The Invention of Murder (34 page)

The only thing missing from Mrs Holroyd’s story was possible monetary gain, and this was not always a constant. Women were accused by their families, by their neighbours, or by people who bore them a grudge, and these accusations were listened to. The similarities between such cases make an overview possible.

In 1843 a report of what was presented as mass murder within a family came from Wrestlingworth, in Bedfordshire. Sarah Dazley (sometimes Dazeley) had been married before, to Simeon Mead, with whom she had had a son, Jonas. Four months after the birth, Mead was taken ill and within a week was dead, and Jonas died later that year. No suspicions were voiced. Two years later the widow married William Dazley, and she got on with him no better than she was reported to have done with Mead. When Dazley became ill, his wife mixed him a rhubarb powder (a purgative), and was reported to have said, ‘It’ll make him better or worse.’ Worse was the answer, for he died the following day. Even now, nothing much was thought about it. It was only when the banns for a third marriage were posted that rumours began to circulate. The local vicar, who clearly fancied himself as a detective, was ‘chiefly instrumental in carrying through the investigation’, before turning his findings over to the coroner, at which point the police became involved.

The witnesses at the inquest gave a picture of an ordinary unhappy life: members of Mead’s family testified that the couple had quarrelled frequently. She had once had a shilling and had refused to give it up, whereupon Mead knocked her down and she responded, ‘D—him, I’ll poison him, but what I’ll get rid of him!’ His sister said that she had ‘frequently’ wished her husband was dead. But the analysis found no poison in his remains, and the inquest jury was instructed to find that there was no evidence to show how he had died. The inquest on Jonas’s remains brought more neighbourhood gossip: she had frequently wished the child dead, said one; she was ‘a brute of a mother. and never washed or kept [the child] clean like other mothers’; she gave the child a powder she said she got from a doctor; she was not friendly with the neighbours. The accumulation of petty remarks had its effect, and Mrs Dazley was indicted for the wilful murder of Jonas Mead.

The Times
reported these inquests extensively, but despite the transcripts having been reprinted in full on the same page, the accompanying articles ranged freely among the rumours, even when their own reports directly contradicted them. It was reported that Mrs Dazley was ‘suspected of being accessory to the death of her former husband and of her daughter, by administering a quantity of arsenic’, despite it having been stated earlier in the same piece that no arsenic had been found in her husband’s remains, and that the ‘daughter’ was a boy named Jonas.
The Times
gloried in sensational invention – Mrs Dazley was known ‘throughout the county of Bedford by the name of the “Female Blue Beard” ‘ – but the paper felt no obligation to deal in hard fact: there were articles on the inquest and the rumours, but nothing on the trial itself. Mrs Dazley was found guilty, although she went to her death swearing her innocence.

Many of these poison cases operated primarily at local level, although there the interest was intense. When Mary Ann Geering was executed in Lewes, Sussex, in 1849 for the murder of her two sons, the
Daily News,
a London paper, dismissed the crowd of three or four thousand as a paltry gathering. Yet Lewes’s population two years later was 9,533. Even allowing for a large number of spectators travelling from surrounding areas, possibly one out of every four inhabitants of the town attended the execution.

To a modern reader Sarah Dazley’s crime appears to have been promiscuity. Promiscuity may also have been the root of the accusations against Sarah Freeman, in Shapwick, near Bridgwater in Somerset. She was the daughter of ‘a decent man’, but was herself of ‘loose character’. She had left home some years before, and had had an unknown number of illegitimate children, all of whom had died young. Towards the end of 1844, she asked her family if she could come back, but they refused. Shortly afterwards her mother and brother died while she was visiting to plead her case. After an inquest on these two, rumour forced another, on one of her illegitimate children. This was the second such inquest: one witness explained that there had been an earlier one ‘because the neighbours thought there ought to be’ – that is, local gossip had made it necessary. At her trial, her lawyer complained that portions of the evidence had been produced after the depositions were taken, and he had therefore been unable to rebut them. But the trial went ahead, and Mrs Freeman was found guilty of murder.

