Episode 204: Amy Archer-Gilligan
Amy E. Duggan was born on October 31st, 1873, to parents James Duggan and Mary Kennedy in Milton, Connecticut. Amy was the eighth of ten children, and there seemed to be struggles with mental illness among Amy’s family. Amy’s brother John became an “inmate” at the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane in 1902, and one of her sisters was later sent there as well. Amy married her husband James Archer in 1897 and the two welcomed their daughter Mary that same year.
The couple got a job in 1901 as a senior caretaker for an elderly man and widower named John Seymour, and the family moved into his home in Newington, Connecticut to care for him. John passed away in 1904 and his family turned the building into a boarding house for the elderly. Amy and her family were allowed to remain in the home and provide care for the elderly residents, and they paid rent to the Seymour children. The boarding house was named “Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly People and Chronic Invalids.”
After the Seymour children sold the home in 1907, Amy and her family moved to Windsor, Connecticut with a new sense of purpose after having been inspired by the elderly care home. She and her husband used their savings to purchase a home on Prospect Street in Windsor Center, and once they got settled they started their own business out of the home they named “Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm.” Nursing homes were not at all common during this time as most people lived together in the same home and cared for their aging parents or grandparents until they passed away. There began to be a cultural shift of young adults moving out of the home and to cities or areas with more opportunities, and aging people began to feel like a burden as they essentially became a responsibility for the community. The Archer Home was one of the first places to serve as a kind of nursing home.
The residents of the Archer Home were referred to as “inmates,” and the Archers advertised the home and the care provided in newspapers and postcards. Pricing ranged from a weekly fee that ranged from $7 to $25, or a $1,000 one time payment that would cover rent and services for the rest of their life. The one-time payment option was the most popular, especially as Amy allowed an option for residents to agree to leave her their estate or remaining savings after they passed if they were unable to pay in a lump sum.
In 1910, Amy’s husband James Archer sadly passed away. His cause of death was listed as “Bright’s disease,” which was the terminology of the time for kidney disease. Amy was now a widow raising a 12-year-old daughter, but as luck would have it, she had the foresight to take out a life insurance policy on James just weeks before he died. She used the money to continue running the Archer Home. She also used James’ death to negotiate not having to pay back taxes owed to the town’s tax collector.
In 1913, Amy married a man named Michael W. Gilligan. He was also a widower and had four adult sons of his own, and he was very excited about this relationship with Amy from both the marriage side of things and the business side of things as he was wealthy himself and saw the Archer Home as a good investment. Just three months after they married, in February of 1914, Michael Gilligan suddenly and devastatingly passed away at the age of 56. His cause of death was determined as “valvular heart disease” as the primary cause of death, with a secondary cause listed as an “acute bilious attack.” This secondary cause essentially boils down to severe indigestion.
Amy, now a widow for a second time, found herself grieving the loss of her husband so suddenly and so soon after their marriage. It turns out that her brand-new husband of just three months had drawn up a whole new will where he left his entire estate of $4,000 to her and not a dime to his four children or the rest of his family.
As Amy continued to run the Archer Home, the elderly residents who lived there passed away at the end of their long lives. However, between 1907 and 1917, the amount of deaths in the Archer Home went from a few here and there to a whopping 60. To put it into perspective, just 12 residents died between 1907 and 1910, but 48 residents died between 1911 and 1916.
On May 29th, 1914, one of the residents, a 60-year-old man named Franklin R. Andrews, was out doing some gardening at the Archer Home. He was a very healthy man in good physical condition, and he stayed active by running errands for Amy, doing chores and yard work and had been out painting the fence earlier that day. It was a shock to everyone when by later that same evening, Franklin was found dead. His cause of death was ruled as a gastric ulcer. His family was cleaning out his room at the Archer Home after his passing and found correspondence from Amy asking him for money on multiple occasions. His sister, Nellie Pierce, found information about Amy asking Franklin for a $500 loan.
Nellie had also been receiving letters of her own where Franklin told her about life at the Archer Home and the daily happenings there. This included the frequency of deaths, especially the sudden ones. She went to the local district attorney and told him everything, but he brushed her off and didn’t take her seriously. Nellie’s next move was to go to the news. The Hartford Courant was very eager to hear what Nellie had to say, and the first article about Amy and the Archer Home was published on May 9th, 1916. They called the Archer Home “a murder factory.”
A fellow resident of Windsor and a Hartford Courant correspondent named Carlan Goslee was in charge of writing obituaries for people in Windsor who had passed away. He had taken notice of the significantly escalating deaths at the Archer Home and felt uneasy about them. He began looking into the poison registers that every drugstore was required by law to keep, and he was alarmed at his findings. Carlan found that Amy had purchased arsenic from the local drugstore multiple times and in large quantities, and she said that the Archer Home was having rat and bedbug problems. An investigation was opened up by the Hartford Courant, and months later, police began seriously investigating Amy and the Archer Home.
Over the next year, police looked into the deaths at the Archer Home as well as the deaths of Amy’s two former husbands. Per the pharmacies poison registers, Amy bought ten ounces of arsenic just before Michael Gilligan’s death. This was enough to kill over a hundred people. As Michael Gilligan had died so suddenly after he married Amy and left her his entire estate despite having four children of his own, authorities investigated this too. They found that the will had been forged, and it was revealed on closer inspection that the handwriting on the will leaving the entire estate to Amy was not Michael’s, but Amy’s herself.
Michael Gilligan, Franklin Andrews and three other residents bodies were all exhumed and examined. All five had been poisoned. Some were poisoned with arsenic while others with strychnine. Autopsy revealed Franklin Andrews’ stomach contained enough arsenic “to kill half a dozen strong men”.
Amy Archer-Gilligan was arrested on May 8th, 1916 and charged with five counts of murder. Her lawyer managed to get the charges dropped to just one count of murder, specifically for the murder of Franklin Andrews. She was found guilty on June 18th, 1917 and was sentenced to death by hanging. Her sentence was changed to life in prison after she attempted to plead insanity after appealing and being granted a new trial.
In 1924, while in prison, she was declared temporarily insane and transferred to the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, Connecticut. She became a permanent resident there until her death 38 years later on April 23rd, 1962 at the age of 89.
In 1917, the same year of the first trial, Connecticut’s state legislature introduced a bill that required the licensing of “Old Folks Homes” with inspections and annual reports of death to be submitted to the State Board of Charities. Where elderly care homes were so new, there were no entities in place to regulate them and the care that was or wasn’t being provided.
This case also inspired playwright Joseph Kesselring, who had heard about Amy Archer-Gilligan as a young boy, to write a play about it. He traveled from New York to Connecticut to look at newspapers and old records and then sat down to write the play “Arsenic and Old Lace.” It opened on Broadway in 1939 as a comedy and was quite successful, and it later was adapted into a movie.
It is believed that Amy killed up to 48 people, making her a prolific serial killer.
Image sources:
windsorhistoricalsociety - “Amy Archer-Gilligan: Entrepreneurism Gone Wrong in Windsor”