Flypaper Lyda

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On the seventeenth of March nineteen twelve, Lyda Southart married her first husband.

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His name was Robert Dooley. A
couple moved in together, living in an

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Idaho ranch with Robert's brother. By
all accounts, they seemed to be a

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pretty happy couple, and before long
Lyda gave birth to a daughter, Lorraine,

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and tragedy struck when Lorraine suddenly died. According to Lyda, her one

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year old daughter had gotten sick from
drinking contaminated well water and had quickly passed

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away. It was nineteen fifteen at
the time, and tragic stories like these

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were not uncommon. Nobody thought anything
of it other than feeling sorry for the

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young mother who had lost her child. That same year, Lyda had bad

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luck, doubled and then tripped.
Her brother in law, Edward, passed

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away within months of Lorraine's death.
His cause of death was determined to be

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bacterial poisoning, which would now be
called food poisoning. Again, this turn

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of events didn't raise any eyebrows.
Antibiotics were still more than ten years away

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from being discovered, so something that
would be as mild as an illness today

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could even kill a healthy adult man
in nineteen fifteen. For a few months,

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all Robert and Lyda had left was
each other. Then, on the

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twelfth of October nineteen fifteen, Robert
caught typhoid fever and never recovered. For

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the first time in her life,
but not the last time, Lida was

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a widow. The struggles of being
a widowed woman in the early nineteen hundreds

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were easily cushioned by money, and
Lida now had a lot of it after

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cashing in on the life insurance policies
of three dead family members. Less than

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two years after Robert's death, met
William G. Mccaffle, and in June

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nineteen seventeen she got married for the
second time. Lida sold Robert's property and

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used the funds to move herself and
her new husband to Montana. Once again,

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tragedy struck. They had been married
for less than a year when William

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suddenly became seriously ill, complaining of
diarrhea and fatigue. He never recovered from

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his illness, and on the first
day of October nineteen seventeen, Lida was

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widowed once again. Possibly this pattern
might have raised eyebrows today. Two dead

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husbands, a dead daughter, and
a dead brother in law might have been

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enough to warrant some type of investigation, but this was nineteen seventeen. The

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Spanish influenza was at its peak and
people all over the country were falling victim

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to serious illness. There were more
dead bodies than there were doctors to carry

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out an autopsy, and William became
just another statistic. His cause of death

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was recorded as dip theoria and influenza, and nobody thought to look into it

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any further, apart from Lyda,
who was quick to cash in on her

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dead husband's life insurance. At this
point, the story sounds eerily familiar with

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another serial killer story from the late
eighteen hundreds h. H. Holmes.

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In nineteen nineteen, Lida married again, just like her marriage to William mccaffle.

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The union lasted just months. Lda's
new husband, a car salesman named

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Harlan Lewis, started experiencing the same
symptoms that William had just a couple of

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years prior. His cause of death
was determined to be gastro intestinal infection,

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and more importantly, he had a
hefty life insurance policy ten times greater than

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Williams. Lighta pocketed five thousand dollars
and set off to find her next unfortunate

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husband. Now referring to herself as
Anna May and still using her dead husband's

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last name, she started dating a
local man named Dmyer. Ed was perhaps

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the most unlucky of Lda's husband's He
only survived one month of marriage before dying

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suddenly. While Lida's string of suspicious
marriages continued, only one person was paying

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attention to the fates of her husbands. Earl Dooley, a relative of Lyda's

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first husband, Robert, didn't believe
her story for a second. He was

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a chemist, and he had suspicions
about the real cause of death, and

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he intended to confirm them himself.
Earl traveled to the farm where Lyda and

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Robert had lived and scooped up a
sample of the soil from the area where

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Robert had supposedly died. It's not
clear whether Earl had truly expected to find

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answers in the soil sample. Years
had passed since Robert's death, and there

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were plenty of ways to kill a
person that would never be detected in the

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soil. Regardless, he got lucky. The soil sample tested positive for a

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poison. To confirm his findings,
he got another chemists and a near by

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a physician to look at the results. Both of them agreed that the soil

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contained large amounts of arsenic. As
a chemist, Earl knew all about arsenic

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poisoning. He knew that the symptoms
diarrhea, abdominal cramping, and weakness perfectly

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mimic the symptoms of other illnesses gastroenteritis
which had killed Harlan Lewis, typhoid which

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had killed Robert Dooley, and diphtheria, which had killed William mccaffle. Even

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though all of Lyda's husbands had been
determined to have died from different causes of

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death, they'd all experienced the same
symptoms, and every one of those symptoms

