December 29, 2020 • 31 mins
Amy Archer-Gilligan was the proprietress of The Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids, in Windsor, Conn., one of the first nursing homes in the U.S. But she may have been responsible for the intentional deaths of as many as 48 residents.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
latest episode of Criminalia, where this season we're exploring the
lives and motivations of some of the most notorious lady
poisoners throughout history. Holly Fry and I'm Ranchre Markie. And
(00:23):
the poisoner that we're talking about today is Amy Archer Gilligan.
And you might know her name. She was the real
life inspiration for the story behind both the play and
the film Arsenic and Old Lace. And this today is
the true story behind the eccentric comedy that came out
of Hollywood as a result of it. And it's absolutely
not a comedy, it's not at all. Um So a
(00:47):
little bit about Amy's story. So from her birth through
her death, Amy's entire story takes place in the state
of Connecticut. She was born to James and Mary Duggan,
probably on Halloween, but definitely in October in eighteen seventy
three in the town of Milton, which at the time
was sort of the northwestern part of what is now
(01:08):
the town of Litchfield, and all accounts suggest that Amy
grew up in kind of a modest circumstance, and there
was really nothing about her childhood that particularly stands out. However,
there was a legacy of mental illness in her immediate family.
Amy's brother John became a patient. He would have been
(01:29):
called an inmate then, which is obviously outdated terminology at
the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane, and that happened
in nineteen o two and so outdated terminology. And then
one of her sisters was listed as residing there as well.
That was during the ninety census, so there is a
(01:49):
strong streak there. There were between eight and ten children
in the Archer family, and as many as seven are
believed to have had mental health issues. It's amazing, um.
So as an adult, Amy married James Archer when she
was twenty three years old, and about five years later
they relocated with their young daughter to Newington, which, as
(02:12):
I was saying, also a town in Connecticut. There they
lived with a man named John Seymour who was frail
and elderly um and they cared for him in exchange
for room and board. When John died in nineteen four
the house went to his heirs, but the Archers decided
to rent it and they turned it into Sister Amy's
nursing Home for the elderly. And yes, you probably could
(02:34):
hear something of an air quote around the word sister,
because Amy certainly did not take any religious vows, although
she was known to be a very pious woman. They
were kind of trading on that name as kind of
a marketing plan. Three years after they started this, though,
John's family decided to sell the property, so the Archers
(02:56):
moved to Windsor, and with their savings, they bought a
red brick house at thirty seven Prospect Street. It's still
there today and you can tour through all that they
asked you to really not take photos. It was in
this house that became the Archer Home for elderly people
and chronic invalids. That is the name of the house,
not a name that we will keep repeating through the episode.
(03:18):
Right in this unassuming red brick house, this business that
they started, uh, did not seem particularly out of the ordinary.
Amy was reportedly a doting Christian woman who took care
of those who were unable to care for themselves. She was,
or at least seemed to be a positive fixture in
her community. It's really true, Like if you you know,
(03:41):
if you if you look at some of the things
that she did, minus the killing, she was very caring.
She was very um willing to give money to the
church for variety of reasons. So if you, if you
didn't know what was going on in her life, you
might think that she was a positive fixture in her community.
So in comparison, today there are a bit more than
(04:03):
fifteen thousand nursing homes and more than twenty eight thousand
assisted living residencies in the United States, and together they're
occupied by about two and a half million people. But
in the early twentieth century when the Archers opened their doors,
this was not the case at all. Most of the time,
caring for your elders was the responsibility of family members,
(04:26):
And basically the Archers were really establishing a brand new
field when they did this, and they were also trying
to make a place in it. They are known to
even advertise their services in the local newspapers, and the
Archer Home for elderly people and chronic invalids worked basically
like this. Patients would either sign their life insurance policies
(04:46):
over to Amy, or they could pay a large amount
of money. By all accounts, This was right around a
thousand dollars up front, but Amy did not only cater
to the well off. If there were people who could
not pay that lump sum up front, they were given
an option to pay weekly. But no matter how they
chose to pay. In return, what they got was residents
(05:07):
and Amy's care. And there were generally anywhere between ten
and twenty residents in the home at a time. So
these residents Amy called them inmates, and we referred to
that earlier when we were talking about her brother, and
it sounds wrong to our twenty century years, but it
was completely in line with the convention of the time.
Everything appeared fine on the outside of this business, yet
(05:31):
there were stories about how Amy's inmates were crowded together
in rooms and often left to fend for themselves. Um
and as I was just talking about, remember, the industry
at this time was so brand new, and that means
there were no regulatory agencies set up yet to monitor
anything anything from the quality of care or anything that
was going on inside the home. And in nine nine,
(05:54):
Amy had her first brush with the law. The mc
talk family of West Hartford sued the Archers over their
perceived lack of care that was given to an elderly
family member. They settled out of court and the Archers
paid five thousand dollars to the mcclint talks. We know
it's unreliable always when we talk about trying to figure
(06:16):
out how much money in nineteen ten would equal to
today's currency, but we always like to do it just
kind of as a a little bit of a benchmark
so you get a sense of it. So it's a
little fun. Five thousand dollars in nineteen ten was a
pretty tidy payout and roughly, very roughly, that's kind of
(06:37):
the equivalent to like a hundred and thirty seven thousand today,
which is really nothing to really laugh at. Um. So, actually,
right now we're going to take a quick break, and
when we return, we're going to talk about the mysterious
and numerous deaths happening at the Archer Home. Welcome back
(07:12):
to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about Amy's quote unquote inmates.
So in nineteen which was about three years after the
Archers opened the Archer Home for elderly people and chronic invalids, James,
if you remember, that's Amy's first husband, suddenly died of
what was at the time called Bright's disease. So Bright's
(07:35):
disease is kidney disease. And this at this point, we're
gonna do some really high level medical talk here. It's
basically what happens when your kidneys become inflamed. So ultimately,
if it's left untreated, that can lead the kidney failure.
