2 cases tagged “elder abuse”
Convicted: Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan
Between 1911 and 1916, forty-eight elderly residents died inside the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids in Windsor, Connecticut. The Jefferson Street Home in Hartford housed seven times as many residents and buried a similar number in the same period. The math was damning. The woman behind those numbers was Amy Archer-Gilligan, known to her congregation as 'Sister Amy,' a woman who donated a stained-glass window to St. Gabriel's Church and whom neighbors described as compassionate and devout. She was also a poisoner of breathtaking audacity. She had purchased more than ten ounces of arsenic from a local drugstore, enough to kill over a hundred people. She had forged a dead man's will. She had taken out life insurance policies on her husbands and encouraged her elderly boarders to name her as their beneficiary. When Connecticut state police exhumed five bodies, every single one tested positive for poison. The case scandalized the nation, inspired one of Broadway's most beloved dark comedies, and forced Connecticut to overhaul its elder care laws entirely. It also left behind questions the courts never fully answered: how many people truly died at Amy's hands, and how long had she been killing? This is the story of Sister Amy.
Convicted: Dorothea Helen Puente
On the morning of November 11, 1988, police began digging up the yard of a blue-and-white Victorian boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. By the end of the day, they had found seven bodies. The woman who owned the house, a stout, silver-haired grandmother type named Dorothea Puente, stood nearby in a housecoat and watched. Detectives didn't consider her a suspect yet. They let her walk to a nearby café to get coffee. She never came back. For years, Puente had presented herself to social workers and city officials as a saint: a warm, generous landlady who took in the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless, the people no one else would accept. She cooked elaborate meals and sent tenants to bed with warm milk. She also drugged them, buried them in her yard, and cashed their Social Security checks. Prosecutors would later allege she collected over $87,000 this way, spending some of it on a facelift. The Death House Landlady, as the press called her, was eventually convicted of three murders and died in prison in 2011 at age 82, still insisting she was innocent. The full story of how Dorothea Puente became one of America's most prolific female serial killers is a portrait of survival twisted into something monstrous.
