The Invention of Murder (44 page)

Anthony Trollope’s
The Eustace Diamonds,
begun the year after the serialization of
The Moonstone,
although only published in 1871–73, has been described as a parody, or inversion, of that earlier novel. Instead of Rachel Verinder stealing her own jewel, in
The Eustace Diamonds
Lizzie Eustace pockets the diamonds which are the property of her dead husband’s estate. The family lawyer is stymied: ‘Had it been an affair simply of thieves, such as thieves ordinarily are, everything would have been discovered long since; – but when lords and ladies with titles come to be mixed up with such an affair, – folk in whose house a policeman can’t have his will at searching and browbeating, – how is a detective to detect anything?’

This was the question that had confounded real detectives from the beginning. In 1851, following the lean years of the 1840s, and the 1848 revolutions in Europe, there were fears that the mob, the working classes, would rise up in some way at the opening of the Great Exhibition in London.
Household Words,
therefore, followed ‘The Metropolitan Protectives’ for three days, and commended the force’s ‘patience, promptitude, order, vigilance, zeal, and judgment’.
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The unspoken assumption of the piece, however, was that the force was watching the working classes in order to protect the middle classes; the idea of their watching the middle classes was so alien it appears never to have entered the authors’ heads. In the case of Constance Kent (see pp.362–79), where a middle-class home was subjected to scrutiny, Samuel Kent, the head of the household, automatically limited the access of the police, resenting, said his solicitor, ‘an uncourteous intrusion’. Two years later, in Mrs Henry Wood’s
Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles,
a fictional detective found himself in a similar situation. He hears of a sudden and violent death in a middle-class house, and, says the notably nettled authorial voice, he entered, ‘possibly to gratify his curiosity; possibly because he thought his services might be in some way required’. First comes the idea that the policeman is gratifying his vulgarly lower-class curiosity, only second the thought that he might be needed. The idea that it was his
duty
to interfere, a more modern notion, is entirely absent. Similarly, when in the novel the police sergeant comes to arrest the suspected murderer, a middle-class solicitor’s son, he is told, ‘You are overstepping -’

A decade later, another murder case would bring the public back to the doors of the middle-class home. But for some reason, despite an extraordinary series of bizarre details, the case of Christiana Edmunds never really caught the popular imagination.

In August 1871 the Brighton papers reported that a number of locally prominent families had received parcels of fruit, cakes and sweets, each with an accompanying note: ‘A few home-made cakes for the children, those done up are flavoured on purpose for yourself to enjoy. You will guess who this is from; I can’t mistify [sic] you, I fear. I hope this will arrive in time for you to-night while the eatables are fresh.’ Everyone who ate from the parcels became ill. The recipients included Mrs Beard, a doctor’s wife, a magistrate and a journalist. Then the story became even more sensational. Earlier that year, readers were reminded, four-year-old Sydney Barker had been visiting Brighton when he was given some chocolates purchased from Maynard’s confectionery. Within twenty minutes he had died of strychnine poisoning. The child was working-class, with no money to leave anyone; no one disliked him, and he came from a happy home. At his inquest, Mrs Cole, who ran a nearby grocery, added to the mystery by testifying that she had twice in the previous three months found chocolates in her shop, apparently forgotten by customers: one eaten from the first parcel had made its taster ill. Then Christiana Edmunds testified. She said she had twice bought chocolates from Maynard’s, and twice been made ill. She said she had told Maynard this, but he had brushed her off. She had had the chocolates analysed, and found they were laced with zinc. Oddly enough, however, she never confronted Maynard with this evidence. The inquest jury returned a verdict of accidental death, adding that, as ‘chocolate manufactories are much infested by rats’, some rat poison might have mistakenly been mixed in with the chocolates that were then sold to Maynard.

At the magistrates’ court hearing on the mysterious poisoned boxes, Mrs Beard told how she and her husband had been friendly with Miss Edmunds, a spinster, and her widowed mother. Miss Edmunds, however, had fallen in love with the doctor, writing him passionate letters, and in September 1870 she had given Mrs Beard a sweetmeat which ‘acted injuriously’. Dr Beard warned Miss Edmunds that he knew she had tried to poison his wife. He said he would not take legal action, to protect his reputation, but he wanted to have nothing further to do with her. (It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that they had been having an affair, hence the doctor’s reluctance to go to the police.) According to the Beards, Miss Edmunds protested her innocence, but they broke off all contact. After the inquest on Sydney Barker, Miss Edmunds wrote to Dr Beard, asking if they could not be friends again – she had bought the sweetmeat for Mrs Beard at Maynard’s, and surely it was now clear to him, she said, that the shop was to blame if there had been anything wrong with it.