Today it would be called nephritis, and it has several
causes such as an infection or high blood pressure. And
(07:57):
we're just gonna put this out there and it probably
won't surprise you. Exposure to arsenic not arsenic? What what's that?
I've never heard him? I wonder what the symptoms. After
James died, Amy began having some financial trouble, but she
(08:19):
was still able to manage the home, and that's because
she had taken out quite a hefty insurance policy on
her husband just about a week or two prior to
his death. A few years later, in nineteen thirteen, Amy
got remarried her new groom, fifty six year old Michael Gilligan,
was a healthy and vivacious man with a hefty savings account.
(08:40):
Like Amy, Michael was a widower, plus he had four
adult sons. In February nineteen fourteen, which was just about
three months after they had gotten married, Michael suddenly died.
The official cause of death was listed as acute bilious attack,
which basically means he was likely suffering from some kind
of liver or dysfunction. Right, it's really hard to come down.
(09:02):
I mean, some people will call it severe indigestion, but
it was a little bit more major than that. Um. So,
when he died, he had willed his entire estate, which
was valued at about four thousand dollars. Uh, that would
be very, very roughly the equivalent of say about a
hundred thousand dollars today. So he willed all of this
(09:25):
to his wife. Um. You know, husbands will their estates
to their wives all the time, it's not weird. But
despite that, the authorities were suspicious, and they later determined
that Michael's will was a forgery and that the handwriting
it turned out matched Amy's. So at this point, there's
a pattern emerging regarding the Archer home, and neighbors were
(09:47):
starting to take notice of the high death rate among
the residents there. And unlike other stories that we've shared
on the show, where shady things kind of went on
for a long time without anyone really getting too concern.
Authorities were actually pretty quick to jump to the conclusion
that these deaths were probably due to foul play in
Amy's case, yet they were not so quick to actually
(10:10):
do anything about it. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Yeah, so,
um Amy was known among her residents for her nutritional
meals and beneficial tonics. But nourishing might not be the
best word to use when we talk about these nutritional
meals that she served. And here's why Amy added arsenic
(10:32):
to her recipes, resulting in the deaths of many of
her residents, all of whom remember, had named her in
their wills when they moved into her home, and many
of them did not have relatives close by or any
family at all. So we're gonna look at the story
of one man who lived at the Archer home and
it is his death that actually kicked off the investigation
(10:53):
against her. One of Amy's residents was a sixty year
old man named Franklin Andrews, and while he had some
sort of mild disability, we don't know what kind of
illness or injury it was, he was still listed as
pretty healthy and robust. He routinely did yard work and
other chores for Amy, and Franklin was one of the
residents that did not have family nearby, but he did
(11:15):
right to his family pretty frequently, including stories and details
about his life at the Archer home. In one letter,
just in passing, he happened to mention that he had
noticed a surprising number of deaths among the residents. I've
wondered after reading the sources on this, every single one
of them says it the same way. But how do
you just put that in passing right? Just like a
(11:37):
cavalier here right? See is saturday in passing rain tomorrow. Yeah,
by the way, three of my best friends just died
last night. Um, so you know, good on Franklin for
sharing that information now, because on one spring day, Franklin
(11:57):
was painting the fence around the property when he suddenly collapsed.
Two days later, he died of what was reported to
be a stomach ulcer. Shortly after his death, his sister
Nellie Pierce found some unusual correspondence among Franklin's belongings. In particular,
Amy had pressured Franklin to loan her five and he
(12:19):
had done so. Suspicious about this loan and her brother's
sudden death. Nelly also contacted the authorities, and initially the
district attorney was not interested in the case, but the
Hartford Current definitely was. The newspaper began their own investigation,
and it was their investigation that ultimately led to Amy's arrest.
(12:42):
So among the things that they reviewed at first were
death certificates. They compared these death certificates of the Archer
Home residence with those of residence of the Jefferson Street
Home for the Elderly in Hartford, which was less than
ten miles away. It turned out that the number of
deaths at the Jefferson Street Home was similar, but the
(13:05):
population there was way larger. It was like seven times
that of the Archer Home. In fact, they discovered sixty
residents of the Archer Home had died since nineteen o seven,
and forty eight of them had died recently between nineteen
eleven and nineteen six. They also discovered Amy's weapon. Carlin
(13:27):
Gossily was a correspondent and the oh bit writer for
the Hartford Current at the time, and had for years
been noticing a really high number of deaths at the
Archer Home. It was a home for the elderly, yes,
but the deaths seemed and to put it, mildly excessive.
So he did some investigating into the poison registers that
(13:50):
every drug store had to keep by law. I love
Carlin for this, how do too? He did such a
good job and this it's amazing. That's good journalism, right man.
He's an o bit writer. He went above and beyond,
and in doing this research he hit the jackpot in
terms of information. He found out that Amy had made
(14:12):
multiple purchases of arsenic at H. H. Mason's drug store
in Windsor, as well as other stores around town, and
one storage register revealed that she had purchased a huge
amount of arsenic ten ounces that is enough to kill
at least a hundred people and possibly as many as
two hundred. Amy cited that there were rat problems and
(14:35):
bed bugs at the house as the reason she was
making these purchases. Now, it may sound strange that the
Connecticut State Police weren't the ones who really went to
work on this case, but good and bad, there are
actually some reasons for that. The Connecticut State Police Department
had only been established for really only a few years
(14:57):
since like nineteen o three year or so. Give her
take a year, and the skills that were needed to
investigate murders and forensics in general weren't really all out
developed yet, but the state police were interested though. After
the newspaper investigation really started to take off and they
did do some of their own work. They sent in
(15:19):
an undercover officer who pretended to be a wealthy widow
in need of care, and this gave them a firsthand
look at how Amy scammed her residence into giving her
well everything. I was really happy to see that. Once
the newspaper investigation took off, the police department was like,
we should get on this. Yeah, yeah, all right. So
(15:42):
they visited the nursing home after their undercover officer came
back with this information, and they found surprisingly arsenic in
the kitchen pantry. Amy again, though, claimed that she used
arsenic to control an ongoing rat problem in the nursing home,
but considering that she had enough arsenic you remember, to
kill more than a hundred people, it sounds like there
(16:04):
had to be more rats than residents. Like. It sounds
like there was quite an infestation going on in the
super rats yes, and bad Bucks kind of like us.
