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Flypaper Lyda · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:14
  On the seventeenth of March nineteen twelve, Lyda Southart married her first husband.
• 0:19
  His name was Robert Dooley. A couple moved in together, living in an
• 0:23
  Idaho ranch with Robert's brother. By all accounts, they seemed to be a
• 0:28
  pretty happy couple, and before long Lyda gave birth to a daughter, Lorraine,
• 0:33
  and tragedy struck when Lorraine suddenly died. According to Lyda, her one
• 0:38
  year old daughter had gotten sick from drinking contaminated well water and had quickly passed
• 0:44
  away. It was nineteen fifteen at the time, and tragic stories like these
• 0:48
  were not uncommon. Nobody thought anything of it other than feeling sorry for the
• 0:53
  young mother who had lost her child. That same year, Lyda had bad
• 0:58
  luck, doubled and then tripped. Her brother in law, Edward, passed
• 1:02
  away within months of Lorraine's death. His cause of death was determined to be
• 1:07
  bacterial poisoning, which would now be called food poisoning. Again, this turn
• 1:11
  of events didn't raise any eyebrows. Antibiotics were still more than ten years away
• 1:18
  from being discovered, so something that would be as mild as an illness today
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  could even kill a healthy adult man in nineteen fifteen. For a few months,
• 1:27
  all Robert and Lyda had left was each other. Then, on the
• 1:32
  twelfth of October nineteen fifteen, Robert caught typhoid fever and never recovered. For
• 1:38
  the first time in her life, but not the last time, Lida was
• 1:42
  a widow. The struggles of being a widowed woman in the early nineteen hundreds
• 1:47
  were easily cushioned by money, and Lida now had a lot of it after
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  cashing in on the life insurance policies of three dead family members. Less than
• 1:57
  two years after Robert's death, met William G. Mccaffle, and in June
• 2:02
  nineteen seventeen she got married for the second time. Lida sold Robert's property and
• 2:07
  used the funds to move herself and her new husband to Montana. Once again,
• 2:13
  tragedy struck. They had been married for less than a year when William
• 2:17
  suddenly became seriously ill, complaining of diarrhea and fatigue. He never recovered from
• 2:23
  his illness, and on the first day of October nineteen seventeen, Lida was
• 2:28
  widowed once again. Possibly this pattern might have raised eyebrows today. Two dead
• 2:34
  husbands, a dead daughter, and a dead brother in law might have been
• 2:38
  enough to warrant some type of investigation, but this was nineteen seventeen. The
• 2:44
  Spanish influenza was at its peak and people all over the country were falling victim
• 2:49
  to serious illness. There were more dead bodies than there were doctors to carry
• 2:53
  out an autopsy, and William became just another statistic. His cause of death
• 2:58
  was recorded as dip theoria and influenza, and nobody thought to look into it
• 3:02
  any further, apart from Lyda, who was quick to cash in on her
• 3:07
  dead husband's life insurance. At this point, the story sounds eerily familiar with
• 3:13
  another serial killer story from the late eighteen hundreds h. H. Holmes.
• 3:19
  In nineteen nineteen, Lida married again, just like her marriage to William mccaffle.
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  The union lasted just months. Lda's new husband, a car salesman named
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  Harlan Lewis, started experiencing the same symptoms that William had just a couple of
• 3:34
  years prior. His cause of death was determined to be gastro intestinal infection,
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  and more importantly, he had a hefty life insurance policy ten times greater than
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  Williams. Lighta pocketed five thousand dollars and set off to find her next unfortunate
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  husband. Now referring to herself as Anna May and still using her dead husband's
• 3:55
  last name, she started dating a local man named Dmyer. Ed was perhaps
• 4:01
  the most unlucky of Lda's husband's He only survived one month of marriage before dying
• 4:06
  suddenly. While Lida's string of suspicious marriages continued, only one person was paying
• 4:13
  attention to the fates of her husbands. Earl Dooley, a relative of Lyda's
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  first husband, Robert, didn't believe her story for a second. He was
• 4:21
  a chemist, and he had suspicions about the real cause of death, and
• 4:27
  he intended to confirm them himself. Earl traveled to the farm where Lyda and
• 4:31
  Robert had lived and scooped up a sample of the soil from the area where
• 4:35
  Robert had supposedly died. It's not clear whether Earl had truly expected to find
• 4:41
  answers in the soil sample. Years had passed since Robert's death, and there
• 4:46
  were plenty of ways to kill a person that would never be detected in the
• 4:49
  soil. Regardless, he got lucky. The soil sample tested positive for a
• 4:56
  poison. To confirm his findings, he got another chemists and a near by
• 5:00
  a physician to look at the results. Both of them agreed that the soil
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  contained large amounts of arsenic. As a chemist, Earl knew all about arsenic
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  poisoning. He knew that the symptoms diarrhea, abdominal cramping, and weakness perfectly
• 5:15
  mimic the symptoms of other illnesses gastroenteritis which had killed Harlan Lewis, typhoid which
• 5:20
  had killed Robert Dooley, and diphtheria, which had killed William mccaffle. Even
• 5:26
  though all of Lyda's husbands had been determined to have died from different causes of
• 5:30
  death, they'd all experienced the same symptoms, and every one of those symptoms
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  could be caused by arsenic poisoning. Earl knew that if you wanted to secretly
• 5:41
  kill somebody, arsenic was an easy way to get away with it. It
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  didn't have any of the bitter taste or smell of other poisons, and it
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  could be easily concealed in a glass of water, stirred into a meal,
• 5:51
  or something like that. One of the easiest ways to get your hands on
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  the poison without suspicion was by boiling or soaking sheets of fly paper which contained
• 6:01
  large quantities of arsenic. With test results in hand, Earle went straight to
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  a prosecuting attorney, Frank Stephen, and Frank was concerned about the findings and
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  ordered Robert Dooley's body to be exhumed and then tested for the poison. The
• 6:16
  results came back quickly. Robert had consumed an amount of arsenic that would be
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  fatal to five grown men. This was more than enough evidence to arrest Lyda,
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  but when a sheriff arrived at her property, there was no sign of
• 6:30
  her. However, Lyda had failed to hide an incredibly incriminating piece of evidence.
