November 3, 2020 • 29 mins
Also known as "The Derby Poisoner," Lydia Sherman poisoned, in total, her three husbands plus as many as eight children in her care --- six of whom were her biological children. She confessed to her murders, showing no remorse, was convicted of second-degree murder in 1872.
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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 Criminalia,
where this season we're exploring the lives and motivations of
some of the most notorious lady poisoners in history. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Maria Trumki, And in today's episode,
(00:22):
we're going to look at the life of Lydia Sherman,
who in total poisoned probably as many as three of
her husband's and more upsettingly, eight children before she was
convicted of second degree murder. So Lydia's span of crimes
actually ran from around it was right around the Civil War.
It was between about eighteen sixty three to the early
(00:44):
eighteen seventies. She was the first woman in the United
States to total up a double digit body count. That's
quite a claim to fame. Yeah. So, Lydia was born
Lydia Danbury on Christmas even four in Burlington, New Jersey.
(01:08):
She was orphaned when her mother died just shy of
a year after her birth, and at that point she
was sent to live with her uncle, who was a
farmer named John Clay. Game. Why her uncle, your guess
is as good as ours. There is no record of
who her father was or why he himself did not
care for his infant daughter. By the age of sixteen,
(01:30):
um she left the farm as she went to live
with her brother in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and that's
where she began working as a seamstress. It was her
first job. And it was while she was living in
New Brunswick that Lydia became heavily involved with the Methodist Church.
And it was through the church that she met Edward Struck,
who was a widowed blacksmith and he was raising six
(01:51):
children alone. Lydia is described as charming. Descriptions of her
list her as slim and pretty, with dark hair and
blue eyes and porcelain skin. Smitten by her, it did
not take long for Edward, who was twenty years older
than her, to propose marriage and Lydia, who at the
time was only eighteen, accepted. So after they got married,
(02:16):
we don't know if they had a long courtship or not.
We do know that they got married. Edward and Lydia
moved to a middle class neighborhood in Harlem on d
Street in New York City, and they went on to
have eight children of their own. And for those keeping score, yes,
that is in addition to the six children that Edward
had from his previous marriage, and that would be a
(02:38):
grand total of fourteen mouths to feed. That's a whole
lot of kids. Can you imagine the chaos? I cannot,
oh my gosh, haveing kids at home just to school
right now as chaotic cricketship. But after relocating, Lydia started
working as a housekeeper, and with so many children at home,
(03:02):
Edward decided that he was going to leave work as
a blacksmith and get a different job, so he became
a New York City police officer. So about six years
into this new line of work, though, Edward was accused
of cowardice on the job, and it was at the
scene of a hotel robbery in Manhattan, but other accounts
report that it might have been a barroom fight either way,
(03:23):
though regardless of which crime was being committed, he lost
his job and when this happened, he sank into a
very deep depression. With a husband refusing to leave their
home or get out of his bed, Lydia decided that
she needed to take matters into her own hands. And
you know what that means around here means boys. Then yeah. So,
(03:49):
according to her eventual confession, I know we're jumping ahead,
but we'll loop back around. Yes, Instead of getting Edward
medical care, and we should point out this was not
a time when things like depression were really treated with
any any sort of insight, she decided instead too and
we quote put him out of the way, as he
(04:10):
would never be any good. Yeah. So she did what
every I say, sarcastically caring wife does. She got herself
a bag of arsenic. And if it seems like we
talked about arsenic a lot around here, it's because we do.
For a very long time, it was really very easy
(04:30):
to acquire arsenic, and that's mainly because it was used
as a rat poison or like bed bugs or any
sort of ants insects that you had in your house.
In the nineteenth century in the United States, Lydia was
able to just get hers at the local drug store. So,
twenty years into what had been a fairly uneventful marriage,
she mixed a thimbleful of the poisonous powder into her
(04:53):
husband's oatmeal. It took several hours of abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting,
ant convulsions before Edward passed away. Man, Poor Edward. But
she might not have thought things through so completely because
now that she had, and I'm using air quotes around
this folved her husband's depression, albeit not as most wives would. Uh,
(05:19):
Lydia realized she had another problem, and that was that
she had many children at home who were hungry, and
Edward had been the family's primary source of income. Not
a lot of consideration of like cause and effect here,
probably pretty impetuous. Yeah, so let's look at the children's
situation for a moment. At this point, their eldest son, John,
(05:41):
who was sixteen, had a job. He had moved out
of the house, and in hindsight, that was probably the
luckiest thing he did in his life. I was imagining
poor John having his he's just forced, he hates his job.
He does this, but hey, he's still alive because he
moved out. Uh yeah, good on your John. So they
also had a younger daughter named Josephine, and Josephine had
(06:04):
passed away years earlier from illness, so there was one
for Lydia, fewer mouth to feed. Uh. Their two year
old daughter. She contracted measles. But what's interesting about the
measles that she had was that she didn't actually die
from the symptoms that you would expect from that viral illness.
She died of the same symptoms as Edward. So Lydia
(06:28):
did what she thought was and again what she thought
was the humane and rational thing to do. Are you
ready for this, because it is, it's rough, and it's
hard to consider someone reaching this decision. Yes, But about
six weeks after edwards poisoning, Lydia poisoned her three youngest children.
(06:49):
Those were Martha Ann, aged six, Edward Jr. Who was four,
and William, who was just nine months old. And she
did this all on the same day. So keeping I'm
here that while this is unfathomable to those of us
who are talking about it and listening, Lydia clearly saw
things very differently than the rest of us do. The
(07:10):
three youngest, she said in the eventual confession that we've
been talking about throughout this episode so far, were the
most burdensome in her opinion, and she said that they
were the three who would not be able to contribute
anything to the family. Now, you might be wondering how
come no one would notice such a thing going on?
