The Invention of Murder (35 page)

The Times’
report of the trial presented all the evidence that had previously acquitted her as an indication of her guilt, and added that since the ‘murders’ she had also been implicated in ‘another charge of poisoning’. This was a reference to Newport’s baby, in whose remains Taylor had been unable to find any poison. The prosecution made no attempt to produce evidence that Mrs Chesham had ever had arsenic, or that any of the supposed victims had even died of arsenic, or any poison. The charge was no longer murder, but attempted murder, a tacit admission of the poverty of the prosecution’s case. The Treasury Solicitor phrased the official view discreetly: ‘The material testimony certainly is not so decisive of the cause of Death as could be wished.’ Taylor, however, was firm: ‘Morally speaking there can be little doubt of arsenic having been the cause of these. attacks.’ But even he admitted that ‘There is a want of … strong
medical proof.
That lack, however, did not prevent him testifying for the prosecution.

Sarah Chesham now had no legal representation. Her defence consisted of her stating that she had never had any poison, and that she had never killed anyone. The judge, in his summing-up, found the prosecution’s case ‘overpowering’, especially as Mrs Chesham had, he said, ‘confessed to having murdered two of her children’. Except that she hadn’t: she had said she was entirely innocent. But after three inquests, one magistrates’ hearing and four trials, this poor, exhausted woman was finally sentenced to death.
*

The piece of evidence that decided the jury was not a fact, but a rumour. It was reported, by
The Times
among other papers, that Sarah Chesham had been in league with Mary May. She hadn’t. They lived in different parts of Essex, and were not of the socio-economic level that travelled. But the name Mary May was enough. Three years before Mrs Chesham’s final trial, Mrs May had been accused of poisoning her half-brother, ‘Spratty’ Watts. The evidence was typical: Watts, who lived with his sister and her family in Wix, near Harwich, had died after Mrs May had taken a mysterious paper from a locked drawer. Also typically, he had died and been buried with no questions asked. Following local rumours, there was an exhumation. Taylor once more did the analysis, and found arsenic in his remains. Watts, who had been nearly fifty when he died, was found to have been insured by Mrs May with two burial clubs for a total of £9 or £10. She had insured him under the name of ‘William Constable’, and given his age as thirty-eight. A neighbour reported that Mrs May had said she was going to use the burial money to buy a horse and cart and turn higgler (an itinerant trader). One newspaper now rather over-excitedly reported that she had murdered fourteen of her sixteen children (she had two, both alive and well). The
Morning Chronicle
did not even trouble to itemize: Mrs May ‘is said to have been implicated in
all
the suspected cases [of murder]
more or less’
(my italics). The trial heard more of the same, and Mrs May was found guilty and executed in August 1848. In June 1851 the banns were read for the marriage of her widower to the neighbour who had testified that Mrs May had been looking forward to the burial-society money. However, May committed suicide the following month, shortly before his fiancée’s illegitimate child was baptized. Village life and village feuds had deep roots.

The real excitement, however, was that at the trial testimony was heard not only about Mrs May, but also about her sister, Hannah Southgate, who, it was suggested, was an assassin for discontented village wives. An inquest was opened on her first husband, Thomas Ham, and her ex-servant testified that Mrs Southgate had told her, ‘It’s a good job [he was dead], for I always hated him; he was a nasty little blackguard.’ Two months after that she married John Southgate. Her servant also added ominously that Mrs Southgate had had six children, of whom five were dead. Another witness testified to hearing Mrs Southgate and Mrs May talking before Ham’s death. Mrs May said, ‘If it was my husband I would give him a pill,’ and Mrs Southgate responded, ‘Yes, I’ll be d—d if I don’t give him a dose one of these days.’ Luckily for Mrs Southgate, she had money for a good barrister – possibly her second husband, described as a farmer, had both the cash and the intelligence to hire Mr Ballantine, an Old Bailey regular. He devastated the prosecution’s case. Under his cross-examination Mrs Southgate’s servant was forced to admit that, like Mrs Southgate, she too had had five children, of whom four were dead, and that Mrs Southgate had sacked her for theft and drunkenness. Thomas Ham’s mother, who had painted a picture of a virago who had beaten her son with a whip, less luridly acknowledged that Mrs Southgate had only attacked him after he got drunk and stole her money. And a third witness, who had heard Mrs May say, ‘If he were mine, I’m d—d if I wouldn’t give him a pill,’ was revealed to have been evicted from a cottage owned by Mrs Southgate’s father. Ballantine won a very rare acquittal for his client. In the one case where the defence could afford a good barrister, this cannot be coincidental.

