William Dale Archerd was 55, white-haired and soft-spoken, when Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives arrested him in July 1967. Time magazine described him as a sometime hearing-aid salesman with a deferential manner who had married seven times. A grand jury had just charged him with murdering two of his wives and his teenage nephew, and investigators linked him to three more deaths reaching back twenty years. The common thread, the prosecution said, was insulin, a hormone the body makes for itself and one that, for most of the years in question, no laboratory test could find in a dead person.
In March 1968 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, sitting without a jury, found Archerd guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death on each. When the California Supreme Court upheld the judgment in December 1970, it wrote that his was "the only known reported case of murder by insulin poisoning in the United States." The sheriff of Los Angeles County, Peter J. Pitchess, wrote in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin that the case was a "medico-legal first": the first time, he said, that an insulin overdose had been measured from brain tissue and a murder proved that way.
Little is known of Archerd's early life; his date and place of birth and his schooling are not on record. What is known is his work. From 1939 to 1941 he was an attendant on the insulin shock ward at Camarillo State Hospital, a state mental hospital. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that the hospital used insulin shock treatment for schizophrenia, and that Archerd learned about insulin in a course there around 1941.
According to the California Supreme Court, Archerd was trained as a member of the ward's shock team. He was allowed to give insulin injections under supervision and to give glucose to bring patients out of shock. Twice, the court said, he injected fellow workers "so that they would know what it was like." Sheriff Pitchess wrote that a former co-worker testified that Archerd had given her small doses so she could learn the early symptoms of shock. Pitchess also reported that Archerd had remarked that death by insulin could be the "perfect" murder.
Time magazine explained the danger in plain terms in 1967. Insulin governs how the body uses sugar for energy. In a diabetic it lowers blood sugar that is too high, but given to someone who does not need it, it can push blood sugar so low that the person suffers convulsions, falls into a coma and dies.
Before any of the deaths in the case, Archerd had a criminal record. The indictment alleged, and the trial court found true, a prior felony conviction for possessing morphine sulphate, for which he had served a term in state prison. Time reported that he had been convicted on a narcotics charge in the early 1950s.
The first death the prosecution laid before the court came in Fontana, California, in October 1947. Archerd was living there with his wife Eleanor and was also seeing a nurse at a local hospital who, the court said, was in love with him. At his request she bought a bottle of insulin. He told her what it was for.
A friend of his, William Edward Jones, had been arrested and was out on bail. According to the evidence summarized by the Supreme Court, the plan was to stage a car accident in which Jones would appear to be injured, with an insulin injection to mimic the effects of a head injury. While Jones was in the hospital, the family of the key witness against him would be paid to go back to Indiana, leaving no one to testify. Archerd suggested that Jones's family raise money for the purpose, and they raised several thousand dollars; the witness's family received $300 and a used car. Sheriff Pitchess put the sum Archerd collected from the Jones family at $10,000. Time gave Jones's age as 34.
Archerd and Jones picked up the insulin at the nurse's house around midnight on October 10, 1947. Police later found the damaged car and Jones. In the hospital his symptoms were not recognized for what they were. Jones's sister, a trained nurse, saw Archerd give him an injection of a preparation that was meant to be given by the doctor. Jones fell into a coma and died at 11 a.m. on October 12. The cause of death was recorded as undetermined.
The nurse married Archerd in August 1949. For years she told no one about the insulin or the plan. She later testified that Archerd had told her that no test could measure the level of insulin in a body, so a death from insulin would have to be recognized by observation, and that insulin shock looked so much like other conditions that no one would think to look for it.
Archerd was never charged with Jones's death. It came into his 1968 trial as one of three uncharged offenses the prosecution offered to show a common plan, and at trial the experts attributed it to low blood sugar caused by injected insulin.
Archerd's marriage to the nurse was annulled on May 14, 1956. The next day, May 15, he married Zella Winders. Time, which counted her as his fourth wife, gave her age as 48. She had just sold her home in Covina and received $10,000 from escrow, which she put into a joint checking account with her new husband. While the sale was pending, he had pressed the real estate office to hurry it, saying he needed the money for a large transaction.
At about 10 p.m. on July 24, 1956, ten weeks after the wedding, the couple reported a robbery at the Covina home. Archerd told the police that two men had come in, one armed with a gun and one with a knife, that one of them had injected Zella and said he had injected Archerd too, and that the men had left with $500 to $600 in cash and a revolver.
