The Devil in the Nursing Home: America’s First Female Serial Killer

Amy Archer-Gilligan was one of America's first female serial killers, killing up to 60 of her patients with her "special" lemonade...

Sources

The Devi'l’s Rooming House - M. William Phelps (book)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arsenic-s-afterlife-how-scientists-learned-to-identify-poison-victims-excerpt/

Transcript

It's that feeling. When the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel wrong, it's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's saying, it's when your heart starts pounding.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. If you're joining us for the first time, this is a podcast of terrifying tales, often told by those who lived them. And if you're a repeat listener, welcome back.

I'm of the belief that every hometown has a dark secret. Sometimes it's thrilling, like the neighbor with the nicest car on the block getting arrested for fraud. Sometimes it's a salacious tale of the local parishioner being caught with his pants down. Other times, it's as sinister as murder. Today, we're deviating from our standard format, and I'm going to tell you a spooky tale of hometown history, a tale of fraud, of a pious woman's devilish impulses. But at the forefront, it's a tale of murder.

Our story starts with a young man who is caught in the middle of it all. This past year, I found a photo of my family having Thanksgiving dinner in the year 1900, just one town over from where I grew up. The photo is about 20 solemn faces, ranging from infant to elder, all staring directly into the camera. The women all have their hair up in messy top knots, and the men mostly spawn thick handlebar moustaches. In the middle of this photo stands a precocious looking young man, about 15 at the time. His name was Carl, and he was my grandmother's father. He's young and spri in the photo, which is hardly an indicator of what was to come for him.

Carl was just 22 years old in 1907, and living in Windsor, Connecticut, when a woman named Amy Archer and her older husband James moved in down the road and opened what many believe was the first convalescent home in America. For just $7 a week, or $200 in today's dollars, you could move your loved one out of your home and into her boarding house, where every accommodation and ailing and elderly person needed would be met. Thought you might live a while longer? No worries, you could pay a lump sum of $1,000 for the lifetime care, which allowed you to live out the rest of your days, however many there may be under Amy's loving guidance. Maybe people were overly optimistic about how long they'd live, or maybe her reputation as a caregiver was just that good, but most people chose to pay the lump sum of $1,000 upfront.

Which one would you pick? Leo had some thoughts.

LEO

Well, knowing what I know, I would say $7 a week, but I feel like $1,000 for like the rest of your life, that's not bad.

KAELYN

That's a bad business model. You can either pay weekly, so no matter how long you live there, she'll make money, or you paid all up front, and she just has your money, and then there's like no way for her to make any money after that.

LEO

Oh, yeah, I didn't think about that. I was thinking, like, if I'm a meal person, get put into the home, my family is paying, that's not a bad deal for them, because I doubt people had a lot of money back that.

KAELYN

When you're old, and I'm putting you in a home, yeah, I'm paying $1,000, and I'm taking my ass somewhere else.

Carl and Amy had struck up a friendship upon her arrival in town. Amy was a very godly woman, being nicknamed Sister Amy for always having a Bible by her side, and Carl really respected that. He taught Sunday School at Grace Episcopal in town, and soon Amy became known for her large donations to St. Gabriel's Catholic Church. At this point in Carl's life, he was a junior reporter at the Hartford Current, but his detective spirit and journalistic mind led him to also be the treasurer of the Windsor Rogue Detecting Society

LEO

like Sherlock Holmes.

KAELYN

Like Sherlock Holmes, no, but he was just a man that lived neighborhood drama. And that passed down. And that generation. That is what we got. I cannot digest lactose and Carl was catching serial killers, but I love small town drama, and I think that's the gene that made it through.

One day, when Carl was reading the current, the paper he himself reported for, he saw Amy's name. This wasn't an article recognizing her good efforts for taking care of the elderly. No. When he was being sued. In 1909, Amy was sued for $5,000 for neglect of one of her inmates, Theresa McClintock. That's almost $150,000 today. Theresa wrote the following to her daughter in a letter. Oh, Belle, take me away from here. I had chills all last night, and I called and called for someone to come to me. When Mrs. Archer came, she was ugly and told me to shut up. I asked for some hot water to drink and for a hot water bottle to be put at my feet. She did nothing for me, and I'm afraid of her because she is so ugly. Like in today's terms, this woman is foul to look at. Please take me away. Give me out, Sle.

The lawsuit was a financial disaster for Amy. The house only had 21 beds and all of them were full. And since it was uncertain how long each person would live and most of them paid their fee upfront, she didn't know when the next payment was going to come in. The next year, tragedy struck again when her husband James died suddenly. He had been complaining of stomach pain for a short time when he died on February 10, 1910. James's death came a few short weeks after Amy had taken out a life insurance policy on him. The needy disease was the official cause of death on the certificate, though he had no symptoms of kidney disease prior to his death.

