Zella Archerd collapsed on July 25, 1956, two months after she married William Dale Archerd. She was his fourth wife. Five years later, on September 2, 1961, his teenage nephew, Burney Kirk Archerd, died in Long Beach. On November 3, 1966, Mary Brinker Post, a writer who had become his seventh wife, died too, having married him under one of his aliases, James Lynn Arden. Each death looked natural. On July 27, 1967, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Archerd on three counts of murder, and on March 15, 1968, a jury convicted him of all three. The weapon in each case, the California Supreme Court later wrote, was unique: insulin.
Insulin given to a person who does not need it drives blood sugar down until the brain fails, producing a coma that can look like a stroke or heart failure, and in those decades a routine autopsy did not measure blood sugar or insulin. It was not then a prescription drug and could be bought over the counter. Archerd, a salesman who had worked for a time as a mental hospital attendant and was often out of work, knew what it did. He was fifty-five at his conviction and had been married seven times.
The prosecution did not stop at the three deaths charged. To show a common plan, it put in evidence three more: William Edward Jones, who died on October 12, 1947, in Fontana; Juanita Archerd, his fifth wife, who died on March 13, 1958, in Las Vegas; and Frank L. Stewart, who died on March 17, 1960. It also introduced a staged hit-and-run accident involving Archerd on October 10, 1960. Each death brought him money through insurance or an estate. According to the experts at trial, in the cases of his three dead wives he was the only person with them at the time the insulin had to have been given.
The investigation that connected the deaths took years and relied on exhumations and new laboratory methods, and the long gap between the first death and the indictment was raised on appeal. On December 10, 1970, in People v. Archerd, the California Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence, holding that the delay was adequately explained by the record. In 1972 the court struck down the state's death penalty, and his sentence became life imprisonment.
Archerd was born on May 5, 1912, in Dardanelle, Arkansas, according to most accounts, though a family genealogy places his birth in Madill, Oklahoma. He died of pneumonia on October 29, 1977, at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, at sixty-five. Two British physicians who studied the case in 2008 called him a serial matrimonialist and concluded that his wives had a habit of dying, and that the three deaths on which he was convicted were probably not the only killings he committed.