Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - The Devil in the Nursing Home: America’s First Female Serial Killer

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Amy Archer-Gilligan was one of America's first female serial killers, killing up to 60 of her patients with her "special" lemonade...   Make sure you're following the podcast on instagram @heartstartspounding. Have a heart-pounding story you'd like to share on the pod? Email [e-mail]

It's that feeling when the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's saying. It's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. If you're joining us for the first time, this is a podcast of terrifying tales, often told by those who lived them. And if you're a repeat listener, welcome back. I'm of the belief that every hometown has a dark secret. Sometimes it's thrilling, like the neighbor with the nicest car

on the block getting arrested for fraud. Sometimes it's a salacious tale of the local parishioner being caught with his pants down. Other times, it's as sinister as murder. Other times, it's as sinister as murder. Today, we're deviating from our standard format, and I'm going to tell you a spooky tale of hometown history, a tale of fraud, of a pious woman's devilish impulses. But at the forefront, it's a tale of murder. Our story starts with the young man who is caught in the middle of it all. This past year, I found a photo of my family having Thanksgiving dinner in the year 1900, just one town over from where I grew up. The photo is about 20 solemn faces ranging from infant to elder, all staring directly into the

camera. The women all have their hair up in messy topnots, and the men mostly spawn thick handle bar moustaches. In the middle of this photo stands a precocious looking young man, about 15 at the time. His name was Carl, and he was my grandmother's father. He's young and spry in the photo, which is hardly an indicator of what was to come for him. Carl was just 22 years old in 1907, and living in Windsor, Connecticut, when a woman named Amy Archer and her older husband, James, moved in down the road and opened what many believe was the first convalescent home in America. For just $7 a week or $205 in today's dollars, you could move your loved one out of your home and into her boarding house, where every accommodation and ailing and elderly person

needed would be met. Thought you might live a while longer? No worries, you could pay a lump sum of $1,000 for lifetime care, which allowed you to live out the rest of your days, however many there may be, under Amy's loving guidance. Maybe people were overly optimistic about how long they'd live, or maybe her reputation as a caregiver was just that good, but most people chose to pay the lump sum of $1,000 upfront. Which one would you pick? Leo had some thoughts. Well, knowing what I know, I would say seven dollars a week,

but I feel like thousand dollars for like the rest of your life, that's not bad, that's not a bad it's like that's a bad business model. You can either pay weekly, so no matter how long you live there, she'll make money. Or you pay it all up front, and she just has your money. And then there's like no way for her to make any money after that. Home. Yeah, I didn't think about that. I was thinking like, if I'm the old person, get put into the home. Yeah.

My family is paying. Like, that's not a bad deal for them, because I doubt people had a lot of money back then. When you're old and I'm putting you in a home, yeah. I'm paying $1,000 and I'm taking my ass somewhere else. Carl and Amy had struck up a friendship upon her arrival in town. Amy was a very godly woman. Being nicknamed Sister Amy for always having a Bible by her side, and Carl really respected that. He taught Sunday school at Grace Episcopal in town, and Carl really respected that. He taught Sunday school at Grace Episcopal in town, and soon Amy became known for her large donations to St. Gabriel's Catholic Church. At this point in Carl's life, he was a junior reporter at the Hartford

Current, but his detective spirit and journalistic mind led him to also be the treasurer of the Windsor Rogue Detecting Society. Like Sherlock Holmes. Like Sherlock Holmes, no, but he was just a man that lived neighborhood drama. And that passed down through generation. That is what we got. I cannot digest lactose and Carl was catching serial killers. But I love small town drama. and I think that's the gene that

made it through. One day, when Carl was reading the current, the paper he himself reported for, he saw Amy's name. This wasn't an article recognizing her good efforts for taking care of the elderly. No. Amy was being sued. In 1909, Amy was sued for $5,000 for neglect of one of her inmates, Theresa McClintock. That's almost $150,000 today. Theresa wrote the following to her daughter in a letter. Oh, Belle, take me away from here. I had chills all last night and I called and called for

someone to come to me. When Mrs. Archer came, she was ugly and told me to shut up. I asked for some hot water to drink and for a hot water bottle to be put at my feet. She did nothing for me and I'm afraid of her because she is so ugly. Like in today's terms, this woman is a foul to look at. Please take me away. Give me out, Slee. The lawsuit was a financial disaster for Amy. The house only had 21 beds and all of them were full. And since it was uncertain how long each person would live and most of them paid their feet up front,

she didn't know when the next payment was going to come in. The next year, tragedy struck again when her husband James died suddenly. He had been complaining of stomach pain for a short time when he died on February 10, 1910. James's death came a few short weeks after Amy had taken out a life insurance policy on him. Kinney disease was the official cause of death on the certificate, though he had no symptoms of kidney disease prior to his death. This part gets a little fuzzy.

It's unclear if James kicked off what would become a larger trend, or if he was part of an already implemented business model. At the current, Carl had access to all of the obituaries that were published in the area, including the ones that were coming out of the Archer home. In the two years after the lawsuit, there were 60 obituaries to come out of Amy's convalescent home. This was well above what was average in town at the time. Sure, you could attribute it to the fact that the clientele was in the later stages of their life,

but the desertivacits were horribly vague. Old age and indigestion were written on most. It's also interesting to note here that in 1913, Amy remarried to a man named Michael Gilligan, another older gentleman with four adult sons. Michael passed away just a few months after the wedding, leaving his entire estate to Amy, not his sons. His cause of death, acute billiast attack, in other words, stomach pain.

It is absolutely wild to me that you could literally put down anything as a cost of death. Anything in the past. Like literally stubbed toe, dead. Yeah, he died because he stubbed his toe. Like I don't know what to tell you. And the fact that old age was just like written on somebody. Death certificates for the longest time when like there's so much you can learn. Even if someone's old when they die, you still want to figure out why they died.

So you can prevent that. But they were like, oh, this person over 60. Death was coming for them. You know, I'm surprised it didn't happen yesterday. Yeah. To be honest. So Amy had a specific cure for stomach pain, lemonade, which at the time was used to cure many ailments, cold, flu, skin conditions, think of lemonade as the celery juice of the turn of the century, a one cure for all. Some of Amy's inmates, however, noticed that people would get worse, not better, upon drinking Amy's concoction.

One time, when the doctor in town, Dr. Howard King, came to make a house call, a patient told him they thought something was wrong with Amy's lemonade. He drank a glass in front of them and lived to tell the tale, which should have put them at ease, but still didn't. I'm obsessed with old-timey medicine. Oh, you think this is poison? Well, I guess I'll eat it and we'll find out. Yeah, literally putting fuck around and find out to the test. Carl started to feel like something was very wrong. But what was he to do? If he went poking around, he risked his reputation. Amy was beloved in town. She was doing God's work. And when Word got out that he was snooping, he started to receive

threatening phone calls on his home phone, scaring his wife and children. In the center of town in Windsor, there's an old brick building that is now a Thai food restaurant. A few years ago, a mysterious brown stain started blooming on the ceiling of the kitchen, and soon a constant drip of thin, brown liquid came down the walls. It wasn't until the following week that the staff realized the man who lived upstairs in the apartment above the kitchen had died, and his body was decomposing.

And as it did, it drained down inside the restaurant. Though terrifying, this was not the first time that this building had been associated with death. In the early 1900s, it was actually the one pharmacy in Windsor, manned by the one doctor in town, Dr. Howard King. Carl made a stop there one day to buy some arsenic, which was routinely used to kill rats. To buy the poison, you'd have to sign the pharmacy's black book

with your name and how much you were buying. And when Carl went to sign, he made a shocking discovery. Amy had been purchasing a ton of arsenic over the last few months, including enough to quote, kill 12 men just days before her husband James was found dead, and enough to kill over 100 men the week of her husband, Michael's death.

Imagine just being like, I'm going to sign my name because I need to kill some rats. Why is someone buying 14 pounds of rap poison? If you know that black book was like Carl one ounce of arsenic Amy Sarah Rachel like it was just a bunch of women buying like a ton of arsenic and everyone's like oh What are all these women doing with all this poison? Yeah, I mean like oh, what's going on? This is this is funky. It's is weird. I guess they just have a lot of rats. Yeah I mean while they're on husband number six. Yeah. Like, no one bats a night.

Carl also thought it was strange that the doctor selling her all this arsenic was the same one showing up to handle the death certificates for those that passed away. I know what you may be thinking. But Dr. King drank the lemonade in front of the residence and survived. How could that be? Well, that's not entirely how arsenic works, and Dr. King would have known that.

I'm so sorry. But this doctor sounds like he saw it. Yeah, no, I looked him up too, and he has like no real like actual license to be a doctor. He was just some guy that showed up to town. I was like, I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. Look at the stethoscope I have that I definitely did not find in a dumpster. I'm the doctor now. Arsnick takes repeat ingestion to kill. One serving, even a large one, may cause digestive issues in the consumer, but not necessarily death. Carl was apparently so freaked out by this revelation that he got an editor at the current Clifford Sherman

to open an official investigation into the Archer home. Of course, forensic science wasn't the same back then that it is today, so it took a long time to actually be able to convict Amy of anything, and it was all because of a resident named Franklin Andrews. So in the fall of 1912, a man by the name of Franklin Andrews took a residence at Amy's boarding home. He was an older gentleman with arthritis, but other than that he was in good spirits. When he first moved into the home, he noticed how run down it was. Amy blamed it on not having a handyman after the death of her husband James, but once she remarried Michael in 1913,

Franklin and Michael developed a strong friendship and started fixing up the house together. So it came as a huge shock to Franklin when Michael died. Shortly after, Franklin wrote a letter home that read, so they go one after another. That makes 21 that's died since I came here. Don't know who will be next. There are 18 here now and she expects more soon. In a way she's kind of running an MLM. When

you put it like that you're not wrong. Because you have to get people in under you in order to keep the business going. The next red flag for Franklin was when Amy reached out to him for money. Amy liked to know how much money all of the inmates had, and even demanded bank bills from the residents before securing a room. In January of 1914, she told Franklin that the bills were getting overwhelming since Michael's passing, lying to him and even saying that Michael's father left him debts that were now her responsibility. She asked for $2,900 or $86,000 today by the following day and begged he not tell anyone else. Franklin refused. And if that weren't enough reason for Amy to take action, at the same time,

Michael's adult sons were fighting Amy on his life insurance money. A judge had just ruled that everyone involved, Amy and Michael's four sons would get a share of Michael's money. Amy had not planned for that. So on the evening of May 29th, 1914, just a few months after his refusal to give more money to Amy, Franklin started complaining of a stomach ache. Which was strange because just that day he had been painting offense for Amy and appeared in good spirits.

Later that night he took a turn for the worse, vomiting until all that was coming out was bile and something that looked like coffee grounds. His roommate called for Amy who refused to call Dr. King, and instead offered him a glass of lemonade. By the morning, Franklin was dead. But Franklin had a sister, Nelly Pierce, and Nelly refused to believe her brother became randomly ill enough to die. She questioned Amy on what had happened, but Amy's story kept changing.

At one point, Amy claimed that Franklin had just eaten too much that night, and Dr. King confirmed. Franklin had eaten so much that it put a terrible strain on his heart, and that was that. Yeah, this doctor's such an idiot. That, like, doesn't sound real. If waiting too much was enough to kill you, I would be dead a thousand times over. Yeah. I would have died last night. Also for her to be like, oh well, he ate a lot. So I think that's how he died.

And the doctor to be like, yes, that's honestly, that sounds legit. Sure, okay. I mean, you know him better than I do, so. But Nelly wouldn't stop. And she was able to team up with the official investigation that was happening on the Archer home to order an autopsy on Franklin. A tell for arsenic poisoning is not just how the body responds to it during exposure, but also how the body responds to it in death. It took two years to be able to obtain a proper autopsy and when the mortician and investigators dug down to the box that held Franklin's remains,

one of the first surprising observations was that there was no smell. Surely a two-year-old corpse would have some sort of smell, but Franklin did not. Then, as they cracked open the lid to see what they could make of whatever was left of smell, but Franklin did not. Then, as they cracked open the lid to see what they could make of whatever was left of Franklin, they were shocked to see that he was all there in almost perfect condition. Arsnick can preserve bodies.

This was actually discovered by Dr. George Adolf Walper in Berlin in 1806. He was studying Arsnick when he heard the case of Sophie or Sinis. Sophie was trying to poison a servant whom she quarreled with by feeding her plums tainted with arsenic. The servant caught on to Sophie's scheme and brought the plums to a chemist who was able to detect high levels of the poison in the fruit. This led to local authorities opening up an investigation

into the strange deaths of Sophie's husband and aunt three years prior, and when the bodies were dug up, they had not decomposed at all. After hearing of this, Dr. Vulper went on to poison various animals with arsenic over the next few years to study the decomposition. Only to find that when exposed to arsenic, decomposition nearly halts. So Franklin's condition, coupled with the fact that his stomach was so well preserved they were able to test what was in his stomach the night he died, was enough to convict Amy of Franklin's murder in 1916. It's believed that she killed closer to 60 inmates,

maybe more. We will never know the exact amount. Though maybe one day Leo and I will be brave enough to dig up some bones and see their condition. Absolutely not. But we could legally, physically. Listen, I will do creepy crawly stuff till the cows come home. I'm not robbing a grave. I'm not digging up a dead body.

Okay, but we might. Amy was initially sentenced to die by hanging, but after a mistrial, she was sentenced to live out her days in an insane asylum until she died in 1962. And Carl, the percusious boy from the photo, went on to live a happy, beautiful life, becoming known as Mr. Windsor, the face of the town he had risked at all to protect. Carl's giving. What a good guy. He's serving.

He's served. He served looks. He made a woman serve jail time. And he served his community. This has been Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. Make sure to leave a rating and review and follow the podcast on Instagram at Heart Starts Pounding. Have a heart pounding story you'd like to share? Email heartstartspounding at gmail.com. Until next time, woo! you