Bessie May Skeels (Lundgren)
Bessie May Skeels was an Andover resident and nurse who was accused of murdering her School Street employer, Miss Florence M. Gay, a teacher at Abbot Academy around 1918. She was indicted for murdering her brother Albert Wilkins of New Jersey who died in July of 1917 when an autopsy provided evidence that he had been poisoned with sugar of lead. [1] [2] In March 1919, Bessie May Skeels was accused of the murders of her mother Elizabeth Wilkins and her sister in law Mary Wilkins of New Jersey. Both women's bodies were exhumed in an attempt to find evidence of arsenic poisoning. Neither woman's body was found to have arsenic in an autopsy ordered by Hudson County, NJ prosecutors. [3] Nicknamed in the New Jersey press as the "Sunshine Nurse," Skeels
Born Elizabeth May Wilkins in 1876 in England, she married Frank Skeels, a New Jersey Native and a Singer Sewing Machine manager who died in January 1908. [4] [5]
The body of Florence M. Gay, interred in Andover's Spring Grove Cemetery, was exhumed three times in a successful attempt to establish definitive evidence that she had arsenic in her stomach. [6]
Prior to her notoriety as an accused murderer, Mrs. Skeels was known throughout the Merrimack Valley as a popular elocutionist and piano soloist. The Evening Tribune of Lawrence reports on dozens of occasions spanning from 1906-1918 that Skeels was performing dramatic and scripture readings and playing piano solos at Methodist churches and social clubs in Lawrence, Methuen and Salem, NH. Bessie Skeels was active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and in the International Organization of Good Templars (I.O.G.T.), a sorority and a fraternal organization that promoted abstinance from alcohol. Skeels was elected Vice Templar in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F), a community service, humanitarian organization, with roots in 18th century England still in existance today.
- ↑ Another Chapter in the Skeels Case, Daily Evening Item, (Lynn, MA) December 10, 1918, p. 7
- ↑ Positively denied giving of arsenic, The Evening Tribune (Lawrence, MA), June 26, 1919, p.5.
- ↑ No Poison Found in Wilkins Analysis, Daily Evening Item, (Lynn, MA) March, 25, 1919, p. 8.
- ↑ Funeral of F.E. Skeels, The Evening Tribune (Lawrence, MA), January 3, 1908, p.1
- ↑ Taken to New Jersey for burial, The Evening Tribune (Lawrence, MA), April 29, 1908, p. 6
- ↑ Both sides line up for battle in murder trail, The Bayonne Times (NJ), June 12, 1919.
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