The officer who took the report did not believe it. Nothing in the house had been ransacked, no door or window had been forced, and valuables lay untouched. Zella told the officer she had seen only one man, about her husband's height, and asked whether he thought it might have been her husband. Officers found a bottle of insulin, about a quarter full, in a vacant lot nearby; where it had been bought could not be traced.
A doctor called to the house that night found nothing wrong with either of them and left a sedative in case Zella grew nervous. During the night she became ill and began to sweat heavily, and at about 8 a.m. she had convulsions. Archerd telephoned the doctor at eight to say he was worried, but did not mention the convulsions. He hired a practical nurse to sit with Zella, who lay in a coma.
Around noon Archerd was alone with his wife. He then went to see her grown children. He told her daughter that her mother was a little upset but was resting in bed with a trained nurse in attendance, and he asked her son to come by that evening. The son noticed a large roll of bills in his wallet. At about 4 p.m. Archerd called the doctor again, saying Zella was worse, and again said nothing of convulsions. The doctor found her in a deep coma and suggested a hospital. Archerd said she was afraid of hospitals and that he had promised not to send her to one.
Zella Winders Archerd died at 5 p.m. on July 25, 1956. Her death was ascribed to terminal bronchopneumonia following a coma of undetermined origin. At the 1968 trial her doctor gave his opinion that she had died of a massive overdose of insulin, and other causes were ruled out.
The money told its own story. After her death some checks and check stubs were missing, and $8,798.80 had been drawn out of the joint account on checks that did not appear on the stubs, among them counter checks for cash endorsed by Archerd. A few days after her death he offered $1,000 in cash to recover a repossessed new Thunderbird. Her estate was insolvent; he was unemployed and was the beneficiary of her insurance.
The investigating officer, the Supreme Court said, did not believe the robbery story but had no proof of a criminal agency. Medical opinion at the time held that the cause of death could not be shown to be criminal. There was no test that could show an insulin injection. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that Sergeant Harry Andre of the sheriff's Homicide Bureau led the early inquiries, and that the coroner's toxicologist could find no test for insulin.
About two months after Zella's death Archerd met Juanita Plum and moved into her home in Monrovia. She had divorced her husband in April 1956, keeping the family home, about $10,000 in savings and $1,000 in checking, and she remained the beneficiary of her former husband's insurance policies. The couple separated around August 1957, made up, and were married in Las Vegas on March 10, 1958. During the marriage about $10,633 went out of her account. Archerd was unemployed most of the time.
On the morning of March 12, two days after the wedding, Archerd called an ambulance for her. A doctor examined her and released her within minutes, noting no disease and that she had been drinking. Archerd took her back to their motel about 9 a.m. A second doctor saw her later that morning and thought her intoxicated; Archerd told him she had taken barbiturates and been drinking. Her condition declined through the day, most of which she spent alone with her husband.
The night before her death Archerd telephoned her daughter, asked her to bring $1,000 to $2,000 to Las Vegas, and told her not to tell her father. She told her father anyway, and the two drove to Las Vegas, but they gave Archerd no money. Juanita was taken to a hospital at about 4:30 p.m. on March 12, unconscious. Convulsions began the next morning, glucose did not help, and she died at 3 p.m. on March 13, 1958. When she died, her daughter accused Archerd to his face of killing her mother. He threatened to kill the daughter if she did not stop. Juanita's will left him one dollar.
The attending physician blamed cardiac failure from barbiturate poisoning. The trial experts disagreed. In their view her signs fit neither a barbiturate overdose nor the low blood sugar that can follow heavy drinking; they fit only insulin shock, from injections given before she reached the hospital. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that Clark County authorities in Nevada were notified. Juanita's death was the second of the three uncharged offenses at the 1968 trial.
On October 4, 1957, during the months he was separated from Juanita, Archerd married a divorced woman under the name James Lynn Arden. They married again in La Habra on May 21, 1959, this time under his own name. Her former husband, Frank L. Stewart, left the hospital in February 1960 with severe arteriosclerosis; his doctor warned that drinking could hasten his death. Time gave his age as 54.
About a week before Stewart died, Archerd told his wife's son-in-law that Frank could not live much longer and that the two of them had arranged an accident that would bring in insurance money, and he asked his listener for a loan. To his girlfriend at the time, Archerd laid out the plan: Stewart would appear to have a fall at the Las Vegas airport, and an insulin injection would produce the look of a head injury. Archerd registered the two of them under the false name "Mr. and Mrs. Don Nightengale."
