Woman Accused of Lacing Christmas Cake With Arsenic, Killing 3, Found Dead in Jail Cell

A woman accused of killing three relatives with an arsenic-laced Christmas cake was found dead in a jail cell in Brazil.

Deise Moura dos Anjos, 42, had been in custody at a women’s state prison in the southern Brazilian city of Guaíba since January, the BBC and CNN Brasil reported.

“Deise was alone in the cell,” the criminal police said in a statement, per CNN. “The circumstances will be investigated by the Civil Police and the General Institute of Expertise.”

Her husband asked for a divorce the day before she was discovered, according to the outlet.

Dos Anjos was accused of serving a Christmas cake laced with arsenic at 2,700 times the legal limit to her family members on Christmas Eve, per CNN.

Three of those family members died, including Tatiana Denize Silva dos Anjos, 43, Maida Berenice Flores da Silva, 58, and Neuza Denize Silva dos Anjos, 65.

Dos Anjos was also accused of poisoning three others who survived. She denied having anything to do with the murders and attempted murders.

Police chief Cléber dos Santos Lima told reporters that Dos Anjos researched and purchased the deadly poison four separate times, per the BBC.

Police said high concentrations of arsenic were found in the victim’s bodies and the flour that was used to make the Bolo de Natal cake, which was prepared by Dos Anjos’ mother-in-law, Zeli dos Anjos, according to CNN.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.  

Zeli dos Anjos’ two sisters and a niece died after eating the cake, per the BBC. Zeli dos Anjos was among those who survived, along with her 10-year-old grandson and the husband of one of her sisters, the outlet reports.

Brazilian police official Marcos Veloso told reporters at a press conference in January that family members noted a “spicy” and “unpleasant” taste to the cake, CBS News reported.

“My better half is gone,” Maida’s husband Jefferson Luiz Moraes told local Brazilian outlet O Globo in Portuguese. “I have to rebuild everything again. Sleeping is difficult. I didn’t want to take sleeping pills, but I think I have to. At night, there’s a hole [in my heart] that remains.”

The deaths prompted police to reopen an investigation into the earlier death of Zeli’s late husband, Paolo Luiz, after an exhumation revealed he had high levels of arsenic in his system, the BBC reported.