The Nursing Home Killer: The Dark Truth Behind “Sister Amy”

In the early 1900s, a quiet red-brick house on Prospect Street in Windsor, Connecticut appeared to be a place of compassion.

It was run by a devout churchgoing woman known in the community as “Sister Amy.”

Her mission seemed noble.
 She cared for the elderly and infirm, people whose families could no longer support them.

But behind the doors of that home, something disturbing was happening.

Between 1907 and 1916, as many as 60 residents died.

At first, no one questioned it.
 The residents were elderly. Many were already sick.

Death was expected.

But when one family member refused to accept the official explanation for her brother’s sudden death, the investigation that followed exposed one of the most chilling cases in American criminal history.

Authorities discovered something hidden behind the respectable reputation of Sister Amy.

Arsenic.

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we examine the story of Amy Archer Gilligan, the woman believed to be responsible for dozens of poisonings inside her nursing home. More importantly, we explore the psychological profile of what criminologists call a “comfort killer.”

Unlike many serial killers, comfort killers do not act out of rage or sexual motive.
 They kill for financial security, control, and survival, often targeting people they care for or have authority over.

Amy Archer Gilligan’s case forces us to ask uncomfortable questions about trust, caregiving, and the power of social roles.

Because sometimes the most dangerous people are the ones society trusts the most.

In This Episode

• The early life of Amy Archer Gilligan
 • The creation of the Archer Home for the Elderly
 • The suspicious deaths of dozens of residents
 • How arsenic po

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Transcript

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Kaitlyn:
A house on Prospect Street. It's Windsor, Connecticut, sometime in the early

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years of the 20th century.

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The house is quiet in a way that small New England towns are quiet.

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Not silence exactly, but a particular kind of stillness.

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Elm trees, wooden porches, the smell of wood smoke in autumn.

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The kind of place where people know each other's names and remember each other's

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parents and expect more or less that life will unfold in ordinary and predictable ways.

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The house itself is respectable.

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Red brick. Well kept. There's a garden out front.

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On Sunday mornings, the woman who runs it walks to St.

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Gabriel's Church with her daughter, nods to her neighbors, makes her donation,

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and is thought as a town pillar of sorts.

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Devout. Hardworking.

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Quietly admirable.

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The kind of woman who took on the burden that most families quietly dreaded. The care of the old.

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The infirm. The people whose bodies were winding down.

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And she did it without complaint. She did it, people said, with genuine Christian compassion.

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And they called her Sister Amy.

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Inside that house, at any given time, there were somewhere between six and ten elderly residents.

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People who could no longer manage a loan. People whose families were distant

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or absent or simply overwhelmed by the demands of keeping them.

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People who had signed contracts, either weekly payments or more commonly a single

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sum, usually $1,000 for lifetime care.

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And in some cases, they made Amy the beneficiary of their estates so she could

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manage their affairs more easily after they passed.

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She had suggested this arrangement, of course, and they had trusted her.

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Between 1907 and 1916, 60 people died in that house.

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60. And the question that would eventually tear the quiet street apart.

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That would make headlines across the country, and that would inspire a Broadway

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play and a Hollywood film and nearly a century of fascinated horror,

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is the same question we're going to sit with.

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Was Amy Archer Gilligan a woman undone by circumstance, by desperation,

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by a mental illness that consumed her?

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Or was she something colder than that?

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Something that wore the costume of caretaker so convincingly for so long that

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the entire town looked straight at it and didn't see it for what it was.

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Because here's the thing about poison.

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It doesn't look like anything. It doesn't announce itself. It just sits in tea.

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It dissolves in lemonade. And then it waits.

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Kaitlyn:
Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening

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to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed

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by women, but why they happened and the psychology behind them.

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Today, we're going into, well, we're going back to the beginning of the 20th

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century, to a small Connecticut town,

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to a boarding house for the elderly, and to a woman known to her community as Sister Amy,

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known to history as one of America's deadliest female serial killers,

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and known to anyone who's ever seen Arsenic and Old Lace as the very dark real

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thing behind a very dark comedy.

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So let's start at the beginning. Let's go to Milton, Connecticut in the autumn of 1873.

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Amy Elizabeth Dugan was born on October 31st, 1873.

