This entry corrects a story rather than telling one. Lavinia Fisher was never tried for murder, was never convicted of murder, and no contemporary evidence connects her to a single killing. She is called America's first female serial killer in a great deal of published material and on the ghost tours run in Charleston. Nic Butler, a historian at the Charleston County Public Library, puts the position plainly: the Fishers were real, and there is a paper trail of their trial, conviction and execution, but it is completely different from the story that has been fictionalised.
She was born about 1793. No birth record survives, and the year is inferred from her marriage, the offences and her age at death. She and her husband John Fisher operated the Six Mile House, a roadside boarding house about six miles north of Charleston, South Carolina. It was one of two houses, with the Five Mile House, used by a gang of highwaymen who robbed the wagon trade running in and out of the city. That trade mattered to Charleston's economy, and by early 1819 the robberies had become serious enough to demand a response.
In February 1819 a group of vigilantes rode out, cleared the area, and left a young man named David Ross to keep watch. The next morning Ross was set upon by the gang and brought before Lavinia Fisher, who, on the account that reached the court, took him by the throat and put his head through a window. He got away and went to the authorities. A traveller named John Peeples then arrived at the Six Mile House looking for a room, was told there were none but invited in for tea, and was robbed. He escaped and reported it. The Fishers were arrested on February 18, 1819 along with several others, and more of the gang were taken over the following days.
They were indicted for assault with intent to murder and common assault. The charge was changed to highway robbery, which was a capital offence in South Carolina at the time, and it is that charge they were convicted on in May 1819. Historians have noted the irregularity: they were convicted of an offence they had not been formally tried for.
While they were awaiting the outcome, a grave was found in the woods near the Six Mile House containing two bodies: a white man, shot at about the time of the vigilante raid, and a young African American woman who had been buried there some two years earlier. Nobody was ever charged over either death, and with the number of people passing through the house it was not possible to establish who was responsible. Two bodies were found. Not hundreds.
Their appeal took the better part of a year, and they spent it in the Charleston jail: first in an isolation cell on the lower level through the summer, then, on Lavinia's pleading, in a less secure part of the upper floor. On September 13, 1819 John made a hole beneath a barred window and they lowered themselves on knotted blankets. He reached the ground. The rope broke before she could follow, and he would not leave without her. Both were recaptured and security was tightened.
The motion for a new trial was rejected in January 1820 and the sentence confirmed the following month. John and Lavinia Fisher were hanged in Charleston on February 18, 1820, a year to the day after their arrest. She was twenty-seven. Both proclaimed their innocence to the end. William Heyward, tried separately for the same attacks, was hanged later.
What accumulated afterwards is the part most people know: poisoned oranges or tea, a tilting bed that dropped guests into a pit beneath the inn, hundreds of skeletons in the cellar. None of it appears in the trial record or the contemporary newspapers. The pit is the easiest to dispose of. Houses in the South Carolina Lowcountry do not have basements. The most quoted line, that she told the crowd from the gallows to give her any message they had for the devil because she would be seeing him shortly, comes from later retellings and has never been verified. Accounts differ even on the wedding dress.
The best modern account is Bruce Orr's Six Miles to Charleston, published in 2010; Orr is a former Charleston-area homicide detective and worked the documents rather than the folklore. She is carried in this archive because she is asked about constantly, and because almost everything in circulation about her is untrue. What she was convicted of was robbery, and what she was hanged for was robbery.