Maynard, however, had been vigilant since the inquest – his reputation had been seriously damaged – and he noticed that Miss Edmunds had frequently bought chocolates from him which she then returned, saying she didn’t like them. When he mentioned this to her, she stopped, but he found that she was paying boys to bring packets back to his shop. After the poisoned parcels appeared in households across Brighton, Maynard went to the magistrates with his suspicions. A chemist identified Miss Edmunds as the woman to whom he had sold strychnine ‘to kill cats’, who had given a false name and address. He had also received orders from other chemists ordering strychnine, while a messenger had recently brought a letter from the coroner asking for the loan of his poisons book (the book that customers who purchased poison needed to sign with their names and addresses). The book had been given to the boy, and when it was returned some of the pages had been torn out. The coroner’s and the chemists’ letters proved to be in Christiana Edmunds’ handwriting. A box that held one of the gifts of fruit and cake was shown to have belonged to her. A dog she had played with had died of what looked like poisoning. On the second day of the hearing, she was charged with the murder of Sydney Barker. The prosecution’s case was that she had wanted to get rid of Mrs Beard; when she failed, and Dr Beard cut her off, she had set in motion random poisonings to prove her innocence and regain his friendship. She was committed for trial on four counts: the murder of Sydney Barker, and the attempted murders of three recipients of the parcels.

On 5 November, an effigy of Miss Edmunds was burnt on the Lewes Guy Fawkes bonfire; pictures of her were widely available in the shops of Brighton, Arundel and other Sussex towns. The trial was therefore transferred to the Old Bailey, and Miss Edmunds was moved to Newgate, which was a shock: she complained vociferously that she was not allowed to wear her bonnet to chapel: ‘she had always been brought up as a lady, and. it was quite impossible she could. submit to attend the chapel service without wearing a bonnet’. By the end of the month, many of the newspapers were suggesting that Christiana Edmunds was insane. At this distance, it is hard to know if her complaints about her bonnet (she appealed to the ordinary, the governor, and threatened to take the matter to the sheriffs) were simply middle-class propriety taken to extremes or a true disconnection from reality. Or if she simply had good legal advice.

Her trial lasted a single day. Her defence was, to a modern eye, curious. Her barrister stated that ‘He did not pretend that on certain occasions she did not give poisoned chocolate creams to several children; but in regard to this charge the Jury must be satisfied that the chocolate cream which caused the death of the boy was given indirectly by the prisoner.’ (Did he mean that she had poisoned children, just not this one? Or that she was not responsible because there was an intermediary who unknowingly handled the poisoned chocolates?) He stressed the ten-day gap between the return of the chocolates to Maynard’s and Sydney Barker’s death: if Maynard’s was as successful as he claimed, he said, how did the poisoned chocolate come to be sold so long afterwards? (She would have poisoned better, and more efficiently, if Maynard hadn’t sold stale chocolate?) And he told the jury that they would find the accused was ‘of impaired intellect’: her father had died in an asylum, while her brother, also dead, had been ‘an epileptic idiot or lunatic’; both grandfathers were ‘perfectly imbecile’, and ‘other relations were afflicted with insanity. Her sister suffered constantly from hysteria, and had attempted to commit suicide.’ ‘Her age was given as 34. but he should show that her real age was 43.’ (A sure sign of insanity: a woman who lied about her age.) The chaplain of Lewes Gaol agreed that, although her conversation was ‘perfectly coherent’, that in itself was ‘extraordinary’, given her situation. Her coherence was thus a sign of insanity. And that was the end of the defence.

After an hour, she was found guilty. She protested: ‘It is owing to my having been a patient of [Dr Beard], and the treatment I received in going to him, that I have been brought into this dreadful business. I wish the jury had known the intimacy, his affection for me, and the way I have been treated.’ The sentence of death was passed, but was quickly commuted, by reason of insanity, to life in Broadmoor, to the subsequent disgust of a Brighton town councillor, who was outraged to discover that the commutation of the sentence left the town ‘saddled, as long as Miss Edmunds lives, with the expense of her maintenance! I say this is one of the grossest pieces of injustice ever perpetrated!’

