The Invention of Murder (27 page)

Eliza Fenning found this out. Her terrible story was inextricably bound up with class anxiety, with fear of the mob, with hierarchy and social structure. Eliza Fenning was born in 1793, the only surviving child of an Irish-born soldier-turned-potato-dealer living in London. She went out to service aged fourteen, and at twenty-one became cook in the household of Robert Turner, a law-stationer in Chancery Lane. Only six weeks later, on 21 March 1815, after eating some dumplings, five people – Mr and Mrs Turner; Mr Turner’s father, the wonderfully named Orlibar (sometimes Haldebart) Turner; Roger Gadsdell, the Turners’ apprentice; and Eliza Fenning herself – all became violently ill. John Marshall, the family’s apothecary-surgeon, arrived to find Mrs Fenning lying on the stairs ‘in great agony’. ‘I directed her to drink some milk and water,’ he later testified, and for the family he prescribed Epsom salts and a mild purgative, and put them on a diet of milk, soda water and mutton broth. Soon everyone had recovered. Everyone recovered. No one died.

Orlibar Turner ‘had a suspicion of arsenic’ – why, is not recorded – and the following day he located the leftover dumpling mixture. ‘I put some water into the pan, and stirred it up with a spoon. upon the pan being set down for half a minute, upon my taking it up slowly, and in a slanting direction; I discovered a white powder at the bottom.’ He showed this to John Marshall, who already distrusted Mrs Fenning: she had, he noted, ‘most obstinately resisted all remedy’ (that is, treatment from him), which he thought was sure ‘proof of her guilt’. Marshall now cut up a leftover dumpling, put a slice ‘on a polished halfpenny, and held [it] over the flame of a candle on the blade of a knife’. It exuded a garlicky smell, the knife turned black, and after it cooled the coin had ‘a silvery whiteness’. When these powdery grains were put between polished copper plates and heated in the fire, they again gave off ‘the alliaceous smell’ and left a ‘silvery whiteness’ on the copper.

Marshall had no doubt that this indicated arsenic, although at the time it was possible to isolate arsenic in foodstuffs only if it was present in very large quantities.
*
About five times the lethal dose could be detected; smaller doses, which would still kill, were completely untraceable until 1836, when the Marsh test made it possible to isolate as little as a three-thousandth of a grain of arsenic (a further refinement, the Reinsch test, was developed in 1841). Nevertheless, on 15 April 1815 Eliza Fenning was tried at the Old Bailey, charged with four counts of attempted murder.

The trial was heartbreaking. Modern ideas of what constitutes evidence have been so firmly internalized that it is difficult to see through to an earlier mindset. But it was only in the eighteenth century that legal and philosophical systems began to grapple with what constitutes proof, apart from directly witnessing an action. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that mathematics came to outweigh less tangible kinds of knowledge, such as perceptions of character. Before this there was no systematic attempt to address probability, or even plausibility, or the difference between presumption and proof. Eliza Fenning was born too early.

Charlotte Turner, the law-stationer’s wife, testified first. Three weeks before the poisoning she had ‘observed [Mrs Fenning] one night go into the young men’s room partly undressed’ (these men were Turner’s two apprentices, who slept on the premises). After being reproved, Mrs Fenning ‘failed in the respect that she before paid me’, Mrs Turner found. She said that Mrs Fenning had been very pressing about making dumplings; although she did not particularly want them, she gave way. She thought that the dough had looked ‘singular’, and noticed it had failed to rise. Sarah Peer, the other servant, had not been in the kitchen while the dumpling dough was being made, she said, and she herself had been in and out. At dinner, ‘I found myself affected in a few minutes in the stomach after I had eaten; I did not eat a quarter of a dumpling; I felt myself very faint, and an extreme burning pain, which increased every minute. It became so bad I was obliged to leave the table.’

After this, both the Turner men, father and son, testified that after eating they too had been sick. Orlibar Turner was asked by the prosecution if Mrs Fenning had given any assistance; ‘None in the least,’ he replied. He then went on to tell how he had found grainy material in the dumpling pan, which he had set aside for Marshall. He had asked Mrs Fenning if she had put anything in the dumplings, and she said the milk Sarah Peer had fetched had gone off. He also said there was a paper twist of arsenic in the office, which had been bought to kill rats, and was carefully marked ‘poison’. Eliza Fenning, it was noted with some disapproval, could both read and write, and she might have opened that drawer in search of wastepaper to use when she lit the fire. He then produced from his pocket the two knives that had gone black to show the court.

