She Married a Serial Killer: The True Story of Mary Brinker Post

“I am 23 years old,” wrote Mary Brinker Post, per the contributor notes for the Spring 1930 edition of Prairie Schooner, “married to an Episcopal priest, have 3 children, and am profoundly happy.”
            Profoundly unhappy marriage, however, would inform much of her fiction and, eventually, her widowhood. In her second story in the Schooner, which ran the year after her first (which was her first story to be published anywhere), a farmwoman sends her husband to town to fetch a doctor for their feverish baby; instead, he spends three days on a drunken binge, and the mother must alone bury their child in the frozen dirt of the field.
            Domestic unhappiness of a less grandly tragic variety became Mary Brinker Post’s bread and butter. The short stories she published in mass-circulation women’s magazines were often accompanied by lavish full-color, full-page illustrations depicting her housewives in A-line skirts and cherry-red lipstick, pouting with a suburban malaise.
            “Jon concentrated so hard on hating his father that he had no heart left for any woman to claim,” read the subhead for Post’s story “The Prodigal” in a 1952 edition of Today’s Woman. Post’s “What Mother Knew Best” in Everywoman’s Magazine, also in 1952, begins with the sentence “They had said just about everything except the words that would bring about the end of their marriage.”
            Mary’s first marriage didn’t end until her husband’s death. Her second marriage ended with her own. Her novels are long out of print, her short stories uncollected, but she lives on in murder podcasts and crime blogs as one of the victims of a “serial matrimonialist killer,” a title applied to William Archerd by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Archerd, who sometimes assumed fake names (including the one he used to marry Mary), was married seven times and buried three of his wives.
            Reflecting on Mary Brinker Post’s life and career—her characters’ predicaments, her stories’ titles, her proximity to crime fiction—one can’t help but see tantalizing parallels and ironies too rich for fiction:

1. She was murdered with insulin by her second husband, a former attendant on the insulin shock ward of a hospital; her second novel was titled Prescription for Marriage.
2. Her short novel, The Woman He Married, published in the May 1945 issue of Woman’s Home Companion, had a how-well-do-you-know-your-spouse plot, with this teaser: “No one had ever asked him how well he knew her. Nothing had ever happened to make him stop and wonder. And then one day he came home to find her gone.”
3. Her short story, “That’s the Man!” which appeared in Today’s Woman in 1947 and was then reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1948 (along with such classics as John Cheever’s “Enormous Radio” and Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode”) and in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1955, is the story of a man misidentified as a rapist. Meanwhile, William Archerd’s first victim was a friend who’d been charged with statutory rape. Archerd injected him with insulin, convincing him it would merely mirror the effects of head injury, allowing him to avoid court. The injection, however, killed him; the insulin was absorbed away, and the coroner erroneously cited encephalitis as the cause of death.
4. In her bestselling novel Annie Jordan, the title character leaves her first husband and becomes involved with a man who takes all her money (just as Archerd would drain Mary’s savings from her million-and-a-half copies of Annie Jordan).
5. Mary’s sister was not only an actress in radio detective dramas but also the wife of Manfred B. Lee, the coauthor of popular murder mysteries about a fictional crime writer named Ellery Queen.
6. For a time, Mary wrote scripts about the tribulations of remarriage for a radio serial titled Second Husband.

Mary Brinker married her first husband, Harry Grant Post, soon after turning seventeen. Famed author Mary McCarthy makes mention of the two of them in her 1987 memoir How I Grew; Mary Brinker was Mary McCarthy’s high school classmate and editor of the school paper, and Harry was their English teacher, though only six years older than Mary. Harry would continue to advise on his wife’s writing when he became a newspaper editor and she a reporter. Harry was also ordained, so occasionally Mary served as a rector’s wife (inspiring her story, “The Rector’s Wife,” published in a 1941 edition of The Layman’s Magazine of the Living Church).
            The only discord to be found in a 1948 newspaper profile of Mary and her family concerned criticism from her “literary friends” for writing for radio. “Granted,” she told the reporter for the Connecticut Post, “soap-operas are obvious and then some. But is being obvious a literary sin? I don’t think so. I’ve come to feel that obscurity, to the point where only one reader in a thousand knows what you’re trying to say and even he isn’t sure, is a graver one.”

