Archerd was born in 1912 and had worked as a hospital orderly, where he learned what insulin does to a person who does not need it. He married repeatedly and moved between California and Nevada.
Between 1947 and 1966 six people close to him died: three wives, a nephew and two associates. Each collapsed and died in circumstances consistent with a cerebral event, and each death produced money for him through insurance or inheritance. Insulin given to someone who is not diabetic drives blood sugar down until the brain fails, and in the 1940s and 1950s it left nothing a routine post-mortem would look for.
He was arrested on July 27, 1967. The case was built on the pattern of the deaths, his medical background, his presence at each, and the financial trail.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1968, in what is recorded as the first American murder conviction to rest on insulin as the weapon. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 when the capital statutes were struck down, and he died in prison in 1977.
The interval is the striking part: nineteen years between the first death and the last, with the same method each time, and no investigation until the sixth. His entry belongs with the insulin cases in this archive and is the earliest of them.