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This episode of LOR was made possible by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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For everyone who solves crime from their couch, knows more about forensics than their own job, and has trust issues with small town sheriffs, Amazon Music's millions of podcast episodes are calling. Just download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite true crime podcasts ad free included with Prime.
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Godfrey and Dalby were rivals Both were competing for the affections of Victorian women. But before you imagine two dapper gentlemen with pistols raised at dawn, I should make one thing Godfrey and Dalby weren't people. No, they were actually medicines. Just like Tylenol and Advil today, duking it out in the headache aisle. Godfrey's Cordial and Dalby's Carminative were two popular patent medicines, both claiming to alleviate the same symptoms. Named for their respective creators, these tinctures sought to reduce colic, that is to keep babies from crying. To quote advertisements for Dalby's Carminative, these Mother's Friends, as they were called, could help infants affected with wind, watery pipes, fluxes and other disorders of the stomach and bowels. Marketed largely to working moms and nannies, it's no surprise that the products were such a hit. After all, you could get a lot more done and therefore bring home a larger income if you didn't have a crying baby to deal with on top of all the rest. And the truth is, the stuff worked too. A few spoonfuls from one of the iconic green glass bottles and even the most finicky babies would quiet right down. How did they work, you might ask? Well, it had a lot to do with the main ingredient. Because you see, both Godfrey's Cordial and Dalby's Carminative were primarily made of opium. All throughout history, the line between helping and hurting hasn't always been as clear as you might think. And for the Victorian women who fed their children these so called medicines, that fact became all too clear when their babies began to overdose and die. After all, the only difference between a medicine and a poison is the size of of the dose. I'm Erin Manke and this is Lore. The skeleton was in rough shape, and not just because it was between 45 and 70,000 years old. Found in modern day Iraq, the poor guy showed signs of head Trauma and was missing an arm. But what had archaeologists buzzing wasn't what the injuries were, but when they appeared to have taken place. Because you see, the Neanderthal in question had clearly survived his wounds. In fact, he went on to live for years after the fact, which meant something remarkable. Early humans must have practiced medicine. They'd taken care of this man and refused to leave him behind to die. And this isn't a lone example. A skeleton of a 15 year old boy found in what is now Florida shows signs of severe spina bifida, which would have required extensive care from his community, A community which existed 7,500 years ago. And yet another burial at a 4,000-year-old site in northern Vietnam contained the remains of a 25 year old man and evidently paralyzed since before adolescence. Despite what would have been a strain on his primarily hunter gatherer community, those around this man kept him alive by helping him eat, clean himself, and perform other basic tasks for at least a decade. So there you have it. Caring for one another is part of what makes us human. And for much of human history, that fact was inextricably linked to magic. In the days before modern medicine, illness was often blamed on evil spirits. The sick were believed to be possessed and to grow well again needed to have those evil spirits exorcised via incantation fumigation. Or if you happened to be in ancient Assyria, casting the demon into a young goat which was then slaughtered. Actually transplanting diseases outside of the body into another object was a common theme. In Cornwall, children with rickets were handed through the branches of a maple tree, and then the tree would take on their illness. In other parts of England, throat ailments could be healed by holding the head of a frog in your mouth, which would then hop away carrying your sickness with it. While in Germany, simply holding a piece of raw meat over the afflicted body part before giving it to a dog or a cat to eat. Meanwhile, if you're in the mood for some arts and crafts, South Sea islanders would create a model canoe occupied by a handmade doll and then set it adrift, believing that the doll would carry the sickness away. Sometimes, though, mythical spirits could only be combated by mythical animals. Medieval bestiaries often featured a creature called a caladrias bird, a pure white bird said to be able to cure the sick. Simply have a caladrius brought to your sickbed and stare it in the eyes, and when it flies away, it will take the sickness with it. But be warned, if it turns its head away from you, you are done for. Oh, and to cure blindness, you can always rub the dung from this bird in your eyes. Eye contact, it seems, is a bit of a theme in itself when it comes to magical healing. One Inuit deity, described rather adorably as a tiny man with a black face who lives in a pebble, was said to draw out illness with a stare. Be careful not to lock eyes if you're healthy, though. Disease, you see, can move both ways. The little pebble guy, though, is far from the only deity with healing powers. The Aztecs had Pate Caatl, whose name means he from