Lyda Southard: The Serial Widow Who Cooked with Arsenic

The Dooley Family’s New Start and a Sudden Turn

Lyda Trueblood was born in Keytesville, Missouri, in 1892. Life was tough for just about everybody back then, but Lyda seemed to pull the short straw more often than not.

At twenty years old, she married a farmer named Robert Dooley. The two of them moved around trying to find a place that felt like home. Eventually they landed in Twin Falls, Idaho, where Robert and his brother Edward found work on a ranch.

Lyda had plenty to do. She kept the house running, made sure the men were fed, and looked after their daughter Lorraine. Lorraine was born a year after the wedding, and by all appearances she was just the beginning of what looked like a growing family.

But that never happened.

Typhoid fever was everywhere, and medical care in 1915 was more guesswork than help. The first to get sick was Edward. He came down with a fever, nonstop vomiting, and sharp pain that didn’t let up. Doctors called it typhoid. Edward died later that year with his brother and family by his side after every attempt to save him failed.

The Poisoned Well and a Family in Freefall

Not long after Edward’s death, tragedy hit the Dooley family again. This time it was three-year-old Lorraine.

Lyda knew exactly what had caused her daughter’s sudden decline. She’d seen Lorraine drinking from the well on their ranch — the same well that would later be found contaminated. Whatever was in that water hit fast. Lorraine died shortly after her uncle, leaving Lyda and Robert crushed.

And then Robert got sick too.

He had also drunk from the well. The same symptoms hit him just as hard. Fever. Weakness. Pain. And no real way to recover. He became completely dependent on Lyda, who took care of him through every stage of his slow, brutal decline. By the time Robert died, Lyda had lost her child, her husband, and her brother-in-law in the span of a year.

She was the last one left.

With no family and no income, Lyda packed up and left the ranch. She moved into town, hoping for work, maybe even a little peace. But as much as her life had just unraveled, she wasn’t entirely empty-handed.

Turns out Robert and Edward had planned ahead. They’d each taken out two thousand dollar life insurance policies naming each other as the beneficiaries. The idea was simple — if one died, the other would be able to take care of Lyda and Lorraine.

Loss, Love, and Life Insurance

When Edward died, Robert collected two thousand dollars from his brother’s life insurance. After Robert passed, Lyda inherited what was left, including his policy payout. She probably did not walk away with the full four thousand, but it was close. In today’s money, that would be about one hundred thirty thousand dollars.

Lyda had lost her entire family, but she now had a small financial cushion. Something to help her reset.

But more than money, she wanted another shot at having a family.

She found that in William McHaffle, a widowed waiter in Twin Falls with a three-year-old daughter. William had been through heartbreak, and so had Lyda. Marrying him meant she suddenly had a husband and a little girl in her life again.

And for a minute, it looked like a fresh start.

But this was the early 1900s, where illness was always waiting just offstage.

The little girl got sick first. It came on fast and left even faster. There was no time to help her. William was devastated. Twin Falls held too many painful memories now, so the couple moved to Montana.

They lasted about a year.

William came down with the flu, then diphtheria. Lyda, who had already spent too much time as a caretaker, tried to nurse him through it. But he could not keep anything down. He got weaker. He died that fall.

This time, Lyda had planned ahead. She had told William what had happened to her first family. He understood grief. So when she asked him to take out a life insurance policy to protect her and his daughter, he agreed.

He applied, made the first payment, and never made the second.

No payout. No financial backup. No silver lining. Just more loss.

And once again, Lyda moved on.

She found another man. And got married. Again.

Marriage Three and the Pattern Continues

About five months after losing William, Lyda married again. Husband number three was Harlan Lewis, a car salesman from Billings, Montana. Maybe Lyda thought her luck was finally turning.

It was not.

Within a few months, Harlan came down with what doctors diagnosed as gastroenteritis. He could not eat. He was in constant pain. Vomiting, diarrhea, the works. It did not take long. Harlan died, and Lyda became the sole beneficiary of his fully paid five thousand dollar life insurance policy.

