Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (8 page)

This set the
scene for her committal hearing, which began at the Brighton Police
Court one week after her arrest, on 24th August 1871. Christiana
appeared decked in black: a long silk dress, a lace shawl, and a
veiled bonnet. Over the course of three hearings over the next
fortnight, many witnesses provided pieces in the jigsaw. Dr Beard
testified to the events of September 1870, when his wife had fallen
sick after eating chocolates. A boy called Adam May testified that
he would run errands for Edmunds, taking forged prescriptions to
druggists to obtain poisons. He would also purchase sweets and
chocolates for her from Maynard’s. A chemist called Isaac Garrett
testified that he had known Edmunds as ‘Mrs Wood’ for four years,
and that in March 1871 and two subsequent occasions he had supplied
her with strychnine. She had said she wanted to poison some local
cats which had become a nuisance. Garrett said that a local
milliner called Mrs Stone had vouched for Edmunds’s good character.
There were others who were called to the stand, too, placing
Edmunds at the scene of other poisoning events, hitherto
unknown.

It quickly
became apparent that enough evidence existed to charge Edmunds with
additional offences. Arsenic had been found in the last batch of
parcels, and Edmunds was also known to have purchased arsenic as
well as strychnine. Secondly, those who had received the recent
poisoned gifts all appeared to know the Beards or have some
knowledge of the poisoning case. Most significantly, the name of
Maynard’s kept returning. It was Christiana who had drawn attention
to herself and to Maynard’s at the time of the inquest into Sidney
Barker’s death, when she had provided evidence of her own
poisoning. Now, a handwriting expert concluded that the addresses
appended to the parcels, the signatures of ‘Mrs Wood’ in Mr
Garrett’s books, and even the notes handwritten to Sidney Barker’s
father, were all by the same author as that August letter to Dr
Beard. The handwriting was a direct match. That author had also
been a regular customer at the sweet shop, placing herself at the
centre of all that had gone on in Brighton that summer. The
direction of the prosecution changed, probably to Dr Beard’s great
relief. The case was no longer about his wife, and his relationship
with Christiana. On 7th September, Edmunds was charged with the
murder of Sidney Barker, and it was this new charge on which she
would stand indicted.

The story now
suggested by the prosecution was that after Christiana’s failed
attempt to poison Emily Beard in September 1870, her subsequent
poisoning spree had been occasioned by a wish to blame Maynard’s
for the whole affair. The suggestion was that by casting guilt
elsewhere, Christiana believed she could reassure Charles that he
had no grounds to banish her. The truth was that no one was really
sure what she had hoped to achieve. An alternative argument doing
the rounds was that Christiana had taken to experimenting in
preparation for a renewed attempt to kill the obstacle to her own,
personal happiness. Throughout the spring and summer of 1871, these
experiments had been meted out allegedly on animals and innocent
passers-by, with different dosages of poison being trialled and the
results noted. Whatever, it was all sensational stuff, and while
some of these ideas were purely supposition, the notion of
Edmunds’s unrequited love driving her to murder was one all too
eagerly consumed by the press.

The case was
scheduled to be heard at the Lewes Assizes, close to Brighton,
until it was felt impossible to find a jury who would not be
prejudiced by what they had read in the newspapers. Instead,
Edmunds was taken by train to Newgate Prison in London, and her
case was heard at the Old Bailey on the 15th and 16th January 1872.
She was placed on trial for the murder of Sidney Barker.

The
circumstances of the case had set tongues wagging all over the
metropolis, and it was not surprising to find the court room full
of journalists and other onlookers. Christiana did not disappoint
them, appearing once more before the court resplendent in black,
this time of velvet with a fur trim. She was bareheaded, and though
her age was stated to be thirty-five, for the first time her
audience could see that she might be older than those stated years.
Her black hair was parted centrally and plaited, so that it was
drawn back and down the back of her head. The Times reporter was
rather uncomplimentary, suggesting that she had a ‘long and cruel’
chin, her lower jaw ‘massive, and animal in its development’.
Despite that, he was prepared to concede that ‘the profile is
irregular, but not unpleasing’, and that there was ‘considerable
character in its upper features’. Her lips occasionally pressed
together in a look of ‘comeliness’ that turned to ‘absolute
grimness’. The portrait was painted: a woman who thought herself
more than she was, an amatory, predatory woman. It is this
caricature that has stayed with her.

