The Invention of Murder (47 page)

Only a month after the court’s ruling the Coburg Theatre opened, staging as its very first production
A Trial by Battle; or, Heaven Defend the Right,
by William Barrymore. The play tells of the beautiful but poor Geralda, who is abducted by a band of brigands on the orders of the wicked Baron Falconbridge. Her noble brother and her stalwart lover, Henrie (sic), attempt to rescue her, and in so doing are accused by the Baron of committing the crimes he was himself guilty of: ‘a guilty man found innocent – acquitted – turned loose upon the world, and no other chance left of meeting with his deserts, but getting his head cracked in a trial by battle.’ The trial by battle is played out onstage, and good triumphs over evil. (The play was revived in 1871,when the now renamed Victoria Theatre reproduced its first ever production as a historical curiosity. One reviewer called it ‘the most ridiculous farrago ever served up’.)

Another, anonymous, version of the story,
The Murdered Maid,
was published in Warwick in the year of the trial, sanitized for family viewing: ‘every disgusting circumstance is carefully omitted’, the preface assured the anxious, and ‘additions’ had been made to reinforce ‘that great moral lesson … That although vice may for a time triumph, a merciful but just God fails not to punish … the perpetration of a crime.’ The play is set in France, and Thornton becomes Thornville, a ‘noted rake’. ‘I despise your insidious language, as much as I do the motive of it,’ Marie hisses at her would-be seducer. She flees, he chases, ‘A shriek is heard, and followed by a noise, as of one falling into Water, – the Stage becomes dark …’ Thornville, we learn, had earlier preyed on Marie’s sister, as Thornton was similarly reported to have ‘known’ Miss Ashford’s sister, while Marie’s aged grandfather stages a dramatic confrontation, drawing back a curtain to show the body of Marie on her bier, calling for
‘Justice, justice, justice, on the murderer, justice, justiceI’
Finally Thornville offers Marie’s brother, Guillaume, the ‘Wager of Battel’ (sic), and, carrying a shield inscribed ‘Avenge Marie’, Guillaume attacks the stronger man, who conveniently suddenly goes mad, experiences a heavenly vision and then shoots himself. Happy family entertainment, as the preface promised.

A less professional version still,
The Mysterious Murder; or, What’s the Clock,
was probably performed at fairs and exhibitions, and may have been written by the prompter at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, who published it himself (‘at the earnest request of his Friends’). Maria is here ‘a giddy, thoughtless girl’, Thorntree a rich cad, Quibble the cunning lawyer. The script follows the real story fairly closely (if we accept that there was a murder, and that Thornton committed it), ending in a churchyard where Maria is buried under ‘a white marble MONUMENT’ that was ‘erected by her Friends, to perpetuate the fatal effect of Inordinate Passions’.

Thornton’s story continued to resonate. In 1826 Walter Scott reported a conversation at a dinner with Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington at ‘Mr Peele’s’ (Robert Peel, not yet Sir Robert): ‘We canvassed the memorable … case of Ashford. Peele almost convinced me of the man’s innocence.’ More than a decade later,
Figaro in London
published ‘The Somnambulist’, a short story presented as a first-person narrative of a visit to the ‘Allegany [sic] mountains’. A traveller lodges at a remote house, waking to find the owner walking in his sleep, repeating the phrase ‘Not guilty!’ and ‘making an action as if drawing a glove upon his right hand, and flinging its fellow upon the floor’. Then, with a smile ‘of demoniacal triumph’ he vanishes. The narrator recognizes Thornton, and hurries away from the ‘contaminating atmosphere’.

There was definitely a ‘contaminating atmosphere’ in Bristol when Mary Ann Burdock, a landlady, came up for trial in 1835 for the murder of her lodger, Clara Smith. Mrs Smith had died in 1833, and Mrs Burdock had organized her funeral, telling the undertaker her lodger had had neither money nor family, and to bury her ‘at as little expense as possible’. Onlookers were surprised: it was believed that Mrs Smith had both family and cash, while Mrs Burdock, in contrast, had been very poor, and was now claiming to have inherited ‘a large property’ from an uncle of whom no one had previously heard. In December 1834 Mrs Smith’s relatives came calling and, aghast at finding no property, began an investigation. The body was exhumed, arsenic was identified and Mrs Burdock was arrested.

