Anjette Lyles was a Macon restaurant owner whose trial in the fall of 1958 drew reporters from across Georgia and beyond. A Bibb County jury convicted her of murdering her daughter, Marcia Elaine Lyles, who was nine, with arsenic. The jury did not recommend mercy, and she was sentenced to die in the electric chair. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the verdict in July 1959.
The case was larger than one death. By the time Marcia died in April 1958, her father, her mother's second husband and her paternal grandmother had all died since 1952. Lyles was charged in those deaths too, according to WMAZ, the Macon television station. At her trial the state was allowed to present testimony that all three had died of arsenic poisoning and that she had collected money after each death. No trial on those charges is recorded, and the sentence for Marcia's murder was never carried out. After a sanity board found her insane, she was sent to the state hospital at Milledgeville, where she lived until her death in 1977.
Lyles was a cook and the owner of a diner in downtown Macon, as WMAZ described her. Her restaurant was a favorite of the town's lawyers, judges and businessmen. In 2015 WGXA, another Macon station, called it a gathering place for local power brokers.
Patricia Sanderfer, a longtime Macon resident, told WMAZ that Macon "had a small-town vibe" in those years and that "people were very close." "It was hard to imagine anyone killing people that they were supposed to love," Sanderfer said.
Little is recorded of Lyles's early life. In a January 2025 essay for CrimeReads, the novelist writing as P.J. Nelson described her as warm and affectionate with customers, blonde, and known around town for a flashy Cadillac. The same essay says she married Ben Lyles in October 1947 and that the family business was then known as Lyles's Restaurant. It gives the births of two daughters: Marcia, in July 1948, and a younger girl in 1951.
Ben F. Lyles Jr., her first husband, died in 1952. WGXA reported that he died of a mysterious illness that year. The CrimeReads essay adds that he fell ill in December 1951, died in January 1952, and that his doctors put the death down to encephalitis. It also says he had sold the restaurant in May 1951 for $2,500 without telling anyone, and that he was a heavy drinker.
At the time no one treated the death as a crime. His name came back into the record six years later, when he was one of three people whom witnesses at his widow's trial said had died of arsenic poisoning. The Supreme Court of Georgia's opinion names him among them.
The CrimeReads essay says that in 1955 Lyles bought the restaurant back, for $12,000, and reopened it under her own first name. That year she met Joe Neal Gabbert, whom the essay calls Buddy, an airline pilot and military veteran. According to the essay they married on June 24, 1955, before a justice of the peace in New Mexico, and he died that December after an illness with a rash, loss of appetite and swelling in his limbs.
Gabbert's death mattered at the trial in two ways. Witnesses testified that he too had died of arsenic poisoning. And among the documents the state put in evidence was a letter to the Veterans Administration, dated June 21, 1955, that purported to be written and signed by Joe Neal Gabbert. The state's evidence, as the Supreme Court summarized it, showed that this document and others were forgeries made by the accused. WMAZ reported that prosecutors pointed to her spending after his life insurance was paid as evidence of motive.
The third death put before the jury was that of Lyles's mother-in-law, the mother of her first husband. The Supreme Court's opinion calls her Mrs. Ben F. Lyles, Sr.; WMAZ gives her name as Julia Lyles. The CrimeReads essay says she fell ill in August 1957 and died in September 1957, and that Lyles had repeatedly asked to be put in her will.
Two documents tied to her were part of the state's case. One was an instrument dated September 2, 1957, which purported to be signed by Mrs. Ben F. Lyles, Sr., and which directed that a burial payment be delivered to the defendant. The other was a photostatic copy of a will said to be hers. WMAZ reported that prosecutors argued her signature on the will had been forged. The Supreme Court wrote that there was evidence the documents "were not only forgeries but forged by the accused."
Marcia Elaine Lyles was nine years old in the spring of 1958. She was Ben and Anjette Lyles's elder daughter. She died on April 5, 1958, the date given in the Supreme Court's opinion and in the presentment that charged her mother.
Reporting on her death centers on a warning that came too late. A worker at the restaurant wrote a letter to the Lyles family saying she believed Anjette Lyles was poisoning the child, WGXA reported in 2015. The family lived in Cochran, and Marcia died before they could get to the city. The CrimeReads essay gives a different account of the letter, saying an employee sent an anonymous note to the coroner suggesting a search of the house for poison.
Laboratory tests found arsenic in Marcia's body, WGXA reported. The death became the basis of the murder charge.
Bill Adams, a Bibb County Superior Court judge whose father served as a special prosecutor in the case, told WGXA that she poisoned her daughter with arsenic, and he spoke of the moment "when she got so brazen as to murder her own daughter." In a separate interview with WMAZ, Adams summed up the state's theory: "Anjette was doing this for the money, for life insurance money."
Once arsenic was found in Marcia, attention turned to the three earlier deaths in the family. At the trial, witnesses testified that Ben F. Lyles Jr., Joe Neal Gabbert and Mrs. Ben F. Lyles, Sr., had each died of arsenic trioxide poisoning, according to the Supreme Court's summary of the evidence. A medical examiner testified that small doses of arsenic had been given to all four over time, WMAZ reported.