This part gets a little fuzzy. It's unclear if James kicked off what would become a larger trend, or if he was part of an already implemented business model. At the current, Carl had access to all of the obituary that were published in the area, including the ones that were coming out of the archer home. In the two years after the lawsuit, there were 60 obituaries to come out of Amy's convalescent. This was well above what was average in town at the time. Sure, you could attribute it to the fact that the clientele was in the later stages of their life, but the death certificates were horribly vague. Old age and indigestion were written on most.

It's also interesting to note here that in 1913, Amy remarried to a man named Michael Gilligan, another older gentleman with four adult sons. Michael passed away just a few months after the wedding, leaving his entire estate to Amy, not his sons. His cause of death, acute, billious attack, in other words, stomach pain.

LEO

It is absolutely wild to me that you could literally put down anything as a cause of death. Anything in the past. Literally stopped out dead. He died because he stopped his toe. I don't know what to tell you.

KAELYN

In the fact that old age was just written on some of the death certificates for the longest time, there's so much you can learn. Even if someone's old when they die, you still want to figure out why they died so you can prevent that. They were like, oh, this person over 60. Death was coming for them. I'm surprised it didn't happen yesterday.

So, Amy had a specific cure for stomach pain, lemonade, which at the time was used to cure many ailments, cold, flu, skin conditions, think of lemonade as the cellar reduce of the turn of the century. Oh, one cure for all. Some of Amy's inmates, however, noticed that people would get worse, not better upon drinking Amy's concoction. One time, when the doctor and town, Dr. Howard King, came to make a house call, a patient told him they thought something was wrong with Amy's lemonade. He drank a glass in front of them and lived to tell the tale, which should have put them at ease, but still didn't.

KAELYN

I'm obsessed with old-timey medicine. Oh, you think this is poison? Well, I guess I'll eat it and we'll find out.

LEO

Yeah. Literally putting fuck around and find out to the task.

KAELYN

Carl started to feel like something was very wrong, but what was he to do? If he went poking around, he risked his reputation. Amy was beloved in town. She was doing God's work. And when word got out that he was snooping, he started to receive threatening phone calls on his home phone, scaring his wife and children.

In the center of town and Windsor, there's an old brick building that is now a thai food restaurant. A few years ago, a mysterious brown stain started blooming on the ceiling of the kitchen, and soon a constant drip of thin brown liquid came down the walls. It wasn't until the following week that the staff realized the man who lived upstairs in the apartment above the kitchen had died and his body was decomposing. And as it did, it drained down inside the restaurant. So terrifying, this was not the first time that this building had been associated with death. In the early 1900s, it was actually the one pharmacy in Windsor, manned by the one doctor in town, Dr. Howard King.

Carl made a stop there one day to buy some arsenic, which was routinely used to kill rats. To buy the poison, you'd have to sign the pharmacy's black book with your name and how much you were buying. And when Carl went to sign, he made a shocking discovery. Amy had been purchasing a ton of arsenic over the last few months, including enough to quote, kill 12 men just days before her husband James was found dead, and enough to kill over 100 men, the week of her husband Michael's death.

LEO

I imagine just being like, I'm going to sign my name because I need to kill some rats. Why is someone buying 14 pounds of rat poison?

KAELYN

Here's the thing, as you know that black book was like Carl, one ounce of arsenic, Amy, Sarah, Rachel, like it was just a bunch of women buying a ton of arsenic and everyone's like, oh, what are all these women doing with all this poison? Yeah, I'm like, oh, what's going on? This is this is funky. This is weird. I guess they just have a lot of rats. Yeah. Meanwhile, they're on husband number six and like no one bats an eye.

Carl also thought it was strange that the doctor selling her all this arsenic was the same one showing up to handle the deaths certificates for those that passed away. I know what you may be thinking, but Dr. King drank the lemonade in front of the residents and survived. How could that be? Well, that's not entirely how arsenic works, and Dr. King would have known that.

LEO

I'm so sorry. But this doctor sounds like he sucks.

KAELYN

Yet, no, I looked him up to and he has like no real, like actual license to be a doctor. He was just some guy that showed up to town. I was like, I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor.

LEO

Look at the stethoscope that I definitely did not find in a dumpster. I'm the doctor now.

KAELYN

arsenic takes repeat ingestion to kill. One serving, even a large one, may cause digestive issues in the consumer, but not necessarily death. Carl was apparently so freaked out by this revelation that he got an editor at the current Clifford Sherman to open an official investigation into the archer home. Of course, forensic science wasn't the same back then that it is today, so it took a long time to actually be able to convict Amy of anything. And it was all because of a resident named Franklin Andrews.

