On December 1, 1851, the Forrest family sat down to dinner in their house on High Street in Cincinnati, and before night James Wesley Forrest, about two years old, was dead. It was the third death in the house in a matter of weeks. Cassandra Forrest, an invalid, had fallen violently ill after the first meal their new nurse cooked for her and died within hours, of what was taken for cholera morbus. Her son John Edward, about eight, had died in less than an hour of the same sickness. This time the doctors suspected poison, a post-mortem found arsenic in the little boy's stomach, and arsenic was later found to have killed his mother and brother as well. The nurse, a girl of nineteen named Nancy Farrer, was the only person in the house who had not been ill.
She had come to the Forrests about three weeks after the death of her previous employer. In July 1851 she had gone to nurse Mary Ann Green, who was recovering from childbirth while her husband was away with a good deal of money left in her keeping. A family friend, thinking Nancy not bright enough to be a nurse, hired a Mrs. Anna Bazley to help. Mrs. Green was soon vomiting violently, and the ice water prescribed to settle her stomach made it worse. Her baby died, and in October she died too. A neighbor had overheard one of the two nurses say, "It's under the bolster, you can easily take it," and Mrs. Bazley say, "Well, Nancy, you know more about it than the doctors," to which Nancy answered, "I expect I do." Mrs. Bazley disappeared soon afterward. Druggists later testified that they had sold Nancy arsenic at different stores.
Nancy Farrer had been born on July 24, 1832, in Farrington, Lancashire, in England. Her father, a shoemaker, emigrated with her younger brother when she was about ten, and she and her mother followed two years later. Her mother had joined the Mormons in England and believed herself a prophetess, the wife of the Savior and the mother of all living things; the family was said to have spent about two years at Nauvoo. Her father drank, tried twice to kill himself, and died of drink in Cincinnati's Commercial Hospital in 1847. Nancy could read a little but could not write, and put her mark on the indictment.
On December 4, 1851, Elisha Forrest swore an affidavit charging her with killing his youngest child. In January 1852 she was indicted for all four deaths, and she was tried in the Court of Common Pleas before Judge A. W. G. Carter, beginning on February 18, for the death of James Wesley alone. Her lawyers were John F. Hoy and a thirty-year-old Cincinnati attorney named Rutherford B. Hayes, appointed by the court, who called it "the criminal case of the term" and set out to argue that her constitution and upbringing diminished her responsibility. A lecturer on the brain, Dr. J. R. Buchanan, testified that her temperament favored imbecility and that she was a subject for compassion rather than punishment. The jury was out from Saturday afternoon until Tuesday evening, March 2, came back once to ask for more instruction on imbecility, and convicted her of first-degree murder.
Before sentencing, the court tried Mrs. Bazley for Mary Ann Green's death. Nancy had told Hayes privately that Bazley had done it and taught her how, and promised to swear to it; on the stand she cleared Bazley completely, and the jury acquitted without leaving the box. Asked afterward why she had lied to him, she said, "Oh, well, one woman is enough to hang for murder, and I didn't mean to hang Mrs. Bazley." Judge Carter sentenced her to be hanged in the jail yard. Hayes's own mother wrote to him that if the governor pardoned her it would be only because she was a woman, and that this was degrading to her sex.
Hayes took the case to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which at its December 1853 term reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial, three justices to one, with Chief Justice Thomas W. Bartley dissenting. In December 1854, instead, a jury in the probate court held an inquest of lunacy and found her of unsound mind. "I succeeded in finally getting an acquittal of my first life case," Hayes wrote to a friend. It made his name in Cincinnati; he went on to the governorship and, in 1877, the presidency.
Nancy Farrer was taken to the Lick Run asylum, and later transferred to Longview. Judge Carter recalled meeting her near Lick Run years afterward, when she greeted him cheerfully and reminded him that he had not hanged her after all. She said she was one of the keepers now and pointed out the patients she took out to air as her pets. One day, by his account, she went out and did not come back, and no one knew where she went.