It was reported in shocked tones that when she was pressed to confess in gaol, Mrs Freeman told the authorities ‘very snappishly’ that she was innocent and, in effect, to stop nagging. A modern sensibility cheers her on: to be convicted of murder was one thing; to have relays of the well-meaning pressing endlessly for a confession must have been like being pecked to death by beady-eyed fowl. Confessions were an integral part of the emotional narrative of trial, conviction and execution. For much of the first half of the century, confession was seen in its religious aspect: the sinner repented, and was therefore, after an earthly punishment, forgiven by a beneficent God. By the late 1840s, however, one senses a change. The desire for confessions now appeared to be more a wish for confirmation that the condemned really was guilty. It may even have been this series of poison trials that crystallized for many a previously unspoken discomfort. By 1856, the newspapers were highlighting the ‘weakness’ implicit in the public’s desire for a confession. In one case, the
Examiner
‘regretted that endeavours were made to extort a confession, for the assumption should always be that the crime has been proved beyond a doubt by the process of law. To solicit it is to imply that the verdict of guilty wants verification.’ But this was what was wanted: reassurance of guilt, not certainty of eternal redemption.

Deaths like that of Mary Gallop made reassurance of guilt doubly necessary. Twenty-one years old, Miss Gallop was the daughter of a carpenter (or in some reports a railway worker) who also acted as the local medicine man. Her mother had killed herself six months previously, after many years of aberrant behaviour. Miss Gallop too was troubled: her father feared ‘she was going like her mother’. She had an understanding with an apprentice in Liverpool, of whom her father did not approve; then her father conveniently died. Evidence was presented that she had bought arsenic for rats, but there was nothing to show that she had administered it. Her father could easily have taken it himself, as he was in the habit of dosing himself as well as others; furthermore, he had been ill for six weeks, while the prosecution claimed that the poison was fed to him only on the day before his death. Unlike most poisoners, Miss Gallop’s reputation was good – she was a Sunday-school teacher – and her young man had barely figured in the prosecution’s case. Nonetheless, the judge in his summing-up identified unlawful, unregulated sexual desire as the motivating force: it was well known, he said, that ‘there were instances where women would go to great lengths to gratify their passions’. The jury found her guilty without even retiring. Mary Gallop had one of those hideous executions that gave even proponents of public hangings pause. She was so frightened that she couldn’t walk, and had to be carried to the scaffold. Once there, she was unable to stay on her feet for sheer terror, and was placed in a chair. Because of this, the drop was miscalculated, and ‘the mortal struggle. was of frightful duration’.

At least, it probably was. The case of Mary Ann Milner three years later is a salutary reminder of how much reliance should be placed even on multiple eye-witness reports. Mrs Milner had also been found guilty of poisoning members of her family, and according to the
Morning Chronicle,
the government’s mouthpiece, at her execution ‘she conducted herself with much composure. The usual preliminaries were quickly adjusted, and the drop having fallen, the wretched murderess, after struggling a few seconds, ceased to exist.’
Jackson’s Oxford Journal
used the same words; so did
John Bull.
The only problem was that Mrs Milner was not executed: she had committed suicide in her cell the previous night. The
Bristol Mercury,
which had reported her execution, later issued a correction, with an implicit shrugging off of responsibility: the first story had been ‘copied from a London contemporary [paper]’. Most of those who reported the execution-that-wasn’t saw no need even to print a correction.

These women seemed part of a trend to their contemporaries. In Essex, however, three cases became so entwined in the public mind as to produce the terrifying idea of a ‘poison ring’, a group of women who were trading tips for murder, helping each other, and their friends, to rid themselves of troublesome family members. In the village of Clavering, Sarah Chesham, a washerwoman who also took in babies to nurse, was arrested in 1846 for the murder of her two sons. The boys had died two months before, around the same time as the illegitimate infant of a local farmer. As with so many of these cases, the deaths at first roused no particular interest. After rumours began, an inquest was set in motion. The local doctor testified that he had not seen the sick children, although their father had called in for medicine, and he had given him first a purgative, then when that had no effect, mercury, also a purgative, and opium. (The practice of dosing patients without seeing them was common – doctors’ visits were expensive.) Two witnesses testified that Mrs Chesham had asked them to buy some arsenic for her; neither had agreed to do so, and one could not even recall if the request had been made before or after the boys’ deaths. Lydia Taylor, the mother of the farmer’s illegitimate child, admitted that while she had said ‘perhaps the mother might have poisoned the children’, she had really ‘had no reason to say so’. The farmer, Thomas Newport, confirmed that he had sacked one of Sarah Chesham’s two boys for stealing eggs, and had had no contact with either of the children since; he did, however, possess arsenic.

