Sarah Jane Whiteling was born in 1848 and lived in Philadelphia with her husband John, a labourer, and their two children, Bertha, nine, and Willie, two. The family was very poor.
In March 1888 John Whiteling died of what was recorded as an inflammation of the bowels. In April Bertha died, and in May Willie. In each case there was a small burial society or insurance payment, amounting in total to a few hundred dollars. A doctor who had attended two of the deaths became suspicious at the third and refused a certificate. The Philadelphia press called her the Wholesale Poisoner.
The bodies were exhumed and all three contained arsenic, bought as rat poison. She confessed, saying that she had killed her husband because he could not support them, and the children because she could not feed them and did not want them left as orphans.
She was convicted of first degree murder and hanged at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on June 25, 1889, aged forty-one. Hers is one of a set of nineteenth-century American cases in which a woman with no money and no options used the one cheap poison available over the counter, and it reads less as a career than as a series of decisions made in destitution.