The apprentice, Roger Gadsdell, said he had eaten some dumpling in the kitchen, together with some leftover bread and gravy. After Robert Turner told him he had been ill, Gadsdell said he had too: ‘I was taken ill about ten minutes after but not so ill as to vomit.’ He said he knew that the arsenic had been in the desk, and had gone missing about a fortnight previously. Sarah Peer testified that she had taken the yeast in when the brewer delivered it. John Marshall was the final witness: he said that he had arrived at the Turners’ house at 8.45 that evening, sent for ‘in a great hurry’, that he found Mr and Mrs Turner ‘very ill’ (‘Mr’ here appears to refer to Robert Turner; Orlibar had perhaps already recovered), and showing symptoms ‘such as would be produced by arsenic; I have no doubt of it by the symptoms; the prisoner also was ill, that was caused by the same’. Then the next day, when Orlibar Turner showed him the pan, ‘I washed it with a teakettle of warm water. decanted it off’ and ‘found half a tea spoon of white powder; I washed it a second time; I decidedly found it to be arsenic’.

That was the prosecution’s case. At this period no summing-up by the defence was legally permitted; until the Prisoners’ Counsel Act of 1836, those standing trial for felonies were forbidden access to any legal counsel at all, although this was, to a degree, permitted unofficially. The Fenning family did have legal advice, for which they paid two guineas, although their barrister left before the end of the trial. Four witnesses swore to Mrs Fenning’s good character, and she made her own defence speech. It was, in its entirety: ‘My lord, I am truly innocent of all the charge, as God is my witness; I am innocent, indeed I am; I liked my place, I was very comfortable; as to my master saying I did not assist him, I was too ill. I had no concern with the drawer at all; when I wanted a piece of paper I always asked for it.’
*
After conferring for ten minutes, the jury found her guilty, and Eliza Fenning was sentenced to death.

The case became a
cause célèbre.
Newspapers, now just coming into their own as independent sources of both news and opinion (not always particularly well separated), divided into two ferociously opposed camps. The
Observer,
a Loyalist paper, was against Mrs Fenning, and for the government and the legal establishment, as represented by the courts; the government-subsidized
Morning Post
was, unsurprisingly, of the same view. The
Examiner,
a Radical paper, was on Mrs Fenning’s side, as was the
Traveller,
edited by the reformer and Radical publisher William Hone.
The Times
and the
Morning Chronicle
were less obviously biased in either direction, although they were happy to print any rumours that surfaced, and tended to the view that a middle-class person was to be believed before a working-class one. But it was early for newspapers really to get their teeth into the subject – that had to wait for Thurtell and Corder – and for the most part the crossfire was carried out in books and pamphlets. John Marshall wrote a pamphlet setting out a detailed case for the guilty verdict; almost all the other pamphlets (at any rate, almost all the ones that have survived) protested Mrs Fenning’s innocence.

Marshall’s pamphlet was extracted in
The Times,
which followed up with a précis of the various indications ‘corroborating … the guilt of Eliza Fenning’. These included: blushing when Mrs Turner told her that ‘the dumplings were by no means what she expected’, asking ‘repeatedly’ beforehand if Mr Turner were to dine at home, even eating the dumplings herself carried ‘the strongest proof of her conviction; as, knowing she was the cause of the mischief, she was determined to destroy herself to evade justice’. There was more, said Marshall: Mrs Fenning’s guilt was evident from the fact that she had not gone to Mrs Turner’s assistance, ‘as she naturally would have done had she been innocent’; that when her box was searched after the accusation, she was found to possess ‘an infamous book. that explained the various methods of procuring abortion’; and, finally, that ‘she having been frequently heard in the kitchen to say “She would have her spite out with her mistress”, further illustrates the idea of premeditated revenge, and shews the depravity of her morals’. Altogether,
The Times
concluded, ‘These facts serve to illustrate how greatly Mr. Turner and family have been exposed to unmerited rancour, by the artful and revengeful conduct of the wretch who has inflicted on them so much suffering and anxiety.’

The
Observer,
which was almost hysterically anti-Fenning, ran a series of articles including the ‘facts’ that
‘her father and mother are both from Ireland,
and that they are BOTH ROMAN CATHOLICS’, that she was from her youth onwards ‘wayward and vicious’, that she had been expelled from school for ‘lying and lewd talk’, that she had tried to poison a previous employer, and that she was of ‘a very
amorous inclination’.
After the trial, it reported triumphantly, ‘even in prison she showed evidence’ of her bad character by writing ‘lewd’ letters ‘in the most voluptuous language’ to a fellow prisoner.

