Well, It Took You Long Enough

William Dale Archerd was a hospital orderly, a salesperson, and a serial killer.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Listen to Hudson River Radio dot Com. Don't make us
come and find you.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Linda Zimmerman.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
I'm Brian Harrowitz, and this is.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Murder in the Hudson Valley on Hudson River Radio dot Com.
Good evening to this ambush episode where I am the
ambushy and Brian is the ambusher. I have no idea
what this case is going to be about, but he

(00:31):
assures me it's horrific.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Oh, you'll be hard way, Yes, it's not going to
be well, the level of horrificness is not going to
quite match, Daddy Dearest, the last episode that we did.
But I think in terms of pure quantity, it'll make
up for it.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Oh boy, all right, I have my pen and paper.
Good take it away.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
All right, we are calling this one. Well it took
you long enough, okay, all right, off we go. We
are talking about William Dale Archard. He was born in
nineteen twelve in Dardenelle, Arkansas. Have you ever been to Arkansas? Yes?

(01:12):
I have.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
There's an amazing ancient Native American site there.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Oh okay, see, okay, I've been through shortstops in Arkansas
and found it everyone to be super nice. Yeah, very
everywhere I've been has been has been great. I haven't
spent any time there, and I think I'll go back
at some point. Yeah, it's the trip. Yeah, all right,

(01:39):
So mister Archard had what we were, what his fellow
people and friends and acquaintances described as China blue eyes
and a very affable demeanor. I don't know what China
blue means.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
The only thing I can think of is that, you
know that flow blue color, that kind of royal blue
that was on China export wear. Okay, everybody, you know
the blue and white China. It was not Correll back then,
wasn't it.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Isn't that the one with the blue You're talking like
fancy fancy, I'm.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Talking about everybody in the early nineteen hundreds had this
blue and white China.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Look up flow blue, Google.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
That and and you know all kinds of and there
was a lot of English copied the I don't want
to get into the history of porcelain right now, even
though I do because I collected. But yeah, early Chinese
export wear that all the Europeans copied was this kind of.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Royal blue on white.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Okay, So that's my guess. I can't think of what
else China blue, and that would have been something every
everybody would have recognized that.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Corral people came much later.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, Correl, that's another story.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Okay, we'll have to launch another podcast, yes, into china
and porcelain and all.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah. My grandmother had an amazing collection of German porcelain, okay,
and I recall as a little kid being absolutely enthrall
and she'd tell me all about them. And I'm looking
at the collection of teacups and things I have here.
I love it all right, thanks to Grandma.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
We always scour the antique shops when we're traveling, and
it's usually for old vinyl and musical instruments. Those are
the things we're looking. But now I'm gonna have to
look for china blue. China.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
There you go, it's everywhere everywhere.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
I'll call you before I buy it then, Okay, make
sure you don't have it already. Okay. So mister Archard
was had what they called a very affable demeanor. He
got along with everybody, didn't ruffle anybody's feathers or anything.
He liked to drink high balls, very sophisticated. It's basically
whiskey and ginger ale, kind of like an Irish mule.

(04:11):
If you're familiar, that's my coral level. You know, that's
where I am got.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
That's our new fighting.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Ye above correll and below correl.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yes, yes, are you a porcelain person or a corral peron?

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, I'm squarely corell obviously. So growing up he was
interested in medicine, but he couldn't afford to pursue medical school,
and apparently they wouldn't have been able to handle it anyway,
just he wasn't that good of a student. He wasn't
necessarily bright enough to handle it, but he was still interested.
The closest he got was in nineteen forty when he

(04:50):
worked as an orderly as they were called back then
at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Camarillo, California. Oh
I've heard of that, have you. I'm not a good place. Yeah, well,
here we go. Archard worked in the psychiatric ward where
they used insulin shock therapy as a psychiatric treatment. We'll

(05:14):
get into that. We're going to do a ridiculously simplistic
look at what insulin is, just in case somebody's not familiar.
It's been in the news lately because of the cost.
What does insulin do so. Insulin is a hormone that
helps regulate blood sugar. It carries glucose from the bloodstream
across the cell membrane into the cells of the body
where it can be used as fuel. And you're the chemist.

