A Very British Murder (16 page)

It was a procedure flawed from start to finish. The coroner’s assistant, Charles Newton, had been drinking, and Palmer exploited the general atmosphere of disorganization to jostle the person charged with removing Cook’s stomach so that its contents were spilt on the floor. Later, it seems that Palmer tried to bribe the courier charged with taking the stomach to the London train to make it go missing, and when it arrived in London for analysis the jar in which the stomach had been placed was found to have been
tampered with: its top had been slit open. Palmer also wrote to the coroner, asking for Cook’s death to be ascribed to natural causes, and enclosing a ten-pound bribe.

All this came out at Palmer’s trial, which was followed with enormous interest and enthusiasm. The
Law Times
would call it ‘the longest, greatest, gravest and most important criminal trial of the nineteenth century’. It piqued the interest of a generation who believed that poison and poisoners were everywhere. It also brought to prominence a new type of medical expert: the analytical chemist.

The prosecution’s job was to prove that Palmer had used poison. A vast array of expert witnesses now appeared in the courtroom, some to make the case, others to refute it. These people and their expertise were unfamiliar to the reading public, but now they stepped forward into the limelight and into the newspapers. Numerous pictures of the ‘analytical chemists’ appeared in the press, and their testimony was reproduced, word for word, for the nation to read over breakfast.

‘Expert witnesses’ in toxicology had begun to appear in trials in the eighteenth century, but it was the development of the Marsh Test for arsenic that gave the specialist chemist his role in murder cases. From 1836, when the test was established, it gradually became clear that it needed to be conducted by a qualified chemist, and not simply by the doctor who performed the post-mortem. The test itself was dangerous: indeed, by the year 1900, no fewer than eight scientists had themselves died from inhaling the fumes while performing it. In the media glare of Palmer’s trial, specialist toxicologists such as Alfred Swaine Taylor, of Guy’s Hospital in
London, and William Herapath, of St Peter’s Hospital in Bristol, became the faces of an exciting new profession.

The aim of ‘the Medical Gentlemen’, as they were called, was ambitious: it was to make the corpse speak. They claimed, in their laboratories, to be able to read invisible evidence from the dead body that could tell the story of a crime. As one writer put it of the contemporary toxicologist, his work caused ‘the vulgar to marvel at the mysterious power by which an atom [of poison] mingled amidst a mass of confused ingesta can still be detected’.

But Dr William Palmer’s case was filled with suspense because, despite their best efforts, these magicians of the modern age failed to prove that there was strychnine in Cook’s stomach. Taylor, the most prominent among all the toxicologists, was on the prosecution side. But he was unable to identify strychnine in Cook’s body, finding instead only a little bit of antimony, a heavy metal. This latter drug was indeed poisonous, but it was also a constituent of many medicines, and its presence did not prove murder. The difficulty was that strychnine was extremely hard to find. It was, as Taylor said, ‘so speedily absorbed in the blood that in the course of an hour after the administration no chemical test at present known could detect it’.

Taylor, a well-known expert witness and the author of a book called
A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence
, was particularly good at combining legal precedent and knowledge of the workings of the law with chemistry. Unlike others, he understood the different standards of ‘proof’ required in the courtroom and in medicine. ‘A court of law,’ he wrote, ‘requires to know whether arsenic [for example] was present and was the cause of death, rather than
whether it was mixed with traces of bismuth or lead, a fact which however interesting in a chemical, is wholly unimportant in a medico-legal way.’

At Palmer’s trial, though, William Herapath, a pioneer of arsenic testing, provided Taylor with a worthy adversary. The two of them were in competition for status and success, and Herapath led the team of ten medical witnesses for the defence, all of them arguing for the weakness of the process of identifying strychnine in the body.

However, despite the absence of evidence for strychnine, Palmer was still convicted. The evidence of the poison purchase, Palmer’s parlous financial situation and his suspicious behaviour at the postmortem all told against him. The work of Taylor and the medical experts for the prosecution was bolstered by the testimony of the chambermaid at the inn who witnessed Cook’s death: the arching of his spine as he died, the stiffening of his limbs and the wild look in his eyes were all considered compatible with the poison theory.

Palmer was hanged on 14 June 1856, before a crowd of 30,000 at Stafford prison. On the scaffold, he apparently teased or taunted those following his case with these words: ‘I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.’ Did he mean he was altogether innocent? Or was he hinting at the use of some other poison? It was a wonderfully titillating moment, and there are still residents of Rugeley today who believe that Palmer, their local hero, was innocent.

Taylor seemed to have won the tussle between the toxicologists. But despite his star status among the medical witnesses, his failure to find any evidence of strychnine in Cook’s body damaged his reputation. In subsequent editions of his
Manual
, which had been
published before the Palmer trial, he took the trouble to include several pages justifying his actions. And years later, Herapath would get his revenge. In 1859, Taylor made an unfortunate mistake in the trial of one Thomas Smethurst. He’d relied upon just one type of test for arsenic, when it would have been wiser to check his results with the multiple methods by then available. Herapath wrote to
The Times
, accusing Taylor of ‘a bungle’, and claiming that ‘no sound chemist’ would have certified ‘to the presence of arsenic by such an analysis’. It’s amusing to hear these lofty and respectable men of science doing each other down, but it also shows how they, along with the science they represented, were still feeling their way, testing and promoting different means of determining the truth.

