Amy and James Archer opened Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly in 1901 in Newington, Connecticut, and quickly earned a reputation as genteel caretakers of New England's wealthy aged. Although neither Amy's or James' qualifications bespoke a background in medicine, their establishment offered the right therapies and tonics to keep its senior patients happy and comfortable. So successful was the clinic that six years later, its proprietors relocated a few miles outside Newington to Windsor where they opened the more commodious, more up-to-date Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm. That is when strange things began to happen, albeit slowly and subtly at first. Inside its whitewashed walls, patients died mysteriously without any cause. The attending physician, a personal friend of the Archers named Howard King, wrote each death off as old age. Even when Amy's husband dropped dead, the senile Dr. King innocently ascribed his death as "natural". Amy wept over James' coffin, King comforted the pretty brunette, and then Sister Amy went to the insurance office and filed for the claim issued previously on her husband's life. Amy didn't remain a widow long. She wed Michael W. Gilligan in 1913, a wealthy widower, who pitched in to help with the business operation and merged his bank account with Amy's. He failed to see anything unusual in the death toll at his wife's rest home a volume exceeding ten mortalities per annum, all from "old age". He obviously never paused to consider that most of the unfortunates had nothing seriously wrong with them medically or, in some cases, were quite physically agile. He should have given the matter more thought, for he too eventually contracted a high fever and cramping after one of Amy's standard "nutritional" meals. Dr. King once again came forth to put pen to paper. "Natural," he wrote after Cause of Death on Mr. Gilligan's death certificate. Although most Black Widows are cautious to a fault, Amy Archer-Gilligan's tactics were anything but obscure. And relatives of dead patients wondered why their parents or grandparents were very able bodied until they happened to sign an agreement allowing Nurse Gilligan to withdraw extravagant sums of money from their account for personal lifetime-care benefits and personal needs. Such happened to Franklin Andrews, after he signed, Maude Lynch after she signed, Alice Gowdy and a sad parade of others after they signed. An estimated forty-plus. Hometown police finally investigated in 1916. In the storerooms at the Archer clinic, investigators found large inventories of bottled arsenic; Amy explained that it was used to kill rats and other vermin. Neither the police nor investigators were convinced. A body of the last patient to succumb was exhumed and, as suspected, murderous quantities of arsenic were found in her system. More bodies were disinterred and the results matched. Even her last husband, Gilligan, had met equal fate. After a long and hot trial in Hartford, Connecticut, Amy Archer-Gilligan was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. But, erratic behavior behind bars led authorities to believe she was insane after all. She was commuted to a state asylum where she passed away, muttering to herself in her two-by-four cell, in 1928. [ReadOn]