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suspicions with a colleague named Kinney, Beardsley secured permission to conduct a postmortem on Sherman. On Saturday, May 20, the two doctors dissected the cadaver, removing the stomachand liver and shipping the organs to a toxicology professor at Yale for analysis. Three weeks later, they received the results. Sherman’s liver was absolutely saturated with arsenic. There was enough poison in his system to have killed three men.
    A warrant was promptly issued for the arrest of Lydia Sherman.
    By then, however, she was no longer in Connecticut. Realizing that the law was closing in on her, she had decamped for New Brunswick. Several officers were immediately dispatched to New Jersey to keep her under surveillance. In the meantime, the bodies of Frankie and Ada Sherman were exhumed. So was the corpse of Dennis Hurlburt. All were found to contain significant traces of arsenic. Inquiring at the local pharmacies, police discovered that, in the spring of 1870, Lydia had purchased an ounce of white arsenic from a druggist named Peck, explaining that she needed the poison because her house was “overrun with rats.” They also learned about the bizarre string of tragedies that had befallen Edward Struck and his six children several years earlier when the ill-fated ex-policeman was married to Lydia.
    On June 7, 1871, authorities decided that the time had come to put the warrant into action. Lydia, shadowed by a pair of detectives, had gone off to New York City on a shopping expedition. When she returned to New Brunswick that evening, she was greeted at the train station by a detective and a deputy sheriff who took her into custody and transported her back to New Haven, where she was charged with the murder of Horatio Sherman.
    Her trial was a sensation, generating headlines in papers from the New Haven Register to the New York Times . According to the press, her crimes were unparalleled; the world hadn’t witnessed such horrors since the days of Lucretia Borgia, the infamous Italian noblewoman and reputed serial poisoner whose name was a byword for lethal treachery. When the trial opened in New Haven on April 16, 1872, spectators traveled great distances for a glimpse of this prodigy of evil—“the arch murderess of Connecticut.” What they saw was not the ogre they were expecting but a prim, proper, perfectly ordinary-looking woman in a black alpaca dress, black-and-white shawl, white straw hat, and black kid gloves.
    The sight of the forty-eight-year-old Lydia, looking calm, even somewhat cheerful, beneath her thin lace veil, had them shaking their heads in confusion. How could this utterly nondescript woman be guilty of such atrocities? The answer, of course, was simple. As with most serial killers, there was a terrifying disparity in Lydia between her mundane appearance and the monstrous abnormality of her mind. But back then, people were unfamiliar with the grotesque operations of the sociopathic personality. The term “serial killer” wouldn’t even be invented for another hundred years.
    The trial lasted eight days. The defense tried to persuade the jury that Horatio Sherman’s death was accidental, possibly caused when he had swallowed tainted water, drawn from a well in which a poisoned rat had drowned. Or perhaps he had taken his own life, driven to suicide by depression over his money problems, marital woes, and the recent deaths of his two children.
    The evidence against Lydia, however, was overwhelming. In the end, she was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the state prison at Wethersfield.
    Public fascination with Lydia’s case did not end with her conviction. Quite the contrary. Then as now, people had a powerful appetite for true-crime sensationalism, and instant books like The Poison Fiend: Life, Crimes, and Conviction of Lydia Sherman (The Modern Lucretia Borgia) were rushed into print. Lydia’s confession—composed in jail while she awaited sentencing and