Vermilyea kept a boarding house in Chicago. Her first husband, Fred Brinkamp, died in 1893, and over the following years so did several of his children, her own daughter, and her second husband, Charles Vermilyea, who died in 1911. Life insurance was paid on a number of them.
Suspicion arose in October 1911 when a young Chicago police officer, Arthur Bissonette, who boarded with her, fell ill after eating at her table and told doctors he thought he had been poisoned. Arsenic was found. The bodies of several of the earlier dead were exhumed and arsenic was found in those as well, and the papers put the number at nine.
She was arrested and, before she could be tried, took poison herself. She died in Chicago in December 1911. There was no trial and no judgment, and the accounts of the individual deaths rest on the coroner's work and on the New York Times and Chicago press reporting of late 1911.
The figure of nine is therefore an investigative total from the weeks of the case and was never tested. She belongs to a group of American women of the period whose cases were tried in the newspapers as black widow poisonings and closed by their own deaths, and the standard of evidence in each should be read accordingly.