Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (20 page)

Was it possible, they inquired, that her brother-in-law had inadvertently ingested arsenic? Such accidents were not uncommon. People who used it as rat poison were often surprisingly careless in handling the stuff, using household utensils to sprinkle it around the floorboards, then neglecting to wash the implements with sufficient care.

Mrs. Robinson dismissed the notion out of hand. She never kept arsenic around the house. If the doctors wished, they were welcome to examine her cupboards and utensils. Nichols and Driver declined her offer. After all, Mrs. Robinson was clearly such a nice person—so frank and natural in her responses—that there was no reason to doubt her. As Nichols would later put it, “there was nothing in her behavior to warrant the slightest suspicion.”

Two days later, Prince Arthur’s last hope for survival arrived in the form of his
older sister, Mrs. Catherine Melvin, who had just gotten word of his desperate condition. At her first glimpse of her brother, she let out an involuntary gasp. She had heard that he was very sick, but she was unprepared for the sheer ghastliness of his suffering. Face contorted, frame shockingly wasted, he thrashed back and forth on the mattress, while begging for something, anything, to ease the terrible pain in his stomach.

Over her sister-in-law’s protests, Mrs. Melvin immediately assumed the role of nurse. She sat at Prince Arthur’s bedside throughout the night, soothing his forehead with a moist compress and feeding him small sips of brandy, along with the medication prescribed by Dr. Nichols: tincture of nux vomica, two drops every hour.

When Nichols arrived early the next day for his morning visit, he was relieved to find that Prince Arthur’s condition had grown no worse. He was even more gratified when he returned that afternoon. For the first time since the onset of his mysterious sickness, the patient actually seemed slightly improved.

That night, Sarah urged her sister-in-law to get some sleep. She would resume the care of Prince Arthur. Mrs. Melvin, however, insisted on staying up with her brother again. The next morning, he felt so much better that, for the first time in days, he expressed a desire for food.

Believing that her brother had turned a corner, Mrs. Melvin—who had her own family to take care of—departed that morning, physically exhausted but feeling hopeful about his recovery. She had no way of knowing that she had returned him to the malevolent care of a madwoman, who was more determined than ever to have him hurry up and die.

That same night—after drinking a cup of the odd-tasting tea prepared by his sister-in-law—Prince Arthur took a violent turn for the worse. Shortly before midnight on Saturday, June 27, he went into convulsions and died. Dr. Nichols, who still could not guess what had killed Prince Arthur Freeman, certified the cause of death as “disease of the stomach.”

As dreadful as his suffering had been, Prince Arthur at least had the comfort of knowing that his six-year-old son, Tommy, was well provided for. Two months after the funeral, the Order of Pilgrim Fathers made good on his life insurance policy, paying $2,000 to his beneficiary, Sarah Jane Robinson. She immediately paid off her creditors, moved into a larger flat, purchased new furniture and clothing, and took a trip to Wisconsin to visit her brother. When she returned, she used the remainder of the
money to take out an insurance policy on the life of her twenty-five-year-old daughter, Lizzie.

Six months later, in February, 1886, Lizzie was stricken with a catastrophic illness and died after several weeks of acute suffering.

In the meantime, little Tommy Freeman had received no benefits at all from the money left by his father. His aunt Sarah—who had been so nice to him while his father was alive—now acted as though she could barely stand the sight of him, treating him like a particularly onerous burden she’d unfairly been saddled with. Visitors to the Robinson household were taken aback by how pale, skinny, and utterly forlorn the little boy looked. When they questioned Sarah about the child, she explained with a sigh that the poor boy missed his parents dreadfully.

“Sometimes,” she remarked to one of her neighbors, “I think he would be better off following in their footsteps.”

On July 19, 1886, a year and three weeks after the death of his father, Tommy fell ill with uncontrolled vomiting and diarrhea. Sarah had one of her premonitions, telling several acquaintances that the boy would never recover. He died four days later, on July 23.

The terrible fragility of life—the possibility that anyone, no matter how young and healthy, could be struck down at any moment—was a lesson that the inhabitants of the Robinson household could hardly fail to learn. Perhaps for that reason, Sarah’s oldest son, twenty-three-year-old William, insured his life with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers shortly after the death of his beloved sister, Lizzie.

One month later, in August 1886, William—who was employed at a commercial warehouse—suffered a minor accident when a wooden crate toppled from a shelf and struck him between the shoulder blades. He shrugged off the mishap: the box was empty, and though the breath had been knocked out of him, he hadn’t been seriously injured. Not long afterward, however, he felt suddenly nauseous and threw up the breakfast his mother had prepared for him that morning.

That evening at dinner, his mother fixed him a cup of her special tea. William took a sip and wrinkled his nose. It tasted very strange to him. Still, at his mother’s urging, he drank it all down. No sooner had he finished his meal than the nausea returned, worse than ever. He took to his bed and was up all night with racking cramps and constant vomiting.

The next morning, his mother sent for Dr. Emory White, a local physician affiliated
with the Order of Pilgrim Fathers. White knew about the strange series of tragedies that had befallen the Robinson household—most of them involving family members insured by the Order—and resolved to keep a close eye on William. When the young man continued to deteriorate, White shipped a sample of his vomit to a Harvard toxicologist named Edward Wood. He also informed Police Chief Parkhurst of his suspicions regarding Sarah Jane Robinson. Parkhurst dispatched a couple of his men to keep watch over Mrs. Robinson. Two days later, word arrived from Dr. Wood: William Robinson’s stomach was saturated with arsenic. By then, however, the young man was beyond saving. He died that same afternoon. “The old lady dosed me” were the last words anyone heard him say.

