The Hi and welcome to Criminal Broads, a podcast about wild women on the wrong side of the law.

I'm Tori Telfer and I'm thrilled to announce

that on this very special episode, I am not alone.

Yes, the rumors are true.

I'm being joined by someone who is an expert on the dark dark side of female psychology.

He is a best-selling true crime author with almost 40 books under his belt and his name is M. William Phelps. He is also the creator and former host of the show Dark Minds

and all you serious true crime fans have probably seen him many times on deadly women and snapped. Radio America calls him the

nation's leading authority on the mind of the female murderer. Today you'll

hear us talk briefly about his most recent book,

Dangerous Ground, My Friendship with a Serial Killer,

which is a very personal account of his friendship,

and that should be friendship in scare quotes, his friendship with Keith Jesperson, who you may know as the happy face killer.

We talk a little bit about what it's like to go to church one day and then Skype with a vicious

sociopath the next hint it's hard and then we get into the criminal broad of

this episode. Amy Archer Gilligan a Connecticut serial killer who murdered dozens of people in a creepy convalescent home in the early 1900s.

She was the inspiration for the play and the movie Arsenic and Old Lace and Phelps has written about her

extensively in his book The Devil's Roming House. So I met up with Phelps a few weeks

ago in Connecticut where we sat outside a coffee shop to chat about this woman.

And now I'm going to warn you, my mic picked up everything.

I did not realize just how sensitive this mic was until I took it outside and then

listened back to the recording and heard things like this.

Because her first letter to me was a couple of sentences. Here we go. Whenever you're filming or recording something

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