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Halloween, as it happens. Though I'll leave you to decide whether that's meaningful

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or simply one of those details that history hands you like a gift.

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She was born the eighth of ten children to James Dugan and Mary Kennedy,

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a large family, a modest one, Catholic, working class in the way of most New

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England families of that era.

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Not destitute, but not comfortable, not perpetually aware of the distance between

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what they had and what they needed.

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There's not a great deal on the historical record about Amy's early years.

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She left few accounts of her childhood.

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What we do know, and what matters enormously when we try to understand the psychology

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of what came later, is this, mental illness ran in her family.

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Not as a whisper or a rumor, but as documented fact.

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Her brother John was committed to the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane

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in 1902, and one of her sisters would later be listed as residing there in the 1930 census.

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A sibling is reported to have leapt from the roof of the family home.

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But here's the thing. That does not mean that family mental illness history

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and individual behavior is a straight line.

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Having relatives with psychiatric condition does not make someone dangerous.

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It does not make someone a killer. What it does give us is the context for a

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person's interior world, the biological and environmental landscape in which

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their psychology was formed.

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And for Amy growing up as the eighth of 10 children in a household marked by financial strain,

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by the particular weight of a large Catholic family in a small New England town

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and the visible reality of mental illness moving through her family like a current,

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that was the foundational material, clearly.

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That's what she was working with internally before the world ever asked anything of her.

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As a child, she attended the Milton School and later the New Britain Normal School.

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She claimed in later life that she trained as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital in

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Manhattan, but this claim had no records that had ever been found to support it.

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Whether that was an invention or an embellishment or simply a documentation

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gap, we can't actually say for certain.

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But what it does suggest is a woman who understood that the story you tell about

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yourself matters, that credentials or the appearance of credentials open doors

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that plain circumstance does not.

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And she was 23 years old when she married James Archer in 1897.

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And that marriage and what followed from it is where the story really begins.

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But before we officially go into Amy's adult life, I do want to spend some time

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on something that I think gets lost in the retelling of this case.

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Because Amy is almost always framed as straightforward a financial killer.

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A woman who murdered for money. And that framing is not wrong exactly,

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but money was clearly and essentially part of what she was doing.

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But the thing is, it's incomplete.

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And that incompleteness matters because when we look at the psychology of women

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who kill, particularly during that time frame, the category of financial motive

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tends to flatten what is actually a much more complicated picture.

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Killing for money sounds calculated. It sounds cold-blooded or simple,

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and in some of Amy's case, it certainly was.

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But the fuller picture, when you look at the circumstances of her life and the

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choices she made and the escalating pattern of what she became,

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is a woman whose relationship to money was not purely predatory.

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It was, in some essential way, existential.

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Think about the world Amy occupied.

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Early 20th century New England, a woman with a daughter to raise and no independent income,

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a woman in an era when the economic options were only basically marriage or

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domestic service, a woman who had grown up watching financial precarity shape everything around her,

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who understood viscerally what it meant to be one bad season away from genuine destitution.

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The fear of poverty in that context is not a small thing.

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It's a rational response to a real and present danger.

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And in some women, not all, but some, that fear combined with a particular set

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of psychological characteristics combines into something that becomes capable

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of extraordinary rationalization.

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The ability to look at what you're doing and frame it internally in terms that

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make it not just tolerable, but necessary, even righteous.

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What those psychological characteristics look like in clinical literature on

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female serial killers who kill for financial gain tends to include a particular

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capacity for what researchers call impression management,

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the ability to construct and maintain a public identity that is completely at

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odds with private behavior,

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a high degree of social intelligence, the ability to read what people need and

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give that to them, and the ability to occupy a role so completely that the role

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becomes its own kind of cover.

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Sister Amy, churchgoer, caretaker, pillar of the community.

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That wasn't a disguise that Amy wore reluctantly.

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I think that was an identity she had constructed with great care and genuine

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investment, because that identity gave her something she never had in the crowded,

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financially strained household that she grew up in.

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It gave her status and it gave her authority.

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It gave her a place in the town that was not something you could really change

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as long as no one looked too closely to see what was actually happening inside the house.

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So in 1901, when Amy was an adult and she had already married James Archer.