The police did not believe this story about the rats
they could do math as well. They believed that Amy
was poisoning residents, but it wasn't until nineteen seventeen when
(16:26):
they officially charged Amy with the murder of the Archer
Home resident Franklin Andrews, that they found out for sure.
And the investigation took more than a year to complete.
During that time, bodies were exhumed and autopsies were performed,
and arsenic YEP was absolutely found in the bodies. Franklin's
corpse included. There were five victims who were definitely, absolutely,
(16:53):
positively no doubt about it, poisoned by Amy with arsenic,
including not only residents of her nursing home, but her
second husband as well. And although you'll hear numbers like
she she killed sixty upwards, the final tally it's still
really high. The final tally from the authorities when they
(17:14):
finished the investigation of the deaths was a total of forty.
And when she was arrested, police asked Amy about the
high number of deaths in her home and she replied, quote, well,
we didn't ask them to come here, but we do
the best we can for them. They are old people
and some live for a long time while others die
(17:35):
after being here a short time. I don't even have
a comment for that. I have a comment for everything
and learning comment. So we're going to take a quick
break from our for our sponsor and we come back
we will talk about Amy's trial. M welcome back to Criminalia.
(18:07):
Let's get into the details of Amy Archer Gilligan's trial.
So the trial headlined in newspapers all across the country
and it really captured people's imaginations. One headline from the
Hartford Current, and this was their lead headline when the
trial began. Police believe Archer home for aged a murder factory.
(18:32):
Murder factory. Well, it's also the police believed part right
like that that presupposes guilt to some degree. Under questioning,
Amy insisted that she was innocent. I am a poor,
hard working woman and I can't understand why I am
persecuted as I have been during the last few years,
(18:53):
The Current reported she told arresting officers. She also went
on to say, quote, this is a Christian work and
one that is very trying, as we have to put
up with lots of things on account of the peculiarities
of the old people. Again, so at her trial, Amy
appeared as a petite widow who was busy raising a
(19:15):
teenage daughter. She remember she had a daughter from her
first marriage and taking care of the elderly, and everyone
in town knew that she was a regular churchgoer and
that she gave generously to the local church. Most of
her neighbors and other churchgoers were actually quite shocked to
find that she had been arrested. Psychiatrists and psychologists who
were known as alienists at the time testified as to
(19:38):
Amy's mental health, and they also brought up Amy's alleged
use of morphine. So this morphine thing, we got to
talk about it for a second. This only came up.
It was only mentioned um this idea that she might
have had a morphine addiction in one reliable source, and
so we couldn't verify it. It might not be true
at all, but it is kind of interesting and a
(20:01):
little too to the leading a piece of the potential
puzzle to not mention it at all. But even though
we're including it, we also want to caution you to
take it with a green of salt. Absolutely right, there's
there's there's some There's always little bits and pieces of
the stories that are a little bit too good. To
not mention, but probably not true. You would think that
(20:25):
would have come up in more than one place if
it were a real issue, exactly. Um, And I believe
it came up in regard to her daughter saying that
my mom has a morphine addiction, you know. And I
like to think that that's because her daughter was like,
please don't send my mom to jail, you know. But
but I have no way to verify that. So Amy's
trial back to that. Amy's trial lasted for four weeks
(20:49):
and it took the jury four hours to convict her.
She was found guilty of murdering Franklin Andrews. Um But
the card of public opinion, though, often has a very
very different point of view. And with Amy, they believed
she had killed at least twenty two other residents, if
not more. But the court sentenced her to death by hanging.
(21:11):
But and there's a big butt. Her defense team appealed
and her conviction was overturned. So there was a second trial,
and that began in June. This time, Amy pleaded guilty
to the lethal poisoning of resident frank Andrews. She received
a sentence of life in prison, which was a reduced
(21:32):
charge of second degree murder due to reason of insanity.
I find that amazing, um Hall, I don't know if
you know that, like most of the um most most
often when someone pleads with reason of insanity, guilty or
not usually not guilty with reason of insanity, it's like
it's like less than one percent. Actually it actually works
(21:54):
in their favor lins right, you know, like it's it's
such a difficult one to argue. So um, I was
actually really surprised to see that that that's how her
case played out. Um. Anyway, although she was tried only
for the murder of Franklin Andrews, Amy was indicted for
five poisoning murders in total, and the people on that
(22:15):
list included Franklin Andrews, which is no surprise um, Alice Goudy,
who was a resident, her second husband, Michael Gilligan, Charles A. Smith,
also a resident, and Maud Howard Lynch I believe, also
a resident. Each had died of arsenic poisoning. That is,
except Maud, who's autopsy showed she was poisoned to a
(22:36):
Stryck nine. During that second trial, it is reported that
Amy kept repeating the same phrase, which was simply I
want to go home. Amy was in her early forties
when she began her sentence at the state prison in Wethersfield.