(07:31):
Someone's husband dying, and a few months later, three children
in one day. This was a time in history when
it wasn't super strange for children to become ill and die,
or have an accident and meet an unfortunate end. Childhood
mortality rates in the nineteenth century were quite grim, and
no one really raised an eyebrow when all of these
(07:52):
kids passed away. I feel like there's also probably a
numbers game, right, I don't know there were a lot
of kids over there. I feel the same way, like,
how can you keep track if you're not part of
the family who those fourteen children are unless you're close
to the family, right, But if you just lived on
the street, when your next door two houses down, I
(08:14):
wouldn't know. I'd be like, there's just kids, there's a
lot of kids. But now there weren't a lot of kids.
Lydia had three remaining children to care for in her home.
So there was George, who was fourteen, who unfortunately contracted
lead poisoning from his job as a painter. Sick in bed,
his mother nursed him with tea laced with arsenic And
(08:38):
then there was Anne Eliza who was twelve and reported
they called her kind of a weak and sickly child.
She was never able to work to contribute to the family.
And at twelve, you know, whether she was a weaken
seekly child or not, I'm not surprised she wasn't contributing
to the family. But none of this helped her at
all to stay alive and Lydia's home. And then there
(09:02):
was their other daughter, also named Lydia, who was eighteen,
and she worked as a retail clerk. But when Lydia,
the younger, fell ill with something as innocuous as what
is apparently a cold or a flu, her mother also
nursed her with tea poisoned with arsenic so, hating to
see each child as she, she would say, suffer, as
(09:24):
she confessed, Lydia thought that it was actually best to
instead poison them all. The death certificates, though, of many
of these children, listed a very not suspicious reason typhoid
fever was the cause of their death, which would have
been common at the time. Still living in New York City,
(09:44):
but now without the responsibility of caring for a number
of children and with no husband, Lydia convinced a sympathetic
doctor to hire her as a nurse. Was a job
she had for several years. We're going to take a
quick break for a word from our sta, sir, but
when we come back, we'll be talking about how the
now single and childless Lydia's life was going. Welcome back
(10:18):
to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about how Lydia was
almost investigated by the District Attorney's office but got really lucky.
Now you'll remember, Edward was a widower before he married Lydia,
and he had several children before meeting her, and some
of Edward's children from his previous marriage were now adults.
(10:42):
They were all alive, and we presume, well, while this
was going on, Lydia's stepson, Cornelius, stepped forward because he
thought the number of deaths in such a short span
of time was really quite suspicious. Thank you, Cornelius, somebody
is raising a flag. Cornelia shared his concern about Lydia
(11:03):
with the District Attorney. Yet while the d A promised
an investigation, nothing happened. So this was the time of
Civil War in the United States. And when the war
ended in eighteen sixty five, Lydia was now forty one,
and she was single, and she was childless, and she
took a job selling sewing machines. And it's this job
(11:26):
that she had that she met a man named John Curtis,
and John was especially impressed with Lydia. He found out
about her nursing skills and so he hired her to
do that job again. In eighteen sixty seven, she would
be caring for his elderly mother. Lydia moved from her
home in Harlem to his home in Stratford, Connecticut. Lydia
(11:49):
lived in Stratford, which is really small town that situated
along the Long Island Sound, and for just about eight
months she was there. That's when she met a man
named Dennis Hurlbert, who was a rich widower. And she
met him at the grocery store. A rich widower, you say,
I know, right, so our Lydia, of course, as we
(12:09):
can see the pattern here, turned on her charm and
soon Dennis hired her as his housekeeper. And we presumed
she left her job caring for John Curtis's mother, and
we also presumed that his mother was still alive when
she left, but we don't have that information. So shortly thereafter,
Dennis proposed marriage. The pair married in eighteen sixty eight.
(12:35):
After Lydia made sure that Dennis made her the sole
beneficiary in his will. Dennis, by the way, was eighty
years old, a rich widower who's also elderly. Right sadis
and so, which stinks because I bet Dennis loved her
just a little more into this marriage, Lydia noticed one
(12:56):
morning that Dennis's hands were a little shaky while he
was getting ready to go to church. Now, shaky hands
can be a symptom of a lot of different things,
everything from dehydration and anxiety to an early warning sign
of some neurological or degenerative condition like Parkinson's disease. In
my case, it's ten cups of coffee. I was about
(13:17):
to say, I have shaky hands all the time, but
I drink coffee all day, and that's maybe I might
be a little dehydrated, like I I please don't poison me.
I'll drink more water. I'll be home right. I'm not ailing,
I'm just caffinating. I'm just buzzing. But for Lydia, the
actual reason, whether it was dehydration or Parkinson's disese, didn't
(13:38):
matter at all. She took the whole shaky hands thing
as her cue to put Dennis out of his misery.
As we've been seeing, those are short of the words
that she likes to use. It took three excruciating, I
assume days for Dennis to die after he ate the
arsenic laced clam chowder that Lydia had prepared for him,
(14:01):
And so she inherited twenty thou dollars worth of real
estate and ten thousand dollars in cash. It's always a
little rough to convert money across time, but today that's
estimated to be worth about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars,
give or take. But it's definitely more than ten thousand dollars.
So she was now single, childless, and sitting pretty with
(14:22):
her hundred and sixty thousand dollars in cash and real estate.
But it was only eight weeks later, in eighteen seventy,
that Lydia met a mechanic. His name was Nelson Horatio Sherman.
