The Invention of Murder (37 page)

Even now, Dickens had not worked Wainewright out of his system, and in 1870 he produced ‘Hunted Down’. Dickens was a friend of the same Henry Smith of the Eagle Life Assurance Company who had provided Bulwer with Wainewright’s papers. By 1848 a story was current that Smith had been in love with Helen Abercromby, and had gone to France not for the Eagle, but for vengeance. Dickens scribbled out a rough idea for a story: ‘Devoted to the destruction of a man … The secretary in the Wainewright case, who had fallen in love. with the murdered girl.’ From this he created Julius Slinkton, who insures the life of his surviving niece after her sister mysteriously dies; she too is now ailing – ‘The world is a grave!’ he sighs mournfully. Slinkton is unmasked by an actuary, who was in love with the dead niece, and afterwards made it his life’s work to expose Slinkton. He ensures that her sister is spirited away to safety, and Slinkton commits suicide. The introduction to the 1870s edition was signed ‘J.C.H.’, John Camden Hotten, and he appended his own highly coloured version of Wainewright’s story – ‘It was death to stand in his path – it was death to be his friend – it was death to occupy the very house with him’ – crediting him with at least five more forgeries, and a full complement of murders.

Throughout the 1860s these elements – the glamour of the man, his gentlemanly status, and the murders, always by poison, sometimes via a poisoned ring – were repeated over and over, as in Mrs Braddon’s
The Trail of the Serpent,
in which the villain commits suicide ‘by means of a lancet. concealed in a chased gold ring of massive form and exquisite workmanship’. In Wilkie Collins’
The Moonstone
the villain is revealed to have embezzled a trust by forging both the power of attorney and the trustees’ signatures on the order instructing the bank to pay out. In
The Haunted Hotel,
Collins returned to the insurance scam with a glamorous, scoundrelly Continental wastrel, Baron Rivar, who murders a peer and swaps his body with that of a dying servant in order to profit from a £10,000 policy. In 1877, Dickens’ magazine
All the Year Round
rehearsed the story once more, and the following year in Mrs Braddon’s
Charlotte’s Inheritance
a stockbroker facing financial ruin persuades his stepdaughter Charlotte to insure her life. As with Helen Abercromby, he escorts her to the insurance offices. She begins to fade, and, as in ‘Hunted Down’, she is spirited out of the house by her concerned friends, after which she recovers to marry happily.

The theatre took to Wainewright too, although many plays involving poison were retrospectively said to have been influenced by his crimes, when they were in fact more consistent simply with straightforward melodrama. The drama critic Chance Newton wrote that in his youth
Who Did It?
at the Britannia was based on Wainewright’s crimes, but the surviving playscript shows no such resemblance – it is about a poisoner, but there is no insurance element at all; instead the poisoner kills before he is cut out of a will. Similarly, in 1898 there was said to be a portrait of Wainewright in
The Medicine Man,
written for Henry Irving. It is difficult, again, to discern any Wainewright elements apart from an aura of stylish evil. Tregenna (Irving) is a society doctor who practises hypnotism (although it is never referred to as such), gaining the confidence of Sylvia, the daughter of his lost love, in order to be revenged, after a quarter of a century, on the man who stole her away from him. After alienating Sylvia from her father and her fiancé, Tregenna discovers that her father never knew his wife had a previous love, and twenty-five years of hatred vanish like the morning mist. (At the moment the scales fall from his eyes he is rather unfortunately murdered by a patient, but it’s the thought that counts.)

Thus, by the end of the century Wainewright no longer meant forgery, or insurance poisoning, but simply an urbane, cultured man committing gratuitous murder. As early as de Quincey, Wainewright was considered to be a ‘murderer of a freezing class; cool, calculating, wholesale in his operations’. This became the predominant motif. Oscar Wilde, in 1889, celebrated him not merely as ‘a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian … and a dilettante of all things delightful, but also a forger. a subtle and secret poisoner. powerful with “pen, pencil, and poison”’. Wilde stressed his dandyish airs, his foppish dress and his fine discrimination. By this time, the actuality was far enough in the past for Wilde easily to conflate two myths, repeating the tale of Wainewright claiming proudly in gaol that his cellmates had never ‘offer[ed] me the broom’, and adding that he was imprisoned alongside ‘the agent of an insurance company’ – a misremembering of Henry Smith of the Eagle Insurance Company.

The following year the writer Havelock Ellis used Wainewright in his sociological study
The Criminal
as an example of ‘the perfect picture of the instinctive criminal in his most highly developed shape … a moral monster’. To back this up, he repeated the now-familiar myths: the Abercromby murders (plural), the French murders, the supposed diary. Ellis also added his own flourish, that Wainewright had ‘admitted … with extraordinary vanity and audacity, his achievements in poisoning’. As, not unnaturally, Wainewright preferred not to be executed, he had done no such thing.

