On October 2, 1913, Ellen Etheridge sent three of her stepchildren, Oscar, who was five, his brother Richard and their sister Pearl, seven, on the long walk to fetch the mail at the Etheridge place in Bosque County, Texas, northwest of Waco. Expecting them to come back thirsty, she had buttermilk and cornbread waiting. The buttermilk was laced with arsenic. All three were soon in pain and vomiting. The boys had drunk the most, and within about four hours both were dead in convulsions. Pearl had drunk little and lived.
It was the second double funeral in the family that year. In June, two younger children had died of what their stepmother said was probably diphtheria, after days of burning pain, vomiting and diarrhea. One was Eula Mae, born in 1911; another account names her brother Harrison. Four deaths among the children of one household in four months could not be put down to bad luck. The authorities sent a package taken from the house to an analytical chemist, Professor S. P. Spencer, who reported on October 7, and on October 10 the analysis of the boys' viscera showed arsenic.
Ellen Walker West Etheridge was a daughter of the Reverend John Walker of Matagorda County. By one later account she was forty-six, a widow living with her parents and without much money, when her sister found her work as a housekeeper for J. D. Etheridge, a well-off widower with a large family. They married in the spring of 1912. She was his second wife, and she came to believe that he had married her to cook and keep house and that his affection went to the children, eight in all, and not to her.
Held in the jail at Meridian, the county seat, she confessed in mid-October. According to the county attorney, H. S. Dillard, she said she had poisoned the first two children with concentrated lye in June and the other two with arsenic in October. Jealousy of her husband's devotion to his children was given as the reason. The press of the day called her a modern Lucrezia Borgia, and the confession was reported with the caveat that it might be "the hallucinations of a diseased mind."
She was tried in the Eighteenth District Court at Meridian, Judge O. L. Lockett presiding, on four indictments for murder and one for attempted murder, the first of them for Oscar's death. On December 23, 1913, less than three months after the boys died, the jury deliberated for an hour and found her guilty on all five. It fixed life in the penitentiary for each murder and five years for the attempt on Pearl.
She served her sentence at the Goree State Farm for Women in Huntsville, and she died there in her sixties.