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  Inside her home was a large barrel full of water and fly paper.
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  She was already preparing for her next dose of poison. With Lyda still unable
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  to be tracked down, there was time to exhume more bodies. The rest
• 6:48
  of her husband's and brother in law all tested positive for arsenic. In fact,
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  the only potential victim who wasn't clearly poisoned was Lyda's daughter Lorraine. Possibly
• 7:00
  her death was a tragic accident, but more likely, the small amount of
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  arsenic required to poison an infant just wasn't detectable at the time. Eight months
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  after her last husband, ed was murdered, authorities finally tracked Lida down.
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  Incredibly, she had once again gotten married. Her husband, Paul Southard,
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  was an officer in the Navy. Even though Paul was by all accounts lucky
• 7:26
  to be alive, he didn't recognize the danger that he had been in.
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  In fact, he was in love with Lyda and didn't believe that she was
• 7:32
  a murderer. By the way, I didn't mention this at the beginning,
• 7:35
  but Lyda was very attractive, so of course she couldn't be a murderer.
• 7:42
  She moved back to Idaho, where a six week long trial began. For
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  some reason, she only faced charges for her most recent murder. She was
• 7:49
  never charged with killing Robert or Edward Dooley, or her daughter Lorraine, or
• 7:55
  any of her subsequent husbands before ed Meyer. The results were disappointing to many
• 8:00
  people. Lyda was only convicted of one count of second degree murder and received
• 8:05
  a minimum sentence of ten years behind bars. Nobody was more disappointed than Lyda's
• 8:11
  most recent husband, Paul. After the guilty verdict, the reality of the
• 8:15
  situation began to sink in and Paul made the incredibly wise decision of filing for
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  divorce, becoming the first of Lyda's husband's to survive their marriage. Prison didn't
• 8:26
  reduce Lyda's ability to charm men. A prison guard became infatuated with Lyda and
• 8:31
  smuggled in extra bedding in a table at her request. She wrote letters to
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  another inmate, David Minton, who also fell in love with her. After
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  David was released from prison, Lyda saw the bars of the window off of
• 8:46
  her cell and used the extra bedding to lower herself to the ground where David
• 8:50
  was waiting. David quickly became aware that he was used by Lyda when she
• 8:54
  left him to marry a rich widow, her sixth husband. As revenge,
• 9:00
  he turned Lyda in and it was just as well. Shortly after she moved
• 9:05
  in with her new man, his mother caught a mysterious illness and passed away.
• 9:09
  Before she had time to commit yet another murder. Lyda figured out that
• 9:13
  authorities were on to her. She ran away to Kansas and tried to disguise
• 9:16
  herself by dying her hair, but police soon apprehended her. Her second stint
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  in prison was also a short one. After being paroled, she was issued
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  a full pardon. This left Lyda a free woman, and what else was
• 9:31
  she going to do but get married again. Her next husband, hal Shaw,
• 9:37
  was married to Lyda for two happy years before he mysteriously vanished. To
• 9:43
  this day, nobody knows what happened to haw Lyda died in nineteen fifty eight
• 9:48
  after having a sudden heart attack, and she was buried near not one but
• 9:52
  two of her murdered husbands. Her autopsy showed that her entire body was completely
• 9:58
  hairless aside effect of spending so many years being exposed to large amounts of arsenic.
• 10:11
  That's ten minute murder for today, brief and bingeible true crime. I'm
• 10:16
  Joe the host, and thank you so much for listening today, and quickly
• 10:20
  before you have a chance to follow through with what you're thinking right now,
• 10:24
  ladies, I'm specifically talking to you, there are better ways to remove hair.
• 10:30
  That last part of the story. I know you were thinking it.
• 10:33
  Don't do it. There are so many other options for hair removal. Arsenic
• 10:37
  is not the answer. Arsenic is going to be a trending self care tip
• 10:41
  next week on TikTok because people don't care about their health sometimes they'll just do
• 10:46
  wild things they think might help them a little bit. All right, So,
• 10:50
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• 10:54
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• 11:01
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• 11:05
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• 11:13
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• 11:20
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• 11:26
  you for listening, and FYI Flypaper no longer contains arsenic Good night.