AS THE HISTORIAN
Ian Burney has pointed out, poisoning was a crime that was peculiarly attractive to the Victorian imagination. Murder by poisoning fitted in with much that was novel about their contemporary society. People now lived in cities, cheek by jowl with strangers, at a distant remove from their kin and friends. Poison was administered remotely, impersonally. It wasn’t a crime of passion, but instead embodied what might even be considered to be typical Victorian virtues: forethought and meticulous planning.

Poison was unnatural and invisible, like many of the chemicals that made the Victorians’ world comfortable and convenient by comparison with the past. It could only be detected by modern medical professionals with skills and subtlety as advanced as those of the poisoner himself. As William Baker, a coroner, said in 1840:
‘In the rude ages, the means resorted to … was always of a bold and violent description, and left its traces behind, but now villainy is so refined … that the murderer leaves scarcely a clue to his discovery.’

The fathers of prosperous families who were living the Victorian ideal – a big, respectable town house, servants, wife’s life insured – were particularly affected by the story of poisoners like William Palmer. He even looked like one of them. In physical appearance, Palmer was likened to ‘John Bull’: the archetypal red-faced, bluff, hearty Englishman.

And yet, at the same time he had enormous debts, he was addicted to betting on horses, he had voracious and improper sexual appetites. In short, he was a man with a secret darkness at the heart of his apparently successful life. William Bally, one of the phrenologists who examined Palmer’s head, claims to have read exactly this from the bumps of the murderer’s skull: ‘a man who, as a rule, would be respectful, polite and even charitable; but one who, for any preconceived object, would act most cunningly and secretly, perfectly indifferent to honour or truth.’

To middle-class readers of the newspapers, the respectable sounding Dr William Palmer was the first in a run of a new and horrifying type of murderer, who seemed to have access to their very own drawing rooms. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may have had the last word on the specific threat he presented. ‘When a doctor goes wrong,’ said Sherlock Holmes of Palmer, years later, in
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
, ‘he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.’

‘The men of the middle classes do not choose that their females should work for money, so we have no option but … the monotonous round of home-pursuits – busy idleness, unremunerative employment.’

Anonymous female writer in
The National Magazine
, 1857

AS WE’VE SEEN
in the case of Maria Manning, the Victorians found it hard to know what to think about murderesses. The female members of middle-class families were supposed to be pure, virtuous, most influential within, and best confined to, the domestic realm. What was a murderous woman, then? She must be crazed, wanton, or suffering from some horrible sickness. This was necessary to protect her father, husband and male associates from accusations that they had failed to keep her in check. It was impossible that she could look or behave like a normal person.

And if she
did
look and behave normally, what then? Despite the difficulties that lie in revisiting and attempting to resolve cases more than a century old, it seems perfectly possible that a couple of
the celebrated poison cases of the later nineteenth century involved women who actually managed to get away with their crimes. This was in part because, despite the considerable evidence against them, people simply couldn’t quite believe that a well-born, well-spoken, attractive young female could have committed murder.

IN 1857, WHEN
she was only 22, a young lady named Madeleine Smith was accused of poisoning Pierre Émile L’Angelier, a young man from a lower social class. Brought up in upper-middle-class Glasgow, cosseted by her parents, Madeleine began her relationship with L’Angelier when she was 19 and recently returned home from boarding school. Conventionally for her background and station, Madeleine’s education had been devoted to preparing her for life as a wife. This was, in many ways, a training in the art of deception. In many boarding schools, the mistresses read all the pupils’ correspondence, with the result that the girls would bribe servants to deliver private letters. ‘Concealment and deception prevail in girls’ schools,’ ranted
Fraser’s Magazine
. ‘Girls learn to grasp after show and pomp; and, as women can rarely acquire these for themselves, they are taught to look at marriage as the means of making their fortune.’ It was true too of life beyond the schoolroom: Madeleine’s success or failure would be measured by the speed and splendour of her engagement.

Despite his romantic name, L’Angelier was far from being the rich, dream husband Madeleine’s parents desired. Originally from Jersey, he had spent some time in France, and was now a clerk in a shipping firm. His friends in Glasgow described him as
being moody and dissatisfied with his lot. He met Madeleine in the only possible place where such an intersection of the classes could happen: out on the public street. Attraction sparked between them immediately, and they went on to exchange over 60 letters, which were smuggled out of Madeleine’s parents’ house by a maidservant. Madeleine showed herself to be pragmatic to the point of cold-heartedness in arranging all this. She blackmailed a family servant into delivering the letters, by threatening to reveal that this maid had an unauthorized young man of her own.