Whatever Went Wrong With Amy?

By Bill Ryan - The New York Times

March 2, 1997

In a way, Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan might be considered a pioneer in health care in Connecticut. In the early part of this century, Mrs. Gilligan operated a home ''for elderly people and chronic invalids,'' in the town of Windsor. She offered some enticements for living there: Most of her clients were elderly men and they could get lifetime care simply by signing over their life insurance policies to her or by giving her $1,000, a healthy amount of money at the time, when they checked in.

In 1916, however, Mrs. Gilligan was arrested. State police, after an investigation, concluded that she had shortened the lives of up to two dozen or so men by poisoning them with arsenic. One of them was Michael W. Gilligan, her second husband. The union had lasted three months when Mr. Gilligan turned up dead.

The arrest of Mrs. Gilligan and her trial in 1917, after many bodies had been exhumed, rocked the state; there were headlines that would do credit to today's tabloids: ''Police Believe Archer Home for Aged a Murder Factory,'' screamed The Hartford Courant's Page 1 on the morning of May 9, 1916, the day after Mrs. Gilligan was arrested. It set the tone.

Mrs. Gilligan, a prim woman approaching her mid-40's, was tried for one murder only, at the discretion of the state's attorney. She was convicted and sentenced to be hanged.

But the verdict was eventually reversed on a technicality and during a second trial she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was incarcerated at the state prison, then a grim old fortress near Wethersfield Cove that normally housed only men. Subsequently Mrs. Gilligan was certified as insane and spent her final years at the state mental hospital in Middletown. In 1962 she died there at the age of 89, having outlived nearly everyone involved in the case. But her story has never died.

For more than eight decades of this century, it has never been totally out of the public consciousness for a couple of reasons. The first is the macabre nature of the case itself, inspiring its retelling in various publications from time to time.

The other is that it was also the inspiration for -- of all things -- a stage comedy. Many people know of Amy Gilligan, although perhaps not by name.

In the late 1930's, a New Yorker named Joseph Kesselring, who had read about the Gilligan case as a boy, decided to write a play about it. He journeyed to Connecticut to talk to the people involved and to study court records. The result was ''Arsenic and Old Lace,'' the Amy Gilligan story with a lot of poetic license by Mr. Kesselring.

He transformed Amy into a pair of Brooklyn spinsters, Abby and Martha Brewster, who took to murdering elderly gentlemen by giving them elderberry wine spiced with arsenic and then burying them in the cellar. The cast of characters included an equally dotty brother, Teddy, who thought he was Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, forever yelling ''CHARGE!'' and running up the stairs, and two nephews, the sane Mortimer and the homicidal Jonathan.

The play opened on Broadway early in 1941 and stayed there for three years, allowing people a pleasant few hours' escape from the real homicide en masse going on in World War II. The stage run was followed by a Frank Capra movie, starring Cary Grant as Mortimer, that also was a big commercial success.

Both the stage play and movie have lived on healthily since, the play in countless productions varying from high school drama clubs to a successful revival on Broadway in 1986, the movie on video cassette.

One new bit of evidence for the abiding interest in the Amy Gilligan story is a book to be published this spring by Rainbow Press in Torrington.

It is called ''Chronicles of Milton: Village Left Behind by Time.'' Milton is a section of the town of Litchfield and the book has been written by a dozen members of the Milton Woman's Club, some of whom once attended a one-room schoolhouse in the village. Each has written one chapter, in a cooperative effort to detail the history of the village from 1740 and tell about some of the more fascinating people who have lived there.

One of the latter was Amy Duggan.

The Duggan family, says one club member, lived on Saw Mill Road, in a house that still stands. One of Amy Duggan's sisters was an invalid, because of a jump or fall from a second floor window. There was a brother who would stand in front of a mirror all day, playing the violin.

As Hazel W. Perret, one of the authors. put it, Amy Duggan, and her eventual infamy, is only one small part of the book. ''And the rest of it is very good.'' Conversely, she will admit that a bit of sensationalism doesn't hurt to sell some copies.

Not that the club needs much help. It is paying Pioneer Press to run off 500 copies, 200 of which have been sold in advance, Mrs. Perret said.

In Windsor, 40 miles from Litchfield, interest in Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan continues.

''We get a lot of queries, particularly from students,'' said Laura Kahkonen, director of the Windsor Public Library. Some people ask about the old home for the aged, she said, and then go to check it out.

There it still sits, on a pleasant street called Prospect, just off the center of town, a three-story brick structure with little ornamentation. Today it contains three apartments, its lurid past put behind it.

At the Windsor Historical Society, people drop in to check the file on Amy Gilligan, said Connie Thomas, a staff member. Many visitors also want to watch a video cassette of a television pilot called ''Local Legends.'' The story of Amy Gilligan was shot in 1991 by an independent production company as one of the initial offerings for the series, but the series was never sold.

On one recent day, Ruth Bonito, who is active in the historical society of the nearby town of Windsor Locks, was at the Windsor society, checking out the Gilligan file and advancing a theory not often heard about the old case.

She believes that Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan, a woman vilified for most of this century, just might have been innocent.

As far as she can determine, Mrs. Bonito said, all the evidence against Mrs. Gilligan was circumstantial. She did buy arsenic but said it was to control rats at her home. She never confessed to any crimes. The home she ran did have a high death rate, but that didn't prove the men who lived there were poisoned.

Besides, said Mrs. Bonito, Mrs. Gilligan was a church-going woman who donated a stained-glass window to a Windsor church. Is this the kind of woman who systematically murders people with arsenic?

And then, Mrs. Bonito added, there is even some question about the post-exhumation arsenic found. Mrs. Bonito said she has been informed by Connecticut's state archeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni, that arsenic was once used extensively by American embalmers. Could that explain the arsenic found in the bodies from Mrs. Gilligan's home?

''I had heard the story of Amy Gilligan for years and I never doubted it until now,'' said Mrs. Bonito.

Dr. Bellantoni confirms that arsenic was indeed widely used for embalming, from the Civil War to about 1910 and cites a recent publication of the Interior Department that warns that elevated levels of arsenic near old cemeteries is only now beginning to emerge. However, Dr. Bellantoni says he is not sure that those facts can be connected to the Gilligan case.

One thing is sure however. Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan does have a certain fascination.