Tioga County PA Archives News.....Death of a Murderess. November 29, 1855
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Donald Buncie http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00034.html#0008389 May 16, 2023, 3:36 am

The Agitator.: (Wellsborough, Tioga County, Pa.) November 29, 1855
We notice the death of Mrs. Elizabeth Barker announced in papers. She died in the
prison at that place, where she had been confined under sentence of death since the
fall of ’53. We do not think that the annals of crime in Pennsylvania furnish such
another case as hers. At the advanced age of sixty-five years, she committed a
double murder, her husband and sister being the victims, in order to become the wife
of her sister’s husband. She poisoned her husband some time in 1852, and, although
there were lively suspicions of the true cause of his death,  he was buried without
a postmortem examination, and the suspicion gradually faded away. A year afterwards,
however, her sister, with whom the murderess then lived, was seized with violent
illness, exhibiting marked symptoms of poison, but she recovered. Soon after she was
seized with the same terrible symptoms and died in great agony. Still no suspicion
rested upon Mrs. Barker. The deed was too foul, the purpose too horrid, to justify
the belief that she was guilty; but for her subsequent unfeeling conduct, she would
doubtless have gone down to the grave with the secret of her crime between herself
and her God.
Little by little facts were devolved until the public mind settled down on the
conviction that she was the murderer of her sister. The body of the victim was taken
from the grave, a postmortem examination made, the stomach taken to Philadelphia and
examined by a chemist, who found in it enough of arsenic to kill three persons, The
body of her husband was also taken up, and although time and the worms had made
havoc with it the fatal drug that laid her sister low, was also found in his
stomach. She was arrested and tried in Huntingdon in 1853, and the jury after two
hours deliberation, rendered a verdict of murder in the first degree. She was
sentenced to death and remanded to prison; but Gov. Bigler humanly determined that
she should not be executed. Her sex and her extreme age plead for her, and she was
allowed to drag out a life of remorse and suspense until called by Providence to her
final account. Two weeks ago a stern summons came, and Elizabeth Barker, severed by
the frost of age, and charged with guilt such as has rarely stained the frame of
mortals, passed to that tribunal where judgment is at once infallible and eternal. -
Chambersburg Whig 



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