William Dale Archerd drank highballs, married often and despised the 9-to-5 job. She was born in Arkansas, thin, with pale blue eyes and silver hair. He encouraged the devotion of love in women and trust in the criminal association. Over the decades, his wives and acquaintances were struck by a sudden illness, causing them to win what detectives did not understand to be murder.
His motive was greed, although he did not do much. He was not yet 55 when the police arrested him at his Alhambra home in 1967. “Well, it took you long enough!” he said laughing. The prosecutor called him “the greatest murderer since Bluebeard,” and the judge called him the worst defendant he had ever seen. There often seemed to be a dent in Archerd’s coolness. Even when he was sentenced to death, he still had a sense of indifference.
Archerd was a natural salesman, at various times hunting for vitamins, hearing aids and folding doors. The thing he sold the most was himself. From 1930 to 1965, he married seven women, sometimes without bothering to divorce the previous one.
He learned his special method of killing – which allowed him to get away with it for a long time – as a hospital worker. At the Camarillo State Hospital, he worked and continued on the “insulin shock ward” from 1939 to 1941. It was a 20-bed dorm for the treatment of schizophrenia in a time of despair before antipsychotic drugs.
As part of the treatment, now debunked, insulin injections put the patient into a deep coma as the brain was starved.
A pencil was rubbed against the ball of the patient’s foot. When the fingers came out of the so-called Babinski solution, “he was going back to the first person, the monkey from which we must have come out,” as one of Archerd’s former colleagues testified. This meant that death was near. Glucose has brought patients awake, sometimes with brain damage that is misinterpreted as mental improvement.
Because insulin is a natural hormone and injections are quickly absorbed, an overdose was unlikely to prove a cause of death. For at least six victims in 19 years, the police believed, it was Archerd’s choice of powder.
His first suspected murder was in 1947. His friend William Jones Jr., a 34-year-old former gunman, was accused of statutory rape of a babysitter. It promised to spoil the good name of the family. Archerd stepped in to help. The Joneses gave him a few thousand dollars to buy a foster family. Archerd gave $300 and kept the rest. He told Jones how to fake a head injury and avoid a lawsuit – an insulin injection would mimic the symptoms. Jones shook his head while Archerd stood quietly by his bed. “Encephalitis,” said the coroner.
Police believe William Dale Archerd killed three of his wives, two husbands, and his 15-year-old grandson. From left, top, are William Edward Jones Jr., Zella Winders Archerd and Juanita Plum Archerd. Below are Frank Stewart, Burney Kirk Archerd and Mary Brinker Post Archerd. (Jack Carrick/Los Angeles Times)
Nine years later, he called the police to the Covina home where he lived with his fourth wife, 48-year-old Zella Winders. He told a funny story: Two robbers had entered the house and injected him with an unknown substance. Police found two puncture wounds on her buttocks. He refused to go to the hospital, and soon after, he was dead, with two more wounds. “Broncho-pneumonia,” said the coroner.
Two years later, he married his fifth wife, 46-year-old Juanita Plum, in Las Vegas. He died within days of inexplicable sweating and convulsions. When her will was read and Archerd realized her take was $1, she dug her fingers into her daughter’s shoulders so hard she nearly buckled her knees. “Accidental barbiturate overdose,” said the coroner.
In 1960, he convinced a 54-year-old acquaintance, Frank Stewart, to participate in an insurance fraud. Insulin would mask the symptoms of a head injury. “Cerebral hemorrhage,” the autopsy said.
The following year, he forced his 15-year-old nephew, Burney Kirk Archerd, to do the same thing. They pretended the boy had been hit by a truck, and the insulin injection mimicked the results. “Bronchopneumonia and cerebral hemorrhage,” said the coroner.
At this time, Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives were convinced that Archerd was a murderer and knew what he was doing. 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,” Archerd was “that rotten bastard,” “that bastard” and “that sly son-of-a-bitch .”
“It’s a hell of a useless feeling knowing that a psychopath like William Dale Archerd can kill so many people, knowing how and why he kills, but not being able to come up with a death sentence to prove the murder,” White wrote.