At the trial, witnesses testified to buying arsenic for Mrs Burdock; her servant said she had seen her pour powder into Mrs Smith’s gruel, before washing her hands twice in two changes of water and scrubbing her nails. She had also used ‘abusive epithets’ about her lodger, referring to her as a ‘drunken old bitch’. Mr Burdock had later been seen with gold rings and a gold bottle for smelling-salts, even though he had been unemployed when Mrs Smith died, at which point he set himself up in business. (He himself had since died.) Mrs Smith’s solicitor contradicted Mrs Burdock’s report of her lodger’s indigence, saying she had received £700 in 1829, and had an annuity as well. Mrs Burdock had made a will after the death of Mrs Smith, being in possession of £500, although only a short time before she had told a witness that ‘she had not a shilling in the world’.

Mrs Burdock’s counsel was particularly active for the period. Before the trial her solicitor attempted to get the venue altered because of local bias – a remarkably innovative idea two decades before Palmer’s Act. He also attempted to keep out of evidence the witnesses who had seen Mrs Smith’s possessions in Mrs Burdock’s keeping after her death, arguing that this was a trial for murder, not theft. He failed, but for the time and for a working-class client it was notable that he even tried. He also produced witnesses who backed up Mrs Burdock’s version of events, that Mrs Smith was indigent, drunk and behind on her rent. The chemist from whom Mrs Burdock was supposed to have bought arsenic testified that she could not have done so: he had had no shop at the relevant period.

It was the scientific evidence, however, that was new, and newly presented. The Recorder, Sir Charles Wetherell, addressed the jury before the trial.
*
Mrs Smith, he noted, had died in October 1833, and was only exhumed in December 1834. ‘I am not aware of any parallel case having ever transpired’ where so long a period had elapsed between death and investigation, he said. But, ‘You will have the testimony of several eminent medical men, and that also of some able chemists, who will state to you the results of certain experiments and tests.’ The idea of detecting poison quickly was well known; long-delayed exhumations after violent death had even been dramatized. In the melodrama
The Murderers of the Round Tower Inn
(1830) the plucky hero Tom Topmast returns from sea to find his father has died. Suspecting his mother’s second husband, Hamlet-like, he takes himself to the cemetery, where, conveniently enough, a grave is being dug next to his father’s, and thus his father’s skull is accidentally exhumed: ‘Oh horror! horror. the dreadful truth now comes to light. Captain, my friend, look here! look here!
(he draws a long nail out of the skull just at the crown).
Now, the Burdock case demonstrated that poison could be identified as easily as a nail in a skull.

The trial began with an attempt to exclude the medical experts from the court while others gave evidence. After consideration, it was decided that they could remain, as they were not witnesses to the events that had transpired, but were simply providing scientific testimony. Just as legal procedures were not yet codified, so the best method of conducting post-mortems had not yet been established. Two of the doctors present at Mrs Smith’s autopsy had never before examined a person who had died of poison; they relied entirely on tests by William Herapath to identify arsenic, as from their own experience they were unable to identify any marks of poisoning. Herapath represented the future. He attended the exhumation and the postmortem, and analysed the viscera, and in his evidence he not only told the court of his results, but explained carefully how each test had been performed, and what the results meant. He also brought sections of the body into court, to demonstrate each point.

All of this was carefully relayed to the reading public. For example, Herapath described how ‘The stomach and abdomen were laid open … and it was discovered that the integuments had been converted into adipocire [sic], which is a hardening of the fat, or animal soap …’ explained one report. Another confirmed that ‘The bowels are in a glass case, and the head of the unfortunate Mrs Smith are [sic]. ready to be produced’ if needed.

