Lyda Southard: The Serial Widow Who Cooked with Arsenic

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Sometimes bad luck looks a lot like premeditation.

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One woman, five husbands, a few tragic kids,

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and a suspicious amount of arsenic.

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Thing is, people kept dying around light as south-eared,

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and she kept collecting life insurance

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like it was a loyalty program she was signed up for.

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This story takes us from rural Idaho with a prison escape

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and a saw hidden in plain sight.

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But before we jump in, if you like your true crime brief and bingeable,

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you're exactly where you need to be.

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Hit follow now for at least two new episodes every week.

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This is 10 Minute Murder.

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Let's get into it.

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[Music]

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LIDA Trueblood was born in Keatsville, Missouri in 1892.

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Life was tough, or just about everybody back then.

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But LIDA seemed to pull the short straw more often than not.

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At 20 years old, she married a farmer named Robert Dooley.

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The two of them moved around trying to find a place that felt like home.

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Eventually, they landed in Twin Falls, Idaho,

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where Robert and his brother Edward found work on a ranch.

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LIDA had plenty to do.

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She kept the house running, made sure the men were fed,

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and looked after their daughter Lorraine.

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Lorraine was born a year after the wedding,

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and by all appearances, she was just the beginning of what looked like a growing family.

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But that never happened.

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Typhoid fever was everywhere, and medical care in 1915 was more guesswork than help.

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The first to get sick was Edward.

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He came down with a fever, nonstop vomiting, and sharp pain that did not let up.

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Doctors called it typhoid.

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Edward died later that year with his brother and family by his side.

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After every attempt to save him, failed.

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Not long after Edward's death, tragedy hit the Dooley family again.

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This time, it was three-year-old Lorraine.

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LIDA knew exactly what it caused her daughter's sudden decline.

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She'd seen Lorraine drinking from the well on their ranch.

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The same well that was later be found to be contaminated.

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Whatever was in that water hit fast.

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Lorraine died shortly after her uncle, leaving LIDA and Robert crushed.

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And then, Robert got sick too.

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He had also had water from the well.

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The same symptoms hit him just as hard.

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Fever, weakness, pain, and no real way to recover.

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He became completely dependent on LIDA, who took care of him through every stage of his slow, brutal decline.

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By the time Robert died, LIDA had lost her child, her husband, and her brother-in-law in the span of a year.

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She was the last one left.

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With no family and no income, LIDA packed it up and left the ranch.

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She moved into town, hoping for work, maybe even a little piece.

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But as much as her life had just unraveled, she wasn't entirely empty-handed.

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Turns out Robert and Edward had planned ahead.

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They'd each taken out $2,000 life insurance policies,

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naming each other as the beneficiaries.

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The idea was simple.

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If one died, the other would be able to take care of LIDA and Lorraine.

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When Edward died, Robert collected $2,000 from his brother's life insurance.

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After Robert passed, LIDA inherited what was left, including his policy payout.

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She probably didn't walk away with the full $4,000, but it was close.

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And today's money, that would be about $130,000.

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

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

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She found that, in William McHaffell, a widowed waiter in Twin Falls with a three-year-old daughter.

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William had been through heartbreak, and so had LIDA.

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Marrying him and she suddenly had a husband and a little girl in her life again.

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

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

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The little girl got sick first. It came fast and left even faster.

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There was no time to help her. William was devastated.

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Twin Falls held too many painful memories now, so the couple moved to Montana.

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That lasted about a year.

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William came down with the flu, then diptheria.

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LIDA, who had already spent too much time as a caretaker, tried to nurse him through it.

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But he couldn't keep anything down. He got weaker.

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And he died that fall.

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This time, LIDA had planned ahead.

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She had told William what happened to her first family.

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He understood grief, so when she asked him to take out a life insurance policy to protect her and his daughter, he agreed.

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

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No payouts, no financial backup, just more loss.

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And once again, LIDA moved on.

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She found another man and got married again.

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About five months after losing William, LIDA married again.

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Husband number three was Harlan Lewis, a car salesman from Billings, Montana.

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Maybe LIDA thought her luck was finally turning.

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It was not.

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Within a few months, Harlan came down with what doctors diagnosed as gastroenteritis.

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He could not eat. He was in constant pain.

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Vomiting diarrhea, the works.

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It didn't take long. Harlan died.

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And LIDA became the sole beneficiary of his fully paid $5,000 life insurance policy.

