Cambridgeshire Murders (8 page)

The X of Joshua Slade

Following a new search of the patch of young oaks Slade had described, the sword was discovered; and on re-inspection of the brewing tub it was clear that the damage had been caused by a weapon less crude than a bill. It is interesting that Slade's confession dismissed the prosecution's claims that the footprints, the knife and bill, the bloodstains and Heddings's statements were correct – without these points the prosecution would have had no case.

From the time of his confession up until his execution Slade expressed both guilt and remorse for the murder and relief at his conviction. He stated that if he had not been caught he probably would have gone on to commit further serious crimes.

On Thursday 30 August Slade had the first and only visit from his father, accompanied by two of his sisters. He spent the rest of his time in the company of the prison chaplain. On Saturday 1 September, at just after 11 a.m., Slade was placed in the cart that was to take him to the site of his execution on the outskirts of the town. A large crowd had gathered and he showed a great deal of fear until the final moments when, standing alone on the scaffold, he finally managed to compose himself.

His body was returned to the prison until it was moved for the dissection, which was scheduled for Tuesday 4 September. The medical examination revealed unusually proportioned toes explaining his distinctive gait. He had also suffered several serious blows to his head during his lifetime. A plaster mould was taken of his face. A touring museum later displayed items connected with this murder, including his skeleton. Two of the few existing exhibits are pictured: a section of the noose and a piece of preserved skin removed from the back of Slade's neck.

Joshua Waterhouse left instructions for burial: ‘Let me be buried twelve feet deep – my coffin standing perpendicularly on its foot: let my face front the east: I shall then be ready: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised.' His grave was dug to almost that depth, but his coffin was placed in the usual position. His tomb can still be seen in the graveyard at the church of Little Stukeley but the inscription (below) is no longer legible:

Beneath this tomb his Mangled body's laid

Cut, stabbed and Murdered by Joshua Slade

His ghastly Wounds a horrid sight to see

And hurl'd at once into Eternity

What faults you've seen him take Care to shun

And look at home – enough's there to be done.

There is one final point of interest which makes a connection between Slade and one of the other cases in this book. The date originally set for Slade's execution – 2 August 1827 – was coincidentally the forty-first anniversary of Huntingdon-shire's previous execution, that of Gervais Matcham, whose gibbet hung nearby until it was removed just one week before Joshua Waterhouse's murder.

T
he last public execution at Cambridge Gaol took place at noon on Saturday 13 April 1850, when two convicts were hanged for the poisoning of a young woman. What made the case extraordinary was that one of the convicts was the woman's husband and the other was her sister. But were they both guilty? Or did one just get caught up in the other's murderous plan?

Susan Reeder
¹
grew up in Castle Camps, a small village in south Cambridgeshire about 3 miles from the Suffolk town of Haverhill. In 1846, at the age of 16, she married 20-year-old Elias Lucas, a strong, handsome young farm labourer whose father had been the parish council clerk in the neighbouring village of Shudy Camps. The marriage was reported as being largely a happy one, despite the fact that the couple's first child died and that three of Susan's four subsequent pregnancies resulted in the loss of the babies at or soon after birth, and that Susan suffered from respiratory problems, described at the trial as ‘chest disease'.

Susan and her sister Mary were barely a year apart in age. Mary was described in a handbill produced in April 1850 as ‘short and plump, and her features were even and good; the expression of her face bore the marks of innocence; her hands were remarkably white and small; and although stated in the calendar to be twenty, she seemed not more than sixteen.'

Mary, also known as Maria, had been working as a servant for Mr Miller, a carpenter and Mrs Miller, his wife. They lived in Castle End, Cambridge, very close to the county gaol. She remained in their service for fifteen months, but resigned at the end of 1849 due to ill health. Coincidentally, and like her sister, she too suffered from a bad chest. The Millers had no complaints about her work and the Cambridge locals who knew her thought her to be ‘a well conducted, willing and modest girl'.