Stewart was admitted to a Las Vegas hospital at 12:30 a.m. on March 17, 1960. Archerd said he had slipped on debris in the airport's men's room. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that Stewart and Archerd, using the Arden alias, had flown to Las Vegas together. Archerd's girlfriend later testified about what she saw him do that day. Stewart died at 10:30 that night.
The autopsy surgeon first put the death down to a cerebral hemorrhage from arteriosclerotic disease. After he learned Stewart's history and heard the girlfriend's account, he concluded that an insulin injection had caused the death. Stewart had bought two flight insurance policies at the airport, one for $62,500 naming his former wife, with a note asking her to divide it among his two daughters and hers, and another for $18,750 naming Archerd's mother. Neither was paid. Sheriff Pitchess noted that the policies paid only on death or the loss of a limb. She separately had a $2,450 policy, which she put into a joint account with Archerd and from which he withdrew substantial sums. Stewart's death was the third uncharged offense in the case.
About six months after Stewart's death, Archerd asked his girlfriend to help stage another accident, this time with himself as the victim. Using a car that had been advertised for sale, with the two of them posing as "Mr. and Mrs. Pierce," he damaged the car's aerial and windshield wiper, wiped off fingerprints and left the car in a parking lot. On October 10, 1960, police found him about six blocks from the place of the supposed collision and took him to a hospital. He received $900 in workmen's compensation, plus medical costs. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that Archerd also filed a $50,000 lawsuit over the supposed hit-and-run and that the suits were dismissed with prejudice.
Some time later Archerd turned up with a dilated pupil that his doctor could not explain medically. The doctor's conclusion was that the most likely cause was eye drops Archerd had given himself. The staged accident was admitted at trial along with the three uncharged deaths.
Archerd's brother died at work on January 22, 1960, leaving a 15-year-old son, Burney Kirk Archerd. Burney received a $7,000 settlement of the workmen's compensation claim for his father's death. Archerd and his mother became the boy's co-guardians, and Archerd also received more than $1,000 of the death benefits paid by the local union. Substantial sums were later withdrawn by Archerd from the guardianship account. Time put the boy's inheritance at $5,000.
Burney was healthy and in good physical condition. One afternoon in August 1961 he was at his grandmother's home, and at about 2 p.m. he helped a neighbor roll up a garden hose. At about 4 p.m. Archerd picked him up in his car; the boy had no injuries then. By about 5 p.m. the sheriff's office had been told that Burney had been in a possible hit-and-run and was at a hospital in Long Beach with his uncle.
Archerd's story was that Burney had been walking home from Lakewood and was partly across an intersection when a red truck knocked him down, that the boy wrote "red truck" and the license number on a piece of paper, walked about four miles home, and that his grandmother then called Archerd. A red truck with that license number was found on a used car lot. It was in poor mechanical condition and made a great deal of noise, it was in view of the lot's office, no one had seen or heard it leave, and it bore no recent scratches or dents. A claim made on Burney's behalf against the used car company was dropped. Archerd told other people that the boy had been hurt on a minibike.
In the hospital Burney had a sore hip with a chipped bone and a widely dilated left pupil, but no other neurological signs. He was awake, alert and hungry. At 7 a.m. on August 23 he was still hungry and alert. Archerd visited throughout that day, several times alone with him. By 10 p.m. the boy had fallen suddenly into a coma, and the family was called. Surgeons operated and found no bleeding, bruising or clot in the brain. His blood sugar was low, with no apparent natural cause, and glucose helped only for a while. On August 26 he was moved from the surgical intensive care unit, where attendants were constantly with him, to a private room, and there Archerd was again alone with him several times. Burney Kirk Archerd died on September 2, 1961.
The immediate cause of death was given as swelling of the brain and congestion of the lungs, with early pneumonia. Slides of the brain showed damage that was overwhelming, uniform and sudden, and not caused by injury. At trial the experts concluded that the boy had been given a massive dose of insulin in the late afternoon of August 23, which probably did most of the damage, and they attributed the later swings in his blood sugar to further injections. The dilated pupil, the court said, had no explanation except a drug.
Archerd's mother, the boy's other guardian, had died on August 24, 1961, while Burney lay in the hospital. The balance of her checking account went to Archerd, and with Burney's death he became the sole heir of both his mother and his nephew. Time, writing in 1967, reported the mother's death as coming three weeks after the boy's and said the investigation had not disclosed its cause; the court record dates it to August 24.
