(1872, Derby, Connecticut) The Disturbing Case of Lydia Sherman

追加: 2026-05-31

[00:00:04]The hot chocolate was still warm on the table when the doctor walked in. Horatio Sherman was dead. He had been sick for only a short time. His wife had been [music] by his side the whole time caring for him. That was what she told everyone. That was what everyone believed, but Dr. Beardsley did not believe it. Something about the way Horatio had died did not sit right with him. So, he did something that none of the other doctors before him had done.

[00:00:30]He ordered a test, and the test found poison.

[00:00:34]Before we proceed, tell us in the comments where you are and what time it is. We have our reasons for asking. It was May of 1871.

[00:00:42]Horatio Sherman was the third husband Lydia Sherman had buried. And once the doctors started looking, they could not stop [music] finding bodies. Between 1864 and 1871, Lydia Sherman killed three husbands and at least eight children. Six of those children were her own. Every single death had a doctor present.

[00:01:03]Every single death had a signed certificate. Every certificate said the person [music] had died from a natural illness. Not one of them mentioned Lydia. Not one of them mentioned poison.

[00:01:13]Not one of them was telling the truth.

[00:01:15]When the story finally came out at trial, the newspapers lost their minds.

[00:01:19]They called her America's queen killer, the poison fiend, the modern Lucrezia Borgia, the Derby poisoner. The names showed how shocked people were. But, the names did not explain [music] the most important part of this story.

[00:01:34]They did not explain how she got away with it for so long. To understand that, you need to go back to the very beginning. And the beginning is not what most people would guess. Lydia Sherman was born on the [music] 24th of December, 1824, in Burlington, New Jersey. Her parents died when she was very young, and her uncle raised her. At 16, she got a job as a tailor. At 17, she met a man named Edward Struck at church.

[00:02:01]He was a widower with two kids and worked as a police officer in New York.

[00:02:05]They got married and had six more children together. For a while things seemed fine. Then in 1863, Edward lost his job. He became deeply sad and stopped functioning. He lay around the house for months. He was not getting better. Lydia made a decision. She went to a shop and bought arsenic. Then she went home and poisoned her husband. When he died, she told people he had taken medicine from the wrong bottle by mistake.

[00:02:31]Nobody questioned it. Nobody dug deeper.

[00:02:34]The doctor signed [music] the death certificate and went home. Then she poisoned the children. Six weeks after her husband died, she poisoned three of her young children. Then two more the following year. The doctor wrote typhoid [music] fever on each certificate. Six people in one household were dead within a year. The neighbors felt sorry for her. The church prayed for her. Lydia collected the life insurance money on each one of them and moved to a new town.

[00:03:00]Here is the part of this case that is hardest to accept. The doctors who examined these people were not bad doctors. Arsenic poisoning is not hard to spot. The signs are very clear. The person gets violently sick to their stomach. Their throat burns. They shake and convulse. They get worse and worse until they die. Doctors in the 1800s knew exactly what arsenic poisoning looked like. There was even a simple test that could find arsenic in a dead person's body.

[00:03:29]That test had been around since 1836, but no one used it. No one asked for it.

[00:03:35]Why? Because Lydia Sherman was a woman, a wife, a mother, a caretaker. And in that time and place, no one looked at a woman like that and thought she might be doing this on purpose. That kind of thinking simply did not happen. So doctor after doctor walked into her home, saw a sick and dying person, wrote down a disease name, and walked back out. She was counting on exactly that.

[00:03:58]In 1868, she married her second husband, Dennis Hurlburt. He was an older man, fairly well-off, from New Haven, Connecticut. Before long, he was vomiting and shaking. Then he was dead.

[00:04:10]Lydia walked away with $30,000 and moved on. In 1870, she took a job as a housekeeper for a man named Horatio Nelson Sherman. He was a widower with four children and a drinking problem.

[00:04:22]Within a few months, they were married.

[00:04:24]Soon after, two of his children were dead.

[00:04:27]Then Horatio drank the hot chocolate she made him one evening. He was dead by morning. This time, the doctor asked questions. Dr. Beardsley looked at Horatio's body and felt something was wrong. He ordered an autopsy. The results came back, arsenic. He then had the bodies of the Sherman children dug up, arsenic. Then the body of Dennis Hurlburt, the second husband, arsenic.

[00:04:50]Professor George Barker, a scientist from Yale University, ran detailed [music] tests on the remains.

[00:04:57]The results were the same every time, arsenic in every body, enough to kill, deliberately given. In June of 1871, police found Lydia Sherman in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and arrested her.

[00:05:11]She was brought back to Connecticut to stand trial. The trial lasted eight days. The evidence was impossible to argue against. The prosecutor showed the jury exactly [music] how much arsenic had been found in Horatio Sherman's body.

[00:05:26]Professor Barker from Yale explained in plain [music] terms that no one could have consumed that much arsenic by accident. Lydia's lawyers did not deny the poison was there. They could not.

[00:05:37]Instead, they tried to argue [music] that she had not meant to kill Horatio, that maybe he had accidentally eaten something that was meant for the children. The jury did not buy it. On the 25th of April, 1872, Lydia Sherman was sent to prison for life. But here is a strange detail.

[00:05:56]Even with all that evidence, even with 11 bodies and years of killing, the jury could not bring themselves to call it first-degree murder.

[00:06:04]They went with [music] second-degree instead. Historians who have studied this case say it was because the jury simply could not fully accept that a woman, a mother, had done all of this on purpose.

[00:06:16]Even at the end, the same blind spot that had protected her for years showed up one last time in the courtroom.

[00:06:24]While she was waiting to be formally sentenced, Lydia did something unexpected. She talked. She confessed to killing three husbands and four children. She could not read or write, so she worked with a police officer to put her story into a book. The book was called The Poison Fiend. It sold copies all across the country. People read it looking for answers. What they found was something strange. Lydia did not sound sorry in the way people expected.

[00:06:50]Instead, she had reasons for everything she had done.

[00:06:54]Her first husband had been sad and out of work. She said she had ended his pain. The children who were sick, she had cut their suffering short. The old man who was going to die anyway, she had just moved things along. In her mind, every death was a kindness, a problem solved, a burden lifted. The newspapers called this thinking evil, and perhaps it was. But some people who have studied her story point to something else. Lydia Sherman had no money of her own. She had no rights of her own.

[00:07:23]She had no way to leave a bad situation without losing everything. She lived in a time when a woman had almost no options at all. That does not make what she did right. But it may explain why, in her own mind, poison felt like the only door available to her. 11 people walked through that door. None of them came back. Five years into her prison sentence, Lydia pretended to be too sick to stay in prison and managed to get out. She found work as a housekeeper for a wealthy widower in Providence.

[00:07:53]She was caught and brought back before anything happened to him. She died in Wethersfield [music] State Prison on the 16th of May, 1878.

[00:08:01]She was 53 years old. Cancer killed her in the end, not a cord, not a rope, cancer. The 11 people she poisoned are buried in different places across New York and Connecticut. Their death certificates [music] still list diseases they did not die from. The test that could have caught her existed for 30 years before anyone used it on one of her victims.

[00:08:23]One doctor in Derby, Connecticut asked a question in May of 1871 that no one had thought to ask before.

[00:08:31]That one question unraveled seven years of killing. The arsenic was always there.

[00:08:36]The bodies were always there.

[00:08:39]The signs were always there. All it took was one person willing to look.