She packed up and left Montana.

Back in Idaho, she met a ranch foreman named Edward Meyer. They got married not long after meeting, and within a month, Edward was sick. This time, it was typhoid fever.

Edward had applied for a ten thousand dollar life insurance policy, but the paperwork had not been finalized. So when he died, Lyda walked away with nothing.

But Edward’s death did not follow the same script as the others. When he first fell ill, he was admitted to the hospital. The doctors expected him to recover. He was doing better. Things looked promising.

Then he came home.

And after just a short time in Lyda’s care, his condition suddenly crashed. He died soon after.

A Chemist Connects the Dots

Edward Meyer’s death caught everyone off guard. His doctors thought he was recovering. His friends did not expect to lose him. But there was one person who was not surprised.

Earl Dooley.

He was the local chemist in Twin Falls and, more importantly, a cousin of Robert and Edward Dooley — Lyda’s first husband and brother-in-law. Earl had seen enough loss in that family, and now with another man dying soon after marrying Lyda, his suspicions kicked in.

After Edward Meyer died, an inspection of his throat revealed signs that set off alarm bells. There were burns that looked like they could have come from poison. Earl knew what he was looking at. He recognized arsenic.

So he pushed to have the bodies of his cousins and young Lorraine exhumed. If they had been poisoned too, it would show.

And it did.

Tests confirmed it. All three had arsenic in their systems. They had been murdered.

Now the question became, how was Lyda getting her hands on it?

Arsenic was not hard to find back then, but buying large amounts would have raised eyebrows. She needed something subtle.

That is where a local shopkeeper came in. He told investigators that Lyda had been buying flypaper. A lot of it. The kind laced with arsenic.

Lyda had been boiling the flypaper in water to extract the poison. Once it cooled, she collected the powder that settled at the bottom of the pot. That powder went into food.

And then came the waiting.

Arsenic poisoning is not quick. It drags on. The victims would suffer constant nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhea. It was miserable, and it lasted.

Lyda had fed this to people she claimed to love. And she watched them die slowly.

On the Run and Still Marrying

With enough evidence tying her to the murders, police were ready to arrest Lyda. But she was already gone.

They tracked her down in Honolulu, where she was living under a new name and in a new marriage. Her fifth husband was Navy officer Paul Southard. The only thing that may have saved him was that he had refused to take out a separate life insurance policy. He figured Lyda would be fine with the government pension if anything ever happened to him. No need to spend extra money.

When police finally caught up with her and brought charges for the murders of her husbands and her daughter, Paul was stunned. But he stood by her. So did her family. They believed her when she said she must have been an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. That she never meant to hurt anyone. That the deaths were a tragic coincidence.

The jury did not buy it.

Lyda was found guilty of murdering Edward Meyer and sentenced to ten years to life. She was sent to the Old Idaho State Penitentiary. But she did not exactly keep a low profile there either.

At one point, she was the only woman in the prison. She arranged the furniture. She decorated. She cooked meals for the warden’s wife and handled the sewing. On paper, she was a model inmate.

And she still had game.

Lyda convinced a prison guard to let her keep a saw in her room. Then she recruited a male prisoner, who was out on bail at the time, to help her escape. He thought they were going to run off together and get married.

Lyda had other plans.

She ditched him and fled to Denver, Colorado, where she got married yet again. This time to a housekeeper named Harry Whitlock.

There are two stories about how she was caught. One says the authorities tracked her down and told Harry who she really was. The other says Lyda had grown attached to Harry’s young son and confessed to Harry herself, asking him to turn her in before she could hurt anyone else.

Either way, she was arrested and sent back to Idaho to finish her sentence.

Lyda Southard was released on probation in 1941. She died of a heart attack in 1958, closing the final chapter on the life of Idaho’s first known serial killer.