Sheriff Pitchess wrote that in 1961 Lieutenant Andre read a newspaper article about the nephew's death and, with Sergeant Harold White, reviewed the hospital records and consulted a doctor, who put the chance of an insulin overdose at 50-50. The Supreme Court noted that in 1961 only two laboratories, both in New York, ran insulin tests routinely, and that insulin injected days before death would probably have dissipated by the time the boy died.
Mary Brinker Post was, in Time's words, a widow, an author and a public relations woman. Time gave her age as 59 in 1967 and counted her as Archerd's seventh wife. On April 18, 1965, Archerd married her under the name James Lynn Arden, and on November 12, 1965, they married again.
She had a good job, with checking and savings accounts, and received a raise after the wedding. Her husband was out of work; his only income was $165 from a hearing-aid company. He never wrote a check on her accounts or withdrew money from them himself, yet between May 1965 and October 1966 they were drained of $21,620.12. Many of her debts had been run up by him. On October 20, 1966, she filed for bankruptcy. By late October the couple had separated, though she was writing to him almost every day, begging him to come back.
On October 28, 1966, she was in a minor car accident in Montclair. Her injuries were superficial, and she left the scene without help. She saw her doctor of five years, who found her alert; she reported no headache or confusion and was sent home. Archerd came back to her on October 31.
She felt fine on Tuesday, November 1. Neighbors noticed lights burning in the house at 11 p.m. and still on at three or four in the morning. At about 8 a.m. on November 2, Archerd, wearing a good suit and appearing very calm, came to the neighbors and said he could not wake his wife. They found her in a coma. He told the ambulance attendant she had taken sleeping pills and handed over the bottle, but did not mention the convulsions she had had earlier that morning. She arrived at the hospital in serious condition with very low blood sugar; barbiturates were also present. Nurses remarked to one another on how calm and indifferent he seemed. He told her doctor that she had had a drink or two and possibly sleeping pills before going to bed around 2 a.m., and that her convulsions had woken him at three. The doctor was puzzled that he had not reported that at once.
Mary Brinker Post Arden died on November 3, 1966, the date charged in the indictment. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that the cause first listed was a drug overdose as against a blood clot in the brain with low blood sugar. At trial the experts concluded that she had died of a massive injection of insulin given around midnight, before she was taken to the hospital, and that the barbiturates had not caused her coma.
According to the Supreme Court, Archerd had been a suspect since Zella's death in 1956, and each later death added to the suspicion. Proof was another matter. A British case in 1958 had used a test in which material from the body was injected into mice. A test that could measure insulin in blood without that step was developed only in 1960, and it was refined in 1963 and 1967 by Dr. Edward Arquilla, a professor of pathology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mary Arden's death in November 1966 brought the file back to Sergeant White, Sheriff Pitchess wrote, and this time a full-time investigation followed. White, by then a lieutenant, was assigned to the case with the support of senior officers, and Deputy District Attorney Raymond J. Daniels Jr. joined it. Time reported that the department put eight detectives on the case after the last death, which its headline called "one coincidence too many."
With the help of a special assistant assigned by the district attorney, the investigators turned to the question of how to detect insulin at all. They contacted Eli Lilly Laboratories, which told them about Dr. Arquilla, a scientist they had not heard of. In January 1967, Lieutenant White learned from him about the different kinds of low blood sugar and about the brain damage visible in the preserved slides from Burney and from Mary. Arquilla found that the damage to the boy's brain matched massive doses of long-acting insulin given eight to ten days before his death, and that Mary's death followed a similar dose given hours before her admission to the hospital.
The Supreme Court described what White took from that meeting: proof that someone had caused the deaths did not depend on a witness who had seen an injection. White went back to relatives, friends and neighbors of each of the dead. He had Dr. Robert E. Tranquada, a specialist in internal medicine with a particular interest in diabetes and low blood sugar, interview them as well. He brought together the attending physicians, autopsy surgeons and neurosurgeons who had treated the six people so they could consult with one another, and the hospital and autopsy records were reviewed in the light of the new information. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that more than 400 witnesses to the deaths from 1947 through 1966 were found and reinterviewed. Dr. Grace F. Thomas, a psychiatrist who was an expert in insulin shock therapy and had worked at Camarillo, reviewed the records and said each one showed signs of massive insulin doses.
The central medical finding, as the Supreme Court summarized it, was that none of the six had any history of low blood sugar, and none had ever shown or complained of its symptoms.
