Cordelia Botkin [SEP] convicted of
two days in agony, Elizabeth and her older sister, 44-year-old Ida Harriet Deane, died from arsenic poisoning. Four others who had sampled the chocolates survived. Elizabeth's father remarked upon the familiar handwriting on the note and saw that it matched the taunting letters he had kept in a drawer. Police traced the candy to a shop in San Francisco, and from there, to Botkin.
Trial.
Botkin was tried before Judge Carroll Cook.
She was convicted of murder in December 1898, appealed,
and was convicted again at a retrial in 1904. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
She was initially imprisoned in San Francisco, but after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was transferred to San Quentin State Prison, where she died in 1910; John Dunning, his career destroyed by the revelations during the trial, had died two years earlier in Philadelphia.
Other sources.
- Transcript on Appeal: People of the State of California, respondent, versus Cordelia Botkin, defendant. Complaint 12,579. San Francisco Superior