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She took on a job as live-in caretaker Well, her and James took in that job.

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And they did it for an elderly widower named John Seymour. He was frail.

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His family was in California. And he need looking after.

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So the archers moved into his home in Newington.

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And provided that care in exchange for room and board.

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It was modest, unglamorous work. But it was also the first time Amy found herself

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in a specific dynamic that would define the rest of her life.

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Seymour died three years later in 1904, and his heirs turned the house into

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a boarding home for the elderly, so the Archer stayed on to run it.

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They called it Sister Amy's Nursing Home for the Elderly. And something in that

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arrangement, the work, the role, the quiet authority it gave her over the daily

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lives of people who needed her, something clicked into place for Amy Archer.

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And in 1907, the Seymour family sold the house.

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Rather than losing what they had built, Amy and James used their savings to

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purchase a home of their own on Prospect Street in Windsor.

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They converted it, and they named it the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids.

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And Amy began, in earnest, the business that would make her famous.

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The business model was simple, and for its era, fairly pioneering.

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Nursing homes were not common at the turn of the 20th century.

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Most families cared for their elderly at home because that was what was expected

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and because there was often no other actual alternative, but America was changing.

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Families were moving. Young adults

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were leaving small towns for cities and factories and opportunities.

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The old were increasingly left behind, increasingly left without family structure

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that had always absorbed them.

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The Archer family home filled a genuine gap. and it offered something real.

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But it offered it at a price, either $7 to $25 a week, or a flat fee of $1,000 for lifetime care.

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That lifetime care contract is worth pausing on because it is both the business

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logic and the murder logic.

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It exists in the same clause here. A resident pays $1,000 up front for care until they die.

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If they die quickly, Amy profits.

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If they live for decades, Amy loses money on that arrangement.

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The longer a resident lives, the worse the deal becomes for the woman running the home.

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So did Amy understand this when she devised the contract?

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Did it occur to her then as a problem to be solved?

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Or did the idea of solving it

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come later and slowly under the pressure of mounting financial difficulty?

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That question is one I'm holding on to because the answer I think is more complicated than it seems.

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James Archer? Yeah, he's been around the whole time, but then he died in 1910.

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The official cause was Bright's disease, a term used at the time for various

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kidney conditions. He was 50 years old.

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Amy had taken out an insurance policy on him weeks before his death.

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The payout enabled her to continue running the home. And there was no investigation.

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He had been unwell. These things happen. And a widow with a daughter and a business

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and a community standing to maintain did not look like a suspect.

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She looked like a woman managing grief and practical necessity simultaneously,

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which is exactly what most people around her assumed she was.

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And that is the thing about Amy Archer Gillian's case that I want you to sit

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with as we move through it.

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At every stage, what she was doing was legible, as clearly something else.

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As widowhood, as hard work, as the inevitable mortality of elderly and infirm

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people in her care, the story had an entirely reasonable surface,

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and that surface held remarkably for years.

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But between 1907 and 1910, 12 people died in the Archer home.

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That is not a negligible number.

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But nor is it extraordinary given that the home was specifically housing elderly

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and chronically ill residents.

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12 deaths over three years in a house full of people who were already unwell

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could be accounted for medically alone.

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Between 1911 and 1916, 48 people died.

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48 in five years in a house that typically held fewer than 10 residents at a time.

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The escalation is the story.

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The escalation is clearly everything here.

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Kaitlyn:
After James Archer's death, something shifted. The financial pressure on Amy intensified.

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Or her capacity to tolerate it diminished. And this is the psychological question

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we can't fully answer from the outside.

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Kaitlyn:
Something that had been considered choice began to feel like a system.

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Like a logic, once started, had its own momentum.

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Residents who had signed lifetime contracts and then lived, inconveniently long,

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began dying of gastric ailments, of sudden and unexplained deterioration following,

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oh, you guessed it, meals.

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Arsenic. When administered in the right dose over the right time frame produces

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symptoms that are almost indistinguishable from gastrointestinal illness.

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Vomiting, cramping, a rapid and bewildering physical collapse.