Archerd killed his seventh wife, 60-year-old Mary Brinker Post, in November 1966. A novelist, he had written the best-selling book “Annie Jordan,” about a badass Seattle heroine who modeled herself on her pioneer family. He became seriously ill and died at Pomona Valley Hospital. “Hypoglycemic shock due to unresponsiveness,” said the autopsy.
The Sheriff’s Department has placed White under full-time investigation. His team began to reveal the fact that the killings were connected to a common plot and plan. “I thought Archerd’s crime had gone on too long. I would have nailed him if it would have taken my whole career to do it,” White wrote.
He enlisted doctors – including leading insulin researchers – to re-examine medical files in six known deaths. All the deaths, the doctors concluded, were caused by an overdose of insulin. Slides of the brains of some victims showed extensive damage that could have been caused by insulin-induced glucose starvation.
William Dale Archerd, right, entering court with a bailiff in December 1967. (Bruce Cox/Los Angeles Times)
When White arrived at Archerd’s house to arrest him, he found the killer painfully thin, weak and “sad”. Even so, White had to resist the urge to punch “the son of a bitch right in the mouth.”
Archerd continued the trial of three LA County deaths – women No. 4 and No.
The star witness was Archerd’s third wife, a former nurse named Dorothea Sheehan, who was furious when she called off their wedding to marry another woman the next day. She was “an angry ex-wife,” White wrote, “and she wanted blood!”
At the stop, he recalled discussing with Archerd how murder-by-insulin would make a good idea for a mysterious story. How he had asked her to buy him a vial of insulin and stab Jones for insurance fraud. He said that because Jones had raped more than one babysitter, “but he was already dead.” And how, when he read about the death of Zella Winders in the newspaper, he confronted her.
“I said smartly, ‘It couldn’t have been insulin, could it?’ And he seemed to step on my heel and look around as if he thought that my house might be closed.”
William Dale Archerd being released from court after his trial in July 1967. (Larry Sharkey/Los Angeles Times)
As she recounts in her book “Assassins… Serial Killers… Corrupt Cops…,” Mary Neiswender got to know him while covering his story for the Long Beach Press-Telegraph. He told her stories designed to evoke sympathy – that he dug trenches as a boy and needed 43 operations for weak legs. She thought he was a liar.
“His bodyguards told me later: ‘I know, he was hoping to beat this one and he was hoping you would find his next wife,'” he wrote. “I’m not happy.”
During the two-month trial, Archerd was open, friendly and respectful to his lawyers. Unlike the defendants in his position, he did not second-guess any of his lawyers’ decisions. “I don’t remember any time he ever showed any concern,” Ira Reiner, the attorney representing Archerd, recently told The Times. “Nothing bothered him.”
He decided to have his case tried by a judge, instead of a jury, thinking that he had no chance of getting the death penalty. Judge Adolph Alexander found him guilty – making him the first insulin killer convicted in the United States – and sentenced him to death.
“He thought he had a perfect plan,” said Reiner, 88, who later became L.A. County’s district attorney. “If there was only one charge and one charge, there is a reasonable possibility that the judge or jury would have been innocent. It was one problem after another.”
When Archerd’s death warrant was signed, Reiner won a last-minute stay. He went to San Quentin to deliver the order himself, rather than risk sending the fax that arrived there a while ago. He remembers Archerd’s indifference to learning the good news.
“It’s hard to describe how comfortable he was,” Reiner said. Archerd was angry, however, that the prison authorities had given him a last meal of steak or lobster, but not both.
“He said, ‘They’re going to kill me, and they want to argue with me about whether I can have venison or lobster.’ He said, ‘It’s not good, it’s not good.’ It’s like he’s arguing with the waiter.”
Archerd’s death sentence was later commuted to life in prison, and he died of natural causes at the age of 65 in 1977. He was a “charming socialite,” Reiner said. “You can’t kill that many people and then be relaxed and beautiful unless there’s a piece missing there.”
William Dale Archerd, left, talks with his attorneys Philip Erbsen, center, and Ira Reiner in court in February 1968. (Jack Carrick/Los Angeles Times)
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This story first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.