The first quotation is taken from a middle-class sporting paper,
Bell’s Life,
the second from a working-class broadside, but there is little to distinguish the two – both were concerned to instruct their audiences on how to read the evidence, in exactly the same way the scientists were instructing the jury. The attitudes reflected in both newspapers and broadsides contrast with the views sometimes imposed retrospectively on the working classes by the more educated.In
Middlemarch
(1871–72), set the year before Mrs Smith’s death, the inn landlady speaks for many when she condemns the ‘advanced’ doctors who go about ‘cutting up everybody before the breath was well out o’ their body’. The evidence of the broadsides, however, indicates a greater sophistication than this in the response of the public. They explained court procedure, repeating the prosecutor’s address to the jury on their legal responsibilities, they analysed the Recorder’s decision not to grant a change of venue, and explained how ‘Mr. Herapath and the Medical Gentlemen’ had ‘taken up’ the body and ‘chemically analysed’ the stomach contents to find ‘above 20 grains of arsenic. although it was 14 months ago since her burial’. One execution broadside even fell into verse on the scientific analysis:

This was the period in which broadsides flourished, and they did not expect their readers to rely on them exclusively – at least one simply noted that ‘newspapers throughout the Kingdom have enlarged their columns with the narrative of this tragic affair’. Many others cannibalized themselves, taking the same text and laying it out differently, or using generic pictures of little relevance: a Regency female, a funeral image, a clergyman in front of a country house (overleaf). Yet there was sufficient market that one local printer found it profitable to produce a broadsheet every day during the trial, as well as at the more standard high points – the confession, sorrowful lamentations, dying speech and execution broadsides.

In 1890 a skeleton was discovered when the foundations of a building in Bristol were being dug, and it was immediately ‘believed by many to supply a missing link’ between Mrs Burdock and a baker’s son who had vanished, although the only apparent connection is that both events took place in 1833 – evidence, perhaps, of the extreme rarity of murder. Mrs Burdock was the first woman to be executed in Bristol in thirty-five years, the twentieth of either sex, including the four rioters.

*&*&*&

When Mrs Burdock stood trial, the idea of scientific analysis was new. By the time John Tawell was accused of murdering his mistress Sarah Hart, in 1845, it was a commonplace, and a tool of the defence as well as the prosecution. But Tawell’s case had another novelty: he was the first person to be arrested by means of that newfangled invention, the telegraph.

John Tawell, of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, presented a sober face to the world. He was over sixty, a pious Quaker, respectably married and doing well in business. Yet behind this façade, a more dubious man lurked. In his youth Tawell had been transported for forging a bill for £1,000 (the sum given in some newspapers; another, less excitingly but probably more accurately, said £10). Whatever the amount, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation and, having worked out his sentence, lived in Sydney as an increasingly prosperous druggist, becoming a Quaker and ultimately returning to London. At some point his wife died, and he began a relationship with his children’s nursemaid. When he married a rich Quaker widow in 1841 he pensioned off the nursemaid, Sarah Hart, paying her £1 a week and continuing to visit her at her new home in Slough.

On the day in question, the next-door neighbour saw Mrs Hart’s visitor arrive; she later heard a scream, and then saw the man leave. Concerned, she went next door and found Mrs Hart lying on the floor, dead. As well as the police, the local vicar appeared on the scene. He gave evidence at the inquest: ‘Hearing … that a person in the dress of a Quaker was the last man who had been seen to leave the house, I proceeded to the Slough station, thinking it likely he might proceed to town by the railway. I saw him pass through the office, when I communicated my suspicions to Mr. Howell, the superintendent at the station … Mr. Howell then sent off a full description of his person, by means of the electric telegraph, to cause him to be watched by the police upon his arrival at Paddington.’ At Paddington, the railway police spotted Tawell in his distinctive clothes, and followed him home. He was arrested the next day, at which point he denied having been in Slough or knowing anyone who lived there, and haughtily tried to quell the working-class policeman: ‘My station in life must rebut any suspicion that might be attached to me.’ The policeman was impervious to this argument, and Tawell was escorted to Windsor, where he said he now remembered Mrs Hart: she had been his servant, and was in the habit of writing begging letters and threatening suicide if she did not receive help. He had travelled to Slough, he continued, to tell her that she could expect no further help from him, at which point she drank the contents of a phial, throwing the rest, conveniently enough, into the fire. ‘I did not think she was in earnest,’ he ended.