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Kaitlyn:
In the early 20th century, without toxological testing as a routine part of

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Kaitlyn:
post-mortem examination, the cause of death recorded was almost always whatever

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the attending physician considered most plausible. you,

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And when you're a physician employed by the home, reviewing the death of an

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elderly, chronically ill patient under the care of a devout,

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church-going woman, well-regarded by the community, the most plausible explanation is rarely murder.

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Dr. Howard King was Windsor's only medical examiner.

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He was also employed as the Archer Home Resident Physician.

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He signed death certificates.

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He listed causes. He was, whether he knew it or not, one of the most important

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structural elements of what Amy was building.

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Not because he was complicit, there was no evidence that he was,

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but because his presence made everything legitimate.

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It made it official. It made it look on paper exactly like it was supposed to look like.

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Kaitlyn:
Amy was buying arsenic from local drugstores.

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Kaitlyn:
Quantities that she told merchants were for killing rats and bedbugs.

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The quantities were extraordinary.

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One investigation would later establish that she had purchased enough arsenic

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Kaitlyn:
to kill more than 100 people.

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Kaitlyn:
The rats of the Windsors would have been very numerous indeed with that amount.

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Kaitlyn:
And she was also asking residents to go to the store on her behalf,

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sending elderly boarders to purchase poison in their own names.

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Kaitlyn:
Whether this was calculated, it was very disturbing on the paper trail,

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making the arsenic purchases traceable to the people other than herself.

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Or was it simply just delegation of errands by a woman running a household?

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It's something investigators debated and never actually resolved.

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Kaitlyn:
And in 1913, Amy married Michael Gilligan.

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I'm sure you were wondering where her last name actually came from.

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And that was from Michael. He was a widower.

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He was reportedly wealthy.

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He was, by most accounts, genuinely interested in Amy, both personally and as a business investment.

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Kaitlyn:
He saw the Archer home as sound enterprise worth putting money into.

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Kaitlyn:
He moved in, and he was healthy. He was vigorous. He was 56 years old,

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and he had every reason to expect a long life.

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Kaitlyn:
Three months after the wedding, Michael was dead.

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Kaitlyn:
The cause of death listed on his certificate, acute bilious attack, severe indigestion.

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Kaitlyn:
He had, during their brief marriage,

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Kaitlyn:
drawn up a will, leaving his entire state, you guessed it, to Amy.

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Kaitlyn:
The will, it would later be determined, was written in handwriting that matched

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Kaitlyn:
Amy's handwriting. It was a forgery.

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Kaitlyn:
And then came Franklin Andrews. Franklin did not fit the typical profile of

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Kaitlyn:
Amy's victims because he was 60 years old, somewhat crippled.

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Kaitlyn:
He also was not her husband, and he was essentially healthy.

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Kaitlyn:
Healthy enough to do chores, run errands, and to spend a morning painting the

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Kaitlyn:
fence around the property.

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Kaitlyn:
He wrote regularly to his family. And in those letters, he mentioned the frequency

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Kaitlyn:
of deaths in the home was a frankness that his sister would later come to understand as significant.

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Kaitlyn:
He also mentioned in terms that would become very clear in retrospect that Amy

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Kaitlyn:
had been pressing him for money, additional payments beyond his original agreement,

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Kaitlyn:
requests that escalated in frequency and urgency.

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Kaitlyn:
On May 29, 1914, Franklin Andrews spent the morning doing yard work.

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Kaitlyn:
By evening, he was dead.

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Kaitlyn:
The cause listed on his death certificate, obviously it's going to be gastric,

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Kaitlyn:
but in this case, gastric ulcer.

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Kaitlyn:
His sister Nellie did not accept it.

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Kaitlyn:
Nellie Pierce had to investigate, and so she went to the local district attorney. He largely ignored her.

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Kaitlyn:
Then she went to Hartford Courant, and on May 9th, 1916,

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Kaitlyn:
the Courant published the first of several articles under a headline that would

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Kaitlyn:
travel across the country and permanently attach itself to the red brick house on Prospect Street.

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Kaitlyn:
Murder factory. The articles forced the district attorney's hand.

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Kaitlyn:
An estate investigation began.

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Kaitlyn:
A female private investigator named Zola Bennett was hired by the Connecticut

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Kaitlyn:
State Police to go undercover inside the home as a resident.

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Kaitlyn:
She would gather evidence of

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the living conditions and of Amy's financial practices with the Borders.

