Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd (14 page)

BOOK: Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

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The body that Toughy had disinterred this time, long enough to get out of the cemetery with the stomach, was that of Charley Andrews. Toughy was in better luck this time. Andrews had been poisoned.

The next day Mike Toughy was sitting in the office of State’s Attorney Hugh M. Alcorn. Toughy had, while the state toxi-cologist had been analyzing Andrews’ stomach, been doing some fast poking around the region. He learned that Sister Amy had insured Andrews for $4,000. He learned that on the occasion that he had had the actuary look into the insurance records for him that the actuary had not looked far enough.

True, Sister Amy had not at that time been carrying in-surance on any of the departed ones. Not that she hadn’t tried. She had tried to take out policies on most of them but they had all failed to pass their medical tests.

But Toughy had discovered something even more vital to the future of The Archer Home. In digging into the poison books of the drugstores, which he had done previously without results, it occurred to him that Sister Amy might not have used her own name when buying arsenic. And he struck luck there, too. A little woman answering Sister Amy’s description had, over a period of years, put in occasional ap-pearances at a drug store in Hartford. And when Mike Toughy sneaked the druggist around to the Bliss house under cover of night and had him get a gander at Sister Amy when she came out the front door next morning, the druggist just nodded.

Now Toughy sat there telling State’s Attorney Alcorn the whole lethal story of Sister Amy’s seven years of bad luck for Windsor. Alcorn saw the black light. But, to make as-surance doubly sure, he had the bodies of four of Sister’s most recent victims dug up. Two of them were filled with arsenic. Two of them had been smothered. That answered a lot, that smothering; it explained why most of Sister Amy’s victims were walking around after supper and leaving in a box a few hours later. And a smothering job didn’t leave any trace in a victim’s stomach.

Finally, The Hartford Courant ran the big story.

Sister Amy was charged with the murder-for-profit of Brother Andrews. A bad case of “prison psychosis” made it seem unlikely that she’d come to trial, but on June 18, 1917, the woman suspected of at least a score of murders faced the jury. After a four-week trial and four hours of deliberation, they found her guilty and sentenced her to die on the gallows in November. But State’s Attorney Alcorn, in his enthusiasm, had made a slip in the first trial and had told the jury about twenty-three other arsenic jobs that the State had linked to Sister Amy. That got her a new trial in June 1919.

At the second trial, a curious thing was noticeable. Sister Amy, though only in her forties, had suddenly lost her re-markable youth. At the first trial, where she had appeared with a daughter from one of the five marriages she had gone through before darkening the Connecticut landscape, she had retained her remarkable youth.

Now, though, she had sud-denly become an old woman, with evil written all over her face. She reminded some court observers of a female Jekyll-Hyde. All through the seven years while she was writing criminal history she had kept her innocent, youthful face. Now, overnight, it seemed, the evil and age had wiped out the innocence and the youth.

Insanity was her defense the second time around, with defense lawyers declaring her crazy. Her 19-year-old daughter, Mary E. Archer, testified that her mother was a morphine addict. The second trial ended on July 1, 1919, with a plea of guilty of murder in the second degree, which carried a life sentence. She was a model prisoner until 1924, when she was declared hopelessly insane and transferred to a mental hospital.

End of story? Not quite.

An aspiring young writer heard of Amy’s story in the 1930’s and wrote it up as a stage play. His name was Joseph Otto Kesselring, and the original title of his word was
Bodies in Our Cellar
. The title changed, however, and the play found its way to Broadway as
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

Written in 1939, it opened on Broadway at the Fulton Theater, on January 10, 1941, to rave reviews. The original production featured Boris Karloff playing a killer who looked like the Boris Karloff of
Frankenstein
fame and made the idea of wholesale slaughter simply hilarious.

Frank Capra later made it into a film, starring Cary Grant. As one critic proclaimed,

“You wouldn’t believe homicidal mania could be such fun!”

Sister Amy was still alive for both the play and the movie. But it is not known if she saw either. Nonetheless, she starred in the original cast and became a celebrity patient, of sorts, in the nut house where she resided. Ironically, she outlived just about everyone she ever met until a day April 1962, when she died quietly at the ripe old age of ninety two.

THE END

Thank you for reading these stories. Look for the second of three volumes of Prescription: Murder in November 2014, and the third volume in January of 2015.

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