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could be caused by arsenic poisoning.
Earl knew that if you wanted to secretly

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kill somebody, arsenic was an easy
way to get away with it. It

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didn't have any of the bitter taste
or smell of other poisons, and it

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could be easily concealed in a glass
of water, stirred into a meal,

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or something like that. One of
the easiest ways to get your hands on

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the poison without suspicion was by boiling
or soaking sheets of fly paper which contained

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large quantities of arsenic. With test
results in hand, Earle went straight to

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a prosecuting attorney, Frank Stephen,
and Frank was concerned about the findings and

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ordered Robert Dooley's body to be exhumed
and then tested for the poison. The

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results came back quickly. Robert had
consumed an amount of arsenic that would be

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fatal to five grown men. This
was more than enough evidence to arrest Lyda,

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but when a sheriff arrived at her
property, there was no sign of

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her. However, Lyda had failed
to hide an incredibly incriminating piece of evidence.

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Inside her home was a large barrel
full of water and fly paper.

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She was already preparing for her next
dose of poison. With Lyda still unable

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to be tracked down, there was
time to exhume more bodies. The rest

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of her husband's and brother in law
all tested positive for arsenic. In fact,

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the only potential victim who wasn't clearly
poisoned was Lyda's daughter Lorraine. Possibly

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her death was a tragic accident,
but more likely, the small amount of

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arsenic required to poison an infant just
wasn't detectable at the time. Eight months

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after her last husband, ed was
murdered, authorities finally tracked Lida down.

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Incredibly, she had once again gotten
married. Her husband, Paul Southard,

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was an officer in the Navy.
Even though Paul was by all accounts lucky

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to be alive, he didn't recognize
the danger that he had been in.

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In fact, he was in love
with Lyda and didn't believe that she was

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a murderer. By the way,
I didn't mention this at the beginning,

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but Lyda was very attractive, so
of course she couldn't be a murderer.

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She moved back to Idaho, where
a six week long trial began. For

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some reason, she only faced charges
for her most recent murder. She was

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never charged with killing Robert or Edward
Dooley, or her daughter Lorraine, or

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any of her subsequent husbands before ed
Meyer. The results were disappointing to many

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people. Lyda was only convicted of
one count of second degree murder and received

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a minimum sentence of ten years behind
bars. Nobody was more disappointed than Lyda's

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most recent husband, Paul. After
the guilty verdict, the reality of the

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situation began to sink in and Paul
made the incredibly wise decision of filing for

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divorce, becoming the first of Lyda's
husband's to survive their marriage. Prison didn't

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reduce Lyda's ability to charm men.
A prison guard became infatuated with Lyda and

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smuggled in extra bedding in a table
at her request. She wrote letters to

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another inmate, David Minton, who
also fell in love with her. After

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David was released from prison, Lyda
saw the bars of the window off of

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her cell and used the extra bedding
to lower herself to the ground where David

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was waiting. David quickly became aware
that he was used by Lyda when she

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left him to marry a rich widow, her sixth husband. As revenge,

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he turned Lyda in and it was
just as well. Shortly after she moved

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in with her new man, his
mother caught a mysterious illness and passed away.

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Before she had time to commit yet
another murder. Lyda figured out that

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authorities were on to her. She
ran away to Kansas and tried to disguise

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herself by dying her hair, but
police soon apprehended her. Her second stint

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in prison was also a short one. After being paroled, she was issued

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a full pardon. This left Lyda
a free woman, and what else was

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she going to do but get married
again. Her next husband, hal Shaw,

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was married to Lyda for two happy
years before he mysteriously vanished. To

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this day, nobody knows what happened
to haw Lyda died in nineteen fifty eight

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after having a sudden heart attack,
and she was buried near not one but

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two of her murdered husbands. Her
autopsy showed that her entire body was completely

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hairless aside effect of spending so many
years being exposed to large amounts of arsenic.

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That's ten minute murder for today,
brief and bingeible true crime. I'm

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Joe the host, and thank you
so much for listening today, and quickly

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before you have a chance to follow
through with what you're thinking right now,

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ladies, I'm specifically talking to you, there are better ways to remove hair.

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That last part of the story.
I know you were thinking it.

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Don't do it. There are so
many other options for hair removal. Arsenic

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is not the answer. Arsenic is
going to be a trending self care tip

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next week on TikTok because people don't
care about their health sometimes they'll just do

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wild things they think might help them
a little bit. All right, So,

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if this is your first time listening
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you enjoyed the episode, but please
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faces and places that you hear about
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you for listening, and FYI Flypaper
no longer contains arsenic Good night.