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Kaitlyn:
The investigation took almost a year.

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Kaitlyn:
But Amy was indeed arrested on May 8th, 1916.

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Kaitlyn:
When the officers came to the door, she reportedly told them,

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Kaitlyn:
I'm a poor, hardworking woman and I cannot understand why I am being prosecuted

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Kaitlyn:
as I have been during the last few years.

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Kaitlyn:
She said it was a Christian work.

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Kaitlyn:
She said it was trying because of the particularities of old people.

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Kaitlyn:
She maintained her innocence, of course. with a conviction, by all accounts,

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Kaitlyn:
that did not waver in the face of handcuffs.

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Kaitlyn:
The bodies of five people were exhumed.

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Kaitlyn:
Michael Gilligan, her husband, Franklin Andrews, obviously, and three former

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Kaitlyn:
residents, Alice Gowdy, Charles Smith, and Maude Howard Lynch.

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All five tested positive for either arsenic or strychnine.

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Kaitlyn:
Franklin Andrews' stomach, upon examination, was found to contain enough arsenic

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Kaitlyn:
to kill, in the words of one investigator, half a dozen strong men.

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Kaitlyn:
The trial opened in June of 1917 and became a national sensation,

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Kaitlyn:
and Amy was charged with five counts of murder, though her lawyer succeeded

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Kaitlyn:
in reducing the case to just one count, just Franklin.

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Kaitlyn:
She took the stand in her own defense. She was calm, she was composed,

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and she presented, even now, as the most devout and earnest woman the town had

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always believed her to be.

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Kaitlyn:
The jury deliberated for four hours and found her guilty.

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Kaitlyn:
She was sentenced to death by hanging. Yes, at that time, that still existed. She appealed.

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Kaitlyn:
The Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors granted a retrial on the procedural

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grounds in 1918, and that second trial began in June of 1919.

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Kaitlyn:
This time, her defense strategy shifted.

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She pleaded insanity. Her daughter, Mary, then 19 years old,

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testified that her mother was addicted to morphine.

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Kaitlyn:
Alienist, the term used at the time for psychiatrists and psychologists,

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Kaitlyn:
testified about her mental state.

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Kaitlyn:
And on July 1st, 1919, Amy changed her plea to guilty of murder in the second

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Kaitlyn:
degree, and she was sentenced to life in prison.

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Kaitlyn:
Now, the death penalty was off the table, and she was a model prisoner until

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Kaitlyn:
1924, when she was declared temporarily insane and transferred to the Connecticut

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Kaitlyn:
Hospital for the Insane in Middletown.

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Kaitlyn:
She remained there until her death on April 23, 1962.

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Kaitlyn:
She was 88 years old. She had outlived almost everyone connected to the case.

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Kaitlyn:
And the house on Prospect Street, it still stands today.

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Kaitlyn:
But it's been converted into apartments sitting quietly on a street where elm

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Kaitlyn:
trees used to girl and is probably extremely haunted. But that's not what this podcast is about.

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Kaitlyn:
Instead, we talk about the psychology.

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Kaitlyn:
And Amy is a clear example of what researchers call a comfort killer.

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Kaitlyn:
The term sounds almost gentle, which is part of why it's worth interrogating.

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Kaitlyn:
A comfort killer is someone who kills primarily for material gain.

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Kaitlyn:
Yes, that includes money and inheritance, and for the practical elimination of financial burden.

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Kaitlyn:
They are distinguished from other categories of serial killers by the absence of what we expect.

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Kaitlyn:
No rage, no sexual motivation, no obvious hatred of victims.

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Kaitlyn:
The relationship with the victims is often actually warm and often characterized

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Kaitlyn:
by genuine or at least convincing expressions of care.

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Kaitlyn:
And this is the profile that research on female serial killers find most consistent.

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Kaitlyn:
Women who kill tend to kill people they know, people in their immediate orbit,

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Kaitlyn:
people over whom they have a caretaking relationship or a financial relationship or both.

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Kaitlyn:
They tend to use poison, a method that requires no physical force and that leaves no visible wound,

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Kaitlyn:
that works slowly and at a distance and can be done by someone who continues

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Kaitlyn:
in the interval between the dose and the death to appear completely normal.

