On the morning of May 29, 1914, Franklin R. Andrews, a resident of the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm on Prospect Street in Windsor, Connecticut, was out working in the garden, a robust man by every account. By evening he was dead, and the death certificate said gastric ulcer. When his sister, Nellie Pierce, went through his letters, she found the owner of the home, Amy Archer-Gilligan, pressing him again and again for money. It fit a pattern she and other families had started to see: residents who handed over a large sum often did not live long afterward.
Amy E. Duggan was born in Milton, Connecticut, on October 31, 1873, the eighth of ten children of James Duggan and Mary Kennedy, and went to the New Britain Normal School in 1890. She married James Archer in 1896 or 1897, and their daughter, Mary, was born in December 1897. In 1901 the couple were hired to look after an elderly widower, John Seymour, in Newington; after he died in 1904 his heirs turned the house into a boarding home for the elderly, and the Archers stayed on to run it for a fee as Sister Amy's Nursing Home. When the heirs sold the house in 1907, the Archers used their savings to buy their own place on Prospect Street in Windsor Center, one of the first private homes of its kind in the state. Residents could pay by the week, or pay a lump sum, around a thousand dollars, or sign over an insurance policy, in return for care for the rest of their lives.
James Archer died in 1910, officially of Bright's disease, a few weeks after his wife took out an insurance policy on him, and the payout kept the home running. In 1913 she married Michael W. Gilligan, a well-off widower with four grown sons who wanted to invest in the business. He died on February 20, 1914, after three months of marriage, of what was recorded as an acute bilious attack, leaving a will that gave her everything. The will was in her handwriting.
Between 1907 and 1917 sixty people died at the home. Only twelve of those deaths came in 1907 to 1910; forty-eight came in 1911 to 1916. Nellie Pierce took her suspicions to the local prosecutor, who largely ignored her, and then to the Hartford Courant, which published the first of its articles on the Murder Factory on May 9, 1916. Police had arrested Archer-Gilligan at the home the day before. Gilligan, Andrews and three other residents were exhumed, and all five had died of arsenic or strychnine. There was enough arsenic in Andrews' stomach, it was said, to kill half a dozen strong men. Local merchants testified that she had bought large quantities of arsenic, for rats, she said. Suspicion for a time fell on the home's doctor, because he and some residents had signed for arsenic purchases, until the records showed her sending residents to the drugstore to buy it.
A Hartford grand jury charged her with five murders, and her lawyer got the case narrowed to one, Andrews. The trial opened in June 1917, and after four hours of deliberation the jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and she was sentenced to hang. The governor stayed the execution while she appealed, and the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors threw out the conviction on a technicality and ordered a new trial.
The second trial opened in June 1919. Her lawyers argued insanity, and her daughter testified that her mother was addicted to morphine. Accounts differ on how it ended: some say she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on July 1, 1919, others that she was found guilty of it. Either way the sentence was life. She served it first at the state prison at Wethersfield, an old fortress that normally held only men.
In 1924 she was declared insane and moved to the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, where she spent the rest of her life, much of it, the Courant later wrote, sitting in a black dress trimmed with lace with a Bible on her lap, praying. She died there on April 23, 1962, at eighty-eight or eighty-nine. The case had led the legislature in 1917 to require licensing, inspection and annual death reports for homes for the elderly. The New York playwright Joseph Kesselring, who followed it, turned it into a comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace, which ran on Broadway from 1939 to 1944 and was filmed by Frank Capra. In 2015 the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that her medical records from her confinement were exempt from the state's open records law.