Fatal Page 4

  After sharing his suspicions with a colleague named Kinney, Beardsley secured permission to conduct a postmortem on Sherman. On Saturday, May 20, the two doctors dissected the cadaver, removing the stomach and liver and shipping the organs to a toxicology professor at Yale for analysis. Three weeks later, they received the results. Sherman’s liver was absolutely saturated with arsenic. There was enough poison in his system to have killed three men.

  A warrant was promptly issued for the arrest of Lydia Sherman.

  By then, however, she was no longer in Connecticut. Realizing that the law was closing in on her, she had decamped for New Brunswick. Several officers were immediately dispatched to New Jersey to keep her under surveillance. In the meantime, the bodies of Frankie and Ada Sherman were exhumed. So was the corpse of Dennis Hurlburt. All were found to contain significant traces of arsenic. Inquiring at the local pharmacies, police discovered that, in the spring of 1870, Lydia had purchased an ounce of white arsenic from a druggist named Peck, explaining that she needed the poison because her house was “overrun with rats.” They also learned about the bizarre string of tragedies that had befallen Edward Struck and his six children several years earlier when the ill-fated ex-policeman was married to Lydia.

  On June 7, 1871, authorities decided that the time had come to put the warrant into action. Lydia, shadowed by a pair of detectives, had gone off to New York City on a shopping expedition. When she returned to New Brunswick that evening, she was greeted at the train station by a detective and a deputy sheriff who took her into custody and transported her back to New Haven, where she was charged with the murder of Horatio Sherman.

  Her trial was a sensation, generating headlines in papers from the New Haven Register to the New York Times. According to the press, her crimes were unparalleled; the world hadn’t witnessed such horrors since the days of Lucretia Borgia, the infamous Italian noblewoman and reputed serial poisoner whose name was a byword for lethal treachery. When the trial opened in New Haven on April 16, 1872, spectators traveled great distances for a glimpse of this prodigy of evil—“the arch murderess of Connecticut.” What they saw was not the ogre they were expecting but a prim, proper, perfectly ordinary-looking woman in a black alpaca dress, black-and-white shawl, white straw hat, and black kid gloves.

  The sight of the forty-eight-year-old Lydia, looking calm, even somewhat cheerful, beneath her thin lace veil, had them shaking their heads in confusion. How could this utterly nondescript woman be guilty of such atrocities? The answer, of course, was simple. As with most serial killers, there was a terrifying disparity in Lydia between her mundane appearance and the monstrous abnormality of her mind. But back then, people were unfamiliar with the grotesque operations of the sociopathic personality. The term “serial killer” wouldn’t even be invented for another hundred years.

  The trial lasted eight days. The defense tried to persuade the jury that Horatio Sherman’s death was accidental, possibly caused when he had swallowed tainted water, drawn from a well in which a poisoned rat had drowned. Or perhaps he had taken his own life, driven to suicide by depression over his money problems, marital woes, and the recent deaths of his two children.

  The evidence against Lydia, however, was overwhelming. In the end, she was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the state prison at Wethersfield.

  Public fascination with Lydia’s case did not end with her conviction. Quite the contrary. Then as now, people had a powerful appetite for true-crime sensationalism, and instant books like The Poison Fiend: Life, Crimes, and Conviction of Lydia Sherman (The Modern Lucretia Borgia) were rushed into print. Lydia’s confession—composed in jail while she awaited sentencing and immediately issued in pamphlet form—also became a popular seller. She even became immortalized in a ballad:

  Lydia Sherman is plagued with rats.

  Lydia has no faith in cats.

  So Lydia buys some arsenic,

  And then her husband gets sick;

  And then her husband, he does die,

  And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.

  Lydia moves, but still has rats;

  And still she puts no faith in cats;

  So again she buys some arsenic,

  This time her children, they get sick,

  This time her children, they do die,

  And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.

  Lydia lies in Wethersfield jail,

  And loudly does she moan and wail.

  She blames her fate on a plague of rats;

  She blames the laziness of cats.

