William Dale Archard drank highballs, got married often, and hated 9-to-5 employment. He was born in Arkansas and was slender with pale blue eyes and wavy silver hair. He inspired romantic devotion to women and trust in criminal allies. For decades, his wife and acquaintances had suffered from a fatal illness that caused sudden seizures, but the medical examiner did not rule it a homicide.
His motive was greed, but he never made much money. He was a frail 55-year-old when he was finally arrested by police at his home in the Alhambra in 1967. he joked. Prosecutors called him “the most ruthless murderer since Bluebeard,” and the judge called him the most evil defendant he had ever seen. Archard’s calmness seemed to have hardly waned. Even as a death row prisoner, he maintained a fearless and cheerful demeanor.
Archard was a natural salesman and once peddled vitamins, hearing aids, and folding doors. The product he sold best was himself. From 1930 to 1965, he married seven women, sometimes willing to divorce his previous women.
As a young hospital worker, he learned a special method of murder that allowed him to get away with murder for a long time. At Camarillo State Hospital, he worked intermittently in the “insulin shock ward” from 1939 to 1941. It was a 20-bed dormitory for the treatment of schizophrenia in the desperate days before the advent of antipsychotic drugs.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in and around Los Angeles, from the famous to the forgotten, the momentous to the obscure, and digs into the archives and memories of those who lived there.
Although now discredited, injecting insulin as part of treatment starves the brain of sugar and puts patients into a deep coma.
A pencil was rubbed along the base of the patient’s toes. If his toes fanned out in the so-called Babinski reaction, as one of Archard’s former colleagues attests, “he was back to being the first man, the ape from which we all supposedly emerged.” That’s what it means. This meant that death was near. The glucose woke patients up and caused brain damage that was sometimes mistaken for mental improvement.
Because insulin is a natural hormone and the injections are quickly absorbed, it was nearly impossible to pinpoint an overdose as the cause of death. Police believed it was Archard’s poison of choice, which killed at least six people over 19 years.
He was first charged with murder in 1947. His friend, former firefighter William Jones Jr., 34, was charged with statutory rape of the babysitter. It promised to ruin the honor of the family. Archard jumped in to help. The Joneses gave him several thousand dollars to buy out the babysitter’s family. Archard handed over $300 and kept the rest. He taught Jones how to avoid court by faking a head injury: mimicking the symptoms with insulin injections. Jones convulsed horribly and Archard stood silently by his bedside. “Encephalitis,” said the coroner.
Police believe William Dale Archard killed three of his wives, two men, and his 15-year-old nephew. From top left: William Edward Jones Jr., Zella Winders Archard, Juanita Plumb Archard. Below are Frank Stewart, Barney Kirk Archard, and Mary Brinker Post Archard.
(Jack Carrick/Los Angeles Times)
Nine years later, he called police to the Covina home he shared with his fourth wife, Zella Winders, 48. He told a funny story. Two robbers broke into the house and injected her with a mysterious substance. Police found two stab wounds on her buttocks. He refused to let her go to the hospital, and she died shortly thereafter with two stab wounds. “Bronchopneumonia,” said the coroner.
Two years later, he married his fifth wife, 46-year-old Juanita Plum, in Las Vegas. She developed unexplained sweating and convulsions, and died within a few days. When the will was read out and Archard learned that his share was $1, he dug his finger into his daughter’s shoulder until his knees buckled. The coroner said it was an “accidental barbiturate overdose.”
In 1960, he persuaded a 54-year-old acquaintance, Frank Stewart, to participate in an insurance fraud. Insulin can fake the symptoms of a head injury. An autopsy revealed a diagnosis of “cerebral hemorrhage.”
The following year, he pressed his 15-year-old nephew, Barney Kirk Archard, with a similar plan. They pretended the boy had been hit by a truck and mimicked the effect with an insulin injection. “Bronchopneumonia and cerebral hemorrhage,” the coroner said.
At this point, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detectives were convinced that Archard was a serial killer and knew how to do it. To Harold “Whitey” White, a sheriff’s lieutenant who recounted nearly a decade of investigation in his memoir, “Whitey’s Career Case: The Insulin Murders,” Archard was “that rotten bastard” and “that slimy bastard.” ” and “that cunning son-”. Damn you. ”
“Knowing that a psychotic man like William Dale Archard is capable of killing so many people, knowing how and why he kills, and finding a criminal cause of death to prove murder.” It’s a feeling of utter helplessness not being able to come up with something,”’ White wrote.
