3 cases tagged “poison murder”
Convicted: Debra Lynn Baker
In June 1990, as Jerry Sternadel lay dying in a Wichita Falls hospital, he did something extraordinary: he told doctors and family members exactly who had killed him. He named two women. One of them, his bookkeeper Debra Lynn Baker, would eventually be convicted of first-degree murder for poisoning him with arsenic administered in his cran-apple juice. The other, his wife Lou-Ann, was never charged. Baker's trial ended on the fourth anniversary of Sternadel's death with a verdict that stunned the courtroom: guilty of murder, sentenced to just ten years' probation and a $10,000 fine. No prison time. Not yet. The case of Debra Baker is a story of loyalty twisted into something lethal, of a privileged life built on a dead man's money, and of a justice system that the victim's own family condemned as a catastrophic failure. His daughter called it a terrible injustice. His first wife wrote a book about it. And Debra Baker, who refused to implicate her best friend even at the cost of a life sentence, walked out of that courtroom a free woman.
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: Kristin Margrethe Rossum
When paramedics arrived at the San Diego apartment on November 6, 2000, they found Gregory de Villers lying in bed, unresponsive, his body blanketed in red rose petals, a wedding photograph pressed against his chest. His wife, Kristin, stood nearby in tears, telling them he had taken his own life. It looked like a scene from a movie. It was, in fact, staged to look like one. Kristin Rossum, 24 years old and a trained toxicologist with access to the county medical examiner's controlled substance supply, had poisoned her husband with seven times the lethal dose of fentanyl — then arranged his corpse in a tableau lifted from her favorite film, American Beauty. She was sleeping with her married boss, secretly using methamphetamine she stole from her own workplace, and her husband had just threatened to expose everything. The rose petals were the detail that haunted investigators, the detail that made the case famous, and the detail that ultimately helped convict her. This is the story of how a summa cum laude graduate with a drug habit, a secret affair, and a dangerous job became one of California's most notorious poisoners.
