The Invention of Murder (33 page)

In the eighteenth century, Friendly Societies had been devised to help the prudent cope with misfortune: for a small weekly sum, a worker could protect himself and his family against the consequences of unemployment or illness. Sometimes professional companies, but more frequently informal groups run out of taverns or by undertakers, were established so that, in case of death in the family, the funeral expenses were paid for from a general fund in exchange for as little as *Vd. a week per person. The Anatomy Act of 1832, aiming to end the resurrection trade, had established that, as well as the bodies of executed criminals, any body buried at the parish’s expense could be handed to anatomy schools for dissection. This was a further goad to be prudent and guard against the expenses of sudden death.

By 1858 there were 20,000 registered Friendly Societies in Britain, with two million members. But there were many more informal organizations, and these were the ones around which rumours swirled. Most clubs would not insure a child at birth – infant mortality was too high for that – and the more respectable the insuring body, the later the age at which it would accept enrolment. The Prudential took children at three months, and paid out only if the child died after a 1d. contribution had been made weekly for at least three months – even then, the payment was only 10s. After a year, that rose to £1, and £2 at two years. Many children were enrolled in more than one scheme. This could be for devious reasons – to collect more money at their death than any single institution would pay out. Or it could be for pragmatic ones – many small clubs were bankrupted by epidemics, or were prone to mismanagement or embezzlement by their unlicensed officials. Spreading the risk was a sensible way to proceed.

It was the case of Robert and Ann Sandys that first taught the public to fear the burial clubs. In Stockport in 1840, the beginning of the decade of economic hardship known as the ‘hungry forties’, the couple, impoverished Irish immigrants, lived with their family in a cellar. Initially a woman named Bridget Riley was arrested, suspected of murdering Robert and Ann’s four-year-old daughter Mary Ann. At the inquest, evidence was presented that Mrs Riley had ‘some time ago’ bought arsenic to kill rats, keeping what was left in a mug. Mary Ann and her brother had visited Mrs Riley, who gave them bread and tea; on the way home Mary Ann began to vomit, and shortly afterwards died. Suspicion lighted on Mrs Riley, as she and Mrs Sandys, once close friends, had fallen out. No post-mortem had been carried out, however, and there was no evidence that the child had been poisoned. The jury refused to return a verdict, and the inquest was adjourned. When it reconvened, the coroner opened the session by stating that, ‘since they last met, circumstances had come to light which would probably. show that the mother of the child was the guilty person, in causing the death’ not only of Mary Ann, but also of Elizabeth, her six-month-old sister, who had died some time before. The inquest heard that the children had been enrolled in a burial club, which had made a payment of £3.10s.6d. on the death of each child. A week later, Robert Sandys’ brother and sister-in-law, George and Honor Sandys, were also included in the charges, accused of poisoning their daughter Catherine, who they said had died of measles. A doctor testified that he had treated Mary Ann and ‘Jane’ (probably Elizabeth). ‘He thought there was very little inclination on the parents’ part to give the children any medicine’ – or perhaps very little money to pay for it? – and that they showed ‘great indifference towards the children’. A collector for the burial society testified that Robert had asked repeatedly how soon Mary Ann would be eligible for the payout. This could suggest wicked intent, or fear that he would be unable to pay for his child’s burial, and she would end up dissected by surgeons. Whatever the case, on 11 October 1840 the collector told him Mary Ann was now eligible; she died on the thirteenth. Another doctor gave evidence that he had examined a child who might have been Elizabeth (the report is unclear), and did not think she had been poisoned; meanwhile an analyst said he had ‘little doubt’ that she had been, even though the tests on the viscera had not been completed.

The coroner reminded the jury that ‘The whole of the parties were Irish. Though he did not wish to draw any invidious distinction, yet he wished the jury to understand, they were catholics,
and, on that account, might probably not attach that seriousness to the commission of a crime which parties of a different religion might do
.’ Even so, the jury took two and a half hours to reach a verdict. Ann was charged with the wilful murder of Elizabeth and Mary Ann; Robert, George and Honor with aiding and abetting in the deaths of Elizabeth and Mary Ann; while Honor was charged with the wilful murder of Catherine.