Five years later, in July, amy situation changed when she
was transferred to the Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, a
(22:58):
state run institution for people with mental illness. So we
have brought this up before, but let's take a brief
moment to review some of the facts about female serial
killers in the United States. They definitely use poison to
kill their victims. That is not the only weapon that
female serial killers have been known to use, but it
goes beyond that, right we've talked about before. They usually
(23:20):
know they're victims, and most often they were actually the
official caretakers of those victims, such as being in a
situation where they were nursing them. And they often kill
for financial gain. And if you look at sort of
that basic profile, Amy really checks a lot of these boxes. Yeah.
Mental illness as well is also listed as a common
(23:43):
thing among female serial killers. Uh a guestimate of about
have some type of mental illness during the time that
they commit their crime. Though her psychiatric records are sealed,
there are one or two things that we do know
about Amy's stay at the Connecticut Valley Hospital one she
(24:04):
continued to read and pray with her Bible in her
lap daily, and to she enjoyed playing funeral music on
the piano there, even when no one had died. I
really liked that detail. It's very haunted mansion e right,
absolutely right, like every day she played a dirge. She
(24:24):
spent the remaining thirty eight years of her life there,
and she died on April nineteen sixty two of natural causes.
There is something interesting here in her story that comes
up in some accounts of her time in the hospital,
and I feel like it needs to be included. Because
she was convicted of poisoning many of her residents through
(24:45):
the meals that she served to them. In prison, Amy
allegedly was allowed to work in the hospital's cafeteria. And
I'm not saying that anything was reported as going wrong.
Nothing happened, but it just seemed to me like it
was poor planning, right. I guess if they were confident
she couldn't get her hands on nine, they were like, well,
(25:09):
we need somebody to cook. There is one good thing
that came out of all of this. In an effort
to prevent anything like this from happening again. In the
same year as Amy's first trial, nineteen, the Connecticut state
legislature introduced a bill requiring the license of quote old
folks homes. And this was the first time nursing homes
(25:30):
would be required to have inspections and to annually report deaths.
Of course, this is something we would probably just end on.
There is also the star studded piece of her story.
So Amy's trial and conviction, like we said earlier, was
really hot and heavy in the media, and that was
across the nation, and it caught the eye of Joseph
(25:51):
kessel Ring, a playwright who was based in New York,
and he adapted this story into a play, um, a
black comedy that he entitled Our Snack and Old Lace,
which you might recognize the place starred Boris Karloff, and
it was a huge hit, and it was adapted into
film by the same name, which started carry grant and
(26:13):
as a standard of high school theater departments across the country.
Exactly now, people are in this play and they don't
really grasp the gravity of it's a exactly so um
So her poison was our Snack and maybe once strychnine,
but Holly, what's yours? Well, so for what's your poison
(26:36):
this time? You know, I always like to ruminate on
the tale we have been discussing. And the thing that
I loved that we didn't talk a ton about, but
it does come up, is how people in the community
perceived her as really just like a very you know, sweet,
wonderful person. And so I thought it would be a
fun thing to play on that, and I came up
(26:57):
with a cocktail called Sweetest pie Um, which could then
hurt you if you drink too much of it um.
And basically I wanted to make something that tasted like
cherry pie so um. This one is one point five
ounces of vodka, one point five ounces of a cherry liqueur, oh,
(27:21):
one ounce of simple syrup, and then uh, this next one.
It depends on what people have in their kitchens. Either
a drop, just a drop of vanilla extract, because if
you have ever tasted vanilla extract, you know it is
not delicious on its own. Really could as a child
because you think it's gonna taste like a cookie, and
(27:43):
in fact it tastes like getting slapt um. So just
a drop because it does give it a bakery flavor
that you don't quite get if you just use vanilla syrup. Also,
if you're like me and you like to bake, and
maybe you have invested in having um powdered vanilla, like
scraped vanilla that's been just pulverized, you can also do
(28:03):
just a little pinch of that instead. Um, either one
of those works, and then two ounces of ginger ale
and you're gonna stir that all together. But then to
serve it, come with me, because you're gonna melt a
little bit of butter and um, use a pastry brush
to just paint that around the rim of your glass,
and then rim it with Graham cracker crushed right right,
(28:27):
so you get like a nice buttery crust sensation as
you sip. And then you just pour your your concoction
your drinking over ice. I like, although if you wanted
to get a sense of like a fresh baked pie,
you could leave the ice out if you don't mind
a room tempt drink. Um, it's so yummy, but it
is definitely full of alcohol. So I thought that's sound.
(28:51):
That was the thing that seemed very wholesome, but is
in factful of alcohol. So that is the sweetest pie.
It's quite me, I will say, um, and it does.
It tastes like a little dessert in your hand, especially
because you get that nice buttery graham cracker crust situation.
That is a lovely, lovely addition to the drink Listen.
(29:12):
I am always going to figure out a way to
put butter if I can, so if you if you
yes butter and ginger ale, I put ginger ale and everything.
You could also do it. If ginger ale is not
something you like, you could also do it with just
like um, um, you know, any sparkling water there just
(29:32):
to give it it just um. I found that before
I added that it's just a little too thick and
syrupy because fruit liqueurs can tend to be a little
bit like the viscosity is a little thick. Um, So
that's really there to to further move that around like
the vodka does some And also because I just didn't
want to pour straight alcohol into a glass, even though
(29:52):
that often delights me. Um, No, I thought it would
help also because that's a little too bitey, and you
want to take some of that bite off of it
and make it a little more like a baked good
um and for me, ginger ale does a nice job
of rounding that flavor out. But if other people don't
like to jail, you can use anything there or even
like a little juice if you wanted, would be fine.
(30:13):
I have a tart cherry juice that actually would probably do.
But yeah, I like to rail, so I don't really
need to let me choose my own cherry adventure. Yes
you could. I mean, that's the thing, right, This is
the kind of thing that once you have it down
and you know how you like your mix, you could
use other fruit liquors to make different alcoholic pie drinks.
