Early in 1888 Sarah Jane Whiteling went into a Philadelphia drugstore for something to kill roaches. The druggist sold her a box of Rough on Rats, an arsenic pesticide sold for household use, and warned her that it could kill a person too. On the way home, she later told the coroner, she thought over what the man had said. The devil must have put it in her head, she said, to give it to her husband. She mixed him a glass of eggnog and put the powder in it.
John Whiteling, thirty-eight, died on March 20, 1888, in the rear apartment the family rented on Cadwallader Street. A neighbor, Elizabeth Gilbert, had come in to help. He was in great pain and vomiting, and she laid hot plates on his stomach and hot irons on his back; his last words were that it felt so good. When Gilbert called downstairs that he was dying, his wife said she could not look at him die, and stayed out of the room. She reported the death as a suicide. The family doctor, George Smith, put it down to inflammation of the bowels.
Nine-year-old Bertha, called Birdie, was Sarah's daughter by an earlier marriage. She died on April 25, of what was first listed as gastric fever. Sarah later said Bertha had been accused of stealing from her teacher, and that she had thought it would make her a better girl to give her something to make her weak and sick. A neighbor who went to the child's bedside said the girl begged for water and medicine and said her mother gave her little; Sarah said she had the insurance money from John's death in a savings bank and could not get it out without two weeks' notice. Willie, two, the son she had with John, died on May 26. She told the undertaker that the children might have been poisoned by candy.
Each death paid a small insurance benefit, on policies ranging from fifty to two hundred dollars. The totals reported ran from a little over three hundred and fifty dollars to three hundred and ninety-nine. The family was desperately poor; they owed everybody, she said, the grocer and everybody else.
Nobody had noticed the monthly pattern. After Willie died Dr. Smith went to Coroner Samuel Ashbridge, who let the boy be buried and then had all three bodies exhumed. The pathologist Henry Formad and the chemist Henry Leffmann found arsenic in every one. A drugstore clerk remembered the sale, and Gilbert remembered that Sarah had, for no reason she could see, given her a box of Rough on Rats. Detective Geyer and the coroner questioned her at length, and she confessed twice, the second time grabbing Ashbridge's arm and sobbing that she wanted the prayers of everyone. On June 15, 1888 the coroner's jury found that John, Bertha and Willie Whiteling had died of arsenic poisoning administered by Sarah Jane Whiteling. The Philadelphia Inquirer printed her confession in full five months before her trial and called it a full and absolute confession. The papers called her the Wholesale Poisoner and the modern Borgia.
She was tried in late November 1888 for Bertha's murder, defended by George W. Arundel and Henry D. Paxson. Whether she had done it was not in dispute; her sanity was. Dr. Alice Bennett, the first woman to run the women's division of the state hospital for the insane at Norristown, had examined her three times and testified that she was of low mental organization, physically diseased and undoubtedly insane. Bennett's theory tied the killings to the months in which her periods failed to come and she feared she was pregnant; she also recorded that Sarah had meant to take the last dose herself, because she wanted the whole family together under the ground. The prosecution answered with Charles K. Mills, John Chapin and others, who agreed she was of weak mind but said she had not been insane. The prosecution also called a clairvoyant, Mrs. Walz, who said Sarah had come to her after the children died to ask whether she would get out of her trouble. After Judge Allison's charge the jury took about two hours to convict her of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to death.
Governor James Beaver signed the death warrant on January 11, 1889, for March 27. Her lawyers took Bennett's findings to the Board of Pardons on February 20, and Bennett carried the case to the Medico-Legal Society of New York on March 13, where the argument split the members. The execution was put off. Told of the delay, Sarah said: let me die, don't spend any more money or waste any more time on my behalf.
She was hanged inside Moyamensing Prison at 10:07 on the morning of June 25, 1889. Pennsylvania had ended public hangings in 1834. She was the first woman executed in Philadelphia since 1737, and she was buried next to her husband and children.