Her next position was with Mr Cross, a farmer from Castle Camps, who was also Elias Lucas's employer. At some point before Christmas 1849, while Susan was pregnant for the last time, Elias and Mary Reeder began an affair. Although it seems that Susan had no suspicions, rumours spread among the villagers, including Mr Cross, who stated, ‘Maria Reeder had been in my service. I have seen the prisoners laughing and talking together near my barn. I went there and asked what they were about, and Lucas said he was helping the girl to get some kindling for the copper.'

After only a relatively short time in Mr Cross's employ Mary resigned, again stating ill health as the reason. She had the option of returning to live with her father 3 miles away, but instead she chose to live with Elias and Susan.

In January 1850 Susan's fourth pregnancy ended with the death of the child, and at Susan's suggestion Mary was invited to live with them and their surviving child, a daughter, now 3 years of age. Mary moved in at the end of January.

In spite of Susan's history of chest problems and failed pregnancies, she was reported to be in good health within a month. At the trial a local woman, Mary Wilson, said, ‘I saw the deceased at 5 o'clock on Thursday, the 21st at Mr. Well's shop. She was quite well.'

On 21 February Susan shared a water mess
²
meal with her husband and sister – we do not know whether their daughter also ate with them. Neither Elias nor Mary commented on the meal, but Susan found hers tasted bitter and was soon taken ill. She continued to be violently sick through the night and the next morning. Mary gave her castor oil as a purgative, but when her condition failed to improve she went to her uncle, Thomas Reeder, in the adjoining cottage for assistance. According to his later testimony:

Maria Reeder came to my house at 10 or 11 next day, and asked me to fetch three pennyworth of brandy, for her sister was sick. Before I had finished dinner, Maria Reeder called to my wife to come and see her sister, who had fallen out of bed. She went in, and as soon as she got there she called to me out of the window to come in. I went and found the deceased on the floor in the bedroom. She was undressed. I helped to put her into bed.

Thomas sent John Casbolt to find Elias Lucas and meanwhile asked another local woman, Susan Potter, to visit his niece. The following is from Potter's account:

I went into her bedroom. She was in bed, and rose up and began to retch violently. She brought up very little, and asked me for a drink. I gave her warm tea. She drank it about three o'clock. She then began to retch again violently. I left her at 4 o'clock. She laid down in bed, and never spoke again till her husband came, about 20 minutes after I got there. She then rose up in bed, and asked him to go for a doctor. I said so too. He left the room immediately; he did not speak to his wife. I was with her when she died. She died five or ten minutes after he left the room.

Lucas rushed to his employer's house and asked Miss Cross if he could borrow a pony as he needed to fetch a doctor for his wife, although he feared she would be dead before one could reach her. Thomas Pledger, who was working on the Haverhill road about 3/4 mile from the town, was the next to see Lucas.

He said:

I saw Elias Lucas going for the doctor. He was on a pony and pulled up when he came to me. He was riding as fast as he could. He asked me where Mr. Robinson the surgeon lived. I asked what was amiss. He said ‘my wife was taken bad after supper last night, and damn me if I do not think she will be dead before I get back'. He then went on quick. I saw Mr. Cramer coming from Haverhill in a gig. Lucas was close behind it.

Lucas went to another Haverhill doctor, Frederick Cramer, assistant to Mr Martin, because he was closest to hand and told him that Susan was desperately ill with chest pains. They hurried back to Castle Camps but as they turned into the lane they were met with the news that Susan had died half an hour earlier. Mr Cramer was about to leave for Haverhill when Henry Reeder, Susan's father, asked him to take a look at the body. Several people were at the house, including Mary Reeder, who explained that her sister had suffered with chest problems for several years. When Mr Cramer examined Susan's body her skin was still warm. To the court he later explained:

I observed that she had died in a state of collapse. The fingers were clenched as a bird's claw. I felt the pulse and said I was sorry I was not called in before. I asked Maria Reeder if she had been purged. She said she had from a dose of castor oil given in the morning. I examined the body, and in the abdomen I found marks of recent confinement. It was supernaturally blue. These symptoms made me think the woman had died from cholera or poison. I suspected the latter.