Archard murdered his seventh wife, Mary Brinker Post, 60, in November 1966. A novelist, she had written the best-selling Annie Jordan, a story of a courageous heroine in the upstart city of Seattle, modeled after a pioneering family. She suffered horrific seizures and died at Pomona Valley Hospital. The autopsy results stated that the patient suffered from hypoglycemic shock due to unknown causes.
The Sheriff’s Department hired White to work full-time on the investigation. His team set out to prove circumstantial evidence that the killings were linked by a common plan and plan. “I decided Archard’s criminal behavior had lasted long enough and I was going to nail him down for the rest of my career,” White wrote.
He asked doctors, including leading insulin researchers, to review the medical files of the six known deaths. Doctors concluded that all deaths were caused by insulin overdose. Brain slides from some victims showed extensive damage that could only have been caused by insulin-induced glucose starvation.
William Dale Archard (right) enters the courtroom with the bailiff in December 1967.
(Bruce Cox/Los Angeles Times)
When White showed up at Archard’s house to arrest him, he noticed that the culprit was painfully thin, frail and “miserable-looking”. Nevertheless, White had to resist the urge to “punch the evil motherfucker in the mouth.”
Archard was on trial for the deaths of three people in Los Angeles County (his wives #4 and #7, and his nephew), but prosecutors used the remaining three to determine his decades-long pattern. Proved.
The featured witness was Dorothea Sheehan, Archard’s third wife and former nurse, who was furious that Archard had annulled their marriage in order to marry another woman the next day. White wrote that she was an “angry ex-wife who wanted blood!”
On stage, she recalled discussing with Archard that insulin-induced murder would make a great plot for a mystery novel. He asked her to buy a vial of insulin and give it to Jones in order to commit insurance fraud. He said Jones raped multiple babysitters and “he was as good as dead.” And how she confronted him when she read about Zella Winders’ death in the newspaper.
“I wisely said, ‘It wasn’t insulin, was it?’ And he kind of kicked me in the ankle, like he thought my house was being bugged. I looked around.”
William Dale Archard is led out of the courtroom after his arraignment in July 1967.
(Larry Sharkey/Los Angeles Times)
Mary Neisbender met him while covering his trial for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, as she recounts in her book, “Assassins…Serial Killers…Corrupt Cops…” . He told her the story of digging ditches as a boy and needing 43 surgeries for deformed limbs to elicit sympathy. She decided he was a pathological liar.
“His guards said to me afterwards, ‘Okay, he was hoping to overcome this and was counting on you as his next wife,'” she said. I wrote it. “I wasn’t complimented.”
Throughout the two-month trial, Archard remained relaxed, friendly and respectful of his lawyers. Unlike most defendants in his position, he took his lawyers’ decisions at face value. “I don’t remember him ever stressing out,” Ira Reiner, a lawyer representing Archard, recently told the Times. “He didn’t care about anything.”
He chose to have the case heard by a judge rather than a jury, believing the death penalty was unlikely. Judge Adolf Alexander found him guilty, making him the first convicted insulin killer in the United States and sending him to death row.
“He thought he had the perfect plan,” said Reiner, 88, who later became Los Angeles County district attorney. “If there had been only one charge, there is certainly a reasonable chance that the judge or jury would have returned a not guilty verdict. One issue after another. ”
When Archard’s death warrant was signed, Reiner won a last-minute bid to stay. Rather than send a fax and risk arriving too late, he went to San Quentin to have the order delivered in person. He remembers Archard’s nonchalance when he learned the good news.
“It’s hard to explain how completely relaxed he was,” Reiner said. But Archard was upset that prison staff offered him steak or lobster for his last meal, but not both.
“He said, ‘They’re going to kill me and want to argue with me about whether I can have steak and lobster.’ He said, ‘That’s not fair, that’s not right.’ Ta. It was like he was arguing with the waiter. ”
Archard’s death sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment, and he died of natural causes in 1977 at the age of 65. He was “a charming sociopath,” Reiner said. “You can’t kill so many people and be so relaxed and charming without some little omission.”
William Dale Archard (left) talks with attorneys Philip Elbsen (center) and Ira Reiner in a courtroom in February 1968.
(Jack Carrick/Los Angeles Times)
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