A Very British Murder (15 page)

From 1823 onwards, though, only
really bad
men and women would be hanged. These people were seen as profoundly flawed, and fundamentally different from the spectators of their deaths. This essential otherness, this difference from the rest of us, is an essential angle of the glamorous murderer created by Thomas De Quincey.

Dickens in 1849 was acting, as he so often did, as a barometer of popular public opinion. If he thought that the spectacle of a hanging had grown distasteful, then so too would his enormous number of readers. People who believed themselves to be civilized no longer felt the need to experience the punishment dealt out to the guilty. They began to trust the proper authorities to see that done.

The law took a little time to catch up, but change it did, and the last public hanging took place in 1868. Capital punishment continued, but invisibly, behind the walls of prisons. And this was a vital precondition for the classic detective story to emerge. Detective fiction, unlike melodrama, or ‘Penny Blood’ fiction, didn’t care about retribution. Its concern was more the
solution
of crime.

Murderers themselves, the detectives who hunted them down, and the authors who processed real life into fiction: all were about to reach a new level of sophistication.

^fn1
An inspector in the Metropolitan Police in 1866 made the parallel explicitly. It was his duty to mix ‘frequently with crowds, at theatre and different places […] it appears to me that they look upon a theatrical scene precisely in the same way as upon an execution’.

‘Fie on these dealers in poison, say I: can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats?’

Thomas De Quincey, ‘On Murder’ (1821)

THE RATCLIFFE HIGHWAY
Murders took place beneath the high walls of London’s Tobacco Dock, while Frederick and Maria Manning lived in cholera-stricken Bermondsey. John Williams, the seaman, and Maria Marten, the mole-catcher’s daughter, never brushed with high society. The events and characters of the first part of our story seemed a world away from the secure, prosperous homes of the West End. But once the ‘great’ murders of the earlier nineteenth century had given readers a taste for lurid death, the activity of enjoying a murder became increasingly acceptable higher up the social scale. Victorian murder became something of a middle-class pastime, and began to take place – both in real life and in fiction – at the heart of the supposedly safe haven of the respectable home.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the murder rate, as far as we can identify it, was once again falling: from 1.7 per
100,000 people in the 1860s, to 1 per 100,000 in the 1890s. Most crime continued to take place among the poverty-stricken and desperate, and criminals were most frequently young men accused of theft. Yet a murder in a well-to-do family was far more attractive to journalists and authors. We start to hear less about stabbing, bludgeoning and the cutting of throats, and much more about madness, bigamy and poison. And the archetypal murderer’s weapon of choice was something fairly ubiquitous in the Victorian home: arsenic.

Historian James Whorton describes the poison’s devastating effects if swallowed:

it produces a sharp, burning sensation in the stomach and oesophagus (usually about 30 to 60 minutes after ingestion), and then profuse vomiting and diarrhoea lasting for hours. Ultimately, the poison damages the heart and other viscera, but typically death comes only after 12 to 24 hours, or even longer. Statistics from the 1800s suggest that about half of those poisoned died.

Unfortunately for the health of the Victorians, arsenic was also a very useful chemical. It was commonly used for killing rats, in colouring green wallpaper and in fixing the bright new dyes that caused mid-century fashions to flare brightly with colour. Its insidious effects could be extremely debilitating: sometimes invalids got better during a trip to the seaside simply because they were no longer breathing in toxic fumes from their bedroom wallpaper at home.

And it was very readily available. ‘On account of the facility with which it may be procured in this country, even by the lowest of the vulgar,’ wrote one toxicologist in 1829, ‘it is the poison most frequently chosen for the purpose of committing murder.’ Completely odourless, it could easily be slipped into food or drink. In France, arsenic was known as
poudre de succession
, or ‘inheritance powder’, and until 1836 it was impossible to detect whether arsenic was present in a dead body. Its effects were almost indistinguishable from those of cholera.

That year, however, a chemist named James Marsh published an article in the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
titled an ‘Account of a method of separating small quantities of arsenic from substances with which it may be mixed’. This was the so-called ‘Marsh Test’, a method of detecting arsenic, and the discovery would have far-reaching effects, raising people’s awareness of this silent, secret killer.

The 1840s became a decade characterized by a new fear of being poisoned. The journal
Household Words
claimed that 249 people had been poisoned to death between 1839 and 1849, but that only 85 murderers had been convicted. Poisoning was ‘a moral epidemic more formidable than any plague’, claimed the
Pharmaceutical Journal
. Likewise,
The Times
believed that many deaths by poison escaped the notice of doctors, and one of its writers pointed out the peculiar horror of a poisoning: ‘domestic treason’ was implied, the poisoner presenting the smiling face of spouse, friend or doctor.

