Williamson was born in 1904 and lived her whole life in Gallitzin, a small town in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. She never married, was known as a churchgoer, and looked after other people's children.
She died of natural causes on August 25, 1980, aged seventy-six. She had left a letter with instructions to be opened after her death, telling the authorities to look in a trunk in the attic of her house. In it were the remains of five infants, wrapped in newspaper and cloth dating from between 1925 and 1932.
The letter said the children were hers, that they had been born at home, and that she had killed them at birth, suffocated or strangled, and it named the man she said was the father, a married man in the town who had died years earlier.
There was no prosecution, because she was dead. There was no trial and no forensic contest, and the account of the deaths is entirely her own written statement, made from beyond any consequence.
The case is in the archive because of the disclosure rather than the detection. Five children were born and killed in a house in a small town over seven years, and the fact was unknown for half a century until the woman who did it chose to say so.