Harry died in 1954, at the age of fifty-four—I’ve been unable to find a cause of death, or even an obituary, despite the many appearances his name made in the papers over the years in connection with Mary, his family, and his church work. And the weddings of two of his sons, just a few years prior to his death, received write-ups in the New York Times.
            I also find no evidence that Mary produced new work after Harry’s death. Her last novel, Matt Regan’s Lady, came out only months after Harry died, and some of her previously published work was reprinted, including her story “Boy in the Birches” in Let’s Go Naked, an anthology of fiction set in nudist camps. Annie Jordan had a new life as an Avon paperback in 1965 after ten years of being out of print. A newspaper column in 1956 hints that a movie version of the novel was in development, and perhaps even entered the early stages of production: associate producer John Auer was scouting locations in San Francisco for the adaptation, which was to be “photographed in Trucolor and Naturama.”
            The newspapers did make note of more tragedy: a few years after taking a job in the publicity department of a college in California, one of Mary’s sons, a veteran of the Korean War, died of cancer, leaving behind a wife (also named Mary) and five children.
            Mary eventually married again on Easter Day, 1965, in Chino, California. According to the court case People v. Archerd, Mary “had a good job, received a salary increase after her marriage, had checking and savings accounts. Defendant never wrote checks or withdrew any funds but there was a total of $21,620.12 depleted from her accounts from May 1965 through October 1966. On October 20, 1966, she filed in bankruptcy. Many of her debts had been accumulated by defendant. He was unemployed. His only income was $165 received from the American Hearing Aid Company.”
            Each of Archerd’s wives has a story worthy of one of Mary Brinker Post’s portraits of marital blisslessness, even the wives he didn’t murder. His second wife, Dorothea, was a nurse, and not only had she provided him with the insulin for his first murder, but they’d discussed what a perfect mystery plot it would make: death from insulin shock would likely be attributed to a natural cause, the drug leaving no signs of itself. While Dorothea would survive their marriage, she was still miffed years later that he’d remarried only the day after their own marriage was annulled. (That new wife, however, didn’t survive.)
            Mary was very nearly among the unmurdered ones—she and Archerd separated after a year, and he went back to his sixth wife. According to some reports, Mary wrote Archerd daily, begging him to take her back, pleas he persistently ignored.
            Her obituary would note that she died of “injuries suffered in an auto accident,” and though that wasn’t the case, the auto accident did lead to her death. After a minor crash on October 28—from which she sustained a few bruises—she appealed to Archerd’s sympathies, and he came to her home to console her. She would fall into a coma a few days after her accident and die on November 2.
            Despite his record of success, Archerd wasn’t the most gifted of serial killers. The murder of his fifth wife in Las Vegas was so transparent, her adult daughter accused Archerd to his face; he then threatened to kill her if she ratted him out. The law was onto him too, and after Mary’s death, Los Angeles investigators accelerated their investigations. He was arrested within a year of Mary’s murder, convicted of killing three people (though linked to six deaths), and sentenced to death himself. In 1972 his sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, so he lived long enough to die of pneumonia in 1977.

I’m at work on a novel based on the life, death, and career of Mary Brinker Post, but before I knew her true story, I knew her fiction. As part of our exploration of the 100-year archive of Prairie Schooner, I’ve looked for stories, poems, and authors worthy of reconsideration, and Mary’s debut, “East Sound Girl,” struck me as enigmatic and elusive. And the story’s contemplation of the body—and the power and connection that Julie, the protagonist, draws from her own body—perfectly fit with this issue’s theme.
            Knowing now what I know about the author’s demise, “East Sound Girl” resonates with mystery, with threat and flirtation, though it merely follows a group of characters on an unexceptional afternoon. Julie is either a young woman or on the cusp of it, and this lack of specificity contributes to the story’s strange tensions; we also never learn why she lives with an aunt and uncle, or the whereabouts of her parents. She’s a touch arrogant, it seems, smug in her youth; she regards the bodies of the older women around her with disdain.
            Julie is tasked with walking to the neighboring farmhouse for a pail of coffee, where a new boarder, a millworker, has taken up residence. He becomes so determined to walk back with her along the country path, that we worry. But it won’t cut the tension for you to know that the story doesn’t follow the path of crime fiction; instead, “East Sound Girl” becomes an almost exultant, transcendent, sweepingly poetic contemplation of the farm. Julie’s own body even begins to take on qualities of the nature around her (“the warmth of the slow dusk rippled like water through her limbs”), while nature begins to take on human qualities (“she looked at the dandelions, half-blown away, and was startled to find them strange old people who might or might not have a destiny”).
            The word “power” appears eight times in the story, five times in one paragraph. She had a power in her, sure and gracious as the sun’s power. . . . Julie’s dismissal of her aunt, and of the woman who runs the boardinghouse, arises from her sense of an “unappeased loneliness,” from her fears and uncertainties, and when off alone, she draws strength from the light, the willow leaves, the soft grass, “the shadow of a wind.” And she realizes that to keep her power, she must keep it a secret from everyone.