She took
copious notes of proceedings, her dark eyes flashing up and down as
she dipped her pen into the inkwell. The evidence from the earlier
hearings was repeated, of poisons purchased and of love gone bad.
There were more witnesses by now, various people had come forward
to say that Edmunds sent boys to buy sweets for her from Maynard’s
shop. Shortly after, she would return the sweets, indicating that
the wrong ones had been purchased in the first place. These sweets
would then be returned to their jar for resale, and alternatives
purchased in their stead. There were also witnesses who had seen
her leave bags of Maynard’s sweets lying around in other shops and
public places. Gradually, the events of the last eighteen months
came to light.

Her barrister
set up the defence of insanity. Several well-known authorities
testified on her behalf. Dr William Wood argued that she satisfied
the principal MacNaughten Rule – she could not distinguish right
from wrong. He had worked previously at Bethlem, and now ran
private asylums in London. He was also a regular expert witness in
insanity cases. Drs Charles Lockhart Robertson and Henry Maudsley,
the famous psychologist, argued that Edmunds belonged to the
‘morally defective’ group of lunatics – a Victorian precursor to
the later term of psychopath. Robertson was a friend of Maudsley’s,
and the Superintendent of the Sussex County Asylum. He was
particularly interested in women’s mental health, and had pioneered
the use of Turkish baths to calm female patients. Between the three
of them they offered a heavy tilt towards a verdict of not guilty,
but insane.

Then Edmunds’s
mother took the stand to deliver a long tale of family madness,
which had eventually trapped her surviving daughter. Edmunds, for
the only time in court, reacted to proceedings. Contemplating her
mother laying bear the family soul, she cried out: ‘This is more
than I can bear’. In the end, it was futile testimony anyway. As
her counsel moved on, Christiana’s defence unravelled. There was
evidence of hereditary insanity, to be sure, but there was nothing
else to offer to back up the opinions of the medical men. There was
nothing obviously insane about Edmunds’s own life. Any sympathy the
court had drifted away from her. When the jury was asked to deliver
their verdict, they found Christiana Edmunds guilty of murder, and
did not recommend mercy.

The defendant
remained in the dock to hear her fate. Neatly dressed, she was
still wearing her black velvet cloak with its fur trim. She had
added a pair of black gloves to her courtroom attire, and her hair
was now arranged ‘coquettishly’. Before sentence was passed, she
asked to be tried on the original charge too, of attempting to
murder Emily Beard, so that she might be able to describe the
nature of her relationship with Dr Beard. If she was to go down,
she surmised, then he would go down beside her. It was, of course,
too late for that.

Edmunds faced
the gallows alone. Her immediate response was fittingly dramatic:
she claimed that she was pregnant. It was a legal tradition that a
pregnant woman could not be hanged until after she had given birth.
A great murmur erupted around the court: so the business of
sentencing was not done yet. Immediately, the court officials began
to cry out for women of a certain age to make themselves known to
them. A jury of matrons was duly empanelled from amongst the
spectators in the room, and retired to examine Edmunds in an ante
room. A doctor was summoned. The court adjourned until an hour
later, when both Edmunds and this latest jury returned to the room.
Asked for their verdict, they declared that Edmunds was not
pregnant. The law would take its course.

She was
returned to Lewes Prison to suffer the extreme penalty of the
English legal system. But the medical evidence presented at her
trial had not gone unnoticed, and there was popular sentiment
locally towards sparing Edmunds’s life. On 23rd January 1872, Dr
William Orange, by now Broadmoor’s Medical Superintendent, visited
her together with Sir William Gull from Guy’s Hospital at the Home
Office’s request. Their report summarised her case as follows:
‘This woman appears to have had a tranquil, easy and indifferent
childhood and womanhood up to a period of about three years ago…The
acts were the fruit of a weak and disordered intellect with
confused and perverted feelings of a most marked insane
character…The crime of murder she seems incapable of realising as
having been committed by her though she fully admits the purchasing
and distributing the poisons as set forth in the several counts
against her. On the contrary she even justifies her conduct’. They
declared her to be insane, and after some consideration the Home
Secretary, Henry Bruce, respited her sentence to one of Her
Majesty’s Pleasure.

