Marian Doyle, seventy-four, had been in Dorothy Matajke's care for about two weeks when she died in Little Rock in September 1986. Her death passed as the death of a frail old woman. What caught the police's attention was her bank account. Matajke, a live-in companion to elderly people, was charged first with forgery and theft for looting it, then with forging checks on the account of another client, Paul Kinsey, and with being a felon in possession of a firearm. When officers searched her home they found mislabeled bottles of drugs and tranquilizers and three bottles of arsenic-based ant poison.
Doyle's body was exhumed on October 23, 1986, and the tests found enough arsenic to kill her. Paul Kinsey, about seventy, had been lying seriously ill at St. Vincent Infirmary for a month. At a news conference Sergeant John Martin of the Little Rock homicide division said that Kinsey had become ill, and Doyle had died, after apparently consuming arsenic placed in their food and drink. On November 24 Matajke, fifty-six, was charged with first-degree murder in Doyle's death and first-degree battery against Kinsey, and she pleaded not guilty. She also faced five counts of forgery, two of theft by receiving, and one of perjury.
The police were already looking backward. Matajke had moved into the Kinsey home on March 24, 1985, to care for Paul and his wife Opal. Opal Kinsey died on April 5, 1985, less than two weeks later; the cause was recorded as a recently discovered cancer. Paul's health failed quickly afterward, and his relatives put it down to grief and loneliness. A police spokesman, Lieutenant R. L. "Bert" Jenkins, said Opal Kinsey's body would be exhumed to test for arsenic, and that if the tests were positive, the bodies of four other elderly people who had died under Matajke's care might be exhumed too. Opal Kinsey was exhumed on December 5, 1986, and the results were kept sealed while the other charges were pending.
She had done this kind of work for years. A resident of Nevada, Iowa, Matajke had begun working as a nurse's aide and paid companion to the elderly and sick in the 1970s. On September 5, 1973, she was convicted of forgery at Nevada and sentenced to prison; the Associated Press gave the term as seven years, later accounts as five years for fraud. She escaped in 1974, stayed free until she was caught on October 7, 1980, and was paroled in December 1983. After her release she moved to Little Rock and went back to living in with elderly clients.
Paul Kinsey died in February 1987; accounts give the date as February 10 and as February 20. The battery charge was replaced with a second count of first-degree murder. In June 1987 Matajke was convicted in Pulaski County of murdering him, and she was sentenced to life in prison. Two months later, under a negotiated plea, she received another sixty years for killing Marian Doyle. The published record does not show that any charge was ever brought in Opal Kinsey's death, or what the tests on her body found.
Some details differ from source to source. Doyle's first name is spelled both Marian and Marion, and her death is dated September 18 and September 19, 1986. The Kinseys' ages are given variously as seventy, seventy-one and seventy-two.