(05:36):
So if there's more to that, then now that's trumping. Okay.
It's made by the pancreas. So somebody with type one
diabetes who's pancreas isn't functioning properly will either be making
no insulin or an insufficient amount of insulin, and their
blood sugar will be high because the body can't absorb
it into the cells and burn it off, so it

(05:56):
just stays in the bloodstream. Blood sugar can get so
high that the patient can actually become unconscious because of that,
which I had seen. Yeah, I just saw that in
my medic days. It's not pleasant. Insulin was discovered in
eighteen sixty nine after decades of research. Artificial insulin was
patented in nineteen twenty three, so just over one hundred

(06:19):
years ago, and they're still charging way too much money
for it. Yes, yeah, the research and it wasn't prescription
when this came out. We'll get to that in a second.
The researchers originally did not want to patent it over
ethical issues, meaning that they wanted it to be available
to as many patients as possible, as cheaply as possible. Huh.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Can you imagine that in pharmaceutical companies today.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Even back then it was a problem. They were convinced
to file for a patent just to protect the integrity
of the product and to prevent some other organization from
filing a patent and then being greedy about it.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Okay, I can see that, but they had altruistic and.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
In fact, the patent was then assigned to the University
of Toronto and the method of preparation of insulin was
published publicly, so anybody could manufacture it to those standards
and nobody would be able to monopolize it. So okay,
I think that's, all things considered, probably the best case scenario,

(07:24):
and hats off to them, you know, So that it
was still patented, nobody could just monopolize it. It could
be made anywhere. With the idea that anybody who needed
it could get it and not get ripped off. Didn't work,
but it was a good idea, and we could argue
about health care another time. That'll be another podcast. We'll
do China and China Blue and healthcare. Yeah, all right,

(07:49):
so insulin terrific. Yay medicine, right, Insulin's a good thing.
Let's get back to insulin. Shock therapy not necessarily a
good thing.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, it was introduced.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, it was introduced in nineteen twenty seven and became
widespread in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. It finally
fell out of favor in the nineteen sixties. Not that
long ago. We're kind of overlapping with the lobotomy era.
It was right up there with electroconvulsive therapy, like the
harsh one that they did back then, not like what

(08:24):
goes on now. Most patients that they used it on
were suffering from schizophrenia. Patients were given increasing doses of
insulin every day in order to purposely drop their blood
sugar to the point where they would have seizures and
then they would become comatose. That would last for about
an hour. They would let them stay like that for

(08:44):
about an hour, and then they would do an ivy
infusion of glucose to bring their blood sugar back up
and the patient would wake back up. That would be
the shock therapy of.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
It, and this was supposed to cure them of schizophrenia.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
It was supposed to reset your brain somehow, you know,
take take your battery down to zero and then recharge
your cell phone somehow. Patients that woke up, they did
say a lot of them had had nicer attitudes, were
more pleasant to deal with brain damage maybe yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
I don't know, yeah, chemical lobotomy.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, basically basically I just think, well, we're looking at
it with a twenty twenty hindsight, but it just really much.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah. They didn't have you know, the arsenal of medicines
we do now, so they were just trying to do something.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
But wow, yeah, yep. So now back to William Dale Archard,
who watched the process over and over again as an
orderly in the hospital, and he saw what insulin did
to all these patients. Side note, during this time he
also racked up three wives who had come and on.

(10:01):
So he who, interesting, Okay, what bad luck? Right now?
When I say gone, I mean divorced or gone. They're
not dead. The first the first three had come and
disappeared and rode off into the sunset. What happens after that?
You're gonna have to stick around because we're gonna take
our first break, and we'll be back right after this.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Hudson River Radio dot com.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Hudson Riverradio dot com.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
And we are back with someone who's interested in medicine.
Is an orderly and watching insulin shock therapy brutalize patients' brains.
And apparently this planted a seed that would grow into
something not good that it did.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
So mister Archard watched the process. He saw what insulin
did to all these people. He had racked up three
wives so far. He also worked occasionally as a salesperson,
using his nice demeanor to his advantage. He sold hearing aids,
he sold vitamins, and he sold folding doors door to door,