He went by Horatio. He lived in Derby, Connecticut, and
he was really all reports seemed to suggest, a really
(14:42):
well liked and generous guy. Her husband's all seemed like
very nice men. He was also a widower, and he
had four children of his own at home, and he
needed a housekeeper. Man enter Lydia. She's like, I can
do that job. She's like, I've been a housekeeper at
least eight times, said I can help you with the children.
So in the pattern that we're seeing, she's tired as
(15:06):
a housekeeper. But they ended up getting married just a
few weeks after she moved in, so it had only
been a little more than a year and a half
before he met Lydia that Horatio's wife had passed away.
His eldest child was a son named Nelson, and he
was seventeen. His daughter Addie or possibly Aida, was fourteen,
(15:30):
and a second son, Natty, was four. There was also
a toddler in the home, very young, named Frankie. And
he bets on who the first victim was. I'd love
to bet that it was for Ratio, but let's talk
about her Ratio for a minute, because he actually was
not the first victim. Hor Ratio liked to drink, and
(15:50):
he really liked to spend Lydia's money, and these are
two things that she did not really particularly like very
much at all. And one afternoon, while her Ratio had
been drinking, he started talking about how he felt terrible
that little Frankie had been recently unwell and he wished
there was something that he could do to make things
better for his toddler son. So this to Lydia was
(16:13):
like a hint or some kind of strange, poisonous, murderous nudge,
because she mixed a little arsenic into the baby's bottle
that night, and Frankie tied very quickly. Just the very
next month, Horatio's fourteen year old daughter fell ill with
the flu. Doctors were called, but there wasn't much anyone
(16:35):
could really do for the flu at the time except
wait it out. Unless you were Lydia, then you definitely
knew what to do. We're going to take a quick
break on that sober note for a word from one
of our sponsors, and when we returned, we were going
to talk about how Lydia poisoned the rest of the
Sherman family. Welcome back to Criminalia. This is where it's
(17:08):
going to get super interesting, because Lydia is about to
make her fatal mistake. So Horatio, her husband, was naturally
heartbroken over the deaths of his children, and his drinking
began to worsen. Lydia not especially happy with his brandy drinking,
habits or the drinking binge that he had embarked upon
(17:28):
following the deaths of his children, decided she would spike
his bottle of brandy with arsenic. So we all know
where this is heading clearly. In eight the generally very
healthy Horatio suddenly became quite ill and the family doctor,
Dr jac Beardsley came to treat him, but during the
(17:49):
examination became really suspicious of his symptoms. When Horatio died,
Dr Beardsley asked Lydia if he could order an autopsy.
Truly amazingly, Lydia said yes to it. We're gonna talking
about this somewhere at the end. So her Ratio's organs
were sent to Yale for analysis, where Yale professor George
(18:12):
Frederick Barker found out that, yes, large quantities of arsenic
were in the remains of the body, and because of
those results, more bodies were exhumed, autopsies were performed, and
this happened for Dennis Hurlbert as well as Frankie and
Addie Sherman, and if you can all probably guess arsenic
(18:34):
was indeed found. So confronted with the evidence of poison,
it turned out there was no need to launch into
an interrogation because Lydia confessed to murdering every single one
of them, and she was apprehended on June seven in
eighteen seventy two. So at the time she was still
living in Connecticut. She was in New Brunswick, but authorities
(18:55):
moved her to New Haven to await her trial. And
while she did for her trial to begin, Lydia wrote
a book about her alleged crimes. The title of her
best selling confession is as long as her victim list.
It's crazy and we're going to do our best to
carry to the exclamation points of this title, which there
(19:16):
are more than fine. Which is the poison Fiend, life,
Crimes and conviction of Lydia Sherman, the modern Lucretia Borgia
recently tried in New Haven, Connecticut, for poisoning three husbands
and eight of her children. Her life in full, exciting
account of her trial, the fearful evidence, the most startling
(19:38):
and sensational series of crimes ever committed in this country.
Her conviction, it's quite a title. It's like the title
and then all the chapter headings, I know, like she's
like her conviction and then appendix. Um. So anyway, that
title aside. It was believed at the beginning of her
(19:59):
trial that Lydia probably poisoned about a dozen people then.
That included three husbands, Edward Struck, Dennis Halbert, and Horatio Sherman.
And it's also believed that she poisoned between five and
eight children, six of whom were her biological children, the
others being her stepchildren. It's more likely that it was eight,
(20:22):
possibly one or two more. It's really hard to know
because of these records. I also have many question marks
about her time as a nurse. I do too, I
have very many questions. Is a nurse, Yes, But when
she confessed, Lydia calmly explained that she only meant to
kill her ratios children. That's right, you're hearing it correctly.
(20:44):
She confessed to poisoning four children, but the killing her
ratio himself was just an unfortunate accident. Her story was
that Horatio, who was often drunk, must have mistakenly mixed
that arsenic she kept in their home for controlling the
rat population into the brandy that he kept next to
his bed. I always like to mix a little poison
(21:07):
in with my Her story doesn't make anything Lydia's trial
began in April eighteen seventy two, and it only lasted
eight days. The tabloids, doing what they do best, called
it the Horror of the century. A newspaper headlines named
Lydia America's queen killer, the poison fiend, the modern day
Lucretia Borgia, and simply the Derby Poisoner. So the Derby
(21:31):
Poisoner really stuck as her nickname. But I actually personally
like the poison fiend. It's just my opinion, wasn't there.
