Welcome to the Femme Fatal, a true crime podcast with an astrology twist. I'm your host, Stacey Dotson. Each week I'll be joined by a guest host because this femme fatal prefers not to work alone. Hi, welcome back to the femme fatal. Today I'm joined again with my husband, Greg. Hi, Greg. Hey, babe. Hi, you wanted to talk about Lida Southord. So go ahead and tell us why you wanted to talk about Lida Southord. Well, I had no idea who she was. I was trying to think of an obscure state where weird things might have happened, and I thought of Idaho, and Idaho did not disappoint. Uh so we got the story of uh Lida Southord here. She, I guess, was their only maybe female serial killer. I don't know if there's any others. I didn't come across any when I was doing my research. But if you're ready, I'll go ahead and kind of just tell you her tale. Yeah, go ahead and jump in. Okay. Well, Lida was born in October of 1892, and she was also known as Lida Ann May Trueblood. And she was an American female suspected serial killer. We'll get into that a little bit more here in a second. But um, it was suspected that she had killed four of her husbands, and I think she had seven total. I got I got a list of them we'll go over here later on in the story as well. But uh she killed four of her husbands, uh, allegedly killed her brother-in-law and her daughter by using arsenic poisoning derived from fly paper. And uh her rationale to do this was to collect insurance money on her family. Um, quick question was True Blood or Maiden name? Yes, I believe it was her maiden name. So apparently she take the fly paper and boil it to get the arsenic off of it and put it into her victim's food and drink. So she uh earned the nicknames uh Lady Bluebeard, uh the Black Widow, and uh my favorite's fly paper Lida. It's a great nickname. Yeah, it's pretty cool, right? Um apparently she was a blue-eyed redhead and was described as having the cooing voice of a dove whenever she spoke. So she was born in a town called Catesville, Missouri. Like I said, on October 16th, 1892, uh 60 miles northeast of Kansas City. And at the age of 19, she got married for the first time. And she married a guy named Robert Dooley, and they got married on March 17th, 1912. They settled in with uh Robert's brother Ed on a ranch in Twin Falls, Idaho, and had a daughter named Lorraine. And she was born in 1913, but died unexpectedly in 1915. She was two years old, and yeah, Elida said that it was dirty well water that killed her. Ed, Robert's uh brother, he died soon afterwards, actually, in August of 1915. So his cause of death was tomain poisoning. Are you familiar with the phrase tomain poisoning, Stacey? No. What's tomane poisoning? Basically, it's an obsolete non-technical term for food poisoning, uh, specifically referring to illnesses caused by eating food contaminated with bacteria or the toxins associated with bacteria. And then so Ed died in August 1915. Robert fell ill and died of typhoid fever in October of the same year, leaving Lida as the sole survivor in the family. And she collected on the life insurance policies of each person shortly after they died. So all of them had it. They all had it had on uh Lorraine and Ed and Robert all had life insurance policies, and somehow, probably through her cajoling or just convincing, she was named as the beneficiary. Beneficiary, there you go, yeah. So she got all the money after they all, you know, shed their mortal coil. So we fast forward two years after Robert's death. So where are we now? We're now 1917. True blood married somebody named William McCaffle. Was she true blood then? Yeah, she's still true blood. She, I guess we went back to her original name. Or I kind of referred to her as Lida. Sometimes refer as True Blood. I don't refer to her as some of her nicknames. So whenever I say True Blood, just know it's Lida. Okay. Apparently she had a three-year-old daughter at some time as well. So two years after uh Robert died, Lida remarried, and she married a guy named William McAffle. And uh shortly afterwards, a couple moved from Idaho to Montana. And then a year after moving to Montana, guess what? You know, Mr. McCaffle mysteriously got ill and passed away. So the death certificate stated the cause of death was influenza and diphtheria. So he died on October 1st, 1918. In March of 1919, Lida got married again to a guy named Harlan Lewis. And he was an automobile salesman from Billings, Montana. So I guess she's still in Montana. Husband died in October, and here we are, what, six months later, maybe? Seven months, something like that. And she's remarried. And guess what happened? He fell ill? He did four months after they got married. Oh, she's escalating. Yeah, it sounds like she might be escalating here a little bit. He fell ill and died from complications of gastroenteritis. Okay, I know what that is. I worked for a gastroenterologist when I was in college. There you go. So Harlan dies, and soon afterwards, Lida moves back to Twin Falls. And she went to work in a little downtown cafe, and there she met a ranch foreman named Edward Meyer, who became her fourth husband. Okay, so you'll like this timeline. They married on August 10th, 1920. They spent their wedding night in Lida's room at the Rogerson Hotel. Uh the very next day, so I guess the 11th, Ed took out a life insurance policy for $2,500. But he soon had a conversation with Lida. And after talking to her, he bumped it up to $10,000, naming her as the beneficiary. Guess