(11:19):
which seems oddly specific. Yeah right, okay, I've never heard
of specifically a folding door salesman.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Especially one going door to door. I guess he could
unfold it at their door to show.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Them, I guess. And I know being a traveling salesman,
especially back then, was a lucrative profession.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
A lot of people did it. We didn't have Amazon
back then.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Right right, you had Sears and Roebuck, which was.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah, but it's nice to see the item, you know,
the salesman's samples, even if they were smaller things. So yeah,
it was good to see the object before you bought it.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yep. So apparently he was pretty good at that as well.
In nineteen forty seven, Archard was visiting a friend named
William Jones Junior, who was thirty four and in the hospital.
Jones was a former firefighter who had been charged with
statutory rape. Okay, the Jones family was worried about their reputation,

(12:21):
which was common back then, and salesman Archard stepped into help,
making air quotes around help. The Jones family gave him
several thousand dollars to pay off the victim's family. To
keep them quiet, Archard gave them three hundred dollars and
pocketed the rest. Ah, I guess that's his salesman's commission. Yeah,

(12:46):
what are friends for exactly. He also convinced Jones that
he could fake a head injury while in the hospital
to avoid going to court on this case. He said
an insulin injection would cause similar symptoms to a head injury.
Jones apparently didn't understand that this is going to be
a one way street that Archard was not going to

(13:09):
be waking him back up. I'm assuming Jones probably didn't
even know what insulin was or how it worked. He
just thought he was going to go to sleep for
a little while. Well, not so much. Jones had a seizure,
he became unconscious, and he died while Archard was standing
next to his hospital bed, a phrase you're going to
hear repeatedly throughout the rest of this episode.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
And this is his friend, this is his friend.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Okay. There was no test for insulin at this time.
They could test for blood sugar, but they couldn't test
for how much insolin was in the bloodstream yet.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Oh okay.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
The coroner ruled the cause of death to be encephalitis
swelling of the brain. All right, not not correct. Another
word that you're going to hear many times throughout the
rest of this episode. All right. Jump ahead three years
nineteen fifty. Archard was sentenced to five years probation for

(14:05):
illegal possession of morphine. I don't know what he was
doing with it. I don't know if he was selling
it or trying to use it on people, or using
it himself. I couldn't find anything more than the charge
on that. His probation was revoked after he was convicted
of something else. I don't know what that something else is.
I couldn't find that either. He was sent to the

(14:25):
minimum security prison at Chino in California. Apparently it was
so minimum that he walked out of the minimum security
prison shortly after he was captured. And then he was
sent to the maximum security prison at San Quentin. We've
all heard, oh, okay, hard time. Yeah, he swung the
pendulum hard in the other direction. And while he was

(14:48):
at San Quentin he got to learn all the ins
and outs of being a criminal from his fellow inmates,
which is one of the biggest side effects of sending
people to prison, yep, because they have lots of time
to learn. So he was released on probation in nineteen
fifty three. He did three years in there. Now he's
out on probation. Jump ahead another three years. Nineteen fifty six.

(15:11):
Archard's now fourth wife. Member. We had three that came
and went right. This is wife number four. Her name
was Zella. She was forty eight years old. She died.
They had been married for two whole months. They were
living in a house in the La suburb of Covena.
I'm hope to say that, right, I don't. I guess Covena.

(15:31):
Archard and Zella called the police to report a burglary
and a robbery that happened in the house. They reported
that two burglars entered their house with guns and hypodermic needles.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Oh, come on, Hu's that real common.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
They both reported two responding officers that they had both
been injected with an unknown substance, and the burglars made
off with five hundred dollars in cash, leaving behind jewelry
that was sitting out in plain sight, something that would
have been easy to grab. They didn't take it. Zella
then became stay with me unconscious, had a seizure, and died.