So when Lydia appeared in court, she looked quite proper
and put together. She wore a black dress, a shawl, gloves,
a hat with a thin veil, and in the courtroom,
(21:53):
despite having confessed too many murders, claims she was innocent
because again she thought she was being merciful. I'm guessing.
I yes, I believe though, So the jury faced with
an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting she in fact was
not innocent. Remember there was an exhamation in autopsy performed
(22:15):
with toxicology reports, right, So they convicted her of second
degree murder of her third husband, Horatio Sherman, and for
that second degree murder, conviction. She was sentenced to life
in prison. There is an interesting anecdote about Lydia's time
in prison. I thought this was crazy. It's a little bananas.
The reports go that about five years into her sentence,
(22:38):
she feigned an illness and escaped. And what's interesting is
she didn't escape and like go on the lamb and
assume a different identity. She actually just went back to
being Vidia. She took a job as a housekeeper to
a wealthy widower. However, she was taken back to her
prison cell about a week after escaping, and he survived.
The lucky man. Details on how she was identified and
(23:02):
brought back in her a little stamped, but a little bit,
but she did go back to her old neighborhood and
people will know you. Yeah. So, Lydia spent the rest
of her life in prison. She died of cancer at
the age of fifty three on May six, eight seventy eight,
in the Weathersfield State Prison in Weathersfield, Connecticut. So one
(23:24):
of the things that Holly and I were talking about
as we were putting this episode together is how, unlike
most of the women we've talked about this season, Lydia
is unlike Julia Agrippina, who poisoned for power, or Marie
Bernard who poisoned for frankly, just cold, hard cash. Lydia
didn't ever seem to poison for any particular reason at all,
(23:47):
except maybe our guest is to solve little problems in life,
like sick with a cold out of milk, just small
things that would happen in a household normally. Lydia's reaction
was clearly, we should kill the children. And this is,
as we all know, not a normal way to deal
with such offens in your life. And today Lydia would
(24:07):
have been given a mental health assessment as part of
her trial. But in nineteenth century America, diagnosis and care
for mental illness was pretty much non existent, and we
talked about her husband's depression, writing something that was just
never addressed exactly. There were some asylums, but you weren't
going to be in them unless you were rich, and
many of them were non delightful. It was not really
about treatment. It was about hiding people who were ill, exactly.
(24:31):
It had nothing to do with your mental illness, and
often things that were perceived as mental illness tended to
be considered a result of brain damage, or sometimes for
some folks, they would explain it as demonic, perhaps a
possession issue, or some other ill spirit involved in creating
behavior that was not societal norm. In the US, some
(24:54):
people with mental illness were cared for and kept safe
by their families. Lydia doesn't to have family. She was
a housekeeper, perpetually married and had more children and killed them. Yeah,
there is obviously a mental break when you're like, oh,
the baby is weak, I can fix this, the baby
has colic, let me poison him. Yeah, it's a strain.
(25:18):
There's obviously like an issue at hand. There. What makes
me sad about Lydia's story is that no one really
stepped in at any point. But I'm not sure who
that would have been. As we said, like, yeah, neighbors
don't always know everybody's business, and exactly don't, and even
if you do, you don't step in often. So Yeah,
this is not a particularly happy or fun one, but
(25:39):
it is fascinating in terms of also just how many
repetition cycles she managed to go through. It's a good
indicator of how little information actually traveled unless it was
headline news. You could step from life to life and
no one would really be any of the wiser. Very true,
(26:00):
very true. Do you want to do something fun now
that we brought the room down? Oh my gosh, can
we do something that's a little more off? So let's
talk about this. What's your poison this week? Holly? Alright
Lydia's poisoning crimes are horrific. But I I was particularly
(26:23):
struck by and had difficulty getting out of my head
the poisoning of the baby bottle. So I came up
with a cocktail called Mother's Milk. Now that is a
grim inspiration, but is delicious. This is not like a
recipe we found on the internet, correctly special, although it
(26:45):
is very similar to a white Russian, but in lieu
of coffee liqueur, which you would normally find in a
white Russian, I subbed in butterscotch schnops. So it's two
ounces of vodka, one ounce of butterscotch ops, and one
ounce of heavy cream. And I put that into a
shaker and I shook it vigorously. And then you want
(27:08):
to pour it out. You don't want to strain it
because you want that little foamy whip creamy head that
you get on the cream. Poured it into a coupe
that just had a little bit of ice in it,
because a coup is often how you would serve a dessert,
cocktail or even you did it on ice, you did
it on rocks. I shook it dry, I shook it
without ice, but then I poured it onto just a
(27:28):
little bit of ice, pretty light, and then I just
tapped a little bit of nutmeg on the top of it.
Oh yeah, that's the best part of like like holiday drink.
You never get that in July. Very good autumnal or
winter drink. And it is absolutely delicious, And yes, I
super enjoyed it, although it did slap me in the
(27:50):
face a little harder than I Yeah, I think it's
a thing for me anytime there's like a sugary liqueur
in the mix, even though it's lighter in alcohol, there's
something about the way my body is up taking the
sugar that it like makes a fast tunnel for the vodka,
so just opens the doors. So it was another one
where I was like, just the one, please, just the one,
(28:12):
thank you. I think that's a great attribute to Frankie
and his baby bottle. Yes, obviously not good for children, no, no,
although at that time they probably were running Brandy on
his teething right anyway, just time and place yes in
remembrance of all of the lives cut short by Lydia Sherman.
We will raise a toast and hope that if there
(28:34):
is an afterlife, that they found peace there. So that
wraps up today's show. Thank you so much for spending
this time with us and learning about Lydia's heroine story.
