Funeral Home in Brevard.
She earned her 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.
Livis and Casper-Leinenkugel were friends on Facebook, according to Livis Facebook page.
An arrest warrant said the murder defendant " 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.”
Acetonitrile is a solvent also known as methyl cyanide, cyanomethane, and ethanenitrile. It has many uses, including as a solvent, for spinning fibers and in lithium batteries, according to websites for the American Chemical Society and the National Library of Medicine.
Casper-Leinenkugel was featured in a 2016 Mountain Xpress story by Cindy Kunst that announced the opening of a restaurant in Asheville called the Patton Public House.
“Casper-Leinenkugel, whose family operates Wisconsin’s Leinenkugel Brewing Co., grew up splitting her time between living in Germany and on the northern border of Wisconsin and Minnesota,” according the Mountain Xpress story.
She had also opened other bars and restaurants across the country, the story said.
Sheriff Lowell S. Griffin thanked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, the North Carolina Department of Insurance, and the District Attorney’s Office for their assistance and collaboration throughout this investigation.
If anyone has information relevant to this investigation, they are encouraged to contact the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crime Unit by calling 828-694-2938.
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