Sarah Jane Robinson was immediately arrested for the murder of her son.

In the weeks that followed, authorities exhumed the bodies of six more of her victims: her daughter, Lizzie; her sister, Annie; her brother-in-law, Prince Arthur Freeman; her nephew, Tommy; her husband, Moses; and her former landlord, Oliver Sleeper. Arsenic was found in all of the corpses.

For the third time in living memory, America had produced a female “poison fiend”—a “Modern Borgia” in the monstrous mold of Martha Grinder and Lydia Sherman. Public excitement over the case was intense, and the newspapers showed little restraint in their sensationalistic coverage. The
New York Times
placed the number of her victims at an even dozen, while one widely circulated story claimed that she’d once poisoned more than a hundred people at a picnic.

Largely as a result of prosecutorial incompetence, her first trial ended with a hung jury. She was immediately indicted again, this time for the murder of Prince Arthur Freeman. During her second trial in February 1886, the government argued that Prince Arthur’s killing had been part of an elaborate plot to obtain his $2,000 life insurance policy, a scheme that also necessitated the murder of both Annie Freeman and seven-year-old Tommy.

Interestingly, it was the defense attorney, John B. Goodrich, who did a better job of identifying Sarah Jane Robinson as the homicidal maniac she so clearly was. In his closing argument, Goodrich argued that money couldn’t possibly explain the horrors of which his client stood accused. “The idea is repellent; it is unnatural; it is unreasonable to suppose that that would be a sufficient motive,” he insisted. The crimes allegedly perpetrated by his client could have only one cause: “uncontrolled depravity.” If “such be the case,” he told the jury, “you must pity her. You cannot condemn her.”
After all, it took a “monster” to commit such atrocities, said Goodrich, and “I do not know that the law hangs monsters.”

In the end, the jury required less than one day to side with the prosecution. Sarah Jane Robinson was found guilty of first-degree murder and condemned to hang, though her sentence was later commuted to life in prison. She lived out the remainder of her days in a narrow cell decorated with engraved portraits of her victims, clipped from local newspapers.

“Poison and Pedophilia”

Though the Victorian era was a particularly fertile time for female serial poisoners, the twentieth century also produced a healthy crop of homegrown Borgias. One notable example was Mary Frances Creighton, dubbed the “Black-Eyed Borgia” in the tabloids. A pretty New Jersey housewife with strikingly “dark, luminous eyes,” Mary began her lethal career in the early 1920s by bumping off her despised mother-in-law with arsenic-laced hot cocoa. She followed up this homicide by serving poisoned chocolate pudding to her younger brother after persuading him to make her the beneficiary of his $1,000 life insurance policy. She was brought to trial twice but acquitted both times for lack of evidence.

After her second trial, she and her family—her husband, John, and children, Ruth and Jack—relocated to a small cottage on Long Island. By 1935, the once “comely brunette” had coarsened into a “squat and triple-chinned” matron.

With the Great Depression in full swing, the Creightons took in a pair of boarders, an acquaintance of John’s named Everett Applegate and his sharp-tongued, morbidly obese wife, Ada. Before long, Everett—or “Uncle Ev,” as she called him—had seduced and embarked on a quasi-incestuous affair with fifteen-year-old Ruth Creighton. Obsessed with the underage girl and determined to marry her, he set out to rid himself of his wife by spiking her eggnog with rat poison. He was assisted by Mary, who not only harbored a deep detestation of the foul-tempered Ada but was eager to see her daughter married and out of the house.

Mary Frances Creighton

Since Ada had tipped the scales at more than 250 pounds, no one doubted her physician’s conclusion that she had died of a heart attack—until authorities found out about Mary’s involvement with the two earlier poison murders. Their suspicions aroused, they ordered a belated autopsy. When the toxicologist reported that the corpse’s vital organs contained eleven grains of arsenic—enough to kill at least three people—Mary and Everett were promptly arrested for murder.

With its irresistibly lurid ingredients (summed up in one memorable headline as “Poison and Pedophilia”), their trial in January
1936 was a nationwide sensation. On the stand, Mary confessed that after Everett had prepared the lethal eggnog, she herself had served it up to Ada with the full knowledge that it was poisoned. Everett, hoping to be convicted on the lesser charge of statutory rape, offered graphic details of his affair with the willing teenager, including a detailed account of the time they had engaged in sex while his wife lay beside them on the mattress. Both defendants were convicted and sentenced to die in the chair.

In the days leading up to her execution, Mary worked herself into a state of such hysterical terror that she became semicomatose and had to be trundled to the death chamber in a wheelchair. Moments later—“with the odor of seared flesh still clinging to the chamber”—it was Everett’s turn. Standing “tall and ramrod straight,” he strode into the chamber and made a final emphatic declaration of his innocence before stoically meeting his doom.

D
URING THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, MAJOR
A
MERICAN
cities such as New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were home to dozens of dime museums—garish showplaces where visitors could gape at a motley assortment of curios, relics, and oddities, from Egyptian mummies to African menageries, dinosaur fossils to human freaks, mechanical marvels to waxwork displays of medieval torture devices. Among the more tawdry of these “palaces of wonder” were the ones that specialized in titillating biological displays: preserved fetuses, wax models of diseased genitalia, and grotesquely deformed taxidermy specimens, along with the skulls, skeletons, and other ostensibly authentic anatomical relics of historical figures.