We hope that you will stick around and come and
visit with us next time when we feature yet another
lady poisoner. Criminalia is a production of Shawonda land Audio
(28:56):
and 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 to your favorite shows.
M hm hm
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Criminalia,
where this season we're exploring the lives and motivations of
some of the most notorious lady poisoners in history. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Maria Trumki, And in today's episode,
(00:22):
we're going to look at the life of Lydia Sherman,
who in total poisoned probably as many as three of
her husband's and more upsettingly, eight children before she was
convicted of second degree murder. So Lydia's span of crimes
actually ran from around it was right around the Civil War.
It was between about eighteen sixty three to the early
(00:44):
eighteen seventies. She was the first woman in the United
States to total up a double digit body count. That's
quite a claim to fame. Yeah. So, Lydia was born
Lydia Danbury on Christmas even four in Burlington, New Jersey.
(01:08):
She was orphaned when her mother died just shy of
a year after her birth, and at that point she
was sent to live with her uncle, who was a
farmer named John Clay. Game. Why her uncle, your guess
is as good as ours. There is no record of
who her father was or why he himself did not
care for his infant daughter. By the age of sixteen,
(01:30):
um she left the farm as she went to live
with her brother in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and that's
where she began working as a seamstress. It was her
first job. And it was while she was living in
New Brunswick that Lydia became heavily involved with the Methodist Church.
And it was through the church that she met Edward Struck,
who was a widowed blacksmith and he was raising six
(01:51):
children alone. Lydia is described as charming. Descriptions of her
list her as slim and pretty, with dark hair and
blue eyes and porcelain skin. Smitten by her, it did
not take long for Edward, who was twenty years older
than her, to propose marriage and Lydia, who at the
time was only eighteen, accepted. So after they got married,
(02:16):
we don't know if they had a long courtship or not.
We do know that they got married. Edward and Lydia
moved to a middle class neighborhood in Harlem on d
Street in New York City, and they went on to
have eight children of their own. And for those keeping score, yes,
that is in addition to the six children that Edward
had from his previous marriage, and that would be a
(02:38):
grand total of fourteen mouths to feed. That's a whole
lot of kids. Can you imagine the chaos? I cannot,
oh my gosh, haveing kids at home just to school
right now as chaotic cricketship. But after relocating, Lydia started
working as a housekeeper, and with so many children at home,
(03:02):
Edward decided that he was going to leave work as
a blacksmith and get a different job, so he became
a New York City police officer. So about six years
into this new line of work, though, Edward was accused
of cowardice on the job, and it was at the
scene of a hotel robbery in Manhattan, but other accounts
report that it might have been a barroom fight either way,
(03:23):
though regardless of which crime was being committed, he lost
his job and when this happened, he sank into a
very deep depression. With a husband refusing to leave their
home or get out of his bed, Lydia decided that
she needed to take matters into her own hands. And
you know what that means around here means boys. Then yeah. So,
(03:49):
according to her eventual confession, I know we're jumping ahead,
but we'll loop back around. Yes, Instead of getting Edward
medical care, and we should point out this was not
a time when things like depression were really treated with
any any sort of insight, she decided instead too and
we quote put him out of the way, as he
(04:10):
would never be any good. Yeah. So she did what
every I say, sarcastically caring wife does. She got herself
a bag of arsenic. And if it seems like we
talked about arsenic a lot around here, it's because we do.
For a very long time, it was really very easy
(04:30):
to acquire arsenic, and that's mainly because it was used
as a rat poison or like bed bugs or any
sort of ants insects that you had in your house.
In the nineteenth century in the United States, Lydia was
able to just get hers at the local drug store. So,
twenty years into what had been a fairly uneventful marriage,
she mixed a thimbleful of the poisonous powder into her
(04:53):
husband's oatmeal. It took several hours of abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting,
ant convulsions before Edward passed away. Man, Poor Edward. But
she might not have thought things through so completely because
now that she had, and I'm using air quotes around
this folved her husband's depression, albeit not as most wives would. Uh,
(05:19):
Lydia realized she had another problem, and that was that
she had many children at home who were hungry, and
Edward had been the family's primary source of income. Not
a lot of consideration of like cause and effect here,
probably pretty impetuous. Yeah, so let's look at the children's
situation for a moment. At this point, their eldest son, John,
(05:41):
who was sixteen, had a job. He had moved out
of the house, and in hindsight, that was probably the
luckiest thing he did in his life. I was imagining
poor John having his he's just forced, he hates his job.
He does this, but hey, he's still alive because he
moved out. Uh yeah, good on your John. So they
also had a younger daughter named Josephine, and Josephine had
(06:04):
passed away years earlier from illness, so there was one
for Lydia, fewer mouth to feed. Uh. Their two year
old daughter. She contracted measles. But what's interesting about the
measles that she had was that she didn't actually die
from the symptoms that you would expect from that viral illness.
She died of the same symptoms as Edward. So Lydia
(06:28):
did what she thought was and again what she thought
was the humane and rational thing to do. Are you
ready for this, because it is, it's rough, and it's
hard to consider someone reaching this decision. Yes, But about
six weeks after edwards poisoning, Lydia poisoned her three youngest children.
(06:49):
Those were Martha Ann, aged six, Edward Jr. Who was four,
and William, who was just nine months old. And she
did this all on the same day. So keeping I'm
here that while this is unfathomable to those of us
who are talking about it and listening, Lydia clearly saw
things very differently than the rest of us do. The
(07:10):
three youngest, she said in the eventual confession that we've
been talking about throughout this episode so far, were the
most burdensome in her opinion, and she said that they
were the three who would not be able to contribute
anything to the family. Now, you might be wondering how
come no one would notice such a thing going on?