Unlike the excitement that surrounded the Essex poisoners, Eliza Joyce, the wife of a gardener in Boston, Lincolnshire, aroused little interest, local or national. In 1844, just before the May-Southgate story took off, Mrs Joyce had pleaded guilty to murdering her stepdaughter and her daughter; she had previously been charged and acquitted of murdering her stepson, but she now admitted to killing him and the two girls. It may be that the lack of interest reflected the lack of the elements that most of these murder cases included: promiscuity, money, wise women – there was not even any backbiting among her neighbours. Instead, when asked why she had committed the murders, Mrs Joyce replied simply: ‘I don’t know, except I thought it was such a thing to bring a family of children into this troublesome world.’ Perhaps this was too raw to be fun to read.

The stories of these sad, impoverished women were not much fun in general. There were no plays about them, and few waxwork exhibits - Madame Tussaud didn’t bother with any of them. A broadside after Mrs Chesham’s death said that ‘agents for Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors’ had tried to gain admission to the ‘dead-house’ to view her body, but no model of Mrs Chesham appears in the guidebooks to Madame Tussaud’s. Almost immediately after the first report came from Clavering, and long before her final trial, Sarah Chesham lent the name of her village to the villainess in Bulwer’s novel
Lucretia,
but for characterization and plot he relied on a vastly more upmarket murderer (see pp.253–4).

Punch
satirized the poison panic in the 1840s, not because it recognized that it was a media confection, but as part of a campaign to control access to poisons in order to stymie these poison rings. In 1849, during the height of the panic, it ran a mocking little playlet in dialogue form, in which a small girl asks Bottles, the chemist’s assistant, for ‘twopence-halfpenny’ of arsenic ‘to kill rats’. He replies, ‘Rats! - eh! Father belong to a burial club?’ If further reinforcement were needed, a cartoon (see following page) hammered away at the same theme.

As a result of newspaper agitation, and the trials of these women, in 1851 the Sale of Arsenic Act was passed, restricting the sale of the drug to those over twenty-one, and either known to the dispensing chemist, or vouched for by someone who was. Their names and addresses had to be recorded and the purchase signed for. If the purchase was for less than ten pounds of uncoloured arsenic (that is, for domestic rather than industrial use), a witness had to endorse the signature. Originally, it had been planned to restrict the sale of arsenic to adult males, but John Stuart Mill protested at this ‘gross insult to every woman … If the last two or three murderers had been men with red hair, as well might Parliament have rushed to pass an Act restricting all red haired men from buying or possessing deadly weapons.’ The clause was dropped. Yet even as it stood, the Act dealt only with arsenic, and only arsenic in its raw state; the drug was still utilized in many household goods that could be purchased with no restrictions.

By the 1860s, however,
Punch
had moved on. Now it mocked the huge readership that these grim deaths attracted, with a parody advertisement for a new magazine, to be entitled the
Sensation Times:
it would be,
Punch
promised, ‘devoted chiefly to … Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End … and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life … Murder, of course, will have in these columns the foremost place … Arsenical Literature will find in these columns its best exponent, and all Poison Cases will be watched by a staff of special reporters who have been medically educated.’

For by now the panic had long faded. By the time Eliza Foxall and Mary Anne Scrafton were charged with attempting to murder Henry Foxall in Durham in 1887, no one was much interested. The Foxalls had been unhappily married for two years, and after Foxall was taken ill, a friend of his wife took a letter to the police. Mrs Scrafton, a fortune teller, had written to Mrs Foxall: ‘I know that if the dose was strong enough it will do for him. You did not say in your letter if he was ill; but I do not think it will be long, and then you will be free.’ Mrs Foxall admitted that she had paid Mrs Scrafton 5s. for a charm ‘to put him away’: if she placed her shoes in the shape of a T before bed, refrained from eating between ten o’clock and midnight, and didn’t speak after 11.45, ‘all would be right’. She was sentenced to five years, Mrs Scrafton to seven, harsh enough punishments for putting your shoes in a T, but compared to the poison-panic sentences four decades earlier, this response to supposed working-class poisoners was almost lenient.

Middle-class poisoners, however, could expect different treatment.