Bessie May Skeels (Lundgren)

Bessie May Skeels Lundgren from the Evening Tribune (Lawrence, MA) April 30, 1921 Courtesy of the Digital Commonwealth

Bessie May Skeels was an Andover resident and nurse who was accused of murdering her School Street employer, Miss Florence W. Gay, a teacher at Abbot Academy. Florence Gay died on December 13, 1917 while in the care of Mrs. Skeels. She was first arrested on larceny charges for stealing jewelry and other belongings from the Gay household, where she worked as a caregiver for Florence Gay and her mother, Rosamond. At the time, an investigation was underway to determine whether Miss Gay had been poisoned with arsenic, even though her death certificate listed a cerebral hemorrhage as the official cause of death. 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. In March 1919, 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 effort to uncover evidence of arsenic poisoning. However, autopsies ordered by Hudson County, NJ prosecutors found no traces of arsenic in either body. Nicknamed in the press as the "Sunshine Nurse," Skeels was found innocent of the charges against her in the case of the death of Florence Gay on July 3, 1919.

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.

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.

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 abstinence 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 existence today.