The crime of poisoning is essentially one which will be most prevalent in a high state of civilization, when the spread of scientific knowledge places nefarious means at the disposal of many, instead of limiting them, as in the days of the Borgias and Brinvilliers, to the specially informed and unscrupulously powerful few. The first intimation conveyed to society of the new terror which threatened it was in the arrest and arraignment of William Palmer, a medical practitioner, charged with doing to death persons who relied upon his professional skill. The case contained elements of much uncertainty, and yet it was so essential, in the interests and for the due protection of the public, that the fullest and fairest inquiry should be made, that the trial was transferred to the Central Criminal Court, under the authority of an Act passed on purpose, known as the Trial of Offences Act, and sometimes as Lord Campbell’s Act. That the administration of justice should never be interfered with by local prejudice or local feeling is obviously of paramount importance, and the powers granted by this Act have been frequently put in practice since. The trial of Catherine Winsor, the baby farmer, was thus brought to the Central Criminal Court from Exeter assizes, and that of the Stauntons from Maidstone.
Palmer’s trial caused the most intense excitement. The direful suspicions which surrounded the case filled the whole country with uneasiness and misgiving, and the deepest anxiety was felt that the crime, if crime there had been, should be brought home to its perpetrator. The Central Criminal Court was crowded to suffocation. Great personages occupied seats upon the bench; the rest of the available space was allotted by ticket, to secure which the greatest influence was necessary. People came to stare at the supposed cold-blooded prisoner; with morbid curiosity to scan his features and watch his demeanour through the shifting, nicely-balanced phases of his protracted trial. Palmer, who was only thirty-one at the time of his trial, was in appearance short and stout, with a round head covered rather scantily with light sandy hair. His skin was extraordinarily fair, his cheeks fresh and ruddy; altogether his face, though commonplace, was not exactly ugly; there was certainly nothing in it which indicated cruel cunning or deliberate truculence. His features were not careworn, but rather set, and he looked older than his age. Throughout his trial he preserved an impassive countenance, but he clearly took a deep interest in all that passed. Although the strain lasted fourteen days, he showed no signs of exhaustion, either physical or mental. On returning to gaol each day he talked freely and without reserve to the warders in charge of him, chiefly on incidents in the day’s proceedings. He was confident to the very last that it would be impossible to find him guilty; even after sentence, and until within a few hours of execution, he was buoyed up with the hope of reprieve. The conviction that he would escape had taken so firm a hold of him, that he steadily refused to confess his guilt, lest it should militate against his chances. In the condemned cell he frequently repeated, “I go to my death a murdered man.” He made no distinct admissions even on the scaffold; but when the chaplain at the last moment exhorted him to confess, he made use of the remarkable words, “If it is necessary for my soul’s sake to confess this murder,[125] I ought also to confess the others: I mean my wife and my brother’s.” Yet he was silent when specifically pressed to confess that he had killed his wife and his brother.
Palmer was ably defended, but the weight of evidence was clearly with the prosecution, led by Sir Alexander Cockburn, and public opinion at the termination of the trial coincided with the verdict of the jury. Originally a doctor in practice at Rugeley, in Staffordshire, he had gradually withdrawn from medicine, and devoted himself to the turf; but his sporting operations did not prosper, and he became a needy man, always driven to desperate straits for cash. To meet his liabilities, he raised large sums on forged bills of acceptance drawn upon his mother, a woman of some means, whose signature he counterfeited. In 1854 he owed a very large sum of money, but he was temporarily relieved by the death of his wife, whose life he had insured for £13,000. There is every reason to suppose that he poisoned his wife to obtain possession of this sum upon her death. His brother was supposed to have been his next victim, upon whose life he had also effected an insurance for another £13,000. The brother too died conveniently, but the life office took some exception to the manner of the death, and hesitated to disburse the funds claimed by Palmer. After this Palmer tried to get a new insurance on the life of a hanger-on, one Bates, but no office would accept it, no doubt greatly to Bates’s longevity.
Meanwhile the bill discounters who held the forged acceptances, with other promissory notes, began to clamour for payment, and talk of issuing writs. Palmer, alive to the danger he ran of a prosecution for forgery, should the fraud he had committed be brought to light, sought about for a fresh victim to supply him with funds. He fixed upon a sporting friend, Mr. John Parsons Cook, who had been in luck at Shrewsbury races, both as a winner and a backer, whom he persuaded to go and stay at Rugeley in an hotel just opposite his own house. It was there that Cook was first taken ill with violent retchings and vomitings, all dating from visits of Palmer, who brought him medicines and food. Palmer’s plan was to administer poison in quantities insufficient to cause death, but enough to produce illness which would account for death. For this purpose he gave, or there was the strongest presumption that he gave, antimony, which caused Cook’s constant sickness. Quantities of antimony were found in the body after death. While Cook lay ill, Palmer in his name pocketed the proceeds of the Shrewsbury settling, and so got the money for which he was prepared to barter his soul. The last act now approached, and in order to avoid the detection of this last fraud, Palmer laid his plans for disposing of Cook. He decided to use strychnia, or the vegetable poison otherwise known as nux vomica; and one of the many links in the long chain of evidence was an entry in a book of Palmer’s to the effect that “strychnia kills by causing tetanic fixing of the respiratory muscles.”