what happened weeks later? He fell ill. He did after eating a meal prepared by Lida. Edward would continue to take turns for the worst at the hospital after taking sips of water, apparently provided by Lida as well. So he died on September 17th, 1920. So this was 28 days, one month after his wedding day, roughly. Okay, I thought the other one was escalating. This one's definitely escalating. She's getting cocky. Yeah, it sounds like she might be, right? The cause of death for Ed was listed as typhoid fever. So we're gonna take a pause here for a second and go over the husbands. Now she was married seven times, but only four of them died. Yeah, mysteriously died or mysteriously died. Her first marriage was to Robert, and that was from March of 1912 to October of 1915. And then there was Mr. McHaffle, and they were married from June 1917 to October of 1918. And then there was Harlan, and they were married from March of 1919 to July of 1919. And then there was Ed, who they got married in August of 1920, and he died in September of 1920. After that is Paul Southard. So that's where the Southard name comes in. And we'll get into that a little bit more here as I get deeper into the story. And then there was uh a guy named Harry Whitlock, who apparently she married in 1932, and we think was divorced. And then there was Hal Shaw, and there's a little mystery behind Mr. Shaw as well. They think they divorced, no one's really sure, and uh again, I'll tie into that here in a little bit. So for the first four, and the brother and the daughter, she collected about $30,000 in life insurance. This is collectively with all four? Collectively for all of them. Well, no, that and uh Ed Dooley and Lorraine, so all of them, translates to about $400,000 today. Enter into the story, another Dooley. So we've had three. Ed Robert and his brother, and now we have a relative. I don't know if he's a cousin or an uncle, but a guy named Earl Dooley. He's a chemist there in Twin Falls, and he starts kind of putting pieces together and realizes hey, something is afoot of the Circle Cave. So um, he begins to study the deaths surrounding Lida. And he enlists the help of a physician and another chemist. And he soon discovers that both Ed and Robert were murdered by arsenic poisoning. So the Twin Falls County prosecutor, Frank Stefan, or Stefan, I hope it's Stefan, like greatest SNL character ever, right, babe? Yes. Stefan began an investigation and had the bodies of three of Lida's husbands, her four-year-old daughter, and the brother-in-law exhumed, Stefan, soon discovered that some of the bodies, I mean, these are dead people. I shouldn't be making fun of them, but yeah, I can't help it. Stefan. He discovered that some of the bodies contained traces of arsenic. Others were suspected of arsenic poisoning by how well the bodies were preserved. I don't know if arsenic was used in embalming fluid or not. Do you know, babe? It was a while ago, but they stopped using it in the 1900s. And so this is after the 1900s. And so they're like, okay, this is suspicious. We have a bunch of dead bodies with arsenic levels in them that probably shouldn't be in there. They start to investigate records at the banks and with the life insurance company. They uh get access to the records of the Idaho State Life Insurance Company of Boise. Of course, as we know already, that all four of her husbands had held a life insurance policy where they listed her as the beneficiary. This is kind of interesting. When they dug up Edward Myers' autopsy, um, well, dug up, I said, when they did the autopsy after they exhumed him, it was found that he had nine times the lethal dose of arsenic in his system. Nine times, Ferris Bueller. Nine times. So they're like, okay, we need to go find her, right? We need to bring her here, and we have all this evidence of this arsenic poisoning, and she's collected all this money. And so they put out, I guess, an APV, and they found her, and she was uh found by law enforcement in Honolulu, of all places. She was married already to the fifth time to Navy petty officer Paul Southord, and there's where the Southard name comes in. Following extradition to Idaho, she was arraigned on June 11th, 1921. Sorry, what does arraign mean? She was arraigned, that means the charges were filed against her. Okay. So Lida obviously is back in Idaho now, and she's facing murder charges on Meyer. I don't know why they didn't try to go after the others. Maybe it's because of the fact that Meyer had the highest amount of arsenic in his body, and they thought that might be easier to prove motive in court versus the others would be my guess. Of course, she pled not guilty, but was convicted of using arsenic to murder her husbands and taking the money from their life insurance policies, anyhow. Okay, so she was convicted, yeah. Yeah, she was convicted. It was determined that uh her motive for the murder was money, of course, you know, since she had taken out and collected the life insurance policies for all of her dead husbands. Yes. So the trial lasted about six weeks, and apparently the uh evidence they had was fairly circumstantial, but the jury took about 23 hours to and they convicted her, right? Of second degree murder and sentenced her to 10 years to life in the old Idaho State Penitentiary. I don't know if there's a new Idaho State Penitentiary or not, but she was incarcerated in the old one. And interestingly, this is where it gets kind of cool, actually. She escaped