(07:31):
Someone's husband dying, and a few months later, three children
in one day. This was a time in history when
it wasn't super strange for children to become ill and die,
or have an accident and meet an unfortunate end. Childhood
mortality rates in the nineteenth century were quite grim, and
no one really raised an eyebrow when all of these
(07:52):
kids passed away. I feel like there's also probably a
numbers game, right, I don't know there were a lot
of kids over there. I feel the same way, like,
how can you keep track if you're not part of
the family who those fourteen children are unless you're close
to the family, right, But if you just lived on
the street, when your next door two houses down, I
(08:14):
wouldn't know. I'd be like, there's just kids, there's a
lot of kids. But now there weren't a lot of kids.
Lydia had three remaining children to care for in her home.
So there was George, who was fourteen, who unfortunately contracted
lead poisoning from his job as a painter. Sick in bed,
his mother nursed him with tea laced with arsenic And
(08:38):
then there was Anne Eliza who was twelve and reported
they called her kind of a weak and sickly child.
She was never able to work to contribute to the family.
And at twelve, you know, whether she was a weaken
seekly child or not, I'm not surprised she wasn't contributing
to the family. But none of this helped her at
all to stay alive and Lydia's home. And then there
(09:02):
was their other daughter, also named Lydia, who was eighteen,
and she worked as a retail clerk. But when Lydia,
the younger, fell ill with something as innocuous as what
is apparently a cold or a flu, her mother also
nursed her with tea poisoned with arsenic so, hating to
see each child as she, she would say, suffer, as
(09:24):
she confessed, Lydia thought that it was actually best to
instead poison them all. The death certificates, though, of many
of these children, listed a very not suspicious reason typhoid
fever was the cause of their death, which would have
been common at the time. Still living in New York City,
(09:44):
but now without the responsibility of caring for a number
of children and with no husband, Lydia convinced a sympathetic
doctor to hire her as a nurse. Was a job
she had for several years. We're going to take a
quick break for a word from our sta, sir, but
when we come back, we'll be talking about how the
now single and childless Lydia's life was going. Welcome back
(10:18):
to Criminalia. Let's get to talking about how Lydia was
almost investigated by the District Attorney's office but got really lucky.
Now you'll remember, Edward was a widower before he married Lydia,
and he had several children before meeting her, and some
of Edward's children from his previous marriage were now adults.
(10:42):
They were all alive, and we presume, well, while this
was going on, Lydia's stepson, Cornelius, stepped forward because he
thought the number of deaths in such a short span
of time was really quite suspicious. Thank you, Cornelius, somebody
is raising a flag. Cornelia shared his concern about Lydia
(11:03):
with the District Attorney. Yet while the d A promised
an investigation, nothing happened. So this was the time of
Civil War in the United States. And when the war
ended in eighteen sixty five, Lydia was now forty one,
and she was single, and she was childless, and she
took a job selling sewing machines. And it's this job
(11:26):
that she had that she met a man named John Curtis,
and John was especially impressed with Lydia. He found out
about her nursing skills and so he hired her to
do that job again. In eighteen sixty seven, she would
be caring for his elderly mother. Lydia moved from her
home in Harlem to his home in Stratford, Connecticut. Lydia
(11:49):
lived in Stratford, which is really small town that situated
along the Long Island Sound, and for just about eight
months she was there. That's when she met a man
named Dennis Hurlbert, who was a rich widower. And she
met him at the grocery store. A rich widower, you say,
I know, right, so our Lydia, of course, as we
(12:09):
can see the pattern here, turned on her charm and
soon Dennis hired her as his housekeeper. And we presumed
she left her job caring for John Curtis's mother, and
we also presumed that his mother was still alive when
she left, but we don't have that information. So shortly thereafter,
Dennis proposed marriage. The pair married in eighteen sixty eight.
(12:35):
After Lydia made sure that Dennis made her the sole
beneficiary in his will. Dennis, by the way, was eighty
years old, a rich widower who's also elderly. Right sadis
and so, which stinks because I bet Dennis loved her
just a little more into this marriage, Lydia noticed one
(12:56):
morning that Dennis's hands were a little shaky while he
was getting ready to go to church. Now, shaky hands
can be a symptom of a lot of different things,
everything from dehydration and anxiety to an early warning sign
of some neurological or degenerative condition like Parkinson's disease. In
my case, it's ten cups of coffee. I was about
(13:17):
to say, I have shaky hands all the time, but
I drink coffee all day, and that's maybe I might
be a little dehydrated, like I I please don't poison me.
I'll drink more water. I'll be home right. I'm not ailing,
I'm just caffinating. I'm just buzzing. But for Lydia, the
actual reason, whether it was dehydration or Parkinson's disese, didn't
(13:38):
matter at all. She took the whole shaky hands thing
as her cue to put Dennis out of his misery.
As we've been seeing, those are short of the words
that she likes to use. It took three excruciating, I
assume days for Dennis to die after he ate the
arsenic laced clam chowder that Lydia had prepared for him,
(14:01):
And so she inherited twenty thou dollars worth of real
estate and ten thousand dollars in cash. It's always a
little rough to convert money across time, but today that's
estimated to be worth about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars,
give or take. But it's definitely more than ten thousand dollars.
So she was now single, childless, and sitting pretty with
(14:22):
her hundred and sixty thousand dollars in cash and real estate.
But it was only eight weeks later, in eighteen seventy,
that Lydia met a mechanic. His name was Nelson Horatio Sherman.
