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immediately issued in pamphlet form—also became a popular seller. She even became immortalized in a ballad:
    Lydia Sherman is plagued with rats.
    Lydia has no faith in cats.
    So Lydia buys some arsenic,
    And then her husband gets sick;
    And then her husband, he does die,
    And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.
    Lydia moves, but still has rats;
    And still she puts no faith in cats;
    So again she buys some arsenic,
    This time her children, they get sick,
    This time her children, they do die,
    And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.
    Lydia lies in Wethersfield jail,
    And loudly does she moan and wail.
    She blames her fate on a plague of rats;
    She blames the laziness of cats.
    But her neighbors’ questions she can’t deny—
    So Lydia now in prison must lie.
    To her contemporaries, the Sherman case was uniquely appalling—“the horror of the century,” asone newspaper called it. In the hundred-year history of the republic, nothing like the “American Borgia” had ever been seen, and her countrymen felt certain that they would never witness such a monster again.
    But they were wrong

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    You may ask yourselves the question, how is it possible for a woman like this to commit such a crime? The answer is, from the depravity that is sometimes found to exist in the human heart—in the heart of a woman as well as in that of a man. As the female sex ordinarily rise above men in morality and kindness and gentleness, so they sometimes sink to lower depths of cruelty and malignity.
    —F ROM THE TRIAL OF S ARAH J ANE R OBINSON
    O NLY THE SENTIMENTAL ATTITUDES OF THE DAY SAVED Lydia Sherman from the gallows. The idea of hanging any woman, even a certified fiend, was repugnant to Victorian sensibilities. Still, there were many New Englanders who felt strongly that her sentence was a miscarriage of justice. A monster like Lydia, they proclaimed, should not be suffered to live.
    They got their wish soon enough. In May 1878—just five years after she was locked away in Wethersfield—Lydia Sherman died after a brief illness. America’s “Queen Poisoner,” as she had come to be known, was gone. But her throne wouldn’t remain empty for long.
    •   •   •
    According to the cliché, every woman dreams of marrying a prince. For Annie McCormick, a young widow living in South Boston, that wish came true—in amanner of speaking. After several lonely years, she was rescued from widowhood by a man with the unlikely name of Prince Arthur Freeman. They were wed in 1879.
    The life he offered her, however, was anything but regal. An unskilled laborer who spent his days slaving in an iron foundry, Prince Arthur had never earned more than a few dollars per week in his life. To make ends meet, Annie continued to ply her trade as a seamstress. Even with the extra money she brought in, they barely managed to scrape by. Food was scant, their tenement flat dismal and underheated. It is little wonder that in February 1885—just a few weeks after their second child was born—the overworked woman contracted pneumonia.
    It was Prince Arthur’s mother, Mrs. Freeman, who took care of the medical bills. In addition to paying the family doctor, Archibald Davidson, she hired an elderly woman named Mrs. Randall to help nurse her bedridden daughter-in-law. After ten days in bed, Annie—to the great relief of her family—began to show definite signs of improvement. By the second week of February, Dr. Davidson confidently predicted that, “with proper nourishment,” the patient would almost certainly make a complete recovery.
    And then Annie’s sister showed up.
    Her name was Sarah Jane Robinson. Like Annie, she was a skilled seamstress, though she had also done her share of nursing. To be sure, her patients had an unfortunate habit of dying. Just a few years earlier, for example, she had cared for her landlord, Oliver Sleeper, during what turned out to be his final illness. His death had taken his friends by surprise. Until he was stricken with a