Before the jury could reach a verdict, there was a sudden adjournment. Five weeks later they returned to find that Mrs Chesham was now charged with poisoning Newport’s child too. The resumed inquest heard evidence of the various times she had shouted at her children, all laced with innuendo to suggest homicidal intent. A neighbour said that Mrs Chesham had prophesied, ‘I shall soon hang on the Chelmsford gallows and be buried underneath it.’ The coroner felt this ‘clearly established’ that the children had been intentionally poisoned, and it was only up to the jury to decide if it had been Mrs Chesham who was ‘the person whose hands prepared the fatal meal’. No evidence of when or how the poison had been administered had been offered, and the coroner accepted that no connection had been made between Sarah Chesham and Newport, but while no purchase of arsenic had been traced to Mrs Chesham, ‘at the same time he. begged to observe that it had been clearly traced to be in the possession of Thomas Newport’ – the man he had just said Mrs Chesham had no connection to. The jury followed his lead and found her guilty of wilful murder, and she was committed for trial.

At the trial for the murder of one of the two boys, the neighbour who had reported Mrs Chesham’s expectation of dying on the gallows now admitted that she was very deaf, and that Mrs Chesham might actually have said that ‘those who died of hard work’ might as well be buried under the gallows for all the reward they got. The defence was simply that there was no evidence that Mrs Chesham had possessed arsenic. The jury agreed, and she was acquitted. She was then retried the next day for the murder of the second boy; the evidence was the same, as was the verdict. And then the third trial began, for the murder of Thomas Newport’s child by Lydia Taylor. The prosecution case was that Mrs Chesham had visited Lydia and the baby twice, in January and June 1845; she had given it something to eat, and ‘from that time [on] it appeared that the child was continually ill’, although it only died three months after her last visit. No poison having been found in the exhumed remains, the prosecution withdrew its case and the jury was directed to bring in a verdict of not guilty.

Three years later the poor woman was indicted once more, for the murder of her husband Richard. The newspapers by this stage had no doubt at all that Mrs Chesham was a ringleader in ‘the extraordinary and fearful system of poisoning’, and they salaciously reported rumours that had continued to be passed around Clavering since her triple acquittal. At the inquest, Alfred Swaine Taylor presented his analysis of Richard Chesham’s remains as clear evidence of ‘secret poisoning’: he had found arsenic in the remains, he said, but not enough to cause death; since, however, the man had died, Taylor attributed his death to arsenic acting on a system weakened by ‘consumptive symptoms’. All the local witnesses, however, had testified that suspicion was first aroused because of Chesham’s great good health before his sudden illness: there was no history of consumption. The jury acquitted Sarah Chesham once more.
The Times
was furious: ‘There was a vast amount of prevarication, with a view apparently to screen the guilty party.’ The magistrates were equally unwilling to accept that Mrs Chesham might perhaps not be a murderer after all. They re-questioned a witness who had originally testified to her love for her children, and under their prodding she now said that she had seen her hide poison under a tree stump. The magistrates held a closed hearing, and the evidence is therefore not on the record, but it was widely reported that this same witness testified there that Mrs Chesham had told her that if she had a bad husband she should make him a pie, bring it to her, and ‘she would season it for her’. Mrs Chesham had apparently also told her ‘it was no sin to bury such husbands’. A cousin of Mrs Chesham’s testified that two years before the deaths he had given arsenic either to Mrs Chesham or to her husband – he could not remember which of them it had been, and anyway, when he’d asked Chesham about it, he’d replied that it was used up. After this evidence, the magistrates decided they had enough to commit Mrs Chesham for trial.