Reason First: The Poison Hot Chocolate Murderer

To die from cancer after being sentenced to life in prison for second-degree murder doesn’t sound too appealing. But that is what happened to Lydia Sherman on May 16, 1878.

One of the few female serial killers in history, Sherman took it upon herself to dispatch at least seven victims during her reign of terror. The horrific cases of her husband being poisoned by hot chocolate paint a portrait of a woman of supreme evil in Derby, Connecticut.

In another instance, she placed arsenic in her husband’s soup. She poisoned and killed all of her children from the youngest crawling to the oldest walking. The townspeople sympathized with the murderer. They thought that she had fallen on bad fortune to have her whole family wiped out by “typhoid fever.”

She then went on to marry (and kill) another husband and his two children. At last, someone became aware of all of the weird deaths associated with Sherman. Dr. Beardsley had discovered arsenic in Nelson Sherman’s stomach and wanted to review his findings with fellow colleagues. Lydia Sherman sensed that the authorities were on her trail so she high-tailed it to New York.

Lydia Sherman was extradited back to Connecticut to stand trial.

What all of this means is that a woman without scruples can be just as malevolent as a man without principles. Lydia Sherman collected the life insurance policies on those that she killed. But money can’t be the conceptual scapegoat. She was not avaricious, she was vicious. She had no sense of self-worth which is why she didn’t think that the people closest to her deserved breath in their lungs.

By murdering these souls, she kept up the ideation to destroy. Thoughts had escaped her head. She had nothing left after the judge put her behind bars. Her callousness in saying that the people she slayed were “better off dead” should signal to any functioning brain that Lydia Sherman represented pure evil.

How she concocted in her mind to kill as many people that should have been her highest values shows that she was selfless. This is to mean that she did not cherish herself at all and that this triggered in her psyche to commit atrocities despite the outcome.

For her evil deeds, she demonstrated no remorse or regard. Her putrid, ugly soul should have been struck down before she could kill her first victim. Her poisonous mind led to the poisoning of various people. Had she devoted her thoughts to a craft or profession, without the intent to kill, she would have avoided being known as “The Poison Fiend.” If all of her victims could be able to say that Lydia Sherman was the lethal lady behind their deaths, they would all corroborate and say that she did it out of pure wickedness. The money wasn’t the problem. Sherman’s inability to align her virtues and values together caused destruction.

Lydia Sherman will forever go down as one of America’s deadliest serial killers. Her methods remained disgusting and disturbing. The mere thought of a woman poisoning her own babies should be enough to unsettle even the strongest of minds.

The way in which Lydia Sherman killed her family members was the feeling that she had for them. These are far from being cold-blooded cases. Lydia Sherman spitefully and deliberately executed the people that surrounded her nucleus. She didn’t give a damn about any prison time or whether she would be hanged. She just wanted to see how many deaths could pile up by her hand.

In all, Lydia Sherman was the murderer who garnered sympathy and then infamy.