William Archerd: a serial matrimonialist killer

William Dale Archerd, also known as James Lynn Arden and by other pseudonyms, was found guilty on 15 March 1968 of murdering his nephew and two of his seven wives. These were probably not the only killings he committed. He was then 55 years old and had a varied past as salesman, erstwhile mental hospital attendant and serial matrimonialist. His wives had a habit of dying, and William had chosen insulin as the weapon to kill two, and possibly three, of them as well as his other victims. He presumably stole it, as for much of the time he was unemployed, but he could also have bought it over the counter as insulin was not a prescription-only drug and was freely available. Although his murderous career really began in 1947, it was only 20 years later, when he was arraigned for murder, that his earlier crimes came to light.

Figure 1.

Chronology of Williams Archerd's victims

William had, it seemed, always wanted to be a doctor but, not having the opportunity or - possibly the ability - to pursue this career, spent some time during the early 1940s working as an orderly in a state mental hospital - and the next 25 years in a life of crime.

In 1950 some of his earlier misdemeanours caught up with him and he was sentenced to five years' probation after pleading guilty to illegal possession of morphine. The probation was revoked after he committed a second drug offence. He was sent to a minimum-security prison, from which he escaped in 1951.

After recapture he was sent to the high-security, and highly notorious, San Quentin jail, from which he was released on parole in 1953. San Quentin had been established in 1852 at Point Quentin, an island off Marin County in San Francisco bay, as an answer to the rampant lawlessness in California at that time. California's only gas chamber and death row for all condemned male inmates were located at San Quentin and it was possibly there that William was launched into serious crime.

The story begins when William contacted the police on 24 July 1956 to report an alleged robbery at his home in Los Angeles. He said that two robbers had come to his home, armed with guns and hypodermic syringes, which they had used to inject both him and his current (third) wife, Zella, in the buttocks. They made off with $500 but none of Zella's jewellery, which was on full view in her bedroom. At the scene of the crime the police initially found two puncture wounds in Zella's buttocks (later amended to four after examination of photographs taken of her after death), but none in William's.

Zella was dizzy but not comatose when the police arrived, and she corroborated her husband's statement about the robbers, although she never saw them, as they put a pillowcase over her head. After the police left she gradually lapsed into coma and had convulsions, from which she died next day without regaining consciousness. During a search of the house and surroundings the police found a hypodermic needle in a bathroom drawer and a half-used vial of long-acting insulin in a nearby field.

The investigating police officer in Los Angeles, Sergeant Harry André, drew the coroner's attention to the insulin vial. However, because no poisonous substances were found in Zella's body and no method of measuring insulin was readily available except in research laboratories, he had no evidence that she had died from insulin poisoning. Zella's death was officially attributed to bronchopneumonia, but suspicion remained, at least in Sergeant André's mind, that she might have been murdered.

The second death to come to the attention of the authorities was that of Juanita, William's fifth wife. She and William lived in Las Vegas, Nevada, where William had gone to live soon after Zella's death. Juanita was discovered in a coma on 12 March 1958, only two days after she and William had married, and less than two years after Zella's death in Los Angeles. Like Zella, Juanita was taken to hospital but died only a few hours after being found and without regaining consciousness. Her doctors attributed her coma to a self-administered barbiturate overdose. This was not confirmed by blood analysis, as the methods for measuring barbiturates were too difficult to do routinely. She also had a low blood sugar, for which there was no obvious medical explanation. In the light of what subsequently emerged, Juanita's coma was almost certainly due to insulin but, once again, the crucial test was not done.

William Archerd's name cropped up yet again just over a year later when, having married for the sixth time, his new wife's ex-husband, Frank Stewart, died in a Nevada hospital on 17 March 1960. He had been taken there after having allegedly slipped on a banana skin in a toilet in the airport while he was on a business trip with William, and had struck his head as he fell. Frank never regained consciousness. William's account of Frank's accident was accepted. Despite the authorities' suspicion of dirty work, no criminal cause could be found to account for Frank's death.

