She was born Lyda Trueblood in 1892 in Keytesville, Missouri, and grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho. Between 1915 and 1920 four of her husbands died, along with her brother-in-law and her infant daughter. Each death was recorded as typhoid fever or influenza, which in the years of the 1918 pandemic was an unremarkable finding. She held life insurance on each of the men.
The pattern was noticed after the death of her fourth husband, Edward Meyer, in 1920, when a Twin Falls chemist recalled selling her flypaper. The standard domestic source of arsenic, which was boiled to extract it. Bodies were exhumed and arsenic was found.
She was tried in Idaho in 1921 for the murder of Meyer, convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to ten years to life. The other deaths were never charged, which is the range of one to six in this roster.
On May 4, 1931 she escaped from the Idaho State Penitentiary with the help of a fellow prisoner, married again while at large under another name, and was recaptured in Kansas City in 1932. She was paroled on October 3, 1941, pardoned in 1943, and died on February 5, 1958.
She used a series of names across her marriages and her time at liberty, including Lyda Southard, Lyda Meyer, Lyda Ambrose and Lyda Whitlock, and the American press of the 1920s called her Lady Bluebeard. This archive also carries a page under the Ambrose name, which is the same woman; it is marked as a duplicate of this entry and carries no separate victim count, so the six deaths here are the whole of it.