  But her neighbors’ questions she can’t deny—

  So Lydia now in prison must lie.

  To her contemporaries, the Sherman case was uniquely appalling—“the horror of the century,” as one newspaper called it. In the hundred-year history of the republic, nothing like the “American Borgia” had ever been seen, and her countrymen felt certain that they would never witness such a monster again.

  But they were wrong

  2

  You may ask yourselves the question, how is it possible for a woman like this to commit such a crime? The answer is, from the depravity that is sometimes found to exist in the human heart—in the heart of a woman as well as in that of a man. As the female sex ordinarily rise above men in morality and kindness and gentleness, so they sometimes sink to lower depths of cruelty and malignity.

  —FROM THE TRIAL OF SARAH JANE ROBINSON

  ONLY THE SENTIMENTAL ATTITUDES OF THE DAY SAVED Lydia Sherman from the gallows. The idea of hanging any woman, even a certified fiend, was repugnant to Victorian sensibilities. Still, there were many New Englanders who felt strongly that her sentence was a miscarriage of justice. A monster like Lydia, they proclaimed, should not be suffered to live.

  They got their wish soon enough. In May 1878—just five years after she was locked away in Wethersfield—Lydia Sherman died after a brief illness. America’s “Queen Poisoner,” as she had come to be known, was gone. But her throne wouldn’t remain empty for long.

  • • •

  According to the cliché, every woman dreams of marrying a prince. For Annie McCormick, a young widow living in South Boston, that wish came true—in a manner of speaking. After several lonely years, she was rescued from widowhood by a man with the unlikely name of Prince Arthur Freeman. They were wed in 1879.

  The life he offered her, however, was anything but regal. An unskilled laborer who spent his days slaving in an iron foundry, Prince Arthur had never earned more than a few dollars per week in his life. To make ends meet, Annie continued to ply her trade as a seamstress. Even with the extra money she brought in, they barely managed to scrape by. Food was scant, their tenement flat dismal and underheated. It is little wonder that in February 1885—just a few weeks after their second child was born—the overworked woman contracted pneumonia.

  It was Prince Arthur’s mother, Mrs. Freeman, who took care of the medical bills. In addition to paying the family doctor, Archibald Davidson, she hired an elderly woman named Mrs. Randall to help nurse her bedridden daughter-in-law. After ten days in bed, Annie—to the great relief of her family—began to show definite signs of improvement. By the second week of February, Dr. Davidson confidently predicted that, “with proper nourishment,” the patient would almost certainly make a complete recovery.

  And then Annie’s sister showed up.

  Her name was Sarah Jane Robinson. Like Annie, she was a skilled seamstress, though she had also done her share of nursing. To be sure, her patients had an unfortunate habit of dying. Just a few years earlier, for example, she had cared for her landlord, Oliver Sleeper, during what turned out to be his final illness. His death had taken his friends by surprise. Until he was stricken with a sudden intestinal ailment, the seventy-year-old Sleeper had appeared in perfectly sound health. Still, he was an old man. Certainly Mrs. Robinson had given him assiduous attention, remaining at his bedside day and night and making sure that he swallowed every last dose of his medicat
ion. For her services, she had charged his estate fifty dollars following the old man’s intensely unpleasant death—a bill that Sleeper’s survivors ultimately settled by remitting Mrs. Robinson’s overdue rent.

  A few years later, her own husband, Moses Robinson, died of an illness whose symptoms bore a remarkable similarity to those manifested by old Mr. Sleeper during his final, agonized days—violent nausea and vomiting, bloody diarrhea, burning pains in the stomach. She had also lost three of her eight children to the same devastating disease, including both of her twin sons, who died within a week of one another when they were barely eight months old.

  Now, she had come to take care of her sister, Annie.

  Taking care of Annie was nothing new for Sarah. She’d been doing it ever since they were children in Ireland. When their parents, a poor farming couple named Tennent, died within a few months of each other in 1853, it was fourteen-year-old Sarah, all by herself, who took her nine-year-old sister across the ocean to America. Later—after Annie’s first husband sliced his hand on a saw blade and succumbed to blood poisoning—it was Sarah who opened her home to the grieving young widow.

