ARCHER-GILLIGAN, Amy

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ARCHER-GILLIGAN, Amy
Little is known about the early life of the woman who would later commit, in the words of her prosecutor, commit "the biggest crime that ever shocked New England." Born in 1873 and married to James Archer in her early twenties, Amy Archer produced her only child—a daughter, Mary—in 1898. Three years later, billing herself as a nurse, without apparent qualifications, she opened a nursing home for the elderly in Newington, Connecticut. Despite "Sister Amy's" relative lack of experience, there were no complaints from her clients, and Newington was sad to see her go in 1907, when she moved to Windsor, 10 miles north, and opened the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm.
For the first three years, it was business as usual in Windsor. Twelve of Amy's clients died between 1907 and 1910, a predictable mortality rate that brought her no unusual profit. The surprise casualty of 1910 was James Archer, his death ascribed to natural causes. Amy waited three years before she remarried, to Michael Gilligan, and her second husband lasted a mere 12 months. The family physician, Dr. Howard King, saw no reason for alarm, nor was he concerned by the deaths of 48 clients at Amy's rest home, lost between 1911 and 1916. The number might have seemed excessive for a home with only 14 beds, but Dr. King accepted Sister Amy's diagnoses in the deaths, his negligence and senility combining to short-circuit suspicion. In fact, Amy had devised what seemed to be the perfect get-rich scheme, inducing new clients to pay $1,000 in advance for "lifetime care," then cutting short their days with poison or a smothering pillow, blaming each successive death on old age or disease. With Dr. King's obliging death certificates in hand, authorities were loathe to cast aspersions, but ugly rumors began to circulate around Windsor by 1914. Two years later, surviving relatives of elderly Maude Lynch took their suspicions to police, and an undercover officer was planted in the rest home, collecting evidence that led to Sister Amy's arrest in May 1916. Postmortem examinations found traces of poison in Michael Gilligan and five deceased patients, leaving Amy charged with six counts of murder and suspected of numerous others. (Physicians calculated a "normal" resident death toll for 1911–16 at eight patients, compared to Amy's fortyeight.)
Dr. King came out swinging, his shaky reputation on the line, describing Sister Amy as a victim of foul persecution. Poison had been planted in the several bodies, he maintained, by "ghouls to incriminate Mrs. Gilligan." Prosecutor Hugh Alcorn responded by calling the case "the worst poison plot this country has ever known." Objections from Amy's lawyer winnowed the charges to one murder count—in the May 1914 death of patient Frank Andrews—and she was convicted in July 1917. Amy's life sentence was successfully appealed on technical grounds, but a second jury returned the same verdict, leaving her caged in Weathersfield Prison. In 1923, a rash of "nervous fits" produced a diagnosis of insanity, and Amy was transferred to a state asylum where she died in 1962, at age 89.