the land of medicines and also happens to be credited as the discoverer of peyote. And over in Ireland, the pre Christian goddess Brigid was a deity of spring and fertility as well as healing. In fact, about an hour and a half from Dublin in Kildare, there's a well associated with her to contain magical healing water. Today, many of her attributes have been Christianized in the form of Saint Brigid. On the eve of Brigid's holiday of Imbolc, which is now also St. Brigid's feast day, believers leave a piece of cloth outside which she blesses with her healing abilities for the year ahead. This cloth, called the Brat Brida, is wrapped around sick family members and seen as an essential help against headaches. Then there's Breivi, the sun goddess of the Saami people. She returns each spring not just with light, but to bless those whose mental health suffered during the long winter. Basically the divine version of those seasonal affective disorder light therapy lamps. But healing gods aren't all sunshine. Some deities are patrons of both medicine and disease. In Sumerian mythology, for example, the goddess Ninhursag cursed the God Enki with eight ailments, each corresponding to a, and then created eight healing deities to cure them. The Greek God Apollo could both cure illness and cause epidemics. And the same went for the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. And looking back, perhaps that duality does make sense. Because just like the mothers who swore by Godfrey's cordial and Dalby's carminative, sometimes the people we trust to heal us end up doing just the opposite. Bertha Gifford was a beloved volunteer nurse in the small community of Katawissa, Missouri from the 1900s through the 1920s, she tended to hundreds of sick locals with tenderness and compassion. Or so it seemed. And then she slipped up. You see, while caring for a middle aged drunk, she made the teensy mistake of remarking that his mother would be better off if he died. Which, yeah, was a horrible thing. To say on a good day. Worse, when the man did die shortly after. And that was all it took, Suspicion rampaged through katowissa. And in 1928, Bertha stood trial for murder. What the courts uncovered was far worse than anyone could have ever imagined. Over the course of years, she had murdered not only that one man, but at least 17 of her patients, all poisoned with arsenic. Suffice to say, the trial was a media sensation. Newspapers dubbed her home a murder farm. Bertha Gifford was found insane and spent the rest of her life in a state hospital. But when the smoke cleared, one question. Why did she do it? And the truth is, no one knows. But the county sheriff did have one theory. He believed that Bertha, and I quote, attributed some mystical healing power to arsenic. In other words, maybe she really had been trying to heal her patients all along. But hey, not all caretaker poisoners are quite so well meaning. Enter Amy Archer Gilligan, proprietress of the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in Windsor, Connecticut. She and her husband James had run the home together, but when he died in 1910, he left her with a slew of back taxes and bills to pay. But don't worry. Amy quickly devised a doozy of a get rich quick scheme. First, she began offering a lifetime care service at the home. For 1,000 bucks a pop, the equivalent of about 30 grand today, patients could ensure care at the Archer home for the rest of their lives. Not a bad deal, right? Her patients must have thought so as well, because they jumped at the opportunity to occupy one of the home's limited 20 beds. Unfortunately, Amy's patients failed to notice a glaring problem with the math. That is, the shorter their lives were, and thus, the quicker a bed opened up for a new paying customer, the more money Amy would make. And wouldn't you know it, the Archer home suddenly had a remarkable turnover. In 1916, Amy was remarried to a man named Michael Gilligan. Just a few months later, Michael mysteriously died. But not before leaving everything to Amy Handy, right? Well, it might have been, had Michael's death not caught the eye of a local journalist. And when this guy started digging, he found a rabbit hole straight down to hell. To start, the journalist learned that Amy was in the habit of buying arsenic at a local drugstore, which she claimed was for rat and bed bug problems at the home, which sure was a common use for arsenic at the time. But he also found something else. Between 1911 and 1916, a shocking 48 residents at the Archer home had kicked the bucket. Exhumations confirmed it, too. The bodies were Chock full of arsenic. In 1917, Amy went on trial for mass murder. And just like Bertha's case, this too was a big old media sensation. While Bertha's house may have been called a murder farm, the papers labeled Amy's place a straight up murder factory. After five years in prison, though, Amy Archer Gilligan was found insane and transferred to a mental hospital, where she passed away in 1962. Oh, and if parts of this story ring a bell, it might be because a popular play turned movie was loosely based on it. Arsenic and Old Lace. Today, of course, there are countless podcasts and Netflix specials about serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. But a century ago, poison wielding women were the true crime trend of the day. And while Amy Archer Gilligan and Bertha Gifford were big names, no one exemplified the genre more than legendary murderess Lydia Sherman. According to certain folklore, girls who are born on Christmas Eve are known as sorrow children.