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She packed up in left Montana.

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Back in Idaho, she met a ranch foreman named Edward Mayer.

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They got married not long after meeting.

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And within a month, Edward was sick.

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This time, it was Typhoid fever.

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Edward had applied for a $10,000 life insurance policy.

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But the paperwork had not been finalized.

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So when he died, LIDA walked away with nothing.

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But Edward's death did not follow the same script as others.

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When he first fell ill, he was admitted to the hospital.

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Doctors expected him to recover.

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He was doing better.

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Things looked promising for him.

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And then he came home.

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After just a short time in LIDA's care, the condition suddenly turned for the worse.

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He died soon after coming home.

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Edward Mayer's death caught everyone off guard.

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His doctor's thought he was recovering. His friends did not expect to lose him.

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But there was one person who was not surprised.

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Earl Dooley.

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He was the local chemist and twin falls-in.

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More importantly, a cousin of Robert and Edward Dooley.

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LIDA's first husband and brother-in-law.

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Earl had seen enough loss in that family.

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And now another man was dying too soon after marrying LIDA.

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His suspicions kicked in.

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After Edward Mayer died, an inspection of his throat revealed signs

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that set off alarm bells.

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There were burns that looked like they could have come from poison.

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Earl knew what he was looking at.

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He recognized arsenic.

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He pushed to have the bodies of his cousins and young Lorraine exhumed.

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If they had been poisoned too, it would show.

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And it did.

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Tests confirmed it.

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All three had arsenic in their systems.

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They had been murdered.

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

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Arsenic was not hard to find back then, but buying large amounts

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would have raised eyebrows.

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She needed something subtle.

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That is where a local shopkeeper came in.

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He told investigators that LIDA had been buying fly paper.

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A lot of it.

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The kind laced with arsenic.

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LIDA had been boiling the fly paper and water to extract the poison.

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Once it cooled, she collected the powder that settled to the bottom of the pot.

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That powder went into food.

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And then came the waiting.

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Arsenic poisoning is not quick.

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It drags on.

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The victims would suffer constant nausea, stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea.

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It was miserable and it lasted.

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LIDA had fed this to people she claimed to love.

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And then she watched them die slowly.

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With enough evidence tying her to the murders,

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police were ready to arrest LIDA.

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But she was already gone.

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They tracked her down in Honolulu, where she was living under a new name and a new marriage.

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Her fifth husband was Navy officer Paul Southerd.

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The only thing that may have saved him was the fact that he refused to take out a separate life insurance policy.

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He figured LIDA would be fine with the government pension if anything happened to him.

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No need to spend the extra money.

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When police finally caught up with her and brought charges for the murders of her husband's and daughter,

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Paul was stunned.

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But he stood by her.

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So did her family.

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They believed her when she said that she must have been an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.

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That she never meant to hurt anyone.

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The deaths were a tragic coincidence.

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The jury did not believe it.

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LIDA was found guilty of murdering Edward Mayer and sentenced to ten years to life.

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She was sent to the old Idaho State Penitentiary.

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But she did not exactly keep a low profile there either.

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At one point, she was the only woman in the prison.

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She arranged the furniture.

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She decorated.

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She cooked meals for the warden's wife and handled the sewing.

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On paper, she was a model inmate.

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And she still had some game left in the tank.

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LIDA convinced a prison guard to let her keep a saw in her room.

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She then recruited a male prisoner who was out on bail at the time to help her escape.

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He thought they were going to run off together and get married.

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LIDA had other plans.

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She ditched him and fled to Denver, Colorado, where she got married yet again.

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This time to a housekeeper named Harry Whitlock.

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There are two stories about how she was later caught.

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One says the authorities tracked her down and told Harry who she really was.

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The other says LIDA had grown attached to Harry's young son and confessed to Harry herself,

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asking him to turn her in before she could hurt anyone else.

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

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LIDA Southard was released on probation in 1941.

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She died of a heart attack in 1958, closing the final chapter on the life of Idaho's first known serial killer.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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My name is Joe, I'm the host, and if you'd like to get in touch with me,

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you can do that by going to 10minutemerder.com.

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You'll find my contact info there and also while you're on my website.

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You can cruise around a little bit, check out the Murder blog,

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which includes the stories that you hear here, plus some new stuff,

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So just go check it out 10minutemerder.com.

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That's going to do it.

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That's your episode for today.

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Thank you so much for listening.

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See you next time.