After a month-long hearing at which more than 130 witnesses testified, a Los Angeles County grand jury returned a three-count indictment for murder on July 27, 1967, and Archerd was arrested at once, according to Sheriff Pitchess. The counts covered the deaths of Zella Winders Archerd, Burney Kirk Archerd and Mary Brinker Post Arden. The indictment also alleged his earlier felony conviction for possessing morphine. Time reported in August 1967 that he was in jail facing the charges and that, if convicted, he would be only the second known insulin murderer, after Kenneth Barlow, an English male nurse sentenced to life imprisonment in 1957 for killing his wife with insulin.
Archerd pleaded not guilty. He was represented first by the public defender, then by appointed counsel Philip Erbsen, with Ira K. Reiner, a former prosecutor, as co-counsel. Because of public interest in the case, the trial court restricted publicity outside the courtroom. The defense moved to dismiss the indictment, to suppress evidence, to sever the counts, and to dismiss on the ground that the charges came too long after the deaths. The motions were denied or reserved and later denied, as was a motion to suppress grand jury evidence about the Nevada deaths. Archerd received full discovery of the prosecution's case.
Archerd and all counsel waived a jury, so the case was tried to a single judge. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that the trial was held before Judge Adolph Alexander in Department 25 of the Los Angeles Superior Court, began on December 4, 1967, and lasted 36 trial days. The reporter's transcript ran to 5,476 pages.
Alongside the three charged deaths the prosecution put in evidence the deaths of Jones, Juanita Archerd and Stewart and the staged hit-and-run of 1960, to show a common plan. Fifteen experts testified, among them attending physicians, autopsy surgeons and specialists in diabetes, low blood sugar, pathology and insulin. Their shared opinion was that all six people had died of low blood sugar caused by insulin injections. Dr. Thomas described what attendants on the Camarillo shock ward had been taught.
Pitchess described a late addition to the medical case. On the first day of trial, he wrote, Dr. Arquilla received preserved tissue samples taken at Mary Arden's autopsy. Arquilla extracted insulin from the brain tissue and measured it in two ways: by radioimmunoassay, a laboratory method, and by its effect on the blood sugar of diabetic mice. He concluded that the tissue held markedly raised levels of insulin, which he said could only be explained by a massive dose from outside the body. Neither prosecutor knew his results until he gave them on the witness stand.
Archerd testified in his own defense. He admitted injecting himself, and some of his wives, for migraine headaches, but denied ever injecting any of them with insulin. Partway through the trial he was hospitalized for six weeks with a heart attack.
On March 15, 1968, according to Sheriff Pitchess, Judge Alexander found Archerd guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. The court found each to be murder by poison and willful, deliberate and premeditated murder, and found the morphine conviction true. On the uncharged deaths, the trial court found them proved beyond a reasonable doubt, a higher standard than the law required for that purpose.
The judge sentenced Archerd to death on each count; Pitchess wrote that the sentence was death in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison. In remarks the Supreme Court later quoted at length, the judge said the decision was his alone. He said he hated the death penalty as much as anyone and doubted that it deterred crime, but that it remained in the statutes and he had sworn to uphold the law. The Legislature, he reasoned, must have meant death for aggravated cases, and this was one: he called Archerd "more evil than any I have ever seen before." He said he had not slept well for several nights, not from a troubled conscience but from the weight of deciding a human life, and that failing to impose death in this case would be cowardly. At a later hearing on a defense motion to reduce the sentence to life, he said that "if ever there was an aggravated offense or offenses, this is the case," and that he imposed death only because it was the law.
The death sentences brought an automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court, where Reiner argued Archerd's case. He raised four main claims.
First, he accused the trial judge of misconduct. Affidavits from Reiner and Archerd said that during the six-week hospitalization the judge had let it be known through trial counsel that he would find Archerd guilty and impose life, but wanted to hear his story, a message the defense called an offer of a lighter sentence to coax Archerd into giving up his right to remain silent. The affidavits also said that on December 13, 1967, Reiner had seen the judge, the prosecutor and a sheriff's investigator talking in chambers, and that the judge had asked doctors outside court about insulin. The Supreme Court found nothing in the record to support the first two claims. They had never been raised with the trial judge, so he had no chance to correct any error or make a record, and the court noted that Reiner, as a former prosecutor, knew the rule. On the third, the judge himself had said on the record that he had tried to learn about insulin from doctors and met a "stone wall." The court disapproved of such outside consultations, because counsel could not question the experts involved, but held that the error did no harm. Consulting textbooks on insulin, it added, was proper.