By mid-century, however, Wainewright’s crime appeared minor compared to the many atrocities laid at the door of Dr William Palmer. Palmer’s crimes seemed extraordinary, and extraordinarily evil, to the respectable professional classes because he was one of their own. As one noted: ‘No one cared to cast the first stone. A family that includes in its members a clergyman, a surgeon, and a lawyer, would … require as cautious handling as a hedge-hog.’ But, once in the public consciousness, these middle-class murderers began to appear ubiquitous: ‘A London man of business is disposed of, in a crowded train, returning to his home in the suburbs; a medical practitioner poisons his relations under the eyes of the Glasgow doctors; a child is found mysteriously dead in the bosom of a respectable family; a young lady buys arsenic, and her lover dies.’
*

William Palmer was born at Rugeley, in Staffordshire, in 1824, the son of a prosperous timber merchant who left his children possibly as much as £10,000 apiece. Palmer trained at Bart’s (St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College) in London; by 1846 he was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and practising in Rugeley. He married and had five children, although only one survived infancy. Palmer kept racehorses, and devoted far more time to the turf than to medicine; by 1852 he had essentially given up his practice. In 1854, overwhelmed by debt, he insured his wife’s life for £13,000 (some said £30,000). Soon after the first premium was paid, she was dead. That same year, Palmer attempted to insure his brother Walter’s life. Walter, an alcoholic, had been rejected by two companies. One finally agreed to insure him, and in August 1855 Palmer bought prussic acid from a chemist; his brother died two days later. Soon afterwards Palmer recommended as a candidate for insurance George Bates, a ‘gentleman … with a famous cellar of wine’, suggesting a £25,000 policy. The insurance company sent an investigator, only to discover that Bates was actually Palmer’s groom. Foiled, Palmer forged a bill to get ready cash. The bill would have fallen due on 20 November, but by then circumstances had changed.

On 13 November John Cook, a racecourse friend of Palmer, had a big win with his horse, Polestar, at Shrewsbury races. That evening Palmer and Cook sat drinking brandy and water, although Cook complained of the taste, and later that night he was taken ill. After two days he had recovered enough for the two men to travel to Rugeley, Cook staying at the Talbot Arms, across the road from Palmer’s house. On 17 November, Palmer ordered coffee for Cook, who was immediately stricken with the same symptoms he had suffered at Shrewsbury. That day and the next, Palmer dosed the vomiting Cook, and ordered special broth for him. On the second day, Palmer consulted Dr Bamford, aged eighty-two; he diagnosed, with Palmer’s help, ‘bilious diarrhoea’, prescribing purgatives and morphia. Palmer went to London, and Cook improved; when Palmer returned, Cook declined. Palmer had bought strychnine while he was away, and the following day he purchased more strychnine and some opium. Finally, on the night of 20 November, Palmer dosed Cook once more, and within half an hour he vomited, suffered a series of terrible convulsions, and was dead. Dr Bamford signed a death certificate giving the cause of death as apoplexy.

Cook’s stepfather, a man named Stevens, arrived shortly after the death, to find Palmer making preparations to bury Cook in Rugeley without any of his family present. Stevens asked for Cook’s betting book and papers, but Palmer brushed him off: ‘It’s of no manner of use. when a man dies, his bets are done with; and besides, Cook received the greater part of the money on the course.’ Cook’s papers had vanished, as had any cash, despite his recent large win and his immediate illness, which made it impossible that he had ever spent the money. Unsurprisingly, Stevens pushed for an investigation.

A post-mortem was scheduled, and Palmer, in a gesture of bizarre professional courtesy, was permitted to attend. When the viscera were removed, to be sent for analysis to London, Palmer jostled the doctor, and the stomach contents spilled out; later the jar with the organs disappeared; when it was located, the seal covering it had been cut through; even after that, the inn’s pot-boy reported that Palmer had offered him money to upset the chaise carrying the jars to the station. By the time the jars arrived in London, the stomach contents had vanished. The following week the analyst Alfred Swaine Taylor wrote to the coroner with his preliminary findings, only for the postmaster to hand the letter over to Palmer before it was delivered (the postmaster was later prosecuted). Palmer also sent the coroner a gift of some game, and £10.

