Marcia Elaine Lyles, nine, was dying in a Macon hospital in the spring of 1958, and her doctors did not know why. Ten days before her death her physician voiced concern about her symptoms and asked the Bibb County medical examiner, Dr. L. H. Campbell, to see her. Then one of the workers at her mother's restaurant wrote to the family warning that Anjette Lyles was poisoning the child. Before the relatives could get to Macon from Cochran, Marcia was dead, on April 4, 1958. Laboratory tests found arsenic. The coroner ordered three earlier bodies exhumed, and all three showed signs of arsenic poisoning.
She was born Anjette Donovan in Macon on August 23, 1925. In 1947 she married Ben F. Lyles Jr., who owned the Lyles Restaurant downtown, near the Bibb County courthouse, and they had two daughters, Marcia in 1948 and Carla in 1951. Ben died on January 25, 1952. In 1955 she began seeing Joe Neal "Buddy" Gabbert, a pilot for Capitol Airways, and married him. That October he went into the hospital for minor surgery on his wrist, came home, developed a fever and a rash that spread across his body, and died on December 2, 1955, while his doctors were still at a loss. With the insurance she bought a house and a new car and changed her name back to Lyles, which raised eyebrows in town. Her first mother-in-law, Julia Lyles, died too, and then Marcia.
On May 6, 1958, she was arrested at a hospital where she was being treated for a leg complaint, and charged with four murders. Sheriff James Wood said officers searching her home had found an assortment of voodoo supplies and recipes for love potions, and four bottles that had held ant poison with an arsenic base. The prosecution said she had gained as much as $50,000 from the deaths. Her trial opened in Macon on October 8, 1958, and was the most talked-about criminal trial in the city in the twentieth century. She was tried only for Marcia's death, but the prosecution was allowed to show that she had killed the other three as well. On October 15 the Bibb County Superior Court jury convicted her, and she was sentenced to die in the electric chair; her lawyers' appeal stayed the execution date set for December 5. The other three indictments were held back while the appeal was pending.
A sanity commission found her to be a chronic paranoid schizophrenic, and she was committed to the Central State Hospital at Milledgeville. By several accounts Governor Ernest Vandiver and the town's leaders did not want Georgia to execute a white woman; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted her death sentence to commitment. At the hospital she told fortunes for the other patients and lectured them on witchcraft, and she told friends there, "They think I'm crazy as hell and I'm gonna let them keep thinking it. Because if they don't, they're gonna fry my ass!" She died at Milledgeville on December 4, 1977, at fifty-two, and was buried near Ben and Marcia in the Donovan family plot at the Coleman's Chapel United Methodist Church cemetery near Wadley.