As Cramer believed that Susan Lucas's death was not from natural causes he refused to issue a death certificate to the registrar. Perhaps in an attempt to make herself look innocent, Mary eagerly explained, ‘To tell you the truth, she has been a deal worse since the water mess last night, and we all think there was something in it which caused her death. Sister first complained it tasted like slack lime, and offered me some in a spoon. I tasted it, but finding it like what sister described I spit it out. We gave some to the cat, who had also been ill.' She also said that about twenty minutes later Susan had gone to the front door, leant against the sill, and had vomited into the garden, saying, ‘I am a dead woman'. Mary explained that she and Susan had prepared the food together and that the mess had not looked normal, but instead appeared curdled.

Perhaps she hoped that by explaining how she had tried the food she would not be suspected, but both she and Elias were already under suspicion. The doctor asked whether there were any poisonous substances in the house, such as corn steeped in arsenic, which could have been used as a rat poison, but Elias said no, and that in any case the bread had been bought from the baker and was not homemade.

Cramer removed what remained of the loaf and returned the following day to perform post mortem tests on the body. He found some inflammation in the chest, but overall pronounced it healthy. While the abdomen was also healthy he could immediately see that the stomach was highly inflamed. He removed the digestive tract and placed it in a bladder and a bag.

Mary told him that her sister had vomited continually through the night, and that each bowel movement had brought such pain that she had lost the power of speech.

Returning to the scene for a third time, on 24 February, Cramer met Constable Tilbrook who had been informed by Elias Lucas that there was in fact arsenic in the house. On arrival at the house Cramer asked Elias about this and was shown a large parcel on a pantry shelf, at a distance from the basins, which ruled out the possibility that it had accidentally contaminated the food. Cramer examined the parcel and found that it appeared to have been opened at one end, then loosely retied. Lucas explained that his employer had given him the packet to destroy, but that instead he had brought it home and left it in the pantry, planning, he said to put with his onion seed in order to kill slugs. It was clearly marked ‘Arsenic – Poison'.

Cramer removed the rest of Susan Lucas's intestines and asked Susan's father to gather up some of the dirt outside the front door where Susan had vomited. The stomach and earth were delivered to Alfred Swaine Taylor, Professor of Chemistry and Medical Jurisprudence at Guy's Hospital, London, for further analysis.

The inquest was held at the Red Lion pub in nearby Linton. On Saturday 2 March 1850 an article in the
Cambridge Chronicle
read:

An inquest, which has been adjourned until Monday next, was held on Tuesday on the body of a woman named Lucas, who it is suspected came by her death in a foul manner, and parties closely allied are supposed to be implicated. A portion of the contents of the deceased's stomach has been sent to Dr. Taylor for analysation, and until the adjourned inquest has taken place we refrain from more pointed or minute particulars.

On the following Saturday the next edition of the
Cambridge Chronicle
reported:

Susan Lucas, the wife of a labourer at Castle Camps in Cambridgeshire, expired on the 22nd of February after a very short illness in the course of which she exhibited all the symptoms of having taken arsenic. A rumour soon got abroad that the poison had been administered to her by her husband and her sister, who were reported to be on too familiar terms, the sister residing in the same house and sleeping in the same bed with the deceased and her husband.

Elias Lucas and Mary Reeder were arrested, but although both protested their innocence they were kept in custody until they could appear before Mr Justice Wightman at the Norfolk Circuit Lent Assizes held in Cambridge in March.

With the scandalous nature of the reported relationship between Lucas and Reeder, public interest was keen and the court case was reported in detail in the local press.

Professional witnesses conclusively proved that Susan Lucas died of arsenic poisoning and that the packet taken from the Lucas pantry had contained the fatal substance.

Constable Tilbrook took the stand to explain that, on delivery of the order for Mrs Lucas's burial, Elias Lucas had said that it was a bad job about his wife being poisoned. Tilbrook, in response, had asked, ‘Have you any poison in the house?' Lucas replied, ‘Yes, half a pound of it, or three-quarters.' He further explained that Mr Cross had asked him to dispose of it to avoid the turkeys or fowls getting at it and thereby being poisoned. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he had the poison in his possession when he spoke to Tilbrook, but Cramer testified that both Elias Lucas and Mary Reeder had denied that there was any poison in the house.