But a big dose of arsenic was a crude and violent way of finishing someone off, and once the Marsh Test had been created, the murderer was in danger of detection if the remains of his
victims were examined. It was much more sophisticated and slick to administer poison drop by drop, causing the victim’s health to decline over time, so that the final
coup de grâce
would arouse no suspicion. The ‘clumsy method of poisoning by large doses of arsenic’, as the
Pharmaceutical Journal
put it, was about to give way to poisoning ‘as an exact science’.

One of the most prolific poisoners of the period (at least among those caught) was Mary Ann Cotton, who seems to have successfully killed three husbands, fifteen children or step-children and a lodger. Her motive was to benefit financially from insurance policies taken out in their names. Suspicion was aroused when, after the death of one of her little boys, she visited the insurance company’s office even before calling on the doctor. She was found guilty and hanged at Durham Gaol.

Many believed (albeit without particularly convincing proof) that the new and vigorous industry of life insurance was growing hand in hand with sales of deadly arsenic. Such was the concern that, in 1850, Parliament decided that the lives of children under three years old could not be insured for more than £3.

But the most sensational poisoner case of the nineteenth century was that of William Palmer, of Rugeley. Its notoriety was due to the fact that – like Harold Shipman in the twentieth century – every affluent newspaper reader felt that he or she could easily have become one of his victims. For Palmer was a doctor.

Born in Staffordshire in 1824, Palmer trained as a chemist in Liverpool, studied medicine in London and obtained his licence from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1846. He then returned to his native Rugeley to practise. Palmer struggled to live within his means,
and also seemed terribly unlucky in his family life. He married, and his mother-in-law came to join his household. She soon died in mysterious circumstances. Four of Palmer’s children then died, of ‘convulsions’. These deaths didn’t seem unusual at first – infant deaths were much more common at the time – but when his wife died, too, at the age of 27, it seemed that Palmer was shedding relatives with remarkable rapidity. He had insured her life for £13,000.

Dr William Palmer of Rugeley, poisoner.

Palmer attempted to take out another life insurance policy on his brother, who suffered from alcoholism, but now his actions
were beginning to arouse suspicion. The insurance company sent Dickens’s friend, Inspector Field, to Rugeley to investigate what was going on (Scotland Yard detectives were available for private hire by anyone with the money to pay). Field concluded that the company should not pay up, as Palmer had been encouraging his brother to drink himself to death. Meanwhile, he’d also begun an affair with his housemaid, with whom he had an illegitimate child. It seemed that Palmer’s life was slipping out of his control.

Financial security could, perhaps, have been restored if Palmer’s final plot, against another friend, John Parsons Cook, had succeeded. Cook was a rich if weak-willed young man, who was Palmer’s betting buddy. After a very successful day’s gambling together at the horse races in 1855, Cook was flush with funds. But instead of enjoying his triumph, he felt rather sick, and was overheard to claim that ‘that damn Palmer has been dosing me’. Cook retreated to the Talbot Arms Inn, in Rugeley, to recuperate. Luckily, it seems, this inn was situated opposite Palmer’s house, so Cook’s friend was on hand to provide treatment. But the patient’s condition only improved when Palmer was called away to London.

On Palmer’s return, the pattern of sickness returned too. Cook seems repeatedly to have fallen ill after drinks given to him by his doctor: after the brandy, a cup of coffee, and after the coffee, a bowl of soup. (Palmer is often credited with introducing a novelty into the English language: the friendly offer of a drink, ‘What’s your poison?’ Rather disappointingly, however, its first recorded use dates from well after his death.) Poor old Cook eventually expired, vomiting and writhing, his entire body convulsed by his agonising final throes.

The death throes of Joseph Cook were much discussed. The arching of the body could have been the result of tetanus, or strychnine poisoning.

It later emerged that Palmer had been a frequent purchaser of strychnine, although the two chemists who’d sold it to him had both failed to record the fact – as they were obliged to by law – in their shop’s ‘Poison Books’. And, once Cook was dead, Palmer was able further to exploit his standing as a doctor. Even though Cook had accused Palmer of poisoning him during his last, painful hours, the doctor was allowed, as a courtesy, to attend his friend’s post-mortem.