(30:37):
You could just just play. That's what it's about. I
do want to make sure we thank everybody for spending
this time with us this week, and we cannot wait
to talk to you again next week. Criminalia is a
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(30:59):
to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
latest episode of Criminalia, where this season we're exploring the
lives and motivations of some of the most notorious lady
poisoners throughout history. Holly Fry and I'm Ranchre Markie. And
(00:23):
the poisoner that we're talking about today is Amy Archer Gilligan.
And you might know her name. She was the real
life inspiration for the story behind both the play and
the film Arsenic and Old Lace. And this today is
the true story behind the eccentric comedy that came out
of Hollywood as a result of it. And it's absolutely
not a comedy, it's not at all. Um So a
(00:47):
little bit about Amy's story. So from her birth through
her death, Amy's entire story takes place in the state
of Connecticut. She was born to James and Mary Duggan,
probably on Halloween, but definitely in October in eighteen seventy
three in the town of Milton, which at the time
was sort of the northwestern part of what is now
(01:08):
the town of Litchfield, and all accounts suggest that Amy
grew up in kind of a modest circumstance, and there
was really nothing about her childhood that particularly stands out. However,
there was a legacy of mental illness in her immediate family.
Amy's brother John became a patient. He would have been
(01:29):
called an inmate then, which is obviously outdated terminology at
the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane, and that happened
in nineteen o two and so outdated terminology. And then
one of her sisters was listed as residing there as well.
That was during the ninety census, so there is a
(01:49):
strong streak there. There were between eight and ten children
in the Archer family, and as many as seven are
believed to have had mental health issues. It's amazing, um.
So as an adult, Amy married James Archer when she
was twenty three years old, and about five years later
they relocated with their young daughter to Newington, which, as
(02:12):
I was saying, also a town in Connecticut. There they
lived with a man named John Seymour who was frail
and elderly um and they cared for him in exchange
for room and board. When John died in nineteen four
the house went to his heirs, but the Archers decided
to rent it and they turned it into Sister Amy's
nursing Home for the elderly. And yes, you probably could
(02:34):
hear something of an air quote around the word sister,
because Amy certainly did not take any religious vows, although
she was known to be a very pious woman. They
were kind of trading on that name as kind of
a marketing plan. Three years after they started this, though,
John's family decided to sell the property, so the Archers
(02:56):
moved to Windsor, and with their savings, they bought a
red brick house at thirty seven Prospect Street. It's still
there today and you can tour through all that they
asked you to really not take photos. It was in
this house that became the Archer Home for elderly people
and chronic invalids. That is the name of the house,
not a name that we will keep repeating through the episode.
(03:18):
Right in this unassuming red brick house, this business that
they started, uh, did not seem particularly out of the ordinary.
Amy was reportedly a doting Christian woman who took care
of those who were unable to care for themselves. She was,
or at least seemed to be a positive fixture in
her community. It's really true, Like if you you know,
(03:41):
if you if you look at some of the things
that she did, minus the killing, she was very caring.
She was very um willing to give money to the
church for variety of reasons. So if you, if you
didn't know what was going on in her life, you
might think that she was a positive fixture in her community.
So in comparison, today there are a bit more than
(04:03):
fifteen thousand nursing homes and more than twenty eight thousand
assisted living residencies in the United States, and together they're
occupied by about two and a half million people. But
in the early twentieth century when the Archers opened their doors,
this was not the case at all. Most of the time,
caring for your elders was the responsibility of family members,
(04:26):
And basically the Archers were really establishing a brand new
field when they did this, and they were also trying
to make a place in it. They are known to
even advertise their services in the local newspapers, and the
Archer Home for elderly people and chronic invalids worked basically
like this. Patients would either sign their life insurance policies
(04:46):
over to Amy, or they could pay a large amount
of money. By all accounts, This was right around a
thousand dollars up front, but Amy did not only cater
to the well off. If there were people who could
not pay that lump sum up front, they were given
an option to pay weekly. But no matter how they
chose to pay. In return, what they got was residents
(05:07):
and Amy's care. And there were generally anywhere between ten
and twenty residents in the home at a time. So
these residents Amy called them inmates, and we referred to
that earlier when we were talking about her brother, and
it sounds wrong to our twenty century years, but it
was completely in line with the convention of the time.
Everything appeared fine on the outside of this business, yet
(05:31):
there were stories about how Amy's inmates were crowded together
in rooms and often left to fend for themselves. Um
and as I was just talking about, remember, the industry
at this time was so brand new, and that means
there were no regulatory agencies set up yet to monitor
anything anything from the quality of care or anything that
was going on inside the home. And in nine nine,
(05:54):
Amy had her first brush with the law. The mc
talk family of West Hartford sued the Archers over their
perceived lack of care that was given to an elderly
family member. They settled out of court and the Archers
paid five thousand dollars to the mcclint talks. We know
it's unreliable always when we talk about trying to figure
(06:16):
out how much money in nineteen ten would equal to
today's currency, but we always like to do it just
kind of as a a little bit of a benchmark
so you get a sense of it. So it's a
little fun. Five thousand dollars in nineteen ten was a
pretty tidy payout and roughly, very roughly, that's kind of
(06:37):
the equivalent to like a hundred and thirty seven thousand today,
which is really nothing to really laugh at. Um. So, actually,
right now we're going to take a quick break, and
when we return, we're going to talk about the mysterious
and numerous deaths happening at the Archer Home. Welcome back
(07:12):
to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about Amy's quote unquote inmates.
So in nineteen which was about three years after the
Archers opened the Archer Home for elderly people and chronic invalids, James,
if you remember, that's Amy's first husband, suddenly died of
what was at the time called Bright's disease. So Bright's
(07:35):
disease is kidney disease. And this at this point, we're
gonna do some really high level medical talk here. It's
basically what happens when your kidneys become inflamed. So ultimately,
if it's left untreated, that can lead the kidney failure.