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Kaitlyn:
To bring soup, to change the bedsheets, to send flowers to the family. Amy sent flowers.

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Kaitlyn:
She sometimes paid for the funerals of the residents that she had killed. Think about that.

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Kaitlyn:
The psychological distance required to arrange flowers for someone you poisoned,

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Kaitlyn:
to stand at the graveside of a person you killed,

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Kaitlyn:
to receive the condolences of their family with a composed and sorrowful face,

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Kaitlyn:
that distance is not ordinary.

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Kaitlyn:
It is not something that has a name in the clinical literature.

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Kaitlyn:
It is called moral disengagement, and it is one of the more chilling concepts

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Kaitlyn:
in forensic psychology.

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Kaitlyn:
Moral disengagement is the process by which a person deactivates the internal

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Kaitlyn:
ethical standards that would ordinarily prevent harm.

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Kaitlyn:
It doesn't mean those standards don't exist. It means the person has developed

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Kaitlyn:
over time a set of cognitive mechanisms for bypassing them,

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Kaitlyn:
reframing the harm as something other than, well, harm, basically minimizing it.

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Kaitlyn:
Attributing responsibility elsewhere, Telling themselves a story that makes

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Kaitlyn:
what they're doing not just acceptable, but necessary.

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Kaitlyn:
Which makes you wonder, what was Amy's actual story? Well, that we can't know with certainty.

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Kaitlyn:
Because she never told it plainly. But we can construct a reasonable hypothesis from evidence.

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Kaitlyn:
I think the story went something like this. These people were old.

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Kaitlyn:
They were dying anyway. They were in pain and pain.

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Kaitlyn:
Often or diminished or just lonely, and she was providing them with care and

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Kaitlyn:
comfort in the time they had.

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Kaitlyn:
And the money? The money was for her survival and her daughter's survival and

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Kaitlyn:
the survival of the work that she had built.

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Kaitlyn:
Without the money, the home would close. Without the home, where would they go?

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Kaitlyn:
That's the kind of rationalization that's not unique to Amy.

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Kaitlyn:
It appears in cases of financial elder abuse across centuries and continents.

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Kaitlyn:
The logic of the caretaker who has slowly, incrementally, convinced themselves

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Kaitlyn:
that the money they are taking and then the harm that they're doing to get it

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Kaitlyn:
is a fair exchange for the burden they carry.

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Kaitlyn:
It's a logic that begins in genuine grievance and ends somewhere it can never justify reaching.

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Kaitlyn:
Now that insanity defense, the morphine, and the transfer to the psychiatric

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Kaitlyn:
institution, what do we make of all that?

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Kaitlyn:
While the morphine addiction was raised by her daughter at the trial and has

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Kaitlyn:
been a point of genuine historical debate ever since.

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Kaitlyn:
Some researchers take it seriously. Others note that it appeared in essentially

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Kaitlyn:
one source and cannot be corroborated.

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Kaitlyn:
What we can say with more confidence is that Amy's mental health did genuinely deteriorate.

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Kaitlyn:
In prison, and increasingly in the decades after her transfer to the psychiatric facility,

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Kaitlyn:
whether that deterioration was the emergence of a pre-existing condition,

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Kaitlyn:
the consequences of decades of carrying the weight of what she had done,

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Kaitlyn:
or something compounded by the morphine habit her daughter described,

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Kaitlyn:
we can't actually determine from the outside.

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Kaitlyn:
But then there's also that family history.

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Kaitlyn:
The brother committed to the asylum, the sister. The suggestion that whatever

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Kaitlyn:
was moving through the Dugan family in Milton, Connecticut, whatever biological

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Kaitlyn:
or environmental inheritance Amy carried, was not irrelevant,

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Kaitlyn:
was not part of the material she was made of, or part of what shaped the particular

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Kaitlyn:
way her mind worked and the particular things that she was capable of.

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Kaitlyn:
But here's what I keep coming back to. In this case, and in every case where

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Kaitlyn:
mental illness and criminal action intersect,

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Kaitlyn:
the presence of mental illness or the possibility of it does not self-explain 60, again 60, deaths.

