A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer used the heat to cover her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a disturbing pattern. Residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, had been dying at an alarming rate for years. 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 two husbands and up to sixty 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 and crimes of America's most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating story, M. William Phelps also paints a vivid, spine-chilling portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.