Today it would be called nephritis, and it has several
causes such as an infection or high blood pressure. And
(07:57):
we're just gonna put this out there and it probably
won't surprise you. Exposure to arsenic not arsenic? What what's that?
I've never heard him? I wonder what the symptoms. After
James died, Amy began having some financial trouble, but she
(08:19):
was still able to manage the home, and that's because
she had taken out quite a hefty insurance policy on
her husband just about a week or two prior to
his death. A few years later, in nineteen thirteen, Amy
got remarried her new groom, fifty six year old Michael Gilligan,
was a healthy and vivacious man with a hefty savings account.
(08:40):
Like Amy, Michael was a widower, plus he had four
adult sons. In February nineteen fourteen, which was just about
three months after they had gotten married, Michael suddenly died.
The official cause of death was listed as acute bilious attack,
which basically means he was likely suffering from some kind
of liver or dysfunction. Right, it's really hard to come down.
(09:02):
I mean, some people will call it severe indigestion, but
it was a little bit more major than that. Um. So,
when he died, he had willed his entire estate, which
was valued at about four thousand dollars. Uh, that would
be very, very roughly the equivalent of say about a
hundred thousand dollars today. So he willed all of this
(09:25):
to his wife. Um. You know, husbands will their estates
to their wives all the time, it's not weird. But
despite that, the authorities were suspicious, and they later determined
that Michael's will was a forgery and that the handwriting
it turned out matched Amy's. So at this point, there's
a pattern emerging regarding the Archer home, and neighbors were
(09:47):
starting to take notice of the high death rate among
the residents there. And unlike other stories that we've shared
on the show, where shady things kind of went on
for a long time without anyone really getting too concern.
Authorities were actually pretty quick to jump to the conclusion
that these deaths were probably due to foul play in
Amy's case, yet they were not so quick to actually
(10:10):
do anything about it. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Yeah, so,
um Amy was known among her residents for her nutritional
meals and beneficial tonics. But nourishing might not be the
best word to use when we talk about these nutritional
meals that she served. And here's why Amy added arsenic
(10:32):
to her recipes, resulting in the deaths of many of
her residents, all of whom remember, had named her in
their wills when they moved into her home, and many
of them did not have relatives close by or any
family at all. So we're gonna look at the story
of one man who lived at the Archer home and
it is his death that actually kicked off the investigation
(10:53):
against her. One of Amy's residents was a sixty year
old man named Franklin Andrews, and while he had some
sort of mild disability, we don't know what kind of
illness or injury it was, he was still listed as
pretty healthy and robust. He routinely did yard work and
other chores for Amy, and Franklin was one of the
residents that did not have family nearby, but he did
(11:15):
right to his family pretty frequently, including stories and details
about his life at the Archer home. In one letter,
just in passing, he happened to mention that he had
noticed a surprising number of deaths among the residents. I've
wondered after reading the sources on this, every single one
of them says it the same way. But how do
you just put that in passing right? Just like a
(11:37):
cavalier here right? See is saturday in passing rain tomorrow. Yeah,
by the way, three of my best friends just died
last night. Um, so you know, good on Franklin for
sharing that information now, because on one spring day, Franklin
(11:57):
was painting the fence around the property when he suddenly collapsed.
Two days later, he died of what was reported to
be a stomach ulcer. Shortly after his death, his sister
Nellie Pierce found some unusual correspondence among Franklin's belongings. In particular,
Amy had pressured Franklin to loan her five and he
(12:19):
had done so. Suspicious about this loan and her brother's
sudden death. Nelly also contacted the authorities, and initially the
district attorney was not interested in the case, but the
Hartford Current definitely was. The newspaper began their own investigation,
and it was their investigation that ultimately led to Amy's arrest.
(12:42):
So among the things that they reviewed at first were
death certificates. They compared these death certificates of the Archer
Home residence with those of residence of the Jefferson Street
Home for the Elderly in Hartford, which was less than
ten miles away. It turned out that the number of
deaths at the Jefferson Street Home was similar, but the
(13:05):
population there was way larger. It was like seven times
that of the Archer Home. In fact, they discovered sixty
residents of the Archer Home had died since nineteen o seven,
and forty eight of them had died recently between nineteen
eleven and nineteen six. They also discovered Amy's weapon. Carlin
(13:27):
Gossily was a correspondent and the oh bit writer for
the Hartford Current at the time, and had for years
been noticing a really high number of deaths at the
Archer Home. It was a home for the elderly, yes,
but the deaths seemed and to put it, mildly excessive.
So he did some investigating into the poison registers that
(13:50):
every drug store had to keep by law. I love
Carlin for this, how do too? He did such a
good job and this it's amazing. That's good journalism, right man.
He's an o bit writer. He went above and beyond,
and in doing this research he hit the jackpot in
terms of information. He found out that Amy had made
(14:12):
multiple purchases of arsenic at H. H. Mason's drug store
in Windsor, as well as other stores around town, and
one storage register revealed that she had purchased a huge
amount of arsenic ten ounces that is enough to kill
at least a hundred people and possibly as many as
two hundred. Amy cited that there were rat problems and
(14:35):
bed bugs at the house as the reason she was
making these purchases. Now, it may sound strange that the
Connecticut State Police weren't the ones who really went to
work on this case, but good and bad, there are
actually some reasons for that. The Connecticut State Police Department
had only been established for really only a few years
(14:57):
since like nineteen o three year or so. Give her
take a year, and the skills that were needed to
investigate murders and forensics in general weren't really all out
developed yet, but the state police were interested though. After
the newspaper investigation really started to take off and they
did do some of their own work. They sent in
(15:19):
an undercover officer who pretended to be a wealthy widow
in need of care, and this gave them a firsthand
look at how Amy scammed her residence into giving her
well everything. I was really happy to see that. Once
the newspaper investigation took off, the police department was like,
we should get on this. Yeah, yeah, all right. So
(15:42):
they visited the nursing home after their undercover officer came
back with this information, and they found surprisingly arsenic in
the kitchen pantry. Amy again, though, claimed that she used
arsenic to control an ongoing rat problem in the nursing home,
but considering that she had enough arsenic you remember, to
kill more than a hundred people, it sounds like there
(16:04):
had to be more rats than residents. Like. It sounds
like there was quite an infestation going on in the
super rats yes, and bad Bucks kind of like us.
The police did not believe this story about the rats
they could do math as well. They believed that Amy
was poisoning residents, but it wasn't until nineteen seventeen when
(16:26):
they officially charged Amy with the murder of the Archer
Home resident Franklin Andrews, that they found out for sure.
And the investigation took more than a year to complete.
During that time, bodies were exhumed and autopsies were performed,
and arsenic YEP was absolutely found in the bodies. Franklin's
corpse included. There were five victims who were definitely, absolutely,
(16:53):
positively no doubt about it, poisoned by Amy with arsenic,
including not only residents of her nursing home, but her
second husband as well. And although you'll hear numbers like
she she killed sixty upwards, the final tally it's still
really high. The final tally from the authorities when they
(17:14):
finished the investigation of the deaths was a total of forty.
And when she was arrested, police asked Amy about the
high number of deaths in her home and she replied, quote, well,
we didn't ask them to come here, but we do
the best we can for them. They are old people
and some live for a long time while others die
(17:35):
after being here a short time. I don't even have
a comment for that. I have a comment for everything
and learning comment. So we're going to take a quick
break from our for our sponsor and we come back
we will talk about Amy's trial. M welcome back to Criminalia.
(18:07):
Let's get into the details of Amy Archer Gilligan's trial.
So the trial headlined in newspapers all across the country
and it really captured people's imaginations. One headline from the
Hartford Current, and this was their lead headline when the
trial began. Police believe Archer home for aged a murder factory.
(18:32):
Murder factory. Well, it's also the police believed part right
like that that presupposes guilt to some degree. Under questioning,
Amy insisted that she was innocent. I am a poor,
hard working woman and I can't understand why I am
persecuted as I have been during the last few years,
(18:53):
The Current reported she told arresting officers. She also went
on to say, quote, this is a Christian work and
one that is very trying, as we have to put
up with lots of things on account of the peculiarities
of the old people. Again, so at her trial, Amy
appeared as a petite widow who was busy raising a
(19:15):
teenage daughter. She remember she had a daughter from her
first marriage and taking care of the elderly, and everyone
in town knew that she was a regular churchgoer and
that she gave generously to the local church. Most of
her neighbors and other churchgoers were actually quite shocked to
find that she had been arrested. Psychiatrists and psychologists who
were known as alienists at the time testified as to
(19:38):
Amy's mental health, and they also brought up Amy's alleged
use of morphine. So this morphine thing, we got to
talk about it for a second. This only came up.
It was only mentioned um this idea that she might
have had a morphine addiction in one reliable source, and
so we couldn't verify it. It might not be true
at all, but it is kind of interesting and a
(20:01):
little too to the leading a piece of the potential
puzzle to not mention it at all. But even though
we're including it, we also want to caution you to
take it with a green of salt. Absolutely right, there's
there's there's some There's always little bits and pieces of
the stories that are a little bit too good. To
not mention, but probably not true. You would think that
(20:25):
would have come up in more than one place if
it were a real issue, exactly. Um, And I believe
it came up in regard to her daughter saying that
my mom has a morphine addiction, you know. And I
like to think that that's because her daughter was like,
please don't send my mom to jail, you know. But
but I have no way to verify that. So Amy's
trial back to that. Amy's trial lasted for four weeks
(20:49):
and it took the jury four hours to convict her.
She was found guilty of murdering Franklin Andrews. Um But
the card of public opinion, though, often has a very
very different point of view. And with Amy, they believed
she had killed at least twenty two other residents, if
not more. But the court sentenced her to death by hanging.
(21:11):
But and there's a big butt. Her defense team appealed
and her conviction was overturned. So there was a second trial,
and that began in June. This time, Amy pleaded guilty
to the lethal poisoning of resident frank Andrews. She received
a sentence of life in prison, which was a reduced
(21:32):
charge of second degree murder due to reason of insanity.
I find that amazing, um Hall, I don't know if
you know that, like most of the um most most
often when someone pleads with reason of insanity, guilty or
not usually not guilty with reason of insanity, it's like
it's like less than one percent. Actually it actually works
(21:54):
in their favor lins right, you know, like it's it's
such a difficult one to argue. So um, I was
actually really surprised to see that that that's how her
case played out. Um. Anyway, although she was tried only
for the murder of Franklin Andrews, Amy was indicted for
five poisoning murders in total, and the people on that
(22:15):
list included Franklin Andrews, which is no surprise um, Alice Goudy,
who was a resident, her second husband, Michael Gilligan, Charles A. Smith,
also a resident, and Maud Howard Lynch I believe, also
a resident. Each had died of arsenic poisoning. That is,
except Maud, who's autopsy showed she was poisoned to a
(22:36):
Stryck nine. During that second trial, it is reported that
Amy kept repeating the same phrase, which was simply I
want to go home. Amy was in her early forties
when she began her sentence at the state prison in Wethersfield.
Five years later, in July, amy situation changed when she
was transferred to the Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, a
(22:58):
state run institution for people with mental illness. So we
have brought this up before, but let's take a brief
moment to review some of the facts about female serial
killers in the United States. They definitely use poison to
kill their victims. That is not the only weapon that
female serial killers have been known to use, but it
goes beyond that, right we've talked about before. They usually
(23:20):
know they're victims, and most often they were actually the
official caretakers of those victims, such as being in a
situation where they were nursing them. And they often kill
for financial gain. And if you look at sort of
that basic profile, Amy really checks a lot of these boxes. Yeah.