(16:10):
Archard was fine. Go figure.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
They found eight coincidence uh huh.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
They found puncture marks on Zella's buttocks, but not on
Archard's uh huh. And Zella also reported to these responding
officers that the burglars had put a pillowcase over her head,
so she never actually saw the suspects in the house.
She could only hear what was going on.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
So he staged this.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Whole thing certainly seems so, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
The coroner said that Zella died of pneumonia. I don't
know where you get pneumonia out of this that was
the cause of death. Okay, mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Not They had no suspicion that whatever was injected into
her caused her death.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Oh all right, oohs.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
The coroner was probably also the local florist or bricklayer.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yes, carner, not medical examiner. It's before the days of Yeah,
a coroner could be anybody. It was an elected.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Position, and a coroner could also accept bribes.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
Okay, well there you go. I have no proof of
evidence that that happened, now, I no.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
But this is so egregious that one would suspect that
perhaps he was paid to just say it's pneumonia.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah. There are a couple of red flags. Yeah so far. Yeah, few,
but you know, put those down and get ready to
pick up some more. Okay, jump ahead two more years.
Nineteen fifty eight, Archard married wife number five, Juanita Plumb Archard.
They were married in Las Vegas two days later, as
opposed to two months with Zella. Two days later was

(18:00):
taken to the hospital with what was described as a
barbituate overdose. She became unconscious, had a seizure and died.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Okay, what was insurance involved in any of these?

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Whys? Funny? You should mention that because Wanita had a
little bit of money, she was not wealthy, but she
was well off. Okay, But Archard was not aware that
Wenita had recently amended her will. So Archard got one dollar.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Oh oh good for Janita.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Too bad she didn't Was it a coincidence or did
she know that something might happen. I don't know. Yeah,
I don't know, but yeah, so that was a bit
of a surprise to Archard and he was not a
happy camper.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
I suspect he needs wife number six.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Now, oh yeah, yeah he does. Let me take a
little sip here, so I mean keep going. Before we
get to wife number six, We're going to jump ahead
to nineteen sixty and another acquaintance named Frank Stewart, who
was fifty four, teamed up with Archer to commit a
bit of insurance fraud. Stuart apparently agreed to be injected

(19:08):
with insulin to help fake a head injury. Does this
sound familiar?

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Wo Hey, if you find something that works, you stick
with it.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Uh huh. So Stuart was going to fake a fall
in an airport bathroom be injected with insulin to mimic
a head injury, and like Jones, Stuart apparently didn't understand
what insulin did and didn't understand that this is going
to be a one way trip. H Archard was the

(19:36):
beneficiary of an insurance policy against Stuart that was taken
out you know, on Stuart.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
Didn't the insurance company think it was a little strange.
That's policy on their friends.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
So good, you're so good at that, thank you. They
refused to pay out because they were not convinced that
it was actually an accident, so Archard got nothing. Wow.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
Okay, yeah, and how many people take insurance policies out
on their friends exactly?

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, good for the insurance company. Yeah, well, not so
good for the coroner because he ruled the cause of
death to be cerebral hemorrhage.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Okay, they had no clue, no clue, And what year
was this? This is nineteen sixty, Okay, by nineteen sixty
they should know better.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
Well, at this point you should be able to link
some things together, and someone did. We'll get to that, okay,
all right. Also around this time, Archard's brother, first named Everett,
happened to die. Separate from all this that Archerd anything,
He wasn't injected. He wasn't injected. So Everett died. Everett

(20:44):
had a fifteen year old son named Bernie b u
r n e Y, a name that I think needs
to come back. Okay, why not? So Archard and his
mother were entrusted to handle the five thousand dollars that
Everett had passed on to Bernie. This is five grand
in nineteen sixty nineteen sixty one, so yeah, that's a

(21:05):
lot of money. Now, that was a lot of money
back then. Yeah. In August of nineteen sixty one, nephew
Bernie was taken to the hospital after he reported that
he was hit by a car and Archerd convinced Bernie.
You want to guess what he convinced him to do.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Inject himself with something, or get injected with something for
insurance purposes.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
He was going to get injected with insulin to mimic
a head injury from this car accident that never happened.
There was no accident. Bernie was in the hospital, Bernie
got secretly injected. Bernie became unconscious, had a seizure, and
died his own nephew, his own nephew yep. And then

(21:52):
three weeks later, Archard's mother died, apparently not by his hand.
From what I know, I don't know. It seems to
be coincident.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
That's rather suspicious, right.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
But that was three weeks later, which left all of
the five thousand dollars to Archard.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, I would vote on the side of him being
behind that as well.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
I would not argue that at all. I couldn't find
anything to back that up, and I look, but it
certainly wouldn't surprise me. Now we're up to wife number six.
She came and went, believe it or not, apparently unharmed
to the and so much so that I couldn't find
her name. I don't know what her name is. I
could not find what wife number six the name is.