Most newspapers reported the case with sympathy, and thought the commutation appropriate. The
Telegraph
said Miss Edmunds was a ‘wretched, half-crazed creature’, and her execution would have brought ‘disgrace upon British justice’.
Reynolds’s Newspaper,
however, always a Radical voice, dissented:
‘She
is a genteel murderess, and the gallows is not for such as her,’ it said, while four men who had been executed that week were of the ‘lower classes’. That information, it added tartly ‘was needless, for if they had belonged to the “upper orders”, some of them would never have been hanged’.

It is hard to understand why this case of indiscriminate poisoning, philandering doctors, unrequited love and madness didn’t catch the imagination of the public, but it didn’t. The only trace that may perhaps – and only perhaps – be found is, surprisingly, in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch,
which began serialization four months after the magistrates’ hearings. The novel is set in the early 1830s, and Tertius Lydgate, the reforming young doctor, is a proponent of the medicalization of the coroners’ courts that Thomas Wakley had endorsed. From her notebooks we know that Eliot read intensively to learn what a doctor would know in 1830; she also read up on the various diseases and illnesses, and their contemporary treatments, that figure in the novel. But there is one anachronism, when Lydgate says: ‘The coroner ought not to be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so.’ The first strychnine poisoning case was not heard until 1856, with Palmer. Had Christiana Edmunds’ recent trial been on Eliot’s mind in her final months of creation?
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For the rest, perhaps madness was too frightening. Or the idea that any packet of chocolate might contain strychnine? Whatever the case, Christiana Edmunds lived out the next thirty-five years imprisoned, whether by her own mind or by bars. By the time of her death, in 1907, her name was long forgotten, as another doctor, and another female poisoner – or possibly not – had captured the public imagination.

Adelaide Bartlett had a background that sounds suspiciously like that of a penny-dreadful heroine. Some contemporary crime historians have suggested that she was the illegitimate daughter of a son of the Duc de la Tremoille and an Englishwoman; others gave her an English father and a French mother. Whatever the case, she was born in about 1855, in Orléans, and by 1874 she was living in Kingston, in Surrey. In 1875 she married Thomas Edwin Bartlett, a devout Methodist grocer more than ten years her senior. The marriage may well have been arranged, and Adelaide’s dowry appeared to have been used to purchase another grocery shop, in East Dulwich. At this point, as was not unusual at the time, the young girl, still not nineteen, returned to school for another two years. After her education had been completed, she moved in with Bartlett, living above his shops, which now numbered six, in different districts of south London. In 1883 or 1884 the couple moved to Merton, near Wimbledon, where they became close friends with the Revd George Dyson, a Wesleyan minister. Soon Dyson was spending long days tutoring Mrs Bartlett in Latin and mathematics, with her husband’s approval, while he was at work. Bartlett also paid for Dyson to go on holiday with them, and when the couple moved to Pimlico, Dyson continued his tutorials, although, noted the parlour maid, he brought no books with him. He also kept a house jacket and a pair of slippers in their house, indicating a shocking level of intimacy. In December 1885 Bartlett began to be unwell, and became convinced that the cause was an infected tooth, although one doctor thought it was mercury poisoning, perhaps from the numerous patent remedies Bartlett was dosing himself with. By the end of the month, whether owing to medical supervision or because he had had a number of his teeth extracted, Bartlett was much improved. On the evening of 31 December he felt well enough to eat some jugged hare, oysters, fruit cake, mango chutney and bread and butter, and to request haddock for his breakfast. He did not live to enjoy it; during the night he swallowed a lethal amount of liquid chloroform, and died.

Mrs Bartlett, like any good wife, had been sitting up by her ailing husband’s bedside; she had dozed off, she said, and when she awoke, he was dead. However, it was quickly revealed that Dyson had recently purchased chloroform at the request of Mrs Bartlett, who had wanted it for her husband’s ‘bad spells’. Bartlett’s father, who very obviously detested his daughter-in-law, revived an allegation he had made some years before: that Adelaide had had an affair with his second son, her brother-in-law. When he had first made this accusation, Thomas Bartlett had been enraged, and had forced his father to apologize to his wife in writing, and to sign a legal document stating that there was no truth in the story. Now Mr Bartlett reaffirmed his original statement, and both Mrs Bartlett and Dyson were arrested.