Few may have heard the story of notorious serial killer Sarah Jane Robinson and even fewer may know that she was born on the outskirts of Armagh in the town of Newtownhamilton.
Certainly locally, little may be known of the woman who in 1886 was accused of murdering upwards of eight people – including three of her own children, William, Moses and Lizzie.
Her crimes had her dubbed by the press as ‘A Modern Borgia’, ‘The Boston Borgia’ and ‘The Massachusetts Borgia’ after the infamous Lucrezia Borgia of the Spanish noble family Borgia who was rumoured to be a prolific poisoner.
While Sarah Jane – whose maiden name was Tennant – was County Armagh-born, she emigrated to America to live in Boston, Massachusetts with her sister at age 14 or 15 where she remained until her death in 1906.
As such, media coverage of her crimes was limited to American newspapers of the time including Morning Journal and Courier, Clarksville Evening Chronicle and The Salt Lake Herald, to name a few – perhaps providing an explanation as to why her crimes never quite made it into folklore here.
At around 20-years-of-age she married Moses Robinson with whom she conceived eight children – five of which survived infancy.
Despite regularly moving house – which is rumoured to have been due to non-payment of rent and utilities – Sarah Jane and Moses became heavily involved with the Cottage Street Methodist Church and it was here she met a man named Thomas R. Smith – a prominent church leader – who would later be named as a partner in her crimes along with a Dr Charles C. Beers.
Between 1881 and 1886 several members of Sarah Jane’s family began to die. They are said to have experienced “excruciating stomach pain and vomiting” prior to death.
The deceased included her children William, Lizzie and Moses, her nephew, Prince Arthur Freeman and her landlord, Oliver Sleeper.
According to a report dated December 13, 1886 by the New Haven Daily Morning Journal and Courier a total of 11 ‘suspicious’ deaths could be traced by authorities to the defendant, Sarah Jane Robinson.
The paper asserted that her son William had died just that morning after “suffering terribly from convulsions in his last hours”.
The report adds: “The symptoms seem to be those of poisoning, but the analysis of the boy’s stomach has not yet been completed.”
Her bail was set at $25,000 (approx. $844,869.68 today) and her co-accused Smith’s set at $3,500 (approx. $118,281.76 today).
The same article insinuates that Robinson may have poisoned the insured parents of young children whom she would then “take charge of”. If the insurance money then passed to the children in her care she would “put them out of the way”, it said.
Exactly one year to the date later the same paper reported that the Modern Borgia was to be “tried for her life”.
By this stage the prosecution had determined that all victims’ deaths had resulted from “arsenic poisoning”, not administered in a single does but in a series of doses and that “in each case the prisoner [Sarah Jane] had general charge of the sick room and superintended the giving of medicines”.
The argument that the murders had been committed for monetary gain still stood and the prosecution appealed for the death penalty – which at this time would have been by hanging.
On November 14, 1888 the Boston Borgia was sentenced.
On that date, the Clarksville Evening Chronicle revealed that she had managed to dodge the death penalty with her sentence being commuted to life imprisonment but added that “her fate will hardly be less terrible”.
In explaining that her life sentence was to be confined to solitary imprisonment the report said: “The terror of it is even worse than death for it implies endless solitude and darkness.
“Already the murderess has been removed to her living tomb, from which her counsel, jubilant in their success in saving her neck, confidently declare their hope of securing in time her liberation.
“Never has the exercise of mercy been so tardily endorsed as in the case of this modern Lucretia Borgia,” it said. “Only the doubt shadowing the evidence warrants the plea for clemency, and yet the community is relieved and breathes easier now that the affair is ended.”
