Whoever fights monsters...

Anjette Donovan Lyles

A self-styled practitioner of black magic and voodoo, Anjette Lyles was born in Georgia during 1917. In 1958, authorities in Macon received an anonymous letter , charging that Lyles’ daughter Marcia was being poisoned at home, and they felt obliged to investigate. The girl died before police intervened, but an autopsy revealed lethal traces of arsenic. The grieving mother spun a tale of accidental death, with Marcia eating poison during a game of “doctor and nurse,” but homicide investigators weren’t convinced. Their background search had turned up other family skeletons, including Anjette’s last two husbands and one of her mothers-in-law. On exhumation, all three victims tested positive for arsenic, and Lyles was shown to have received insurance benefits upon the death of each. Convicted and sentenced to death at her trial, the defendant was later ruled insane by court psychiatrists, packed off to the state hospital at Milledgeville for life.

(I’ve lost the source for this - if anyone knows they can send it to me and I’ll include it!)