Investigators who searched her home found a brand of ant killer that contains arsenic, along with items associated with voodoo, WMAZ reported. Years later, Mercer University's law school held original evidence and models from the case. When WGXA reporters were given access to them in 2015, the collection included black candles, objects that appeared to be connected to voodoo, and a box like the one that had held the ant poison investigators said she used.
Investigators also traced the money. WGXA reported that they noted a pattern of rising life insurance payouts and inheritances connected to the deaths. The Supreme Court wrote that the defendant "collected a substantial amount of money from the death of each victim."
Lyles was arrested in May 1958, according to the CrimeReads essay. A Bibb County grand jury then returned a special presentment charging that she murdered Marcia Elaine Lyles by giving her arsenic and arsenic trioxide. WMAZ reported that she was also charged in the deaths of her two husbands and her mother-in-law.
Her lawyers challenged the presentment with general and special demurrers. The trial court overruled them, and the Supreme Court later agreed that the presentment, which gave the specific date of the child's death, was sufficient in form and substance.
The trial took place in the fall of 1958 in the Bibb County Courthouse in Macon. It drew large crowds and national attention, WMAZ reported. Adams told WGXA that reporters came from local, state, national and international outlets. Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Constitution, whose colleagues called her the paper's "murder queen," covered it from the courtroom balcony with 27 other reporters, according to Richard L. Eldredge's Atlanta news site, Eldredge ATL.
Lyles was tried only for Marcia's death. The central legal fight was over the other three. As the Supreme Court later restated the rule, proof of a distinct, separate offense is not admissible unless there is some logical connection between the two. The prosecution argued there was one: each of the four deaths had the same unusual cause, arsenic trioxide poisoning, and in each case the defendant had collected money. The state's position was that her motive was the collection of insurance. The trial judge allowed the testimony, and the jury heard a number of witnesses say that she had poisoned three other people before her daughter.
The documents came in too: canceled checks, some dated after Marcia's death; the 1955 letter to the Veterans Administration in Gabbert's name; the 1957 instrument about burial money in her mother-in-law's name; and the photostatic copy of the mother-in-law's will. A handwriting expert testified about forged signatures, WMAZ reported.
Witnesses also described what she had said about the child. According to the Supreme Court, the state's evidence included a statement she made more than once shortly before Marcia's death, that "she would kill her if it were the last thing she ever did." The CrimeReads essay says restaurant employees testified that they had heard her threaten Marcia, that hospital staff described her going into a bathroom with her purse before bringing food to patients, and that she ordered a small coffin while doctors were still saying the girl might recover.
Adams told WMAZ that she believed she could persuade the jury of her innocence. "She thought she could charm the all-male jury into believing her when she said she did not do this," he said.
The jury found her guilty of murder without a recommendation of mercy. She was sentenced to be electrocuted. The CrimeReads essay says the trial began in October 1958 and lasted about a week, that the jury deliberated for less than an hour, and that protesters outside the courthouse carried signs calling for her to be burned as a witch.
WGXA reported that she was expected to be put to death within a year.
After the verdict, Lyles was held at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. There she gave Celestine Sibley an exclusive interview in her cell, Eldredge ATL reported. She wore lipstick and posed for the Constitution's photographer. Near the end of the visit Sibley passed her a tube of lipstick through the bars, the one item the warden had approved in advance.
Lyles asked Sibley what drew her to murder. "The truth intrigues me," Sibley answered. Lyles replied by suggesting that everyone has at some time wanted to kill someone, according to the Eldredge ATL account. Sibley's trial reports and the interview were later collected in a book of her journalism, "Celestine Sibley, Reporter."
Lyles's lawyers, William K. Buffington, Jack J. Gautier and Roy B. Rhodenhiser Jr., took the case to the Supreme Court of Georgia. The state was represented by Attorney General Eugene Cook, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Rubye G. Jackson, and two special assistant attorneys general, H. T. O'Neal Jr. and Charles F. Adams. The appeal was argued on May 11, 1959.
The defense raised many objections. Fifty-five of its special grounds attacked the testimony about the three earlier deaths. Four more attacked the documents. Another claimed that the trial jury had never been sworn. The defense also argued that the circumstantial evidence did not support the verdict.
The court, in an opinion by Justice Candler, rejected every ground. On the earlier deaths it relied on a line of Georgia decisions allowing proof of other crimes when they show a plan, scheme or motive, and it held that the state's evidence met that test, since each death was from the same uncommon poison and each had brought the defendant money. The court said its ruling did not conflict with Bacon v. State, the case in which the court had held that a separate crime cannot be proved unless it is logically connected to the one on trial. On the documents, it held that they were relevant because there was evidence that she had forged them. The jury-oath claim failed because the trial judge certified that the jury had been sworn.
