If you’re looking for comedy rather than gore for your Halloween, Frank Capra’s classic, Arsenic and Old Lace, plays out like a sitcom of a dysfunctional, slightly insane, family. Originally written for Broadway, then adapted to screen and released in 1944, it tells the story of Mortimer Brewster, who arrives at the home of his elderly aunts to tell him he’s just got married. But it’s the protagonist who gets a shock when he discovers a body in the window seat and finds out about the sweet old ladies’ morbid hobby.
The film is funny, a little weird, and oddly cute. Yet it’s based on a chilling true crime story that is anything but light. The playwright Joseph Kesselring was inspired by the boarding house where he lived while teaching at Bethel College in Kansas. But he derived the unassuming murderesses from Amy Duggan Archer-Gilligan, who was suspected of murdering between 20 and 100 people, including her two husbands, from 1907 until her arrest in 1916.
It all began when Amy and her first husband James Archer opened the “Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm” in 1907 in Windsor, Connecticut. Then it 1910, Archer died of Bright’s disease, which was the term used to diagnose most kidney illnesses of the time. She then married the wealthy Michael Gilligan in 1913, only to have him die a year later from stomach issues shortly after signing his entire estate to Amy. This last thing was eventually proven to have been forged since it was written in Amy’s handwriting.
Eventually Nellie Pierce, sister of one of the boarders who had died despite in seemingly good health, began digging around those in Amy’s care. From 1907 to 1916 there had been 60 deaths at the nursing home, yet 48 had occurred from 1911 onwards .Finally in 1916, Pierce’s brother was finally exhumed two years after his death. Instead of the causes found on the death certificate, the autopsy found enough arsenic in his system to kill more than a few men. Her husband’s body, and those of four other boarders were reexamined and found to have been poisoned as well.
She was arrested that year, stood trial, and her 1919 appeal resulted in her being deemed criminally insane. In 1924 her condition got her sent to a mental institution where she remained until her death by natural causes in 1962.
The story would appear to end there, but then in 1988, an inquiry into the disappearance of a mentally disabled man, resulted in several bodies being discovered in a Sacramento Boarding house. The owner, Dorothea Puente, would end up being convicted with two life sentences.
Inspiration can come from the most strange and inexplicable sources. It seems that in the case of this classic movie, which is perfect to watch while eating leftover candy or pumpkin carving, truth is stranger than fiction.