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Bad luck from birth.
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And for at least one little sorrowed child named Lydia, born in New Jersey on December 24th of 1824, she would more than live up to that name. Lydia was just a teenager when she married Edward strzok, a widower 20 years her senior. And over the decade that followed, the young bride gave birth to seven lovely children. From the outside, they looked like one big happy family. But then that family started to die. First, 22 month old Josephine died, supposedly from measles. Then in 1863, Edward lost his job at the NYPD and fell into a depression. He grew paranoid, refused to leave bed or see his friends. But luckily, his loving wife, Lydia knew exactly what he needed. On May 23rd of 1864, she waltzed into a local drugstore, paid 10 cents for a bottle of arsenic granules, and back home, she mixed enough into Edward's oatmeal to kill an ele. The man writhed in agony all night long. By morning, he was dead. The official cause, according to the doctors, was consumption. Yes, Lydia had gotten away with murder suspicion free. But now she had another problem. She was a 40 year old widow with six mouths to feed. And so she thought, wouldn't it be easier if that number was smaller? She started with the littlest six year old Martha Ann, four year old Edward and nine month old William. All fed, to quote Lydia herself, the same kind of gruel their father had eaten. Three children dead. But in the 1800s, child mortality was so common, no one blinked an eye. Now, for a while, Lydia seemed placated. One of her older sons left home to make his own way in the world and was henceforth not her problem anymore. Meanwhile, 14 year old George even started bringing in an income as a painter's assistant. But when he developed painter's colic, a weirdly cute name for lead poisoning, and had to quit his job, he too just became another mouth to feed. And by now Lydia knew what to do with those. This time she mixed arsenic in with George's tea and poof. The kid count was down to 2. For a whole beautiful year. No one else was murdered, which isn't the most impressive number, but we will take what we can get. Here. Lydia lived with her two remaining daughters, a teenaged Lydia Jr. And 10 year old Ann Eliza. But then Ann Eliza fell ill during a brutal winter of 1866, forcing her
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sister to quit her job as a
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clerk to care for her. Money got tight. But luckily for Ma Lydia, she still had some arsenic kicking around. Bye bye Ann Eliza. And then there was one. Mother Lydia and daughter Lydia lived alone for months. Until one spring day, Lydia Jr. Came down with a fever. Within weeks she was gone. And look, while Lydia Sr. Swore to the end that she didn't kill her 18 year old daughter, let's be real here, her track record was not great. And neither were the girl's symptoms, which looked a heck of a lot like poisoning. And there she was, Lydia, completely miraculously alone. No mopey husband, no pesky expensive children depending on her. She was finally free with a trail of bodies in her wake. But then again, that was only the carnage from her first marriage. It was a classic. Meet cute girl goes to grocery store, meets 72 year old widower in the produce aisle and quickly marries him. Then girl puts arsenic in new husband cider and inherits $10,000 and an entire farm. Talk about a Hallmark movie ending. That's right. Lydia remarried. And then she killed the guy within a year and walked away with a pretty penny. As she later recalled, he told me that if I would marry him, all that he was worth should be mine. Basically the worst possible thing anyone could say to this specific lady. So what was next for our horrible heroine? Surprise, surprise. More poisoning. Now you would think that people would stop marrying Lydia by now, but never underestimate the power of feminine charm. She had always been pretty, with blue eyes, dark hair and porcelain skin. And as such, it didn't take long for her to pick up husband number three. It all started when the friends of her very dead second husband offered her a spare baby. Yes, you heard that right. They looked at Lydia, a lady who famously had a good Half dozen kids die in her care and thought, you know what she needs? More kids. You see, a local woman had recently died in childbirth, leaving