In August 1898, a small package arrived at a prominent home in Dover, Delaware, bearing no return address. Inside: a box of chocolate bonbons, a cambric handkerchief, and a note reading "With love to yourself and baby." Mary Elizabeth Penington Dunning shared the candy with her sister Ida Harriet Deane and several guests on the family porch that evening. Within hours, everyone who ate the chocolates was violently ill. Within days, Mary and Ida were dead from arsenic poisoning.

The killer was Cordelia Botkin, a woman sitting three thousand miles away in San Francisco. She had nevermet her victims. Her target had been the family of her former lover, Associated Press correspondent John Preston Dunning, who had ended their three-year affair when he departed for the Spanish-American War. Botkin purchased arsenic from a drugstore on Market Street, laced a box of bonbons from George Haas and Sons Confectionery, and mailed the package from the Ferry Post Office. She had weaponized the United States Postal

Service.

The investigation that followed linked Botkin to the crime through handwriting analysis, drugstore receipts, candy shop identification, and a price tag she forgot to remove from the handkerchief. San Francisco Police Chief Isaiah W. Lees coordinated the cross-continental investigation, and handwriting expert Daniel T. Ames matched Botkin's penmanship to the package and anonymous letters she had previously sent to the family. Her trial in San Francisco captivated the nation, with William Randolph Hearst's Examiner erecting a public bulletin board outside the courthouse to update the crowds.

In the woods above Brattleboro, Vermont, a 65-foot stone tower has stood since the 1890s. It was not built by architects or hired masons. It was built by the patients of an insane asylum, stone by stone, under the direction of their doctors who believed that breaking rocks could fix broken minds. But some patients found another use for the tower they had built with their own hands. They climbed it one last time. In 1938, officials sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers.

This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution.

• 1806: Richard Whitney dies under Dr. Perley Marsh's experimental treatments in Hinsdale, New Hampshire
• 1834: Anna Hunt Marsh dies, leaving $10,000 (over $300,000 today) to establish a psychiatric hospital
• 1836: The Vermont Asylum for the Insane opens in Brattleboro with no chains, no cells, and no fences
• 1887-1894: Patients construct the 65-foot Retreat Tower from locally quarried granite on the ridge above campus
• 1938: Tower entrance sealed after multiple patient deaths

The Brattleboro Retreat remains one of the oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Founded on the radical premise that the mentally ill deserved kindness rather than chains, it pioneered America's first patient-produced newspaper, the first swimming pool at any hospital in the world, and a campus that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. In 2016, a cemetery restoration project recovered names for the numbered graves where possible and installed a memorial marker for those whose identities were permanently lost. The tower itself was restored by volunteer stone workers in 2019. Anna Hunt Marsh never saw the asylum open. She missed it by two years. But nearly two hundred years later, her institution still treats patients on the same ground her trustees purchased with her money.

In 1891, the first twenty-five patients stepped off a train and walked into the Vermont State Asylum for the Insane in Waterbury, a sprawling brick-and-stone campus built along a ridge above the Winooski River. The facility was supposed to heal broken minds through fresh air and structured labor. Instead, it grew into something the entire state whispered about -- a place so defined by confinement that saying someone "ought to go to Waterbury" became shorthand for madness itself.

This episode traces the full arc of the Waterbury asylum, from its founding under Governor William P. Dillingham through the decades of overcrowding that packed 1,728 patients into wards designed for far fewer. It follows the rise of Dr. Eugene A. Stanley, the superintendent who opened patient records to University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont -- a program that cataloged more than 6,000 Vermonters by bloodline and targeted Abenaki, French-Canadian, disabled, and low-income families for sterilization.

Timeline of Key Events:

1763: Waterbury chartered by Governor Benning Wentworth, named after Waterbury, Connecticut.

1891: Vermont State Asylum for the Insane opens; first 25 patients arrive from Brattleboro.

1925: Henry Perkins launches the Eugenics Survey of Vermont at UVM, with fieldworker Harriett Abbott documenting over 60 families.

1931: Vermont passes Act 174, "A Law for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization." At least 253 Vermonters sterilized through 1957; two-thirds were women.

2011: Tropical Storm Irene floods the hospital; 51 patients evacuated. The facility never reopens.

2021: Vermont House votes 146-0 to formally apologize for state-sanctioned eugenics on the 90th anniversary of the sterilization law.

Historical Significance:

The Waterbury story reaches far beyond one institution. It reveals how state power, medical authority, and pseudoscience combined to strip reproductive rights from hundreds of Vermonters -- many of them indigenous Abenaki families who hid their identity for generations to survive. Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Abenaki has spoken publicly about his grandmother changing her name three times to escape the state's eugenics lists. Meanwhile, on Perry Hill above the old campus, an ongoing search has revealed that the 1991 memorial marker for 19 deceased patients was placed in the wrong location. The dead are still waiting to be found.

The 2021 legislative apology, championed by Rep. Tom Stevens of Waterbury and passed unanimously, marked Vermont as one of the first states to formally reckon with its eugenics history -- but the scars on Abenaki families and other targeted communities remain.