Because both Juanita's and Frank's deaths had occurred in another state and were consequently outside Sergeant André's jurisdiction, there was little he could do about them. Nevertheless he reported his suspicions about William to the Nevada police authorities but, despite the strong circumstantial evidence pointing to wrongdoing, they were unable to find sufficient evidence to implicate William in Frank's death. Once again, as no one had measured Frank's blood glucose level while he was unconscious, the authorities never considered the possibility of insulin overdose.

William's name next came to Sergeant André's attention a year and a half later when he read a newspaper account of Burney Kirk Archerd, William's nephew, who died following a hit-and-run traffic accident in Nevada. William had taken his nephew to hospital on 21 August 1961 in a semi-comatose state. Burney was complaining of a sore hip and scalp and, on examination, the pupil of one eye was dilated. This is common after a head injury, but, with the benefit of hindsight, it could have been caused by William putting atropine into one of Burney's eyes to produce inequality in pupil size to feign a head injury. Burney became fully comatose during the evening and night of 23 August, shortly after a visit from William. He never regained consciousness and died 10 days later, on 2 September 1961.

The only laboratory abnormality recorded in Burney's clinical notes was a low glucose concentration in his cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This had been collected as part of the investigation of his coma. No particular significance was attached to the low CSF glucose concentration, and by implication low blood glucose concentration, until after Burney's death. The pathologist who conducted Burney's autopsy was aware of the Kenneth Barlow case,¹ and later said that he had considered the possibility that Burney's coma was due to insulin. But he had no means of proving it, since any insulin would long since have gone. Burney's death was put down to the car accident that had brought him into hospital.

Sergeant André then drew William's record to the attention of Sergeant White of the Los Angeles homicide squad. Sergeant White had been charged with investigating fatal road accidents in a large area surrounding the city, and his involvement in this case played a crucial role in unravelling the story. He became further involved after he had investigated, and disproved, a fraudulent claim by William for damages following a road accident he said he had been involved in, but which had been deliberately staged by him in collusion with others, including his then current girlfriend, Stella Morrin, who was fortunate enough not to marry him. There was, however, still no definite evidence linking William with the deaths of Frank, Burney, Zella or Juanita - though suspicion ran high.

Things came to a climax when William's seventh wife, a romantic novelist called Mary Brinker Arden, died on 2 November 1966, 18 months after her wedding, allegedly as a result of head injuries sustained in a road traffic accident.

Lieutenant White, as he now had become, was assigned the job of investigating Mary's death, which was far from straightforward. William and Mary had lived together for about a year after their marriage but parted when she became bankrupt. William then returned to live with his sixth wife, Gladys. After her car accident on 28 October, Mary got in touch with William, who, after she had returned home from the hospital, went to her house to console her. Two days later Mary was admitted to hospital in a coma and she died the next day without recovering consciousness. Blood tests showed she had a very low blood glucose level and that some barbiturates were present.

Here was yet another suspected murder by insulin with no hard evidence to go on. For reasons that are far from clear, neither Lieutenant White nor any of his forensic medical advisers appears to have known that six years earlier, in 1960, an exquisitely sensitive method had been developed for measuring insulin in blood and other body samples. The technique, radioimmunoassay, was to earn one of its inventors, Rosalyn Yalow, the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Unfortunately her co-inventor, Sol Berson, could not participate in the award, as it is never given posthumously. Radioimmunoassay rapidly became accepted as the best, and at that time only, sensitive and reliable method for measuring insulin in blood and tissues at the infinitesimally low concentrations in which it occurs in the body even after criminal or suicidal use.

Lieutenant White established contact with Dr Edward Arquilla, who was the Professor of Pathology at the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center. By coincidence, Dr Arquilla had himself invented a technique for measuring insulin in blood and tissues using antibodies. It was not as sensitive or reliable as the radioimmunoassay method devised by Berson and Yalow and consequently was less widely used.

Immunoassay uses antibodies to measure substances in blood in a test tube. It can also be used to detect substances in thin sections of tissue removed at operation or autopsy without measuring their actual concentration. This technique is known as immunohistology and identifies substances that react with the antibody to the exclusion of everything else - or so the theory goes. In those early days, before its complexity was fully appreciated, immunohistology was relatively crude. It could create artefacts and was not as reliable as many people supposed, especially in the forensic situation. Even so, it provided useful information for research and sometimes for diagnostic purposes in the clinic.