  To those who knew her, therefore, it came as no surprise that Sarah had hurried to her sister’s sickbed the moment she got word of Annie’s illness. Of course, in a very real sense, no one knew Sarah Jane Robinson. Even her nearest acquaintances had been deceived by her apparent normality. Several years would pass before she stood revealed to the world as the kind of virulent personality we now describe as a criminal psychopath. Though capable of counterfeiting ordinary human emotions, such beings lack every trace of fellow feeling. Like Sarah Jane Robinson, they may be adept at putting on convincing shows of sympathy and concern. At bottom, however, they care about nothing but their own monstrous needs. And they will happily sacrifice anyone—a husband, a child, or an ailing younger sister—to make sure those needs are gratified.

  When Sarah arrived at the Freeman’s tenement, she found a family friend, a woman named Susan Marshall, seated at Annie’s bedside. Annie herself was much improved. Her coloring was better than it had been in many days, and her coughing had let up significantly. Propped up on her pillow, she greeted her sister with a fond smile.

  Sarah, however, seemed strangely dismayed at the sight of her sister. After spending a few minutes quizzing Annie about her health, she asked to speak to Mrs. Marshall in private.

  Retreating to the kitchen, Sarah told Mrs. Marshall about a terrible dream she’d had the night before. In it, Annie had gotten sicker and sicker, until she had wasted into a skeleton.

  “I just know she’ll never get any better,” Sarah exclaimed as she finished describing the nightmare.

  “But she is getting better,” Mrs. Marshall replied, seeking to reassure the obviously distraught older woman.

  But Sarah would not be consoled. “Whenever I have a dream like that,” she said, “there is always one of the family who dies.”

  Later that day, after Prince Arthur returned home from work, Sarah persuaded him to dismiss Mrs. Randall. Why waste good money to pay for a nurse when she herself could tend to Annie? To demonstrate the point, she proceeded to fix her sister a nice bowl of oatmeal gruel and a cup of freshly brewed tea. Both appeared to have a strangely bitter quality to Annie, though her sense of taste had been so impaired by her illness that she could not really be sure.

  That night, Annie took a sudden and devastating turn for the worse. She was overcome with nausea, and seized with savage stomach pains. She lay awake all night, alternately retching into the chamber pot and writhing on her mattress in agony. When Dr. Davidson arrived for his morning visit, he was completely bewildered by her altered condition. Only one day earlier, his patient had been well on the way to recovery. Now, she had not merely suffered a setback; she had begun to display an entirely new set of symptoms. Davidson prescribed a common nineteenth-century remedy for acute gastric distress: bismuth phosphate, each dose to be dissolved in three parts water and taken at regular intervals.

  In spite of the medicine—faithfully administered by Sarah, who made sure that her sister swallowed every sip of the doctored water—Annie continued to grow worse. In addition to her other symptoms, she was stricken with a ferocious burning in the pit of her stomach. She begged for anything to soothe the pain. Sarah bought her some ice cream, and fed it to her a few spoonfuls at a time. But the ice cream only made Annie’s nausea worse, and intensified the vomiting until she was bringing up nothing but a thin, blood-streaked fluid.

  When Susan Marshall came by several days later, she was shocked at her friend’s transformation. The last time she’d visited, Annie had clearly been on the mend, her strength returning, her appearance improved. Now—as Mrs. Marshall would later testify—her “features were very much bloated,” and her complexion was of a ghastly “discolored” hue. It was clear to Mrs. Marshall that her friend wasn’t suffering from “any ordinary sickness.” Her throat was so constricted that she could barely speak, though she did manage to voice a desperate plea for something cold to drink, to ease the dreadful burning in her stomach. She was afflicted with a blinding headache, overwhelming nausea, and another, deeply puzzling, symptom—terrible cramps in the calves of her legs. Even with the opium that Dr. Davidson had prescribed to alleviate the poor woman’s suffering, she remained in an almost constant state of agony, groaning miserably and rolling back and forth on her mattress.