He went by Horatio. He lived in Derby, Connecticut, and
he was really all reports seemed to suggest, a really
(14:42):
well liked and generous guy. Her husband's all seemed like
very nice men. He was also a widower, and he
had four children of his own at home, and he
needed a housekeeper. Man enter Lydia. She's like, I can
do that job. She's like, I've been a housekeeper at
least eight times, said I can help you with the children.
So in the pattern that we're seeing, she's tired as
(15:06):
a housekeeper. But they ended up getting married just a
few weeks after she moved in, so it had only
been a little more than a year and a half
before he met Lydia that Horatio's wife had passed away.
His eldest child was a son named Nelson, and he
was seventeen. His daughter Addie or possibly Aida, was fourteen,
(15:30):
and a second son, Natty, was four. There was also
a toddler in the home, very young, named Frankie. And
he bets on who the first victim was. I'd love
to bet that it was for Ratio, but let's talk
about her Ratio for a minute, because he actually was
not the first victim. Hor Ratio liked to drink, and
(15:50):
he really liked to spend Lydia's money, and these are
two things that she did not really particularly like very
much at all. And one afternoon, while her Ratio had
been drinking, he started talking about how he felt terrible
that little Frankie had been recently unwell and he wished
there was something that he could do to make things
better for his toddler son. So this to Lydia was
(16:13):
like a hint or some kind of strange, poisonous, murderous nudge,
because she mixed a little arsenic into the baby's bottle
that night, and Frankie tied very quickly. Just the very
next month, Horatio's fourteen year old daughter fell ill with
the flu. Doctors were called, but there wasn't much anyone
(16:35):
could really do for the flu at the time except
wait it out. Unless you were Lydia, then you definitely
knew what to do. We're going to take a quick
break on that sober note for a word from one
of our sponsors, and when we returned, we were going
to talk about how Lydia poisoned the rest of the
Sherman family. Welcome back to Criminalia. This is where it's
(17:08):
going to get super interesting, because Lydia is about to
make her fatal mistake. So Horatio, her husband, was naturally
heartbroken over the deaths of his children, and his drinking
began to worsen. Lydia not especially happy with his brandy drinking,
habits or the drinking binge that he had embarked upon
(17:28):
following the deaths of his children, decided she would spike
his bottle of brandy with arsenic. So we all know
where this is heading clearly. In eight the generally very
healthy Horatio suddenly became quite ill and the family doctor,
Dr jac Beardsley came to treat him, but during the
(17:49):
examination became really suspicious of his symptoms. When Horatio died,
Dr Beardsley asked Lydia if he could order an autopsy.
Truly amazingly, Lydia said yes to it. We're gonna talking
about this somewhere at the end. So her Ratio's organs
were sent to Yale for analysis, where Yale professor George
(18:12):
Frederick Barker found out that, yes, large quantities of arsenic
were in the remains of the body, and because of
those results, more bodies were exhumed, autopsies were performed, and
this happened for Dennis Hurlbert as well as Frankie and
Addie Sherman, and if you can all probably guess arsenic
(18:34):
was indeed found. So confronted with the evidence of poison,
it turned out there was no need to launch into
an interrogation because Lydia confessed to murdering every single one
of them, and she was apprehended on June seven in
eighteen seventy two. So at the time she was still
living in Connecticut. She was in New Brunswick, but authorities
(18:55):
moved her to New Haven to await her trial. And
while she did for her trial to begin, Lydia wrote
a book about her alleged crimes. The title of her
best selling confession is as long as her victim list.
It's crazy and we're going to do our best to
carry to the exclamation points of this title, which there
(19:16):
are more than fine. Which is the poison Fiend, life,
Crimes and conviction of Lydia Sherman, the modern Lucretia Borgia
recently tried in New Haven, Connecticut, for poisoning three husbands
and eight of her children. Her life in full, exciting
account of her trial, the fearful evidence, the most startling
(19:38):
and sensational series of crimes ever committed in this country.
Her conviction, it's quite a title. It's like the title
and then all the chapter headings, I know, like she's
like her conviction and then appendix. Um. So anyway, that
title aside. It was believed at the beginning of her
(19:59):
trial that Lydia probably poisoned about a dozen people then.
That included three husbands, Edward Struck, Dennis Halbert, and Horatio Sherman.
And it's also believed that she poisoned between five and
eight children, six of whom were her biological children, the
others being her stepchildren. It's more likely that it was eight,
(20:22):
possibly one or two more. It's really hard to know
because of these records. I also have many question marks
about her time as a nurse. I do too, I
have very many questions. Is a nurse, Yes, But when
she confessed, Lydia calmly explained that she only meant to
kill her ratios children. That's right, you're hearing it correctly.
(20:44):
She confessed to poisoning four children, but the killing her
ratio himself was just an unfortunate accident. Her story was
that Horatio, who was often drunk, must have mistakenly mixed
that arsenic she kept in their home for controlling the
rat population into the brandy that he kept next to
his bed. I always like to mix a little poison
(21:07):
in with my Her story doesn't make anything Lydia's trial
began in April eighteen seventy two, and it only lasted
eight days. The tabloids, doing what they do best, called
it the Horror of the century. A newspaper headlines named
Lydia America's queen killer, the poison fiend, the modern day
Lucretia Borgia, and simply the Derby Poisoner. So the Derby
(21:31):
Poisoner really stuck as her nickname. But I actually personally
like the poison fiend. It's just my opinion, wasn't there.
So when Lydia appeared in court, she looked quite proper
and put together. She wore a black dress, a shawl, gloves,
a hat with a thin veil, and in the courtroom,
(21:53):
despite having confessed too many murders, claims she was innocent
because again she thought she was being merciful. I'm guessing.