The purchase by Palmer of strychnia was proved. The night he bought it, Cook, who had been taking certain pills under medical advice, not Palmer’s, was seized with violent convulsions. He had swallowed his pills as usual, at least Palmer had administered them—whether the ordinary or his own pills will never be known, except as may be inferred from the results, which indicate that he had taken the latter. Cook recovered this time; it was probably Palmer’s intention that he should recover, wishing to encourage the supposition that Cook was in a bad way. Next night Cook had a second and a more violent attack. That day Palmer had bought more strychnia, and had called in a fresh doctor. The second attack was fatal, and ended in Cook’s death from tetanus. This tetanus, according to the prosecution, was produced by strychnia, and followed the administration of pills by Palmer prescribed nominally by the fresh doctor, for which Palmer had substituted his own. Cook’s death was horrible—fearful paroxysms and cramps, ending in suffocation by the tetanic rigour which caught the muscles of the chest.
After Cook’s death his stepfather, who was much attached to him, came to Rugeley. He was struck with the appearance of the corpse, which was not emaciated, as after a long disease ending in death; while the muscles of the fingers were tightly clenched, not open, as usual in a corpse. He said nothing, but began to feel uneasy when he found that Cook’s betting-book was missing, and that Palmer put it forward that his friend had died greatly embarrassed, with bills to the amount of £4000 out in his name. Palmer too showed an indecent haste in preparing the body for interment, and in obtaining the usual certificate. After this the step-father insisted upon a post-mortem, which was conducted somewhat carelessly. The intestines were, however, preserved and sent for analysis, but it was proved that Palmer tried hard to get possession of the jar containing them, and even sought to upset the vehicle by which they were being conveyed a part of the way to London. The examination of the stomach betrayed the presence of antimony in large quantities, but no strychnia, and it was on the entire absence of the latter that the defence was principally based when Palmer was brought to trial. All the circumstances were so suspicious that he could not escape the criminal charge. He had already been arrested on a writ issued at the instance of the money-lenders, and an action had been commenced against Mrs. Palmer on her acceptances. It came out at once that these had been forged, and the whole affair at once took the ugliest complexion. A government prosecution was instituted, and Palmer was brought to Newgate for trial at the Central Criminal Court. There was not much reserve about him when there. He frequently declared before and during the trial that it would be impossible to find him guilty. He never actually said that he was not guilty, but he was confident he would not be convicted. He relied on the absence of the strychnia. But the chain of circumstantial evidence was strong enough to satisfy the jury, who agreed to their verdict in an hour. At the last moment Palmer tossed a bit of paper over to his counsel, on which he had written, “I think there will be a verdict of Not Guilty.” Even after the death sentence had been passed upon him he clung to the hope that the Government would grant him a reprieve. To the last, therefore, he played the part of a man wrongfully convicted, and did not abandon hope even when the high sheriff had told him there was no possibility of a reprieve, and within a few hours of execution. He suffered at Stafford in front of the gaol.
Palmer speedily found imitators. Within a few weeks occurred the Leeds poisoning case, in which the murderer undoubtedly was inspired by the facts made public at Palmer’s trial. Dove, a fiendish brute, found from the evidence in that case that he could kill his wife, whom he hated, with exquisite torture, and with a poison that would leave, as he thought, no trace. In the latter hope he was happily disappointed. But as this case is beyond my subject, I merely mention it as one of the group already referred to. Three years later came the case of Dr. Smethurst, presenting still greater features of resemblance with Palmer’s, for both were medical men, and both raised difficult questions of medical jurisprudence. In both the jury had no doubt as to the guilt of the accused, only in Smethurst’s case the then Home Secretary, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, could not divest his mind of serious doubt, and of which the murderer got the benefit. Smethurst’s escape may have influenced the jury in the Poplar poisoning case, which followed close on its heels, although in that the verdict of “Not Guilty” was excusable, as the evidence was entirely circumstantial. There was no convincing proof that the accused had administered the poison, although beyond question that poison had occasioned the death.