At the police department's request, Dr Arquilla applied an immunohistological technique using his own insulin antiserum to thin slices of Burney's brain that had been collected at post-mortem and preserved. They reacted with the insulin antibodies, whereas normal brain tissues did not. Dr Arquilla was also given some of Mary's brain, from which he made extracts that he injected into mice. He showed that they lowered blood glucose concentrations in the mice more than did similar extracts made from normal brain. From this he concluded that the samples contained abnormally high quantities of insulin. Dr Arquilla's results did not become available, however, until after William had already been charged, on 27 July 1967, in Los Angeles, with the murders of Zella, Burney and Mary. Indeed, Dr Arquilla did not even receive the samples for analysis until the day the trial itself had begun. This was on 4 December 1967, by which time the police had interviewed 400 people in extensive investigations. Among them was Dorothea, William's second wife, from whom he was divorced just a day before he married Zella. Until the investigations proved otherwise, Zella was believed to be William's first victim.

Although Archerd was not specifically charged with the offences, the court allowed evidence to be heard ‘to show common plan or scheme’ that William had used insulin to murder Juanita, his fifth wife, the ex-husband (Frank Stewart) of his sixth wife and a friend (William Jones). This decision was made after Dorothea, who was a nurse and still alive, had told the police about the death of William Jones. Jones had been involved in a moneymaking scam with William, who killed him by an insulin injection in 1947. Jones had apparently agreed to let William inject him with insulin as a cover-up for some of their illegal activities, which involved faking unconsciousness due to a head injury purportedly caused by a motoring accident, not knowing or appreciating the consequences of what he was doing.

Dr Grace Thomas testified at William's trial. She had been the psychiatrist in charge of Camarillo State Hospital when William worked there and when insulin coma therapy for schizophrenia was in vogue. She told the court that the hospital records of all of his victims found alive were consistent with hypoglycaemia. Dr Robert Tranquada, Professor of Medicine and a well-known endocrinologist from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and who had written extensively on the investigation of hypoglycaemia, agreed with her.

William had waived his right to trial by jury and was found guilty by the presiding judge on three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Zella, Burney and Mary. On 6 March 1968, he was sentenced to death in the gas chamber of San Quentin State Prison. Later, in 1970, the California State Supreme Court confirmed the conviction. They also held that evidence that he had killed Juanita, Frank and William Jones was admissible as showing ‘a common plan or scheme’. Two years later, in 1972, William's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after the US Supreme Court had ruled that the death penalty was a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. The death penalty was subsequently re-instated in the USA in 1974 and the first post-Supreme Court execution took place two years later, although William himself escaped it, dying instead of pneumonia at the age of 65.

With the benefit of hindsight, and subsequent knowledge of how insulin behaves in the body, it is unlikely that the results of the tests for insulin in the brains of Burney and Mary would stand up in court today since they were almost certainly artefacts. We now know that insulin cannot be accurately detected in the brain, as it is easily confused with related chemicals. Without these measurements, there must be some uncertainty that what was undoubtedly a justified conviction would have been obtained. What is truly surprising is that even as late as 1966, when Mary died, none of the doctors looking after her—or for that matter those consulted by the police—knew about Yalow and Berson, radioimmunoassay or the dozens of papers that had been published describing its use for measuring insulin in blood.

William appears to have been motivated by greed throughout his criminal career. Zella had been comparatively well off when he married her and he stood to gain from her death. Junita left an estate worth $40,000, but unbeknownst to William, she had altered her will shortly before she died so that he got none of it. Mary was a successful author in her own right and, as her next of kin, William stood to inherit her estate, whatever it was worth, despite her bankruptcy. William's nephew Burney had been awarded $8000 in compensation for the death of his father, and William had been named as trustee. After Burney's death none of the money could be found or accounted for. And Frank Stewart had taken out $80,000 worth of accident insurance payable to William's aged mother and his former wife, Gladys, in the event of his death whilst on his business trip with William. The insurance company, however, refused to pay out on the policy, not having been convinced that his death was accidental, so once again, William left the scene empty-handed.