her husband, Horatio Sherman with a sickly infant and three other children to raise. Not only that, but his mother in law was hanging around and being a general nuisance, getting into all out screaming fights with Horatio's 13 year old daughter. In short, Horatio needed help. And given that Lydia was recently widowed herself, it seemed like the perfect match. Lydia and Horatio were married in September of 1870. She was now officially Lydia Sherman, the name by which she would go down in infamy. Her first victim in the Sherman house was tragically that infant. Lydia was convinced that the only reason Horatio's mother in law was still there was because of the baby. And so she figured no baby, no mother in law. Two birds with one stone, right? All it took was a wee smidge of arsenic mixed into baby Frankie's milk. He died that very night. To Lidia's annoyance though, it turned out that it wasn't care for the baby keeping the old woman around at all, but a continued insistence that Horatio owed her money for a piano. The priorities of everyone in this story by the way, not the best. Exasperated, Lydia gave her the money and the mother in law finally took her leave. But that didn't mean that life was all roses in the Sherman house. Horatio drank heavily, was out of work and had a habit of not paying his bills. And then Christmas Eve arrived. While the sorrow child herself celebrated her 46th birthday, her 13 year old stepdaughter Ada took ill with typhoid fever. And Ada would be sick for days. The doctors didn't believe that she would ever recover. Horatio, by the way, was decidedly not helping. When the doctors prescribed Ada medicinal brandy, her father guzzled it down himself. As for Lydia, none of this was how she had hoped to spend the holidays. And she was miserable and tired of waiting for Ada's illness to run its course. But you know what really hits the spot? A steaming mug of arsenic tea. Lydia may have grown a year older that December, but Ada would forever be 13. I think it's fair to say that the death of his beloved daughter did nothing to help Horatio's drinking problem. What little money the family had quickly disappeared into a bottle and the couple's marriage had entirely deteriorated. Finally, after he returned home from a day long bender, Lydia had had enough. And staying true to the old adage of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, she turned to her trusty tool of arsenic right in her Husband's brandy. And pretty soon he wasn't doing so hot. His doctor, Ambrose Beardley, was called and told Horatio that he had alcohol poisoning. Horatio only shrugged and took another swig from the arsenic laced bottle. Child after child after child had died. One husband and then another, and now a third. Only seven months in the Sherman household and Lydia had already destroyed the entire family. And all the while, no one so much as glanced her way. At least not until this time. Because as Horatio's condition worsened and his symptoms grew stranger, Beardsley began to suspect his diagnosis of alcohol poisoning and might have been a little too literal. By now, Horatio's breathing had become labored, he was unquenchably thirsty and his skin had gone hot and dry. No, these were not the markers of a drunk. These were well known symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Cautiously, the doctor asked Horatio if he had taken anything else besides his normal prescriptions. And Horatio insisted that no, his oh so lovely wife Lydia had been a very careful pharmacist. Horatio soon died, but the good doctor wasn't letting this one go. He ordered the body autopsied, and three weeks later the results came in. Horatio's liver contained enough arsenic to kill three grown men. Suddenly, Lydia's past was cracked open like a rotten egg. Body after body was exhumed. Ada's and her baby brothers, Lydia's second husband. And all of them testing positive for arsenic. It was April 16th of 1872 when Lydia first entered the New Haven courtroom where her trial would take place. She was draped in a silk trimmed black alpaca dress, her face obscured by a thin black veil. Her story had already appeared in papers across the country where she earned new names. Ones like the Arch Murderess of Connecticut, the Woman Monster, the Champion Husband Killer. And despite it all, there before a packed room of jeering spectators, she insisted on her innocence. But it was far too late for that. Lydia Sherman's reign of terror was finally at an end. Another Christmas Eve came and went, until on Christmas Day of 1872, while awaiting her final sentencing in her jail, Lydia gave the courts the best present they could have ever asked for. A full gory confession. Or, well, almost full. She admitted to murdering just two of her three husbands and only six of the children. But most believe that she was responsible for the whole Grimm collection. And don't worry, I've kept count for you. That final number of victims would be 10. Lydia swore that she'd had a religious epiphany, that she'd been saved and was changed as a woman and was more than Happy to die in prison if it meant atoning for her sins. Which, based on the life sentence that she soon received, was exactly what would happen. And you know what? With all that prayer and piousness, she almost fooled them. If not for the fact that after five years of playing the repentant murderess, Lydia Sherman did what innocent people rarely do. She escaped. So much of Lydia's story feels like a dark fairy tale. She's an evil stepmother, worse than Snow White's, a spouse killer to rival Bluebeard. And she even fulfills that strange superstition about little girls born on Christmas Eve. That date, by the way. I can't help but notice that it tends to pop up at significant moments throughout the story. Yes, her birth, but also the night that Ada falls ill, marking the start of Lydia's downfall. And the night before her final confession. It's almost like she escaped right from the pages of a Grimm Brothers story. But most frightening of all was the way she killed. Not the poison itself, but rather by targeting those that she was meant to keep safe. Lydia, Amy, Bertha, these women were all caretakers and their victims. The very people they were supposed to protect. It's true. We have been caring for the most vulnerable members of our society since ancient times. The 62,000 year old skeleton from Iraq proves that. So what Lydia and her kindred killers did, it wasn't just evil. It went against one of the most essential parts of our humanity. Our instinct to take care of one another. You'll be happy to know that Lydia's prison break didn't last too long. It only took a week before she was caught and placed back behind bars. She would die less than a year later, on May 16th of 1878, right there in her cell. Oh, and one final thing. According to newspapers from the time she spent her last days suffering from horrible nausea, she couldn't keep food down and vomited up all the medicine the prison tried to give her. Call it coincidence, call it karma, call it poetic justice. All we know is that in the end, when her final moments arrived, Lydia Sherman was forced to endure the very same symptoms that she had once inflicted upon all her victims. I hope you enjoyed this journey through one of the biggest true crime trends of yesteryear. And while I can't speak for everyone, I personally find the breaking of trust to be the most frightening part of this legendary trope from the world of murder. Caretaking, of course, is often stereotyped as women's work, but the truth is, a lot of men do it as well. And if one story from history is to be believed one of those men chose to abuse that very same trust roughly a century ago. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.
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It was a cold February day in 1915 when a striking man marched into a New York District attorney's office. The 25 year old stranger had a dark beard and wore a heavy corduroy hunting costume, complete with knee breeches, golf stockings and a small alpine tipped hat with a jaunty feather chain. Smoking Egyptian cigarettes, the man frantically waved down the policeman on duty, and then, in a thick Austrian accent, he began to confess. To what exactly? Well, that would be mass murder. He worked, this man explained, as a nurse at the German Odd Fellows Home in Yonkers, and in his time there, he insisted that he had killed eight people under his care and even listed each victim by name. His own name, he said, was Frederick Morse, a name that he had bestowed upon himself after arriving in New York the previous year. Morse, he explained, meant death. I wanted my past to be dead, he told the bewildered police officers. I wanted to begin a new life. And at first, no one took him seriously. They figured that he was a bit off his rocker, so to speak, and sent him off for psychiatric evaluation.