So in the fall of 1912, a man by the name of Franklin Andrews took a president's at Amy's boarding home. He was an older gentleman with arthritis, but other than that, he was in good spirits. When he first moved into the home, he noticed how run down it was. Amy blamed it on not having a handyman after the death of her husband James. But once she remarried Michael in 1913, Franklin and Michael developed a strong friendship and started fixing up the house together. So it came as a huge shock to Franklin when Michael died.

Shortly after, Franklin wrote a letter home that read. So they go one after another, that makes 21 that stied since I came here. Don't know who will be next. There are 18 here now and she expects more soon. In a way, she's kind of running an MLM. When you put it like that, you're not wrong. Because you have to get people in under you in order to keep the business going.

The next red flag for Franklin was when Amy reached out to him for money. Amy liked to know how much money all of the inmates had and even demanded bank bills from the residents before securing a room. In January of 1914, she told Franklin that the bills were getting overwhelming since Michael's passing. Lying to him and even saying that Michael's father left him debts that were now her responsibility. She asked for $2,900 or $86,000 today by the following day and begged he not tell anyone else. Franklin refused. And if that weren't enough reason for Amy to take action, at the same time, Michael's adult sons were fighting Amy on his life insurance money. A judge had just ruled that everyone involved, Amy and Michael's four sons would get a share of Michael's money.

Amy had not planned for that. So on the evening of May 29, 1914, just a few months after his refusal to give more money to Amy, Franklin started complaining of a stomach ache, which was strange because just that day he had been painting a fence for Amy and appeared in good spirits. Later that night, he took a turn for the worse. Vomiting until all that was coming out was bile and something that looked like coffee grounds. His roommate called for Amy who refused to call Dr. King and instead offered him a glass of lemonade. By the morning, Franklin was dead.

But Franklin had a sister, Nelly Pierce, and Nelly refused to believe her brother became randomly ill enough to die. She questioned Amy on what had happened, but Amy's story kept changing. At one point, Amy claimed that Franklin had just eaten too much that night and Dr. King confirmed. Franklin had eaten so much that it put a terrible strain on his heart. And that was that.

LEO

Yeah, this doctor's such an idiot.

KAELYN

That doesn't sound real. If I'm too much was enough to kill you, I would be dead a thousand times over. Yeah. I would have died last night.

LEO

Also, for her to be like, well, he ate a lot. So I think that's how he died. And the doctor to be like, yes, that's honestly, that's how little jish. Sure, okay. I mean, you know him better than I do.

KAELYN

But Nelly wouldn't stop. She was able to team up with the official investigation that was happening on the Archer home to order an autopsy on Franklin. Attell for arsenic poisoning is not just how the body responds to it during exposure, but also how the body responds to it in death. It took two years to be able to obtain a proper autopsy. And when the mortician and investigators dug down to the box that held Franklin's remains, one of the first surprising observations was that there was no smell. Surely, a two-year-old corpse would have some sort of smell, but Franklin did not. Then, as they cracked open the lid to see what they could make of whatever was left of Franklin, they were shocked to see that he was all there in almost perfect condition.

Arsenic can preserve bodies. This was actually discovered by Dr. George Adolf Welper and Berlin in 1806. He was studying arsenic when he heard the case of Sophie or Sinus. Sophie was trying to poison a servant whom she quarrel with by feeding her plums tainted with arsenic. The servant caught on to Sophie's scheme and brought the plums to a chemist who was able to detect high levels of the poison in the fruit. This led to local authorities opening up an investigation into the strange deaths of Sophie's husband and aunt three years prior, and when the bodies were dug up, they had not decomposed at all. After hearing of this, Dr. Walper went on to poison various animals with arsenic over the next few years to study the decomposition. Only to find that when exposed to arsenic, decomposition nearly halts.

So Franklin's condition, coupled with the fact that his stomach was so well preserved, they were able to test what was in his stomach the night he died, was enough to convict Amy of Franklin's murder in 1916. It's believed that she killed closer to 60 inmates, maybe more. We will never know the exact amount. Though maybe one day, Leo and I will be brave enough to dig up some bones and see their condition. Absolutely not. But we could. Legally? Um, physically? Listen, I will do creepy crawly stuff till the cows come home. I'm not rocking a grave. I'm not digging up a dead body. Okay, but we might. Amy was initially sentenced to die by hanging. But after a mistrial, she was sentenced to live out her days in an insane asylum until she died in 1962. In Carl, the percotious boy from the photo went on to live a happy, beautiful life, becoming known as Mr. Windsor, the face of the town he had risked it all to protect. Carl's giving. What a good guy. He served. He served. He served looks. He made a woman served jail time. And he served his community.

This has been Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kaelan Moore. Make sure to leave a reading and review and follow the podcast on Instagram at Heart Starts Pounding. Have a heart pounding story you'd like to share. Email Heart Starts Pounding at gmail.com. Until next time. Whoo!