Lydia Sherman: Connecticut's 'Lucrezia Borgia'

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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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. 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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. 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 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,

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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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