Amy Archer-Gilligan: Sometimes Predators Look Like Pious Grandmas

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 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 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 He would have been called an inmate then, which is obviously outdated terminology at the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane, and that happened in nineteen o two and so outdated terminology.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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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. 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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. 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. 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

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

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. 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. 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 to your favorite shows. H