At the trial for the death of Mary Ann, no evidence was actually presented that the child had been murdered. The prosecution relied instead on Mrs Sandys’ statement that only she and her husband had fed the child during her illness, as an obvious indication of guilt. They also presented evidence that Mrs Riley had bought half a pound of arsenic, and that on the day of Mary Ann’s death some had gone missing, although it was unclear what this was supposed to add – Mrs Riley was not on trial, and there was no evidence that she and Ann Sandys were colluding, or even on speaking terms. It took fifteen minutes for the jury to find Robert and Ann Sandys not guilty. The next day they were tried again, for the murder of Elizabeth. The prosecution this time used Sandys’ questions to the collector of the burial society as evidence of his guilt, together with the fact that he had given the registrar of deaths and the church sexton two different causes of death. His defence was that no one had produced any evidence that Elizabeth had been murdered. This time the jury found him guilty, but Mrs Sandys innocent. Honor and George Sandys had by now vanished from the record, and it appears likely that the charges against them had been dropped. Fortunately for Sandys, the requirement that executions be carried out within forty-eight hours of sentencing had been abolished. His lawyers submitted arguments for an ‘arrest of judgement’ on a point of law, his sentence was ‘respited’ and he was eventually transported.

Despite an entire lack of evidence that any child had been poisoned, much less been intentionally killed, this was the case that convinced much of the population that scores – hundreds – thousands – of the poor routinely murdered their children for cash. Even in cases where the money element was entirely missing, the burial-club bogey was superimposed. In 1847 Mary Ann Milner was found guilty of the murder of her sister-and father-in-law.
The Times
printed a report that before her death she said that she had done it because her sister-in-law ‘was continually vexing her, and making herself unpleasant to her; and that, in revenge, she determined to rid both herself and brother of the wife and child’, while her mother-and father-in-law ‘came to her house on all occasions, as though it was their own, and took and did what they liked, without regard to her; and also that her husband gave them money and things …’
*
Yet before her execution, the
Morning Chronicle
editorialized: ‘The only imaginable motive for the conduct of the wretched woman. was the obtaining moneys from burial-clubs on the deaths of the deceased.’ At neither trial had there been any mention of money, nor any suggestion that Mrs Milner had tried to claim anything on their deaths, nor even evidence that the deceased had been insured.

It was not just newspaper gossip: serious thinkers considered the reality of mass burial-society murder to be indisputable. In 1843, soon after Robert Sandys’ sentence was commuted, Thomas Carlyle reminded his readers of ‘The Stockport Mother and Father’: they think, ‘What shall we do to escape starvation?’ and then look at ‘starveling Tom’, who would be better off ‘out of misery’, and the money used to keep ‘the rest of us … alive[.] It is thought, hinted; at last it is done.’ (As the coroner had done, he also laid stress on their nationality.) A couple of years later, burial-society deaths were now simply assumed to be part of the natural order. In Disraeli’s
Sybil,
a poor woman, needing to repay a loan, promises that ‘we shall have a death in our family soon: this poor babe can’t struggle on much longer. It belongs to two burial-clubs … after the drink and the funeral, there will be enough to pay all our debts.’ The idea of vicious working-class parents making money out of their children’s misery appeared in all sorts of guises. A broadside, ‘A Copy of Verses on Mary Arnold, the Female Monster’, tells of a woman who blinded her daughter to make her a more lucrative beggar by placing beetles in nutshells and tying them over her eyes until they ate through. This was presented as a true story, although it was actually lifted from Reynolds’s
Mysteries of London.
*

In 1854, a parliamentary select committee on the Friendly Societies questioned this unswerving belief in mass murder. The committee noted how few cases there were where there was any evidence, and how many there were of unsupported assertion – cases that included the phrases ‘everyone knows’, ‘I was told of a case’, ‘you hear it everywhere’. The writer Harriet Martineau, in
Once a Week,
a family magazine, wrote in exactly these vague terms: she ‘knew of’ a woman who had murdered her eight babies by putting arsenic on her breasts. She added darkly that there were many (unnamed) parents who told doctors they could not pay their bills right away, but would when the burial-society money arrived – as if paying doctors’ bills was not exactly what insurance was designed for. Even those who should have known better felt no need of hard evidence. Alfred Swaine Taylor, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Guy’s Hospital in London, reported in 1851 that there had been 185 arsenic poisoning cases in England in 1837–38; ‘We have not seen any statistics of the last year or two,’ he added blithely, ‘but we certainly think the number must have increased.’