from prison. What? Yeah, she escaped from prison on May 4th of 1931. So apparently there are two people involved: a guard and an inmate. Um, I believe the inmate drove the getaway car and the guard helped her frame the escape. Was kind of my understanding of it. Apparently, David Minton, he was the inmate, worked in the women's ward where he exchanged notes with Lida, and in the spring of 1931, she used that relationship basically to help get her out of jail. She asked for a trellis, like a ladder-shaped thing for flowers and stuff like that, to be constructed. And she apparently was tending flowers there in the prison yard, and she wanted the trellis by her cell. So she got the supplies and she started putting the trellis together, and those supplies was a saw. So that night she saws out one of the bars of her window, squeezes out, and uses a trellis to climb down the wall, and then she got to the outside wall and apparently used bed sheets roped together to get over the wall and out into the car with David. Who was the former inmate. She used to write him love letters. Yeah. So it gets a little confusing because there's two guys. Yes. Two guys helped her escape. But anyway, so David and her for sure leave. Okay. Yes. And um uh and they go to Denver, and she ends up working as a housekeeper for a widower named Harry Whitlock. And Harry lived with his mom. And guess what happened after Lida started working there? Um, I don't know, they lived happily ever after. No. His mother soon died of a stomach ailment just before she married Harry. Interesting. Who would become the sixth husband, and this was in March of 1932. So she went back to her old ways. Yeah. So David, you know, he helped her escape, right? The guy is captured in Colorado and maybe a little bit miffed that she married this other guy, spills the beans, right? Yes. You know, tells authorities this is where she is, this is where you can find her. Um, Lida, being, you know, not stupid, upon finding out that David had been, you know, arrested or brought into police custody for questioning wherever it might have been, she hits the road, right? She flees. And she goes to Kansas and she's tracked down at a Topeka post office in July. So she was out of prison for about 15 months before they caught her again and then brought her back. She's brought back to the old Idaho State Penitentiary, and she ends up serving another nine years, and she is actually released on parole in 1941 and received a pardon from the governor two years later, which is pretty wild, I think, considering the jailbreak and the poisonings and all that. Stacy, I know you did some digging on that. What did you find? I did. So the pardon was actually granted because the state corrections officials were impressed by her record as a model prisoner in parole and ruled she no longer posed a threat to society. And there's a fascinating detail from a 1943 newspaper account that she'd been granted a conditional pardon a year prior to this pardon, with the provision that it would become a full pardon if her behavior warranted it. She also leaned really hard into religious redemption narratives and told the press that she would devote the remainder of her days to living a Christian lifestyle and she would never remarry again with a quote saying, religion is my whole life now. And she went and on and lived with her sister, and they lived in Nyessa, N Y S S A, Nyssa, Oregon, and went to church regularly. Wow. So it worked for Lida, did not work so well for Carla Faye Tucker. Right. I'm like, I just was thinking about your Carla Faye Tucker story. Yeah. Okay. So to wrap up, let's review here. So she murdered her first four husbands, her first husband's brother, their daughter, all to collect insurance money. And then she eventually gets caught because a relative of the first murder victim, her first husband, puts the pieces together. She gets put in jail, uses her charm to break out of jail, gets found 15 months later, gets put back in jail, discovers God, gets paroled, and then because she was such a model prisoner, gets a full pardon from the governor, moves to Oregon, somehow marries this Mr. Shaw guy, she dies, and then he disappears to the annals of history, and no one knows whatever happened to that dude. She died first and he disappeared? Or no, he disappears. He disappears after she dies. Okay, so maybe he's not one of her victims. So he disappears after she dies. I would assume that it was after she died because if they were together, they would know where Mr. Shaw is with her. I think so after she passes is when he kind of disappears and then that's it. No one knows whatever turned up from him or where he ended up. You know, his whereabouts remained unknown. I imagine by now he's probably passed on, you know. This happened in the 30s and you know, she passed away in the fifties and so he might not have been a victim, is what you're saying. No, as far as we know, he's not a victim. But she did break her promise on her pardon. She said she'd never remarry, and then she did remarry. Yeah, she did. But interesting person. I mean, uh she lived uh quite the unique life, that's for sure. Not a very nice person, but uh an interesting one nonetheless. Yep. So I'll go ahead and just kinda jump into what there is about her in pop culture slash media and all this stuff, and you know, you talked about all the nicknames in the beginning, and she had a bunch. So you had fly paper, Lida, obviously, from the arsenic, yeah. Then