In the poison register kept by Dr. J. W. Powers, a druggist in Pacific, Missouri, the name Bertha Gifford appears again and again against sales of arsenic and strychnine. The book survives at the Washington Historical Society. In August 1928 the Franklin County prosecutor, Frank Jenny, took the ledgers of the Pacific pharmacies before a grand jury, with testimony that she had bought arsenic several times just before one of her patients died. On August 23 the jury indicted her for first-degree murder in the deaths of Edward P. Brinley and Elmer Schamel.
She was born Bertha Alice Williams on October 30, 1871, in Morse Mill, Missouri, one of ten children of William Poindexter Williams and Matilda Lee. She married Henry Graham, and they had a daughter, Lila. After Graham's death she married Eugene Gifford and had a son, James. Around the farm country of Catawissa, west of St. Louis, she was known for her cooking and for going to anyone who was sick, neighbors and relatives alike, to nurse them.
Over the years seventeen people died in her care, from a child of fifteen months to a man of seventy-two. When a St. Louis newspaperman came to Catawissa and wrote a story naming at least five people who had died mysteriously while she was nursing them, the prosecutor ordered a grand jury in November 1927 to look into Brinley's death. She threatened libel suits against anyone who testified, witnesses fell silent, and the jury did not indict. She and Gene moved to St. Louis County. Her former neighbors kept pressing, and eight months later Jenny tried again with the pharmacy ledgers.
She was arrested at Eureka, Missouri. The bodies of Brinley and the two Schamel boys, Elmer and Lloyd, were exhumed, and all three contained large amounts of arsenic. According to newspaper accounts she admitted putting arsenic in the medicine she gave them. "I did it to ease their pains," she was reported as saying, and later, "I told you about giving some of them arsenic, maybe I gave some others arsenic too." The next day, learning that her statement had been made public, she became hysterical and denied all of it. In her cell she moaned and paced and kept a blanket ready to throw over her head at the sound of footsteps, so that no one could photograph her. Her husband stood by her, saying she had been nervous and had not known what she was saying.
She was tried in Union, Missouri, for the three deaths. The trial lasted three days. She said she was innocent and that any poisoning had not been intentional. The jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she was committed to Missouri State Hospital No. 4, a psychiatric hospital at Farmington.
She never left. She died there on August 20, 1951, at seventy-nine. The grand jury investigation had raised questions about twelve more deaths beyond the five first examined, but no other case was ever brought. Arsenic was sold freely and used in medicine at the time, and it has never been settled how many of the seventeen deaths in her care she caused, or whether she meant to cause them.