During the height of her fame, Lydia Sherman was dubbed “America’s Queen Killer,” “The Poison Fiend,” “The Modern-Day Lucretia Borgia” “The Derby Poisoner” and the The New York Times called Lydia Sherman “The Lucrezia Borgia of Ansonia” but she was actually far worse, poisonous at least 11 people, probably more, before she died in Wethersfield State Prison in 1878.
Eight of the people she killed were children in her care, 6 of which were her own, and her three husbands.
Sherman was born Lydia Danbury in New Jersey in 1824 and was raised by an uncle. At age 16 she went to work as a tailor. A year later, she met and married Edward Struck, a widower with two children and a policeman in the town of Yorkville, New York.
Seven years went by and the couple had six children together. Struck lost his job (A detective was killed "in a row in a saloon" when Struck was supposed to be on duty but was away without leave, and he was fired) and fell into a deep depression and Lydia poisoned him by mixing a “thimbleful” of arsenic into his oatmeal gruel and after several hours of vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea and convulsions, Edward died.
Within weeks Lydia, who was working as a nurse, also killed their three youngest children. By the end of the year, she also murdered her remaining three children.
In 1867, Lydia took a nursing job in Stratford and met and married Dennis Hurlburt, a wealthy Litchfield farmer and fisherman who was much older than Lydia, something she probably planned since Mr. Hurlburt “possessed very few attractions, besides his property” but, shortly after their marriage, Hurlburt changed his will, leaving Lydia everything.
Then he grew ill and died suddenly and Lydia inherited his $30,000 estate equal to about a half a million today at a time when a respectable middle class income was $2,000 a year. Yet, no one suspected anything unusual.
Only eight weeks later she went to work as a housekeeper in Ansonia, then a part of Derby called Birmingham for a widower and father of two named Horatio N. Sherman.
Within a few weeks of working for Sherman, Lydia was married to him and Sherman’s infant son died for reasons unknown. Then Sherman’s teenage daughter became ill and she died and then Sherman himself died.
A local Ansonia, Yale trained doctor named Beardsley, was suspicious and ordered an autopsy which disclosed the use of poison. Beardsley then authorized the bodies of Sherman’s children to exhumed, as well as Dennis Hurlburt’s body. An examination proved all three were poisoned.
In the meantime, Lydia fled the city but was arrested in June of 1871 for the murder of Horatio N. Sherman. She was tried in New Haven in 1872. She contended in her defense that she accidently killed Sherman, but did intend to murder his children. She said that Sherman accidentally ate arsenic thinking it was saleratus, a baking soda-like compound that, when mixed with cider, made it foam.
(Doctors agreed with her, Sherman appears to have mistakenly mixed the arsenic that his wife had bought to kill and his children with a glass of cider.)
The jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. A while later, in 1873, she made a full confession, admitting to poisoning her “three husbands and four children.” On January 11, 1873, Judge Sanford of New Haven sentenced Lydia Sherman to life in prison at Wethersfield State Prison.
On June 5, 1877, Sherman escaped from Wethersfield and made her way to Rhode Island where she checked into a hotel in Providence using the name “Mrs. Brown” but then referring to herself by a different last name. Suspicious, the hotel keeper called the police and Sherman was arrested.
A while later, a surprise inspection of Sherman’s cell revealed "a piece of crayon of a very 'bilious' color, and from experimenting with it upon the white skin of different persons it was found that a little brisk rubbing would change the color of the cuticle from a clear white to a sickly yellow: and it is now believed that the woman, as a 'crayon artiste,' has for a long time made a complexion to suit the demands of an artificial fever complaint and make prison life endurable."
Lydia Sherman died a year later, on May 16, 1878, after several weeks of illness probably from cancer, she died at age 51. She remained famous even after her demise. In both 1873 and in 1878, two different companies published her 1873 confession.