there was the black widow, not to be confused with Scarlet Johansson. And the one I like the best is Lady Bluebeard. And so if you know your fairy tales, you know this one. It's a French folk tale about a wealthy nobleman with a blue beard. And so Charles Perrot published Bluebeard in Paris, 1697, as part of his famous collection of Tales of Mother Goose, the same collection that gave us Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood. The tale centers on a wealthy man with a hideous blue beard who has already had several wives, all of whom have mysteriously disappeared. He marries a young neighbor girl, and before leaving on a journey, he hands her the keys to every room in his castle, with one exception, one small forbidden key that she must never use. And overwhelmed by curiosity, she opens the forbidden chamber and finds the corpses of all his previous wives hanging on the walls. Oh my god. Oh my god. And this was in a children's book. Well, originally, when this Tales of Mother Goose was published, it was published to be a conversation piece at what they had around then the Royal French salons. So anyway, so not intended, but a lot of those stories did end up being a kid's thing. So anyway. So Bluebeard was not exactly the smartest guy, right? I mean, it's like, okay, here's the keys to every room in the house. The one, I'm still gonna give you a key to the one room I don't want you to go in. So I wrote this part down too. Bluebeard returns, discovers her disobedience, and moves to kill her too. But her brothers arrive just in time and shut it down. The most discussed symbol in the story is that small key. Apparently, it was already stained with blood when he handed it to her. So Peralt kind of ends the whole thing with two contradictory morals. First, blaming the wife's curiosity and immediately winking and saying that the story is from a distant past and nothing about modern husbands, ha ha, classic. So, anyway, back to Lida. That was a nickname that she got. The press gave it to her, and it caused like all kinds of commotion because obviously, you know, women typically are victims, not the ones that commit the crimes. So her trial that you mentioned. Earlier, apparently, it was like tons of people showed up. It was a circus. Yeah, I imagine it would have to be a circus. And I get the bluebeard part now because it was just a flip. She was the predator and killed the husbands versus bluebeard killing the wives. Yes. So with that, she shattered the domestic perception of being a wife, right? She weaponized that to her advantage. And that's why it became sort of a national spectacle. Now, flash forward to modern true crime, Lida has found an audience again. In 2020, the podcast Female Criminals dedicated an episode to her in their Black Widows series. In 2023, 10 Minute Murder covered her under the title Fly Paper Lida. She's been the subject of a 2018 book called Black Widow Lida Trueblood by Jesse Dillard. And back in 1994, a full biography was written called Lady Bluebeard: The True Story of Love and Marriage, Death, and Fly Paper. That title goes hard, right? You know? I like that title. Yeah, it's good. Most recently in 2025, she got a short film and it's called Fly Paper. And it's part of a larger project called 13 Stories that centers on inmates of the old Idaho State Penitentiary. Now, I found it, the short, I found it on YouTube and watched it. And uh it's good. Like it's funny, it's very black and white, kind of like that. Like film noir kind of looking or film noir, little vaudeville, like where everything's fast. But she breaks the fourth wall a lot. Like after like guys fall for her BS, right? She'll look at the camera like, uh-huh, I did it again. So it's very cute little short. So there's a good story there about her. And apparently she was super charming and you know, was able to charm her way into all those marriages, and people trusted her and made her a beneficiary. So I'm gonna go ahead and jump into astrology too, if that's cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing kind of what the stars have to say about her. We're gonna heavy focus on her sun sign and where the sun was. So Lida Southart was born on October 16th, 1892. It makes her a Libra. And, you know, tons of great Libras I love, but every sign has a dark side, right? And so we're gonna focus on her dark sign qualities. So setting the stage, Libra is the seventh sign of the zodiac. It's ruled by Venus, the planet of love, beauty, desire, and attraction. And Libra is symbolized by the scales, and it's the only inaminate object on the entire zodiac, which is telling. Libra's obsessed with balance, fairness, with partnership. They are the diplomats of the zodiac, charming, gracious, socially magnetic. Historical accounts describe Lida as having, as you said earlier, the cooing voice of a dove and the charm that drew men and prison guards apparently to her almost helplessly. Textbook, Venus ruled Libra. Here's where it gets interesting, okay? October 16th, the day she was born, specifically falls in the third decan of Libra. And so you've heard me talk before about how every sign has 30 degrees. So when the first day, like a Taurus, take a Taurus, April 22nd, that's one degree, right? And go all the way till it ends on the 21st. You've got your 30 degrees. And the further you are born into that degree, you've absorbed a lot of qualities, right? So what a decan is, it's a way of dividing those 30 degrees into three