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Kaitlyn:
It does not explain the forged will It

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Kaitlyn:
does not explain the systematic purchasing of arsenic The calculated use of

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Kaitlyn:
residents as unwitting proxies in their own poison Or the management of a public

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Kaitlyn:
identity so expertly maintained That the entire town went on attending church

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Kaitlyn:
beside her Long after the death began.

382
00:30:03,210 --> 00:30:07,710
Kaitlyn:
That requires something more than illness. It requires a kind of sustained,

383
00:30:08,130 --> 00:30:10,790
Kaitlyn:
deliberate, operational intelligence

384
00:30:10,790 --> 00:30:15,550
Kaitlyn:
that is very hard to square with someone who is simply unwell.

385
00:30:15,870 --> 00:30:17,830
Kaitlyn:
The two things can coexist.

386
00:30:18,470 --> 00:30:23,470
Kaitlyn:
A person can be genuinely mentally ill and also genuinely calculating.

387
00:30:24,010 --> 00:30:30,010
Kaitlyn:
And they can be both compromised in their judgment and highly functional in their execution.

388
00:30:30,970 --> 00:30:36,310
Kaitlyn:
The categories are not mutually exclusive, but they do complicate each other

389
00:30:36,310 --> 00:30:41,870
Kaitlyn:
in ways that insanity, at least as a defense, by design tends to flatten.

390
00:30:42,590 --> 00:30:46,870
Kaitlyn:
So here we are, at the part where I ask you to stay with me in the discomfort,

391
00:30:46,870 --> 00:30:52,730
Kaitlyn:
because Amy Archer Gilligan's cases raises questions that we don't have clean answers to.

392
00:30:53,190 --> 00:30:59,470
Kaitlyn:
This one woman killed 60 people, and it caused legislation that changed how

393
00:30:59,470 --> 00:31:02,270
Kaitlyn:
America regulates elderly care. But is that justice?

394
00:31:02,710 --> 00:31:06,830
Kaitlyn:
It protects the next generation of elderly people being placed in the care of

395
00:31:06,830 --> 00:31:10,450
Kaitlyn:
stranger, but it does nothing for the people who died on Prospect Street.

396
00:31:10,650 --> 00:31:14,130
Kaitlyn:
It does nothing for the families who signed over estates and said goodbye to

397
00:31:14,130 --> 00:31:19,770
Kaitlyn:
parents who were then helped out of the world for profit of the woman holding their hand.

398
00:31:20,350 --> 00:31:24,290
Kaitlyn:
And then there's the question that I think is the most philosophical,

399
00:31:24,290 --> 00:31:26,170
Kaitlyn:
typical uncomfortable one in this case.

400
00:31:26,430 --> 00:31:31,670
Kaitlyn:
More uncomfortable even than the question of how she did it or how she justifies it.

401
00:31:31,790 --> 00:31:33,210
Kaitlyn:
What does it tell us about the

402
00:31:33,210 --> 00:31:37,490
Kaitlyn:
way we think about women and about care and about the role of caretaker?

403
00:31:38,450 --> 00:31:46,130
Kaitlyn:
Amy operated for years without any serious scrutiny. She was not invisible.

404
00:31:46,410 --> 00:31:53,430
Kaitlyn:
She was very visible and she was respected. She was trusted precisely because she occupied a role.

405
00:31:53,630 --> 00:31:59,850
Kaitlyn:
The female caretaker, the devout churchwoman, the self-sacrificing person who

406
00:31:59,850 --> 00:32:04,930
Kaitlyn:
does all the hard work that no one wants to do, that our society has always

407
00:32:04,930 --> 00:32:08,090
Kaitlyn:
assigned to women and has always in doing so,

408
00:32:08,550 --> 00:32:11,770
Kaitlyn:
treated as self-evidently virtuous.

409
00:32:12,450 --> 00:32:17,090
Kaitlyn:
Thing is, Amy was also a calculating killer.

410
00:32:17,530 --> 00:32:21,250
Kaitlyn:
This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions,

411
00:32:21,350 --> 00:32:25,650
Kaitlyn:
and I'm Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light.

412
00:32:25,830 --> 00:32:30,030
Kaitlyn:
Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought

413
00:32:30,030 --> 00:32:31,530
Kaitlyn:
we knew about the criminal mind.