This was the beginning of a new panic that began a few years after the Sandys case, when a conviction took hold that dozens, if not hundreds, of cases of domestic poisoning were taking place every year. The idea of the ‘secret poisoner’, a cunning fiend who utilized a ‘poison … so rare that the greatest chemist shall find no trace of it’, suddenly became widespread. The last quote is from an 1860 stage version of
The Woman in White,
in which the master criminal Count Fosco puts a mysterious substance into a glass of water, waves his handkerchief over it and gives it to his victim to drink. In the real world, however, it was not some mythical unknown poison that was feared, but arsenic. Arsenic was colourless, odourless, tasteless, and, most of all, cheap. It was also found in dozens of household items: in paint, dyes, soaps and patent medicines. It was used for pest control, as a fertilizer and weedkiller, in stables as a wash for horses’ coats, and on farms as sheepdip. Once newspapers picked up the idea, the ubiquity of arsenic made it terrifying; as they printed more (and more sensational) cases, it appeared that poisoning cases were on the rise.

Medical journals, and professionals like Taylor, should have been calming influences, but instead they drove these fears on. Today, the statements from the professionals appear little different from those of the newspaper sensations. The
Annual Register
wrote in 1847 that poison ‘appears to have become fearfully prevalent’;
The Times
countered that in some places arsenic was ‘a weapon in the hands of the weaker vessel’; while the
Illustrated London News
warned that ‘the women of England of the lowest and most ignorant class are proved to be addicted to this crime, for the sake of pecuniary profit’. Compare this to the Coroners’ Society, which in 1855 ‘urged its members to be vigilant against the rising tide of secret poisoning’, while the
London Medical Journal,
edited by Taylor, ran a series in 1847 entitled ‘On the Increase of Secret Poisoning’, and in 1855, Taylor reported that ‘he himself [had] received annually … from 100 to 150 confidential cases [of secret poisoning]’.
*

What these widely disseminated stories made it impossible to realize at the time was that at most, in the 1840s two cases a year in England and Wales revolved around murder or attempted murder by poison, and that number remained stable for twenty years. These figures were available, but no one, not even the medico-legal fraternity, was reading them with an unclouded mind. How could they, given newspapers reporting murder rings operating across the country? Everyone saw the increased numbers of poison trials: from 1829 to 1838 the Old Bailey held seven, while from 1839 to 1848 there were twenty-three, and from 1849 to 1858 there were seventeen, before dropping back to seven in the following decade. But more trials – even more guilty verdicts – did not necessarily mean more poisonings. An increased level of newspaper rumour encouraged more fear; more fear brought more accusations; more accusations saw more trials.

The newspapers laid great stress on women poisoners, particularly working-class women poisoners. An early prototype can be found in 1816, the year after Eliza Fenning was hanged. Matthew Holroyd, a weaver, lived near Ashton-under-Lyne with his wife Susannah and their three children. In April, their eight-year-old, their newborn and Holroyd all died. Mrs Holroyd earned her living by nursing illegitimate children while their mothers worked, and one of these mothers now gave evidence that a fortune teller had promised Mrs Holroyd that, within six weeks, three funerals ‘would go from her door’. According to her evidence, when Holroyd had complained that his gruel tasted peculiar, his wife urged him on, saying ‘it was the last gruel she would ever prepare him’. Many of the elements that were to recur in the mid-century poison cases are present in these few bare details: the women mostly lived in small rural communities; there was little or no evidence that a murder had taken place; there were reports of an angry snatch of conversation which could in hindsight be interpreted as a threat to kill; superstition of some sort frequently played a role; and the accused was often an outsider, in some way deviant – Mrs Holroyd nursed illegitimate children, other women accused were sexually promiscuous, had too many children they could not support, or were simply sharp-tongued or bad-tempered.