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But figuring that it was better to
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be safe than sorry, the police did give that odd fellow's home a call and said, hey, you noticed any murders lately? And the surgeon there, he flat out laughed at them. No. The home insisted all the patients that Frederick had named were dead, but of natural causes, nothing to worry about. And still, Frederick was unshakeable in his story. I am no more crazy than you are, he told the detectives on the case. And then he urged them to interview his former co workers, which. Which, amazingly, they did, only to find the nurses singing a very different tune than the surgeon had. In short, they corroborated every word Frederick had said more than once. They said rooms in which Frederick was attending to a dying resident smelled strongly of chloroform. One colleague said that Frederick had shown him a bottle of chloroform and announced, and I quote, that's the stuff that puts him out of the way. Another recounted an incident in which he asked Frederick why he was shaving an elderly resident, to which Frederick replied, to save the undertaker the trouble. Yeah, not an ideal thing to say. Worse yet, the fact that the man died just two hours later. Frederick had also been heard to threaten several residents. In one particular colorful example, an old man complained that his room was too cold, only for Frederick to reply, and I quote, if you don't stop making so much trouble, I'll send you to where there will be more heat than you want. Now, you're probably wondering why on earth anyone would let this guy work at a nursing home for so long. Heck, he didn't even have any formal medical training. But Frederick claimed that his actions had been ordered by a higher up at the hospital, a fact that was never proven, by the way. Furthermore, he insisted the killings had been done not out of cruelty, but but compassion. When you give an old person chloroform, he said, it's like putting a child to sleep. It frees them from all pain. It is humane and kind hearted. He even claimed that several of the people he killed had asked him to help them die peacefully and that he only killed people who would have died anyway. Although I'll be honest here, given the deeply creepy vibes his colleagues described, I'm not really sure that I buy that officially deemed not well, mentally, which is an understatement, for sure. Frederick was sent to an asylum to await deportation back to his native Austria. Oh, and it's worth noting here that he repeatedly asked to be given a position as an orderly, a request that was, for obvious reasons, very much refused. This asylum, by the way, happened to be a low security facility, which is an important detail because when In May of 1916, Frederick learned that his deportation was imminent. He immediately escaped, never to be found. Flash forward a few years. It's 1919 now, and a factory worker in Torrington, Connecticut is flipping through a magazine when he sees a familiar face between the pages. It's a photograph of a man who the caption identifies as a Fredric Morse, escaped mass murderer. But that can't be right, because the factory worker knows this guy. Actually, he used to work with him. Up until just a year prior, it had been a hold to do. In fact, this fellow that the factory worker spotted in the magazine, a guy who had been known as Dr. Frederick Maurice Benno, had fled Torrington after coming under suspicion, not as a murderer, by the way, but as a German spy. He vanished overnight, leaving behind a letter stating his intent to take his own life. And now here was his face in crystal clear black and white, Dr. Frederick Benno, who, it turns out, had been one and the same as Fredrik Morse. And it seems that once again, Frederick had killed his past and started a whole new life. In 1923, a skeleton believed to belong to Frederick was found in the woods near Torrington. It was sun bleached and stained by forest fire smoke. His clothes had long since rotted away, but still certain items remained intact. A pair of shoes, a few odds and ends, and most importantly, a medicine bottle, which most assumed contained whatever substance the man had used to take his life. It seems Frederick Morse's final poisoning victim was none other than himself. By the way, back in that factory. It's worth mentioning which department Frederick had worked in, because you see, he wasn't simply assembling machine parts or sealing packages. No, Frederick Morse, aka Dr. Benno, worked to produce something deeply life saving first aid supplies. This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, and written by Jenna Rose Nethercott with research by Cassandra d' Alba and music by Chad Lawson.
- [39:24]
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Just a reminder, I have a brand
- [39:25]
A
new history book coming out on August 4th called Exhumed, which explores the roots of the New England vampire panic through the lens of centuries of folklore, medical advancements, pseudoscience and philosophy. It's available for pre order right now and if you pre order the hardcover, my publisher has a cool webpage setup where you can submit your receipts and get a free gorgeous tote bag. Head over to aaronmanke.comexhumed to lock in copy today. The link is in the description. Don't like hearing ads on Lore? Well, there's a paid version on Apple Podcasts and patreon that is 100% AD free. Subscribers also get weekly mini bonus episodes called Lore Bytes and Patreon. Members get discounts on Lore Merch. Learn more over@lorepodcast.com support follow the show on YouTube threads, Blue sky, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.
- [40:32]
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- [41:07]
E
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