Lydia Danbury was born in New Jersey in 1824 and was orphaned young. She married Edward Struck, a New York policeman, and had six children by him. Struck lost his job in 1863 after an incident at a saloon, took to drink and to his bed, and in 1864 she gave him arsenic in his gruel, later saying she had done it because he had become useless to the family and she could not feed the children. The children were Martha, six; Edward Struck Jr, almost four; and William, nine months.
Having killed him, she killed the children. Six of them died over the following year, one after another, of what doctors recorded as remittent fever and bronchitis. She said afterwards that she could not support them.
She moved to Connecticut, married an elderly farmer named Dennis Hurlburt in 1868, and he died within fourteen months leaving her his property. She then married Nelson Sherman, a widower with children, in 1870; his baby, his daughter Ada, and then Sherman himself all died by May 1871. A doctor who had attended Sherman was not satisfied, kept the liver, and had it analysed at Yale. It was full of arsenic.
She was tried at New Haven in April 1872 for second degree murder, convicted, and sentenced to life. From prison she gave a full written confession to a newspaper listing eleven deaths, which was printed and sold. The press called her Queen Poisoner and the Derby Poisoner. She escaped briefly in 1877 and was recaptured, and died at Wethersfield prison on May 16, 1878.