The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer

In The Devil’s Rooming House, the author presents a portrait of a killer: Amy Archer-Gilligan, the malevolent matron of a New England home for the elderly and infirm, where sixty-six people died from 1908 to 1916. “America’s deadliest female serial killer,” as the book’s title refers to Archer-Gilligan, poisoned her charges with arsenic-spiked lemonade. Her motive: hasten turnover in the home, where most residents paid a one-time “life care” fee up front. Several years following Lizzie Borden’s lurid case, the Archer-Gilligan story shocked the country, prompted legislation that regulated group homes, and even inspired the hit Broadway show and film Arsenic and Old Lace. The author of more than a dozen true-crime books, M. William Phelps draws on six years of research to re-create Archer-Gilligan’s activities in the town of Windsor, Connecticut. He sets the story in the Archer home, in the local newsroom where an enterprising stringer questions the suspiciously high number of obituaries with ties to the home, and, inevitably, in the courtroom. The author’s source material included news articles, 1,200 pages of trial transcripts, death certificates, and autopsy and police reports.