Mata Hari

Born Margaret Gertrude Zelle on August 7, 1876 in Leeuwarden, Holland.

Father Adam Zelle, a Dutch hatter and his Javanese wife Antje van der Meulen. The family was very wealthy and well to do and raised her in a very happy home with a comfortable lifestyle. After her mother's death in 1890, she was sent by her father to live in a convent. Briefly attending a teaching school but was expelled after allegedly having sex with the school's headmaster.

In 1894, answered a "lonely hearts club" advertisement placed by John Rudolph MacLeod, a Dutch colonial officer in the Dutch East Indies, who was 20 years her senior.

The couple married in 1895 and moved to Java where they lived until 1901. The couple's early years were anything but ideal as she engaged in scandalous affairs and he often slept with other women in their house while she was in the next room.

The couple had a son named Norman in January 1896, but the child died, believed to have been poisoned by a former house servant with a vendetta against John. They also had another child, a daughter named Jeanne. At this time, it is rumored, the couple engaged in a blackmail scheme by which Margaret would entice a wealthy landowner into her bed, whereupon John would storm angrily into the room, threatening the man with scandal and then blackmailing him for a lucrative sum (some of the details were reveal during the couple's divorce proceedings). Despite their money schemes, the marriage was filled with quarrels and John physically abused her. The couple divorced sometime between 1902 and 1904.