Anna Cunningham

Victims

5 deaths in the family - 1 conviction, for the murder of her son Walter, and the parole board later concluded she was innocent even of that; the other four deaths were attributed to arsenic and never charged

Years active

1918 - 1922

Location

Lake County, Indiana, USA

Method

Poisoning (arsenic)

Status

Convicted at Crown Point, Indiana on July 26, 1925 of the murder of her youngest son Walter and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Indiana Womens Prison. She was PAROLED in June 1933 after the prison board concluded she was innocent of that murder, having served about eight years, and returned to Gary to live with a daughter and son-in-law. No later record of her has been found and her date of death is not established.

Cunningham was born in 1873 and lived in Lake County, Indiana, near Gary. Between 1918 and 1922 her husband David and four of her children died: Isabelle, twenty-eight, Harry, twenty-three, Charles, eighteen, and Walter, thirteen. Each death was attributed to illness at the time.

Suspicion arose in 1923 when her son Walter died and a doctor who had attended more than one of the deaths refused to certify it. Arsenic was found, exhumations followed, and arsenic was found in the others. She had taken out life insurance policies on each of them.

She confessed to the five killings and was tried on one count. She was convicted in 1925 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The case ran in the Chicago and Indiana papers as another black widow poisoning, alongside Tillie Klimek's in the same period and the same region, and the two were reported together at the time. Only one murder was tried, and the account of the other four rests on her confession and the exhumation findings.