The Jury almost immediately returned a verdict of “Not Guilty.”
If the estimate of the witness Scrate is taken for the difference between a drop and a minim, and the second witness, Moswell, is correct in saying that he gave the accused at least 50 drops, equal to 25 minims, as only 2·5 minims were left in the bottle, equal to 4¼ drops; in the two doses the accused must have administered more than 45 drops, equal to 22½ minims. If the cork was not broken in the bottle when the first dose was administered, the probability is that the dose then given did not exceed seven drops of the size that would make them equal to 3½ minims, thus leaving 19 minims for the second dose. It is to be regretted that the strength of the prussic acid was not tested.
NOTE ON TAWELL’S CASE.
In a case of the poisoning at Egglesham, near Glasgow, by prussic acid, of a young woman, of the name of Agnes Montgomery, by Peter Walker, a tailor, the symptoms were thus described by one of the witnesses, as well as the effect of prussic acid on herself:—
“After we learnt that the moaning came from Aggie’s room, we came up, got Clarkson’s key, and went in. (As in Tawell’s case, the prisoner had left the girl’s room only a few minutes before.) Aggie was sitting on a chair (in which it was probable from other evidence that she had been placed by her murderer), with her head leaning on the table. The body was quite still. There was a little froth coming out of the wicks of her mouth. It was a little coloured with blood; and we afterwards found she had bit her tongue and her lips. She threw back at different times, as if in distress. Her right hand was very firmly closed. I loosed the boot of the left foot, and found it was swelled and quite stiff. About ten minutes after that was another groan: the breathing was slow, and with great oppression. She sighed six times before she died. Her skin was getting quite cold after we got her. I thought there was a little sweat on her face. We got hot water to bathe her arms. The eyes were large and staring. She died about three quarters of an hour after we got her. When we went into her room, I found a sickening smell. I felt in my nostrils a kind of nipping, and my throat was dry. I felt it off Aggie the moment I came forward. I know the smell of almonds, but can’t say it was exactly like that. On the 5th of November I saw the superintendent of police, and others, and saw something (it was prussic acid) put into beer. I smelt the beer; and after some of it was poured on the floor, I recognised it as the same smell. It affected me in the same way as before in the nostrils and throat.”—Evidence of Mrs. M’Donald.
In this case, on a post-mortem examination of the exhumed body, the presence of prussic acid was clearly detected; and it was proved on the trial that the prisoner had employed a carrier to get some prussic acid for him, and that the bottle containing it had been given to him on the day of the murder; and the fragments of a glass phial were subsequently discovered, with the key of the girl’s room, at the root of a tree, at which the prisoner had been seen stopping, as he returned from going for a doctor. In this case the poison had been most probably given in beer, as in Tawell’s, a tumbler in which beer had been being found on the girl’s table.
The fellow, two months afterwards, tried to poison a Mr. Mason and his wife, with whom he had gone to lodge in Glasgow, with prussic acid, but happily failed in his attempt.
He confessed his guilt; and at first gave as his motive his desire to possess himself of the girl’s money, but subsequently said he could not tell what possessed him to do it. “Following so closely on the case of Madeleine Smith, the probability is that her case had had on him the same effect as Palmer’s on Dove—exciting a morbid desire to tamper with deadly drugs, and that the death of his victim, and the danger of the others, was as much due to this feeling as the desire for plunder.” He was discovered to have been transported for robbery, and to have been guilty of other crimes. He now confessed that he had murdered a lad, by pushing him into a quarry hole. He was executed at Paisley, Jan. 14, 1858.—Annual Register for 1858.