The Devil’s Rooming House: The True Story of America’s Deadliest Female Serial Killer

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A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer started her own murderous bender. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and started to suspect who was reliable: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who’d opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her tale inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Ancient Lace.

The Devil’s Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America’s most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating tale, M. William Phelps also paints a plain portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.