Edward F. Meyer, a ranch foreman outside Twin Falls, Idaho, married Lyda Trueblood in Pocatello in August 1920 and was dead by September 7. His death was entered as typhoid. He was the fourth husband she had buried in five years, and each of the four had carried life insurance naming her as beneficiary. When an autopsy in April 1921 found arsenic in his stomach, reported at more than nine times a lethal dose, the other graves were opened too.
She was born Anna Elizabeth Trueblood on October 16, 1892, in Keytesville, Missouri, in the middle of a large family, and the names Anna and Eliza were run together into the Lyda she went by. The Truebloods moved to Twin Falls in 1907 and settled south of the High Line Canal. On March 17, 1912, she married Robert Dooley, and the couple went to live on a ranch with his brother, Edward Dooley.
The family around her began to die in 1915. Her daughter by Dooley died that year, and Lyda said the child had drunk water from a dirty well. Edward Dooley died in August, and the cause was recorded as ptomaine poisoning. Robert Dooley fell ill and died of what was called typhoid fever on October 12, 1915. She collected on the insurance each time. The accounts do not agree about the girl. Newspaper captions in 1921 called her Laura Mae Dooley; later accounts name her Lorraine, give her birth year as 1913, and in some versions place her death after her mother's second marriage, at three or four years old. The surviving accounts do not settle which is right.
Her second husband, William G. McHaffie, married her in June 1917 and took her to Montana. He died there on October 1, 1918, in the worst months of the influenza pandemic, and the death certificate gave influenza and diphtheria. In March 1919 she married Harlen C. Lewis, an automobile salesman from Billings. He was dead within four months, of what was recorded as complications of gastroenteritis. Then came Meyer. From the first three husbands she had collected more than $7,000 in insurance; the policy on Robert Dooley alone was reported in 1921 at $4,600.
The case against her began inside her first husband's family. Earl Dooley, a Twin Falls chemist and a relative of Robert's, started looking into the deaths around her, and with a physician and a second chemist he concluded that Robert and Edward Dooley had died of arsenic poisoning. The Twin Falls County prosecutor, Frank Stephan, had the bodies of three husbands, the child and the brother-in-law exhumed. Some held measurable arsenic. In others, investigators pointed to how well the bodies had kept, a condition associated with arsenic. Arsenic was also reported in the pots and pans she had cooked with, and Stephan found the motive in the files of the Idaho State Life Insurance Company in Boise.
By then she had left Idaho. In California she married a fifth time, to Paul Vincent Southard, a Navy petty officer, and followed him to his posting in Hawaii. She was found in Honolulu in May 1921, as the New York Times ran the story under the headline "Charge Poisoning of Four Husbands." Southard refused to believe any of it. She was brought back to Idaho and arraigned on June 11, 1921, on a charge of murdering Meyer alone. None of the other deaths was ever tried.
Her trial opened in Twin Falls on October 3, 1921, and ran six weeks before a packed courtroom and front-page coverage in New York. The state's theory was that she had boiled arsenic out of flypaper and fed it to Meyer, and flypaper had been found in quantity where she had lived and at Meyer's ranch house. She denied it. Much of the rest of the case was circumstantial: the insurance, a marriage without evident affection, and her flight after the death. On November 4, 1921, after twenty-three hours of deliberation, the jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. The court sentenced her to ten years to life, and she entered the Idaho State Penitentiary in Boise on November 9.
Staff at the prison came to regard her as a model inmate and let her keep a garden in the women's ward, with roses planted outside her cell window. On the night of May 4, 1931, she sawed through a bar on that window and let herself down, by most accounts on a rope of bedsheets, and got over the wall. Waiting outside was David Minton, who had been paroled from the men's side of the prison three weeks earlier. Warden R. E. Thomas opened an investigation, and state officials came to believe that more than one person had helped her get out.
She spent fifteen months at large. In Denver she took a job as housekeeper to Harry Whitlock, a widower who lived with his mother and son, and in March 1932 she married him without telling him who she was. Her freedom ended in Topeka, Kansas, on July 31, 1932, and the accounts of how differ. A syndicated news caption that August said she surrendered at the Topeka post office to a detective who recognized her; later histories credit Whitlock with helping police, and one credits Minton with the tip. Whitlock had the marriage annulled. Minton, who had known her only inside the prison walls, then wrote to Warden Thomas confessing to her murders himself. The letter freed no one. She was back in the penitentiary in August 1932.
She was released on probation on October 3, 1941, after nearly twenty years in custody, and later received a full pardon; published accounts give the year as 1942 and as 1943. She married at least once more, to Hal Shaw. She died of a heart attack in Salt Lake City on February 5, 1958, aged sixty-five, and was buried at Sunset Memorial Park in Twin Falls under a flat stone that reads Anna E. Shaw. The newspapers of the 1920s had called her Lady Bluebeard, and later writers in Idaho called her Flypaper Lyda.