Dr. Smethurst was long an inmate of Newgate, and was tried at the Central Criminal Court. He had all the characteristics of the poisoner—the calm deliberation, the protracted dissimulation, as with unshrinking, relentless wickedness the deadly work is carried on to the end. Smethurst’s victim was a Miss Bankes, with whom he had contracted a bigamous marriage. He had met her at a boarding-house, where he lived with his own wife, a person of “shady” antecedents, and whom he left without scruple to join Miss Bankes. The latter seems to have succumbed only too willingly to his fascinations, and to have as readily agreed to marry him, in spite of the existence of the other Mrs. Smethurst. Probably the doctor had told her the story he brought forward when tried for bigamy, namely, that Mrs. Smethurst had no right to the name, but had a husband of her own, one Johnson, alive—a story subsequently disproved. Miss Bankes seems to have counted upon some species of whitewashing, no less than the repudiation of the other marriage, and told her sister as much when they last met. For some months Smethurst and Miss Bankes lived together as man and wife, first in London, and then at Richmond. She had a little fortune of her own, some £1700 or £1800, and a life-interest in £5000, a fact on which Smethurst’s counsel dwelt with much weight, as indicating a motive for keeping her alive rather than killing her. But probably the lump sum was the bait, or perhaps Smethurst wished to return to his temporarily deserted first wife. Whatever the exact cause which impelled him to crime, it seems certain that he began to give her some poison, either arsenic or antimony, or both, in small quantities, with the idea of subjecting her to the irritant poison slowly but surely until the desired effect, death, was achieved. As she became worse and worse, Smethurst called in the best medical advice in Richmond, but was careful to prime them with his facts and lead them if possible to accept his diagnosis of the case. Smethurst was found guilty by the jury, and sentenced to death. But a long public discussion followed, and in consequence he was reprieved. The Home Secretary, in a letter to the Lord Chief Baron, stated that “although the facts are full of suspicion against Smethurst, there is not absolute and complete evidence of his guilt.” Smethurst was therefore given a free pardon for the offence of murder, but he was subsequently again tried for bigamy, and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment.
Catherine Wilson was a female poisoner who did business wholesale. She was tried in April 1862 on suspicion of having attempted to poison a neighbour with oil of vitriol. The circumstances were strange. Mrs. Wilson had gone to the chemist’s for medicine, and on her return had administered a dose of something which burnt the mouth badly, but did not prove fatal. Wilson was acquitted on this charge, but other suspicious facts cropped up while she was in Newgate. It appeared that several persons with whom she was intimate had succumbed suddenly. In all cases the symptoms were much the same, vomiting, violent retching, purging, such as are visible in cholera, and all dated from the time when she knew a young man named Dixon, who had been in the habit of taking colchicum for rheumatism. Mrs. Wilson heard then casually from a medical man that it was a very dangerous medicine, and she profited by what she had heard. Soon afterwards Dixon died, showing all the symptoms already described. Soon afterwards a friend, Mrs. Atkinson, came to London from Westmoreland, and stayed in Mrs. Wilson’s house. She was in good health on leaving home, and had with her a large sum of money. While with Mrs. Wilson she became suddenly and alarmingly ill, and died in great agony. Her husband, who came up to town, would not allow a post-mortem, and again Mrs. Wilson escaped. Mrs. Atkinson’s symptoms had been the same as Dixon’s. Then Mrs. Wilson went to live with a man named Taylor, who was presently attacked in the same way as the others, but, thanks to the prompt administration of remedies, he recovered. After this came the charge of administering oil of vitriol, which failed, as has been described. Last of all Mrs. Wilson poisoned her landlady, Mrs. Soames, under precisely the same conditions as the foregoing.
Here, however, the evidence was strong and sufficient. It was proved that Mrs. Wilson had given Mrs. Soames something peculiar to drink, that immediately afterwards Mrs. Soames was taken ill with vomiting and purging, and that Mrs. Wilson administered the same medicine again and again. The last time Mrs. Soames showed great reluctance to take it, but Wilson said it would certainly do her good. This mysterious medicine Wilson kept carefully locked up, and allowed no one to see it, but its nature was betrayed when this last victim also died. The first post-mortem indicated death from natural causes, but a more careful investigation attributed it beyond doubt to over-doses of colchicum. Dr. Alfred Taylor, the great authority and writer on medical jurisprudence, corroborated this, and in his evidence on the trial fairly electrified the court by declaring it his opinion that many deaths, supposed to be from cholera, were really due to poison. This fact was referred to by the judge in his summing up, who said that he feared it was only too true that secret poisoning was at that time very rife in the metropolis. Wilson was duly sentenced to death, and suffered impenitent, hardened, and without any confession of her guilt.