by Noel Hynd
At the second trial, a curious thing was noticeable. Sister Amy, though only in her forties, had suddenly aged. At the first trial, where she had appeared with a daughter from one of the five marriages she had gone through before darkening the Connecticut landscape, she had retained her remarkable youth.
Now, though, she had suddenly become an old woman, with evil written all over her face. She reminded some court observers of a female Jekyll-Hyde. All through the seven years while she was writing criminal history she had kept her innocent, youthful face. Now, overnight, it seemed, the evil and age had wiped out the innocence and the youth.
Insanity was her defense the second time around, with defense lawyers declaring her crazy. Her 19-year-old daughter, Mary E. Archer, testified that her mother was a morphine addict. The second trial ended on July 1, 1919, with a plea of guilty of murder in the second degree, which carried a life sentence. She was a model prisoner until 1924, when she was declared hopelessly insane and transferred to a mental hospital.
End of story? Not quite.
An aspiring young writer heard of Amy’s story in the 1930’s and wrote it up as a stage play. His name was Joseph Otto Kesselring, and the original title of his word was Bodies in Our Cellar. The title changed, however, and the play found its way to Broadway as Arsenic and Old Lace.
Written in 1939, it opened on Broadway at the Fulton Theater, on January 10, 1941, to rave reviews. The original production featured Boris Karloff playing a killer who looked like the Boris Karloff of Frankenstein fame and made the idea of wholesale slaughter simply hilarious.
Frank Capra later made it into a film, starring Cary Grant. As one critic proclaimed,
“You wouldn’t believe homicidal mania could be such fun!”
Sister Amy was still alive for both the play and the movie. But it is not known if she saw either. Nonetheless, she starred in the original cast and became a celebrity patient, of sorts, in the nut house where she resided. Ironically, she outlived just about everyone she ever met until a day April 1962, when she died quietly at the ripe old age of ninety-two.
The End
Also by Alan Hynd
Alan Hynd’s “‘Til Death Do Us Part” Volume 1: 5 Spicy Classic Tales of Adultery, Murder and Marriage
by Alan Hynd et al.
Link: http://amzn.com/B00QMIUYP0
Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From The Files of Alan Hynd
by Alan Hynd
Link: http://amzn.com/B00NG77JSK
Prescription: Murder! Volume 2: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd
by Alan Hynd
Link: http://amzn.com/B00PBYTIE4
Prescription: Murder! Volume 3: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd
by Alan Hynd
Link: http://amzn.com/B00Q1X5ZCI
Alan Hynd in 1943