This was quite
an unusual decision, overturning as it did the verdict of a jury.
It was not uncommon to have the death sentence commuted to life
imprisonment, and there were other Broadmoor murderers who had been
transferred with such a tariff. Their guilt, however, remained.
Christiana had been absolved from hers by two professionals,
contrary to the result in the courtroom. The Times bemoaned this
unsatisfactory situation in a leader piece on 25th January, even if
it did agree that the outcome had been the right one. It wondered
aloud on the wisdom of politicians permitting a jury to give ‘a
solemn verdict which they know will be afterwards reversed’. The
decision was unpopular back in Brighton too: the Home Secretary had
effectively saddled the ratepayers with Christiana’s upkeep from
now on, creating another large bill to pay. Certainly her case had
been a big ticket item, making full use of venues, discourse and
precedent. Perhaps the attention was thrilling, though the fact
that a verdict could be legally correct yet medically unsound was a
conclusion of little importance to Christiana. She had achieved a
more basic ambition. Gull and Orange had given her back her life,
and she was therefore transferred to Broadmoor as a pleasure
patient on 5th July 1872.

On her arrival
at the Asylum, she was forty-three years-old. She was wearing make
up on her rouged cheeks, a wig (‘a large amount of false hair’) and
had false teeth. ‘She is very vain’, wrote Dr Orange at the time.
The surgeon at Lewes Prison who signed her transfer documents had
obviously done so reluctantly. He was most unimpressed with the
diagnosis of insanity, writing that after ten months of supervision
he could not be satisfied either that Edmunds was insane, or that
she was not responsible for her actions. He did, however, say that
she was of a delicate constitution, and prone to being
hysterical.

Dr Orange was
nevertheless convinced that he had made the correct diagnosis.
Edmunds’s behaviour in his charge did not conform to social norms.
When her surviving brother died shortly after her admission, she
showed no grief, and appeared to be completely unmoved by the loss.
She was also deceitful. As soon as she was transferred, she
immediately began to try and smuggle in clothes or beauty aids. Her
younger sister, Mary, was complicit in this. One letter asked for
clothing; another talked about ways to find and apply make-up while
in the Asylum. Orange attempted to reason with Mary, insisting that
Christiana was able to partake of any comfort that she required. It
was to no avail. Mary began to send Christiana gifts too, and it
was the gifts that caused great irritation to the matron of
Broadmoor’s female wing. Inside every parcel was some sort of
contraband, hidden within another item. Each one needed time and
attention to search. It appeared to be attention-seeking on the
part of both of the Edmunds women, and it was more than the matron
could bear. The final straw was the receipt of a cushion stuffed
with false hair during 1874. The matron complained to Orange that
Edmunds was amassing and hoarding hair in her room, and that no
further gifts should be allowed. The Superintendent was initially
reluctant to interfere with behaviour which he saw as
self-indulgent, but largely harmless. The matron, however, put her
foot down.

Also in 1874,
Broadmoor intercepted clandestine correspondence sent to the
chaplain at Lewes Prison, with whom Christiana had struck up a bond
during her time in custody. Dr Orange noted that he had no
objection at all to Edmunds corresponding with the chaplain, but
her decision to do so secretly was ‘in conformity with her state of
mind to prefer mystery and concealment’. Presumably the chaplain
was intended to become a Dr Beard substitute. Still, Christiana’s
webs of intrigue continued. In 1875 her room was twice searched and
various concealed articles were recovered on each occasion. Dr
Orange wrote that ‘she deceives for the pure love of
deception’.

Edmunds was a
patient who required micro-management. She was a bundle of
contradictions. Generally quiet and biddable, she joined the ranks
of the more trusted patients in the original female Block. She had
access to the Terrace and the gardens, and probably delighted in
causing mischief through playing croquet and other games with her
fellow patients. For she was certainly disruptive, as a note of
1876 indicates: ‘her delight and amusement seem[s] to be in
practising the art of ingeniously tormenting several of the more
irritable patients so that she could always complain of their
language to her whilst it was difficult to bring any overt act home
to herself’. The same note suggests that her room is still being
regularly searched, and that when her mother visited, she would
omit her make up and try to look as desperate as possible.