Ellen Etheridge

Victims

4 - four life sentences, one per stepchild killed, and a further five years for the attempted murder of a fifth who survived

Years active

June/October 1913

Location

Bosque County, Texas, USA

Method

Poisoning (arsenic)

Status

Pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 23, 1913, within weeks of the last death. Tried again on the remaining counts and given a total of four life terms, plus five years for the attempted murder of a fifth stepchild who survived. Held at the Goree State Farm for Women at Huntsville, where she died in 1932 after about eighteen years in custody, aged about sixty-six. She had been reported as still serving in February 1930, aged sixty-four.

Etheridge was born in 1866 and married J. D. Etheridge, a wealthy Bosque County, Texas, farmer and widower with eight children, in 1912. She was reported to be his second wife and to have resented the attention he gave the children.

In June and October 1913 four of the children died: two in June and two in October, of what was recorded as illness at the time. Arsenic was found after the fourth death and the earlier bodies were examined.

She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 23, 1913, the whole matter concluding within weeks of the last death.

The accessible record is Texas press reporting of 1913 and the summaries that descend from it. A date range of 1912 to 1913 is sometimes read as her lifespan; those are the years of the marriage and the killings. She was born in 1866.