  Utterly aghast, Mrs. Marshall questioned Sarah about this sudden, inexplicable reversal in Annie’s condition. “We have been doing all we can for her,” Sarah replied, shaking her head mournfully. “But I do not expect that she will ever leave her bed.” Then, after a brief pause, she gave a heavy sigh and added: “It is happening just as in my dream.”

  On February 27, 1885—slightly more than a week after Sarah came to care for her sister—Annie Freeman died in the presence of her weeping husband, several grief-stricken friends, and her dry-eyed older sister.

  Sarah Jane Robinson’s dream had come true.

  No sooner had Annie emitted her last, tortured breath than Sarah asked to speak to Mrs. Marshall and another family friend, Mrs. Mary L. Moore. Much to the consternation of the two sorrowing women, Sarah—who seemed bizarrely unaffected by her sister’s death—wanted to discuss a matter of obviously paramount importance to her. She wanted them to use whatever influence they possessed to persuade Prince Arthur to come live with her, along with his two children. It was, she declared, her sister’s last wish. To be sure, no one had heard Annie express such a desire in her final days. But then, no one had spent as much time in the dying woman’s company as Sarah, who had remained at her sister’s side night and day, refusing to allow anyone else to feed her or to administer her medication.

  Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Moore promised to do everything in their power to see that Annie’s last wish was honored.

  The last shovelful of dirt had barely been tossed onto Annie Freeman’s grave when Sarah herself spoke to Prince Arthur, telling him the same flagrant lie that she had told Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Marshall: that Annie had expressly wanted him and the two children to come live in Sarah’s home. The stricken man—who had just seen his beloved wife vanish forever into the ground—seemed too stunned to think clearly about the subject, though he did permit Sarah to take his two small children home with her to Boylston Street that night. He himself followed a few weeks later, taking up residence at the home of Sarah Jane Robinson in early April 1885.

  Three weeks later, Prince Arthur suffered a second devastating blow when his one-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, developed a sudden case of “intestinal catarrh.” Sarah gave little Elizabeth the same watchful care that she had lavished on the baby’s mother, and with the same results. In the last week of April, Elizabeth died in great distress and was laid in the ground beside her mother.

  Immediately after the child’s funeral, Sarah sat her brother-in-law down at the kitchen table and explained what must be done. Like other laboring men of the time, Prince Ar
thur belonged to a “mutual assessment and cooperative society”—the United Order of Pilgrim Fathers of Boston—whose main function was to provide low-cost life insurance to its working-class members. He owned a policy worth $2,000. Annie, of course, had been the beneficiary. Now that she was gone and Prince Arthur and his remaining child—a six-year-old boy named Thomas—were residing with Sarah, it was only reasonable that she be made the beneficiary. That way, little Thomas was sure to be well taken care of. Just in case anything unfortunate should happen to Prince Arthur.

  One month later, on May 31, 1885, Prince Arthur’s $2,000 life insurance policy was made over to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Sarah Jane Robinson.

  Almost immediately, people around Sarah began to notice a dramatic shift in her attitude toward Prince Arthur. Ever since the deaths of his wife and infant daughter, she had treated him with utmost kindness and consideration. Suddenly, he became a constant source of annoyance to her. It was as though she no longer had the slightest use for him. And she didn’t hesitate to let others know exactly how she felt.

  During the first week of June, for example, a friend named Belle Clough dropped by Sarah’s apartment for a cup of chamomile tea and some neighborly gossip. As they sat at the kitchen table, Sarah suddenly burst into a bitter denunciation of her brother-in-law. He was “worthless”—“good-for-nothing”—“too lazy to earn a living.” His wages amounted to only six dollars a week, half of which he spent on trolley fare. She ended her harangue with a comment whose sheer vehemence caused Mrs. Clough to raise her eyebrows in surprise.