Second, Reiner argued that the three uncharged deaths should have been kept out. The court held that they were relevant to identity, intent, malice, premeditation, motive, knowledge of the means used and the method, and were admissible despite their prejudicial effect. It agreed that the evidence was substantial enough to support the trial court's finding that they were proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Third, he argued that the long gap between the deaths and the indictment had denied Archerd a speedy trial and due process. The court held that the speedy-trial guarantee applies only once a charge is pending, that there is no time limit for prosecuting murder, and that the delay had to be judged as a question of fairness. Reviewing the slow progress of the medical science, it found the delay neither unreasonable nor deliberately caused to harass him, and found no showing that any crucial defense had been lost; the prosecution had found the witnesses Archerd asked for, or agreed to what they would say.
Fourth, he argued that the judge had wrongly believed the death penalty was mandatory. The court read the judge's words as showing that he knew he could choose life or death and chose death because he found the case aggravated.
On December 10, 1970, in an opinion by Justice McComb expressing the unanimous view of the court, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgments of conviction and the sentences of death. It was in that opinion that the court called the case the only known reported murder by insulin poisoning in the United States, adding that only one other had been reported worldwide, in England.
The three deaths that were not charged, of William Edward Jones, Juanita Archerd and Frank L. Stewart, were never the subject of a conviction. They entered the case as evidence of a common plan. The trial court found them proved beyond a reasonable doubt for that purpose, the Supreme Court called them "uncharged murders" and found the evidence substantial, and Sheriff Pitchess counted six murders in all. But Archerd was never tried or convicted on any of them, and he denied ever injecting anyone with insulin.
Accounts differ on several details. Time put Burney's inheritance at $5,000; the Supreme Court gave the workmen's compensation settlement as $7,000. Time placed the death of Archerd's mother three weeks after the boy's; the court record dates it to August 24, 1961, before his death. The Supreme Court spelled the boy's name Burney, while the sheriff's article spelled it Bernie. Sheriff Pitchess wrote that the boy was brought to the hospital on August 21, 1961; the court record does not give the date of the supposed accident. The sheriff dated the English insulin prosecution to 1958 and Time dated Barlow's sentence to 1957, while the Supreme Court opinion places the English case in 1956. Pitchess described the nurse Archerd married in 1949 as his third wife; Time counted Zella as his fourth, Juanita as his fifth and Mary as his seventh.
The cause of death of Archerd's mother was not examined in the court record, and she was not among the six deaths put in evidence.
1939 to 1941: Archerd works as an attendant on the insulin shock ward at Camarillo State Hospital.
October 10, 1947: a staged car accident in Fontana involving his friend William Edward Jones.
October 12, 1947: Jones dies in hospital; the cause is recorded as undetermined.
August 1949: Archerd marries the nurse who bought the insulin in 1947.
May 14, 1956: that marriage is annulled.
May 15, 1956: Archerd marries Zella Winders in Covina.
July 24, 1956: the couple report a robbery at her home.
July 25, 1956: Zella Winders Archerd dies.
October 4, 1957: Archerd marries a divorced woman under the name James Lynn Arden.
March 10, 1958: he marries Juanita Plum in Las Vegas.
March 13, 1958: Juanita Archerd dies in Las Vegas.
May 21, 1959: he marries her again, in La Habra, under his own name.
January 22, 1960: his brother dies at work.
March 17, 1960: Frank L. Stewart dies in Las Vegas.
October 10, 1960: Archerd stages a hit-and-run with himself as the victim.
August 23, 1961: his nephew Burney falls into a coma in a Long Beach hospital.
August 24, 1961: Archerd's mother dies.
September 2, 1961: Burney Kirk Archerd dies, aged 15.
April 18, 1965: Archerd marries Mary Brinker Post under the name James Lynn Arden; they marry again on November 12, 1965.
October 20, 1966: Mary files for bankruptcy.
October 28, 1966: she has a minor car accident in Montclair.
November 3, 1966: Mary Brinker Post Arden dies.
January 1967: Lieutenant Harold White consults Dr. Edward Arquilla.
July 27, 1967: a Los Angeles County grand jury indicts Archerd on three counts of murder; he is arrested.
December 4, 1967: trial begins before Judge Adolph Alexander, jury waived.
March 15, 1968: Archerd is found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder; he is sentenced to death on each count.
January 1969: Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess describes the case in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.
December 10, 1970: the California Supreme Court unanimously affirms the convictions and death sentences.