Lyles was born in 1925 and ran a restaurant in Macon, Georgia, that she had inherited from her first husband. She was sociable, well known in the town, and consulted fortune tellers and kept books on voodoo, which the press made much of at the trial.
Between 1952 and 1958 four people close to her died: her first husband Ben Lyles, her second husband Joe Neal Gabbert, her mother-in-law Julia Lyles, and her own daughter Marcia, aged nine. Each was attributed at the time to illness. She collected insurance on each of them, and she was the beneficiary of policies taken out shortly before some of the deaths.
The case broke with Marcia's death in 1958. The child was in hospital for weeks with what doctors could not explain, a nurse became suspicious of her mother's behaviour at the bedside, and arsenic was found. The three earlier bodies were exhumed and arsenic was found in all of them.
She was convicted of Marcia's murder in 1958 and sentenced to death. The last woman sentenced to death in Georgia for many decades. In 1960 the Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted the sentence on a finding of insanity and she was committed to the state hospital at Milledgeville, where she died in 1977.
One conviction covers four deaths. The insurance documents were the spine of the case, and the entry notes that the voodoo material, which dominated the contemporary coverage, was decoration on a straightforward insurance motive.