The
Observer
followed this up by refusing to carry advertisements for
The Important Results of an Elaborate Investigation into the Mysterious Case of Elizabeth Fenning …,
written by John Watkins. Here, fourteen years before the founding of the Met, an ordinary jobbing author acted more like a detective than the police would as late as the 1840s. The pamphlet reproduced the trial transcript above Watkins’ running commentary, in which he highlighted inconsistencies, improper questions or answers that made no sense. There were plenty of these. Orlibar Turner had testified that Mrs Fenning had not eaten any of the dumpling; Watkins noted that all he could properly testify was that he had not seen her eat any – Mrs Fenning, as a servant, ate separately from the family, in the kitchen. Watkins also noted that John Marshall, who was so vehemently convinced of Mrs Fenning’s guilt, had not arrived for five or six hours after the first episode of sickness; another doctor had first treated the family, but had not been called as a witness, whether because his evidence did not suit the prosecution, or simply because they had failed to interview him, was not known.

Watkins went on to discuss things that occurred during the trial which were not taken down by the shorthand writer (this, therefore, is evidence we have from him alone). He recorded that Mrs Fenning’s father had wanted to give evidence of the Turner family’s earlier hostility to his daughter, but the Recorder, Sir John Silvester, had refused to permit this. Silvester had summed up heavily against Mrs Fenning, giving much weight to the fact that she had not gone to the aid of Mrs Turner: ‘If poison had been given even to a dog, one would suppose that common humanity would have prompted us to assist it in its agonies.’
*
Watkins reminded his readers that the second servant, Sarah Peer, was there, a doctor was there, and Mrs Fenning herself was ill – a fact never denied by the prosecution. He further pointed out that hearsay evidence had been permitted; that no evidence of poisoning had been submitted; that the charge of attempted murder legally required that ‘felonious intent’ be shown, but no attempt had been made to do so. He added that both the clerk who took down the early depositions and the solicitor to the prosecuting barristers were both friends of Mr Turner, while John Marshall was a friend of their barrister.

But the real excellence of the pamphlet was in Watkins’ examination of the scientific merits of the case. This was almost the first time in history that such forensic work was displayed in detail. John Marshall said that he had drawn off about half a teaspoon of arsenic from the leavings of the dough in the pan. This, estimated Watkins, would indicate that the four dumplings made from the dough had contained some 1,800 grains of arsenic. Five grains was generally considered to be a fatal dose (although occasionally death has occurred from as little as four grains). Therefore Mrs Turner would have ingested enough to kill ten people, and Orlibar Turner enough to kill 120; yet, miraculously, neither had died. Watkins stated flatly that Marshall’s proof for the presence of arsenic, that it turns a knife black, was wrong. (He also failed to note that Marshall wrote that yeast itself ‘may tinge iron black’, which, if true, would mean that any dumpling would turn a knife black.) Mrs Turner had presented the fact that the dumplings had not risen properly as evidence that they were poisoned; that, too, wrote Watkins, was not true: there was no evidence that arsenic stopped the action of yeast.

The courts had accepted statements from respectable (that is, middle-class) witnesses at face value, without questioning motives or sources of information, and the newspapers continued to do so. The
Morning Chronicle
thought that an employer should be believed by virtue of the fact that he was an employer. The
Observer
chose a more circular argument. There was no point in listening to Mrs Fenning or her supporters, it wrote: ‘The ultimate fate of the criminal is the best proof that [her protestations of innocence have] no foundation in truth’ – that is, Mrs Fenning was guilty because she had been found guilty.
*
Watkins disregarded social background and went looking for evidence. After Mrs Fenning’s execution, Mr Turner made public a letter which stated that she had tried to poison one of her previous employers, a solicitor, and had attempted to cut the throat of another. Watkins questioned the solicitor, who said he had written this letter not because Mrs Fenning had tried to poison him, but because ‘he thought Mr
Turner
had done what was proper, in
hanging the girl!
– as nobody would be safe if these
Irish
wretches were suffered to get into respectable families’. The woman whose throat she had attempted to cut told Watkins that she had never met Eliza Fenning, she had therefore never employed Eliza Fenning, and nobody, Eliza Fenning included, had ever attempted to cut her throat. Watkins followed up yet a third rumour – another case where it was claimed Mrs Fenning had tried to poison an ex-employer – to find that this story originated with a man who remembered an incident one day when the water in his kettle frothed strangely, so it had been thrown away. He said, ‘I don’t say it was
Eliza Fenning
as did it; – it
mought
[sic] have been her, or it
mought
not; – I DON’T KNOW AS SHE LIVED WITH US AT THE TIME.’