Despite this, the resumed inquest might have gone either way on the medical evidence. Taylor was unable to isolate any strychnine (the only poison Palmer was known to possess that would have caused the tetanic convulsions Cook suffered), and instead found a small trace of antimony, although not enough to result in death. Antimony poisoning causes dizziness, headache and vomiting, not convulsions. As always, however, Taylor was prepared to commit himself on contradictory (or no) evidence. He therefore ignored the poison he had actually found, and instead gave a judgement based on the poison he could not find: Cook had ‘died from tetanus, and that tetanus was caused by medicine given to him shortly before his death’, in pills containing strychnine. The jury took less than ten minutes to find a verdict of wilful murder of Cook by Palmer.

Two weeks later, the bodies of Palmer’s wife and brother were exhumed. A solicitor arrived for their inquest with a watching brief for twenty insurance companies. Taylor again testified, this time that Anne had been poisoned by antimony; the jury again found for wilful murder by Palmer. At Walter’s inquest, the boot-boy of the hotel where he had lived told how Palmer had given him alcohol for Walter (who was supposedly drying out), and was later seen putting something in the bottles. Taylor this time announced that Walter had definitely been poisoned, although he had been unable to find any poison at all in his remains, and added that prussic-acid poisoning and alcoholism produced the same symptoms. (They don’t.) The coroner, the man Palmer had tried to bribe, brushed aside the insurance question and summed up for apoplexy, but after a long two hours the jury found a third time for poisoning by Palmer.

It was not only Palmer who played fast and loose with judicial etiquette. Taylor wrote two articles for the
Lancet
in January and February 1856, months before the trial, stating that Mrs Palmer had ‘died from the effects of tartar emetic [antimony], and from no other cause’. His sole concession to professionalism was that he coyly refused to give his reasons until the trial itself. He had already been reproved at Cook’s inquest after reports of his analysis had appeared in the
Morning Post
and
The Times.
Taylor denied releasing the details, and it is possible that the report was leaked by the police. But even if he had said nothing then, he was entirely responsible for an interview he gave to Augustus Mayhew, which appeared in the
Illustrated Times.
Taylor claimed that he had no idea Mayhew was a journalist, and that he had presented himself as the representative of an insurance company.
*
One leaked report may have been unfortunate; four press spreads in a matter of months cannot be coincidental. At Palmer’s trial, before Taylor gave his evidence, the defence used these indiscretions as a way of undermining him on the witness stand, reminding the jury that he ‘had used expressions towards the prisoner which, to say the least, were not discreet’.

Long before the trial in May 1856, the newspapers went into overdrive. This was the first major sensation since the newspaper tax had been abolished. Before 1855, only
The Times
sold more than 10,000 copies a day, although many working men and women would have read the papers had they been affordable. Some clubbed together to buy a single copy, others read the papers in pubs or coffee houses. In the mid-1850s 3–4d. bought a bed in a poor lodging house in London’s East End, including access to shoe-blacking, brushes and soap; a newspaper was ‘almost always’ included in the price. Once the heavy newspaper tax was removed, circulation skyrocketed: the
Telegraph
halved its price to 1d., and circulation immediately rose to 27,000 copies a day, rising again to 141,700 copies daily within the next six years, while
The Times,
still selling at 4d., had only half the readership. By 1860, 3 per cent of the population regularly read a daily paper, and another 12 per cent did so on Sundays. Then along came what may have been the biggest murder news since Thurtell. A special ‘Rugeley Number’ doubled the circulation of the
Illustrated Times
to 400,000;
Lloyd’s
bought two new rotary presses simply to keep up with demand.

Truth became an irrelevancy. The
Manchester Times
claimed that Palmer had owned a horse named Strychnine, which figured ‘mysteriously on the Turf’. (Palmer had no horse named Strychnine, and I have yet to work out what a horse must do to be mysterious.) The
Era
claimed that he had tried to kill the boot-boy at an inn near Rugeley, to prevent him giving evidence (of what, or to whom, did not appear); it added that he had tried in a fit of delirium tremens to cut his own throat (this possibly referred to his brother Walter). An article in
Lloyd’s
showed how anything at all about Palmer was considered fit to print: the paper claimed that Palmer had been seen with the Lord George Bentinck, a well-known habitué of the turf, on the day Bentinck died suddenly, and that Palmer had then claimed that Bentinck, whose betting book was missing, just like Cook’s, owed him a large sum. In the next paragraph, the article contradicted everything it had just said: Bentinck’s betting book was not missing, no one resembling Palmer had visited him on the day he died, and he had died at home, of a heart attack. Then it segued smoothly into a story of a missing commercial traveller, friendly with Palmer’s mother, who had vanished suspiciously after having been seen with her son. In the late 1830s, the Revd R.H. Barham had already mocked such reports: