Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (18 page)

P
RURIENT RUMORS ABOUT POWERFUL INDIVIDUALS—OFTEN INVENTED BY THEIR
political enemies—offer so much in the way of titillating entertainment that, as a general rule, people much prefer them to the humdrum truth. As a result, all sorts of scandalous stories have attached themselves to certain historical figures.

A case in point is the Renaissance noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia. Though revisionist historians portray her as a loving, pious, and charitable woman who was manipulated by her Machiavellian family, she has come down in legend as a ruthless, sexually ravenous femme fatale who engaged in incestuous relations with her father and brothers and dispatched her enemies with poison powders dispensed from a special hollow ring.

It was her ostensible fondness for this latter method of homicide that made her name a byword in the nineteenth century, when our country was rocked by a string of serial murder cases involving female poisoners. Each of these killers in turn was known as “The American Borgia.”

One of the earliest female psychopaths to be branded with this nickname was Mrs. Martha Grinder, also known as “The Pittsburgh Poisoner.” A full-fledged “homicidal monomaniac”—as serial killers were labeled in the Civil War era—Grinder
derived “fiendish delight” from serving arsenic-laced food to the people around her, then lavishing loving attention on them while they suffered excruciating deaths. Though convicted and executed for a single homicide—the 1865 murder of her next-door neighbor Mary Caruthers, who was tenderly nursed by Mrs. Grinder while dying horribly from the latter’s poisoned soup—“the wretched torturer” (as the Pittsburgh Post called her) was believed responsible for at least seven other murders. Her alleged victims included various members of her husband’s family, including his two younger brothers, both Union soldiers who died in agony shortly after returning from the war and partaking of meals prepared by Martha.

Her own demise was appropriately gruesome. Owing to a careless adjustment of the noose, her neck didn’t snap when the trap was sprung. “She strangled slowly,” wrote one spectator. “Struggling fearfully, she caught with her right hand the edge of the fallen trap and grasped and held it firmly for some time. At length, the struggles became feeble, died away to a shrug—and then ceased.” It took her a full twelve minutes to die.

M
RS.
G
RINDER’S PRESUMED
body count of eight victims was surpassed a few years later by that of another female serial killer, Lydia Sherman, aka “The Poison Fiend,” “The Queen Poisoner,” and “The Borgia of Connecticut.”

Her original name was Lydia Danbury. Born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1825, she was just seventeen when she married her first husband, Edward Struck, a forty-year-old widower with six children. Within a year of their wedding, she had given birth to a healthy boy. Five more children followed in rapid succession.

With a wife and twelve children to support, Struck—by then living with his family in Manhattan—took a job as a police officer. In 1863, however, he was fired in disgrace after failing to respond quickly enough when a knife-wielding drunkard attacked a hotel bartender.

By then, Struck’s children from his first marriage had grown up and left home, and one of Lydia’s babies had died of an intestinal ailment. That left five children in the household. With not a penny coming in to feed them, Struck plunged into a state of extreme despondency. Eventually he refused to leave his bed. Deciding that he had become more trouble than he was worth, Lydia killed him with arsenic-laced porridge. The attending physician diagnosed the cause of death as “consumption.”

Lydia was a forty-two-year-old widow with no income. Just a month after disposing of her husband, she began to feel disheartened by the difficulty of supporting five children on her own. In the first week of July, she poisoned the two youngest with arsenic.

Freed of these burdens, Lydia’s situation improved, particularly since her fourteen-year-old son, George, had gotten a job as a painter’s assistant. Unfortunately, George developed a condition known as “painter’s colic” and was forced to quit work. His mother gave him a week to recuperate. When he showed no signs of improvement, she killed him with arsenic-spiked tea.

Lydia Sherman murder pamphlet (
Courtesy of New York State Historical Association Library, Cooperstown.
)

Two of Lydia’s children still remained above ground: her eighteen-year-old daughter, also named Lydia, and little Ann Eliza, aged twelve. Ann Eliza was a frail child, frequently sick with fever and chills. Lydia began to feel oppressed by the burden of caring for her. In March 1866, she killed the little girl by mixing a few grains of arsenic into a spoonful of patent medicine. The cause of death was given as “typhoid fever.”

For the next six or seven weeks, the two Lydias, mother and daughter, lived together in a small apartment on upper Broadway. In early May, after paying an overnight visit to her half sister in lower Manhattan, young Lydia returned home with a fever and took to bed. Her mother did not feel like caring for her. On May 19, 1866, after dutifully taking the foul-tasting medicine her mother had fed her, the eighteen-year-old girl died in convulsive agony and was laid to rest beside the bodies of her father and five siblings.

Shortly afterward, Lydia moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where she met and married an old man named Dennis Hurlburt, a local farmer of considerable means.
Slightly more than one year later, Hurlburt fell violently ill and died after eating a bowl of his wife’s special clam chowder. His death was attributed to “cholera.”

The forty-six-year-old widow came into a considerable inheritance. If her motives had been entirely mercenary, she could have tossed away her arsenic and never killed again. While Lydia was happy to profit from her crimes, it was not greed that drove her but an addiction to cruelty and death: what her contemporaries described as a “mania for life-taking.”

Within months of Hulbert’s death, she married Horatio N. Sherman, a hard-drinking widower with four children. In mid-November 1870—just two months after the wedding—Lydia murdered Sherman’s youngest child, a four-month-old baby named Frankie. The following month, she poisoned his fourteen-year-old daughter, Ada.

The sudden death of his two children devastated Sherman. He began to hit the bottle harder than ever. After returning from one weekend bender, he took to bed for several days before returning to work on Monday, May 8, 1871. When he came home from the factory that evening, Lydia was waiting with a nice cup of poisoned hot chocolate. Two days later, he was dead.

Mr. Sherman drinks his
DEATH POTIOK
prepared by his wife.

The sudden, shocking death of the seemingly healthy Sherman aroused the suspicion of his physician, Dr. Edward Beardsley. Securing permission to conduct a postmortem, Beardsley removed the stomach and liver and shipped them to a toxicology professor at Yale for analysis. Three weeks later, he received the results. Sherman’s liver was saturated with arsenic. A warrant was promptly issued for the arrest of Lydia Sherman.

On June 7, 1871, she was picked up in New York City and transported back to New Haven. Her trial was a nationwide sensation. In the end—rejecting her lawyer’s suggestion that her despondent husband had taken his own life—the jury found her guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced her to life imprisonment in the state prison at Wethersfield. She died there of cancer eight years later, though not before being immortalized in a popular ditty:

S
O MONSTROUS WERE
the crimes of Lydia Sherman that her contemporaries felt certain they would never see her like again. But they were mistaken. Just eight years after the death of America’s “Queen Poisoner,” another homegrown Borgia succeeded to her vacated throne.

In early February, 1885, a poor, forty-two-year-old South Boston seamstress named Annie Freeman contracted pneumonia shortly after giving birth to her second child. Thanks to the largesse of her mother-in-law, a private nurse was brought in to tend to the bedridden woman. To the immense relief of her husband—an unskilled factory worker improbably named Prince Arthur—Annie slowly began to show signs of improvement. By the second week of February, the family physician, Dr. Archibald 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 medication. For her services, she had charged his estate $50 following the old man’s intensely unpleasant death—a bill that Sleeper’s survivors ultimately settled by remitting Mrs. Robinson’s overdue rent.