The Devil’s Rooming House by M William Phelps

Lyons Press (Hardcover release April 2010)

The gripping tale of a legendary, century-old murder spree

 A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer began her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect who was responsible: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who’d opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. “Sister Amy” would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace.

The Devil’s Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America’s most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating story, M. William Phelps also paints a vivid portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.

Praise for M. William Phelps and The Devil’s Rooming House  

“Phelps is one of America’s finest true crime writers.”          

–Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter and Reclaiming History  

“The Devil’s Rooming House was certainly a revelation. I had no idea that there was such a gruesome backstory to one of my favorite films, Arsenic and Old Lace, and after reading this exhaustively researched book, I can now say I know every lurid detail. I think readers will be surprised to find that another WOMAN has joined the infamous ranks of serial killers and that if the heat doesn’t get you, the poison will.”

—Paula Uruburu, author of American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and The Crime of the Century

“This harrowing account of how one seemingly dedicated and devoted caretaker of the old and infirm can emerge from her cocoon of Christian piety and prove to be an obscene force of destruction is written with the usual clarity and style of renowned crime writer, M.William Phelps.  The Devil’s Rooming House not only depicts the shocking persona of the serial killer, Amy Archer, but also tenderly gives voice to her heroic, doomed victims.”

–Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, author of Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir