He was told that Brita was the kind of person who "put her pies under the pot when she cooked", meaning that she used sorcery.
Her husband had a promising career when they married, but after about four years, he suffered terribly from syphilis, which confined him to bed and ruined him financially.
Brita was called "Näslösan" (Noseless), because her husband's disease made him lose his nose.
Her brothers, the sports instructors of the court, no longer acknowledged either sister because of an argument over an inheritance.
In 1668 the master mariner Cornelius accused her of having cursed his ship, and having Satan throw him off his horse three times.
In 1674, a girl accused her of sorcery, but the court again set her free, as they considered the witness insane.
By this time, the period of the Swedish witch trials had begun after the accusation of Märet Jonsdotter.
The parents ran in the directions the children pointed and chopped at the walls with axes in search for the attacking witches.
The parents appealed to the authorities, who set up a special witch commission to investigate.
Children claimed they had seen her playing dice with her sister in Blockula to decide which of them would set fire to the royal palace, and Brita won.
The court pressed Brita's daughter Annika to confirm the accusations that she saw her mother light the ship on fire.
She gave her testimony so unwillingly that she tried to accuse the court-member, Frank, and the mayor, Thegnér, of sorcery.
When asked why she carried a knife in her muff, she answered that she would rather be executed guilty of murder than innocently of sorcery.
They sentenced her with the words: "Brita Zippel can not be acquitted, but shall be decapitated and her body shall well deservedly be burned at the stake for others as warning, and justly so."
Anna Månsdotter committed suicide before the execution, though her body was still publicly decapitated and burned.
She cursed everyone from the Royal House and the judges to the prison guards, the audience, and anyone who had come to watch her execution.
Even if the executioner cut off her head and burned her skull and corpse on a stake, she would come back to have her vengeance on them all.
They could do what ever they pleased, burn her, cut her body to pieces, and she would feel nothing, but doubt not that she would have her vengeance—by the aid of Satan.
After the witch-trials were declared false following the investigations of Urban Hjärne and Eric Noraeus, the witnesses were tried for perjury.