The inspiration for the theatrical and Hollywood productions of “Arsenic and Old Lace” is former Windsor nursing home proprietor Amy Archer Gilligan, believed to be Connecticut’s most notorious female serial killer.
For $1,000, she would promise to take in boarders “for life,” a period which often turned out to be alarmingly short. After arsenic was detected in the unearthed corpse of her husband, she was sentenced to hang in 1917, but won a new trial and was later hospitalized as criminally insane. East Hartford journalist and author Ron Robillard, who is writing a book about Gilligan, discovered that some 200 records of her life stay at what is now Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, having been rescued and placed in a vault by a former hospital superintendent.
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