Mental illness as well is also listed as a common
(23:43):
thing among female serial killers. Uh a guestimate of about
have some type of mental illness during the time that
they commit their crime. Though her psychiatric records are sealed,
there are one or two things that we do know
about Amy's stay at the Connecticut Valley Hospital one she
(24:04):
continued to read and pray with her Bible in her
lap daily, and to she enjoyed playing funeral music on
the piano there, even when no one had died. I
really liked that detail. It's very haunted mansion e right,
absolutely right, like every day she played a dirge. She
(24:24):
spent the remaining thirty eight years of her life there,
and she died on April nineteen sixty two of natural causes.
There is something interesting here in her story that comes
up in some accounts of her time in the hospital,
and I feel like it needs to be included. Because
she was convicted of poisoning many of her residents through
(24:45):
the meals that she served to them. In prison, Amy
allegedly was allowed to work in the hospital's cafeteria. And
I'm not saying that anything was reported as going wrong.
Nothing happened, but it just seemed to me like it
was poor planning, right. I guess if they were confident
she couldn't get her hands on nine, they were like, well,
(25:09):
we need somebody to cook. There is one good thing
that came out of all of this. In an effort
to prevent anything like this from happening again. In the
same year as Amy's first trial, nineteen, the Connecticut state
legislature introduced a bill requiring the license of quote old
folks homes. And this was the first time nursing homes
(25:30):
would be required to have inspections and to annually report deaths.
Of course, this is something we would probably just end on.
There is also the star studded piece of her story.
So Amy's trial and conviction, like we said earlier, was
really hot and heavy in the media, and that was
across the nation, and it caught the eye of Joseph
(25:51):
kessel Ring, a playwright who was based in New York,
and he adapted this story into a play, um, a
black comedy that he entitled Our Snack and Old Lace,
which you might recognize the place starred Boris Karloff, and
it was a huge hit, and it was adapted into
film by the same name, which started carry grant and
(26:13):
as a standard of high school theater departments across the country.
Exactly now, people are in this play and they don't
really grasp the gravity of it's a exactly so um
So her poison was our Snack and maybe once strychnine,
but Holly, what's yours? Well, so for what's your poison
(26:36):
this time? You know, I always like to ruminate on
the tale we have been discussing. And the thing that
I loved that we didn't talk a ton about, but
it does come up, is how people in the community
perceived her as really just like a very you know, sweet,
wonderful person. And so I thought it would be a
fun thing to play on that, and I came up
(26:57):
with a cocktail called Sweetest pie Um, which could then
hurt you if you drink too much of it um.
And basically I wanted to make something that tasted like
cherry pie so um. This one is one point five
ounces of vodka, one point five ounces of a cherry liqueur, oh,
(27:21):
one ounce of simple syrup, and then uh, this next one.
It depends on what people have in their kitchens. Either
a drop, just a drop of vanilla extract, because if
you have ever tasted vanilla extract, you know it is
not delicious on its own. Really could as a child
because you think it's gonna taste like a cookie, and
(27:43):
in fact it tastes like getting slapt um. So just
a drop because it does give it a bakery flavor
that you don't quite get if you just use vanilla syrup. Also,
if you're like me and you like to bake, and
maybe you have invested in having um powdered vanilla, like
scraped vanilla that's been just pulverized, you can also do
(28:03):
just a little pinch of that instead. Um, either one
of those works, and then two ounces of ginger ale
and you're gonna stir that all together. But then to
serve it, come with me, because you're gonna melt a
little bit of butter and um, use a pastry brush
to just paint that around the rim of your glass,
and then rim it with Graham cracker crushed right right,
(28:27):
so you get like a nice buttery crust sensation as
you sip. And then you just pour your your concoction
your drinking over ice. I like, although if you wanted
to get a sense of like a fresh baked pie,
you could leave the ice out if you don't mind
a room tempt drink. Um, it's so yummy, but it
is definitely full of alcohol. So I thought that's sound.
(28:51):
That was the thing that seemed very wholesome, but is
in factful of alcohol. So that is the sweetest pie.
It's quite me, I will say, um, and it does.
It tastes like a little dessert in your hand, especially
because you get that nice buttery graham cracker crust situation.
That is a lovely, lovely addition to the drink Listen.
(29:12):
I am always going to figure out a way to
put butter if I can, so if you if you
yes butter and ginger ale, I put ginger ale and everything.
You could also do it. If ginger ale is not
something you like, you could also do it with just
like um, um, you know, any sparkling water there just
(29:32):
to give it it just um. I found that before
I added that it's just a little too thick and
syrupy because fruit liqueurs can tend to be a little
bit like the viscosity is a little thick. Um, So
that's really there to to further move that around like
the vodka does some And also because I just didn't
want to pour straight alcohol into a glass, even though
(29:52):
that often delights me. Um, No, I thought it would
help also because that's a little too bitey, and you
want to take some of that bite off of it
and make it a little more like a baked good
um and for me, ginger ale does a nice job
of rounding that flavor out. But if other people don't
like to jail, you can use anything there or even
like a little juice if you wanted, would be fine.
(30:13):
I have a tart cherry juice that actually would probably do.
But yeah, I like to rail, so I don't really
need to let me choose my own cherry adventure. Yes
you could. I mean, that's the thing, right, This is
the kind of thing that once you have it down
and you know how you like your mix, you could
use other fruit liquors to make different alcoholic pie drinks.
(30:37):
You could just just play. That's what it's about. I
do want to make sure we thank everybody for spending
this time with us this week, and we cannot wait
to talk to you again next week. Criminalia is a
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(30:59):
to your favorite shows. H
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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