sections. And each section adds layers of nuance to personality traits based on where your son falls in within that sign. So it's a subset of a subset. So she's born in the third decan, which means she gets a hit of Mercury and not the element, the planet. Gotcha. She gets Mercury energy on top of her Venus rulership. And Mercury is the planet of communication, strategy, and the mind. So you're blending Libra's social charm with Mercury's sharp, calculating intelligence. She was a thinker, she planned, she was patient, she watched. And every astrology profile for the date, October 16th, Libras describe them as observant, watching nonverbal cues, reading how people respond to them, and always calibrating. She's not just likable, she's strategic about being likable. So the shadow side of Libra's greatest gift is their charm. Okay. That charm just doesn't attract people. It can manipulate them when it's, you know, on the dark side. One astrologer writer describes it this way: no one would ever suspect the beautiful, sweet, charming Libra to use that charm to get what they want, but they do, and they do it shamelessly. And they'll have you believing you're the best things and sliced bread, and suddenly you'll be committing murder for them. Sounds like exactly what she did. I mean, she had a prison guard smuggle in a saw, and she wrote love letters to a fellow inmate who bought a car and waited outside the prison walls for her escape. And that man was devoted, and she left him in Denver two weeks later. So, you know, that was her personality. Plus, she was able to convince her husbands to make her the beneficiary. And that one, they jumped the amount from $2,500 up to $10,000 after she talked to them. And so obviously she's using her charm and probably their trust in her being their wife and wouldn't do anything to harm them. Remember that part, Stacey, the wife not harming the husband part. That's very clear. Okay, I'll try to remember. How much life insurance do you have? Not that much. Also, just to point out back then, too, like the communication wasn't there. So when she left Montana and had those incidences there, maybe it didn't get back to Idaho until that one guy had that light bulb moment, like, hey, you know, something's happening here. Well, that's a lot of astrology that I did already. But let's go back. So we talked about how Libra's the seventh sign. So that means Libra rules the seventh house. It governs partnerships, marriage, and committed relationships. And she married, what, six, seven times, you've said? Seven times. Seven times. So the seventh house, when distorted, can become an obsession with partnership, not as love, but as a transaction, as a means to an end. And she needed to be in a relationship. And astrology profiles for October 16th Libras literally say they are constantly in love to find motivation for everything else in life. Every single husband was chosen, assessed, insured, and then, you know, what happened? Eliminated. Eliminated, yeah. Another interesting thing, the tower card in tarot is also associated with October 16th. And the tower represents sudden dramatic disruption, the collapse of something that was never built on solid ground. And for four husbands, it was never built on solid ground, it looks like. And so she was the tower, and the collapse was, you know, what happened. Yeah, that's interesting. To sum that up, you have a Libra with the Mercury mind and a Venus mask and the seventh house full of insurance policies. Yeah, I mean, all in all, a pretty interesting character, but still, I mean, it's just an interesting story, just how it ties into the astrology pretty well with some of her motivations, it seems. And, you know, she just was the most famous serial killer from the great state of Idaho. Yeah. I mean, you if you look at it, like she really was just out for herself, self-preservation. I need money to survive, and I have this way to get it. And she got better at it from marriage to marriage to marriage. You know, the timelines got less and less and less. She got more efficient at the time. Like you said earlier, there's no way a woman could be doing these crimes. You know, it has to be something like diphtheria or whatever. So, like none of them were ever diagnosed with dying from arsenic, right? It was always something tetanus or something dysentery. You know, if you're on the Oregon Trail, that's what everyone died from, right? Dysentery. Stuff like that. She was never, never seen as a potential suspect. Like that happened now. First person they look at is the spouse, right? But back then, you know, because of her sex and just the mindset of people back then, there's just like, there's no way. And she got away with a lot of uh evil, horrible things because of that. Plus, apparently she was super attractive and just had a way to charm people. So they're gonna definitely overlook that. Hmm, this charming, lovely lady would never do that. Yeah, I think that was uh why she was able to get away with a lot of that until you know Earl put it all together. Which is why she's now being highlighted on the Femme Fatal podcast. Bum boom boom. Well, thanks again, babe. Of course, it was fun. Yes, it was. I will go ahead and link to some of the stuff I mentioned, including that little short I have found on YouTube. So, okay, bye. Awesome, babe. Bye. The Femme Fatal, created and hosted by Stacy Dotson, produced by Mark Williams, music by Marcia Yingling, Chad Chane, and Greg Loycano.