(22:37):
So I'm guessing that was brief, revolving door in and out.
Maybe she knew something was going on. I have no
idea that I couldn't or.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Maybe we don't know where the body is buried.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
No, she was alive when she left. She was alive. Okay,
what happened after that?

Speaker 2 (22:57):
You know, right?

Speaker 1 (22:57):
I can't really say right now. The Los Angeles Sheriff's
department knew that Archard was a serial killer, but they
could not come up with concrete evidence. Detective Lieutenant Harold
White aka Whitey, a name that does not need to
come back like Bernie does, was assigned to the case,

(23:19):
and he'll come back later in the story. So at
least the Sheriff's department.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
Now now they're suspicious.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Now they knew that something was going on with this guy.
There's too many things going on with Archard. By this time,
Archard had changed his name and was going by James
Lynn arden Ard n. In April of nineteen sixty five,
wife number seven came along. Her name was Mary brinker Post.

(23:47):
She was fifty nine, a couple years older than him.
She was already a successful novelist and a public relations manager.
She was widowed. Her husband had money, and she made
a lot of her own money, so she was quite
well off. And she fell for those China blue eyes,
the China blue eyes, the Corel China blue eyes. Well,

(24:12):
Mary showed up at the Pomona Valley Communital Community Hospital
with hypoglycemia. She became unconscious, she had a seizure, and
she died.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Oh what a surprise. I've lost track how.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Many this is. Yeah, that's a lot. I mean, I
would have to go back and count myself. Too many.
I'm gonna run out of fingers. So why don't we
take a break. Yes, and then we're gonna come back
and see how this all plays out.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
Okay, this is Hudson River Radio dot com.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
This is Hudson River Radio dot Com.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
We are back to murder in the Hudson Valley, which
happens to to be a serial killer in California. This
episode and quite diabolical.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, yep. And he found a way to do it
to kind of stay under the radar for the most part. Yeah,
and he got.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
All these people he suckered in to willingly take these
injections not knowing the consequences.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Salesman's skill. Yeah, yep, it's a skill. I don't have it.
It's a skill.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
So you'll recall that we now have Lieutenant White, Detective
Lieutenant White assigned to this case. He did his homework, finally,
thank god, he did his homework. He reached out to
various doctors, specifically insulin researchers who knew what they were
talking about. He had them review the medical files from
these six deaths that were up to so far, and

(25:51):
they were able to examine samples from the brains of
the victims that were fortunately kept by the coroner's office.
Oh okay, all right. At this point, lab testing was
available to determine the amount of insulin that was in
a bloodstream, and in fact, it had been developed several
years before, but for some reason, nobody in California knew
about it. It was available in the country, but nobody

(26:15):
in California. For some reason, nobody, nobody was knew about it. Yeah, rita, Yeah,
so it was able to be tested for several years
before this came up. But at least we have Lieutenant
White at this point doing what he's supposed to do.
Good for him. Yeah. So they were able to test
for insulin at this point, and all six deaths could

(26:37):
be attributed to an insulin overdose. Ah, so now we
can link them all together.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Okay, And who do we link them all to?

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Mister Archard is the name that comes up, right. So
Archard was finally arrested on July twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven,
at his home in Alambra. And I hope I'm saying
that right. Alambra outside Los Angeles for three of the murders,
where they had enough evidence to pursue Charles all right,
Lieutenant White said that Archard looked frail. Excuse me, he

(27:10):
looked frail, thin and miserable. That was his description of him. Yeah,
definitely good. Archard told police, well, it took you long enough.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Oh excellent, So he admits it.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
So he admitted it. He was charged with the murders
of Zella, wife number four, the nephew Bernie, and Mary,
wife number seven. So those are the three that he
got charged with. Prosecutors were able to use the other
three victims to show a pattern of behavior. They were
able to introduce the cases, but there wasn't enough evidence