I yes, I believe though, So the jury faced with
an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting she in fact was
not innocent. Remember there was an exhamation in autopsy performed
(22:15):
with toxicology reports, right, So they convicted her of second
degree murder of her third husband, Horatio Sherman, and for
that second degree murder, conviction. She was sentenced to life
in prison. There is an interesting anecdote about Lydia's time
in prison. I thought this was crazy. It's a little bananas.
The reports go that about five years into her sentence,
(22:38):
she feigned an illness and escaped. And what's interesting is
she didn't escape and like go on the lamb and
assume a different identity. She actually just went back to
being Vidia. She took a job as a housekeeper to
a wealthy widower. However, she was taken back to her
prison cell about a week after escaping, and he survived.
The lucky man. Details on how she was identified and
(23:02):
brought back in her a little stamped, but a little bit,
but she did go back to her old neighborhood and
people will know you. Yeah. So, Lydia spent the rest
of her life in prison. She died of cancer at
the age of fifty three on May six, eight seventy eight,
in the Weathersfield State Prison in Weathersfield, Connecticut. So one
(23:24):
of the things that Holly and I were talking about
as we were putting this episode together is how, unlike
most of the women we've talked about this season, Lydia
is unlike Julia Agrippina, who poisoned for power, or Marie
Bernard who poisoned for frankly, just cold, hard cash. Lydia
didn't ever seem to poison for any particular reason at all,
(23:47):
except maybe our guest is to solve little problems in life,
like sick with a cold out of milk, just small
things that would happen in a household normally. Lydia's reaction
was clearly, we should kill the children. And this is,
as we all know, not a normal way to deal
with such offens in your life. And today Lydia would
(24:07):
have been given a mental health assessment as part of
her trial. But in nineteenth century America, diagnosis and care
for mental illness was pretty much non existent, and we
talked about her husband's depression, writing something that was just
never addressed exactly. There were some asylums, but you weren't
going to be in them unless you were rich, and
many of them were non delightful. It was not really
about treatment. It was about hiding people who were ill, exactly.
(24:31):
It had nothing to do with your mental illness, and
often things that were perceived as mental illness tended to
be considered a result of brain damage, or sometimes for
some folks, they would explain it as demonic, perhaps a
possession issue, or some other ill spirit involved in creating
behavior that was not societal norm. In the US, some
(24:54):
people with mental illness were cared for and kept safe
by their families. Lydia doesn't to have family. She was
a housekeeper, perpetually married and had more children and killed them. Yeah,
there is obviously a mental break when you're like, oh,
the baby is weak, I can fix this, the baby
has colic, let me poison him. Yeah, it's a strain.
(25:18):
There's obviously like an issue at hand. There. What makes
me sad about Lydia's story is that no one really
stepped in at any point. But I'm not sure who
that would have been. As we said, like, yeah, neighbors
don't always know everybody's business, and exactly don't, and even
if you do, you don't step in often. So Yeah,
this is not a particularly happy or fun one, but
(25:39):
it is fascinating in terms of also just how many
repetition cycles she managed to go through. It's a good
indicator of how little information actually traveled unless it was
headline news. You could step from life to life and
no one would really be any of the wiser. Very true,
(26:00):
very true. Do you want to do something fun now
that we brought the room down? Oh my gosh, can
we do something that's a little more off? So let's
talk about this. What's your poison this week? Holly? Alright
Lydia's poisoning crimes are horrific. But I I was particularly
(26:23):
struck by and had difficulty getting out of my head
the poisoning of the baby bottle. So I came up
with a cocktail called Mother's Milk. Now that is a
grim inspiration, but is delicious. This is not like a
recipe we found on the internet, correctly special, although it
(26:45):
is very similar to a white Russian, but in lieu
of coffee liqueur, which you would normally find in a
white Russian, I subbed in butterscotch schnops. So it's two
ounces of vodka, one ounce of butterscotch ops, and one
ounce of heavy cream. And I put that into a
shaker and I shook it vigorously. And then you want
(27:08):
to pour it out. You don't want to strain it
because you want that little foamy whip creamy head that
you get on the cream. Poured it into a coupe
that just had a little bit of ice in it,
because a coup is often how you would serve a dessert,
cocktail or even you did it on ice, you did
it on rocks. I shook it dry, I shook it
without ice, but then I poured it onto just a
(27:28):
little bit of ice, pretty light, and then I just
tapped a little bit of nutmeg on the top of it.
Oh yeah, that's the best part of like like holiday drink.
You never get that in July. Very good autumnal or
winter drink. And it is absolutely delicious, And yes, I
super enjoyed it, although it did slap me in the
(27:50):
face a little harder than I Yeah, I think it's
a thing for me anytime there's like a sugary liqueur
in the mix, even though it's lighter in alcohol, there's
something about the way my body is up taking the
sugar that it like makes a fast tunnel for the vodka,
so just opens the doors. So it was another one
where I was like, just the one, please, just the one,
(28:12):
thank you. I think that's a great attribute to Frankie
and his baby bottle. Yes, obviously not good for children, no, no,
although at that time they probably were running Brandy on
his teething right anyway, just time and place yes in
remembrance of all of the lives cut short by Lydia Sherman.
We will raise a toast and hope that if there
(28:34):
is an afterlife, that they found peace there. So that
wraps up today's show. Thank you so much for spending
this time with us and learning about Lydia's heroine story.
We hope that you will stick around and come and
visit with us next time when we feature yet another
lady poisoner. Criminalia is a production of Shawonda land Audio
(28:56):
and 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 to your favorite shows.
M hm hm
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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