Amy Duggan was born in Milton, Connecticut, in October 1873, one of ten children. She married James Archer and in 1907 the couple opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in a house on Prospect Street in Windsor. It was one of the first private nursing homes in the state and it filled quickly.
The business model was the mechanism. Residents could pay a weekly rate, or they could pay a single lump sum of around a thousand dollars for care for the rest of their lives. A great many chose the lump sum, and a great many of those did not live long afterwards. Between 1907 and 1917 sixty people died at the home, and the figure was noticed only because a local newspaper, the Hartford Courant, started counting.
Her husband James died in 1910 shortly after she took out a policy on him. Her second husband, Michael Gilligan, died in 1914, three months after the marriage, having made a will in her favour that she had written.
The Courant's investigation prompted exhumations, and arsenic and strychnine were found in five bodies. She was tried in 1917 for the murder of Franklin Andrews, a resident, convicted, and sentenced to hang; the conviction was overturned on appeal and at the second trial in 1919 she pleaded guilty to second degree murder and was given life. In 1924 she was declared insane and moved to the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane at Middletown, where she died on April 23, 1962, aged eighty-nine. The case is generally accepted as the source for the play and film Arsenic and Old Lace.