(27:48):
for conviction on that. But throughout the whole process, Archard
remained cool and calm. He never got rattled. He was
polite to everybody, to the court officers, to his defense
attorney charming as always well said yeah, exactly, well almost
everybody one exception. Archard had waived his right to a

(28:12):
jury trial and had his case heard by the judge,
Judge Adolph Alexander Adolph being a name that I don't
think we'll ever come back huh. And he went that
route thinking that he would have a better shot avoiding
the death penalty. That's why he went with a bench
trial instead of the jury trial. Well, the judge found
him guilty and sent him to death row. Oops. Yeah, yeah,

(28:36):
on March sixth, nineteen sixty eight. They did all the appeals.
The sins was upheld by the California Supreme Court in
nineteen seventy, so we're looking at three years since the
arrest to get to the Supreme Court. Well, the time came,
his death warrant was signed. That's signed right before execution.
That's not right ahead of time. So that's done right before.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
I think it has to be within twenty four hours
or yeah, something, at least in New York it used
to be.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yeah, I don't know all the details. And again this
is California in the nineteen sixties. His defense attorney actually
got him a stay of execution. In between the death
warrant being signed and the stay of execution, Archard was
offered his last meal. He was offered either steak or lobster,
but he wanted both and he was not offered both.

(29:26):
And he made a stink that it's not fair and
it's not right that he was not allowed to have both.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
Because he's got so many rights at this point.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, that is the one case throughout this whole thing
where he kind of lost his school a little bit.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
That was the straw that broke the camels.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, he wanted both, he didn't get it, So there
you go. Also, while this was all happening, in nineteen
seventy two, the US Supreme Court deemed capital punishment to
be cruel and unusual. We talked about this in our
Methods of execut podcast right way back when that was
a while ago. I'm still up, so you should go
back and listen to that one. So archard sentence was

(30:07):
commuted to life in prison, and he wound up dying
of pneumonia in nineteen seventy seven at age sixty five.
And the reality, with the way the judicial system moved,
even if he was still on death row, he probably
would have died before an execution been able to be
carried out, because we're looking at five years after that
Supreme Court decision and then it was reversed again. So

(30:30):
either way, he died in prison at age sixty five. Boohoo, exactly, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
So unbelievable. This, Yeah, this is a remarkable case again
where nobody figured it out before no one was So
did did wife number four, five and six know about one? Two?

Speaker 1 (30:51):
Three?

Speaker 2 (30:52):
I mean, I one question.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
I am not certain that he divorced one before the
next one came along. I'm sure there were overlaps. I
couldn't find exact days for when this marriage ended one regain,
so I'm sure there was overlaps there. I'm sure there
were red flags going up all over the place. But
how do you approve an insolent injection? And who would

(31:14):
even come up with it? And again, even back then,
who knew what insulin was? If you weren't involved with it,
if you didn't have a family member that needed it?
You know how many people?

Speaker 2 (31:24):
And these are the murders we know about, correct, you
know what else was he doing? And you know someone
who just so coolly and chlously murders his own family
members and wives, and.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
What else was he doing? Right? And he worked in
a hospital where he would have had access to these things,
so he probably practiced. It would not surprise me, Yeah,
it would not surprise me. So there you go.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Wow, So all right, that was disturbing.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Good, that's what we do here.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Yeah, and went on way way too long. Yeah, and
you can see it in maybe the twenties, thirties, but
by the time you're in the nineteen sixties and you're
not catching up on what this guy's doing.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Not good, correct, So makes you want to pay attention.
And yeah, if you if you feel a red flag
somewhere in your mind, it's probably a real red flag
on the outside that you should take action against.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah, so all right, would you like to take us out?

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Sure? Well, thank you everyone for joining us. We love
hearing from you. Let us know if there are any
cases in particular you think we should cover, and we
will see you or you will hear us back on
murder in the Hudson Valley on Hudson River Radio. If
you are not a victim of murder in the Hudson

(32:50):
Valley

Speaker 1 (32:54):
This is Hudson River Radio dot com.