The court acknowledged that the case against her was circumstantial, but it held that the evidence authorized the verdict, noting that the trial judge had approved it. On the evidence as a whole, the court wrote that it showed "nothing short of a deliberate, premeditated, well-concocted plan and scheme" to "murder an innocent child for no cause except to satisfy her selfish desire for money." The judgment was affirmed on July 8, 1959. Presiding Justice Wyatt dissented from the rulings on the earlier deaths and on the documents, and from the affirmance. A motion for rehearing was denied on July 23, 1959.
The death sentence was never carried out. WGXA reported that the governor created a sanity board, that it found her criminally insane, and that she was sent to the state asylum at Milledgeville. WMAZ reported that psychologists declared her insane. Adams told WGXA that the sentence was never commuted to life in prison, so that in theory it could have been carried out had she later been found sane. The CrimeReads essay says the commitment order stated that she would be executed if she ever recovered.
The CrimeReads essay also gives a reason that was discussed in Macon at the time: that local officials did not want their city to carry out the execution of a white woman. It says that at the hospital she told fortunes and talked about witchcraft with other patients, and that she privately told friends she was pretending to be insane to avoid the electric chair.
She spent the rest of her life at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville. She died there in 1977, at 52, of a heart attack, WMAZ reported. The CrimeReads essay gives the date as December 4, 1977.
The case became part of Macon's history and of Georgia's. Shannon Ray told WMAZ that it was "part of Macon's tarnished history that people don't like to talk about very much." Denver Pickard, a Macon playwright, told WMAZ that the root of the case was money, which he called the root of all evil. WMAZ and WGXA both reported that the case has been the subject of books, a play and television crime programs.
In 1999 Mercer University Press published Jaclyn Weldon White's book "Whisper to the Black Candle: Voodoo, Murder, and the Case of Anjette Lyles," with Celestine Sibley as a consultant. White called Lyles "a textbook sociopath," according to Eldredge ATL.
The Atlanta writer and director Chad Darnell later made "Murder Queens," a 20-minute black-and-white short film based on Sibley's reporting and her prison interview, according to Eldredge ATL. It was shot in a single day at the Liberty County Jail in Hinesville, with Jessica Miesel as Lyles and Andrea Frankle as Sibley, and it was shown at the Macon Film Festival.
The other three deaths. Lyles was convicted of one murder, her daughter's. The testimony that she poisoned her two husbands and her mother-in-law was heard by the jury as evidence of plan, scheme and motive, and the Supreme Court held it admissible; a dissenting justice disagreed with that ruling. She was charged in those deaths, according to WMAZ, but no record shows that any of the charges came to trial.
The letter. WGXA reported that a restaurant worker wrote to Marcia's family, who lived in Cochran. The CrimeReads essay says an employee wrote anonymously to the coroner. Which account is right, and whether there was more than one letter, has never been settled.
The sentence. WGXA, quoting Judge Adams, reported that the death sentence was never commuted.
The insanity finding. WGXA attributes the finding to a sanity board created by the governor; WMAZ says psychologists found her insane. The CrimeReads essay says she told friends she was faking. No court ruling on that point is reported.
The motive for sparing her. The CrimeReads essay says Macon officials did not want their city to execute a white woman. That is a description of local feeling, not a finding by any court or board.
October 1947: Anjette Donovan marries Ben Lyles (CrimeReads).
July 1948: Marcia Elaine Lyles is born (CrimeReads).
1951: a second daughter is born (CrimeReads).
January 1952: Ben F. Lyles Jr. dies; doctors attribute the death to encephalitis (CrimeReads; WGXA gives 1952).
1955: Lyles buys back the restaurant and, on June 24, marries Joe Neal Gabbert in New Mexico (CrimeReads).
June 21, 1955: date of a letter to the Veterans Administration in Gabbert's name, later held at trial to be a forgery by the accused.
December 1955: Joe Neal Gabbert dies (CrimeReads).
September 2, 1957: date of an instrument, in her mother-in-law's name, directing burial money to her; later shown at trial to be forged.
September 1957: her mother-in-law dies (CrimeReads).
April 5, 1958: Marcia Elaine Lyles, 9, dies; tests find arsenic.
May 1958: Lyles is arrested (CrimeReads); a Bibb County grand jury charges her by special presentment with Marcia's murder.
October 1958: trial in Macon; the jury convicts her without a recommendation of mercy, and she is sentenced to death.
After the verdict: held at Georgia State Prison, Reidsville, where she is interviewed by Celestine Sibley.
May 11, 1959: appeal argued in the Supreme Court of Georgia.
July 8, 1959: conviction and sentence affirmed (Lyles v. State, 215 Ga. 229); rehearing denied July 23, 1959.
Later: a sanity board created by the governor finds her insane, and she is committed to Central State Hospital, Milledgeville.
December 4, 1977: she dies at Central State Hospital, aged 52 (date from CrimeReads; year, age and cause from WMAZ).
1999: Jaclyn Weldon White's book on the case is published by Mercer University Press.
2015: WGXA views evidence from the case held by Mercer University's law school.