The Invention of Murder (38 page)

The pamphlet and book market also fattened itself on Palmer. One pamphlet,
The Doings of William Palmer,
appeared four months before the trial, advertising Palmer’s ‘public frauds and private trickeries’. It reported that his children died ‘very, very young’, that his father-in-law’s ‘brains were blown out, but by whom was never discovered’ (his father-in-law had committed suicide), and added a story of a man who had died mysteriously after making a large loan to Palmer. Meanwhile,
The Illustrated Life and Career of William Palmer of Rugeley
reported yet another racing man who had died mysteriously after a win, and whose betting book and money too were missing, while Palmer’s mother-in-law went on her last visit to her son-in-law with the words, ‘I know I shall not live a fortnight!’

Palmer’s defence protested that he would not receive a fair trial in Staffordshire.
*
The
Manchester Examiner
reported that while the defence may have wanted a change of venue, the people of Stafford – particularly those connected to the ‘victualling interest’ – ‘loudly protest against this, as a violation of what they conceive to be their just rights’. Despite the grievances of the catering trade, it was agreed that it was perhaps not always ‘expedient to the ends of justice’ to hold a trial where local feelings ran high, and what was colloquially called Palmer’s Act was passed, which permitted a venue change for any defendant where it was feared that this might prejudice a trial’s outcome. Given the national newspaper coverage of Palmer’s case, it is not certain that a jury anywhere else would be any less influenced. Certainly the social status of the spectators at the Old Bailey was remarkable: the Duke of Cambridge, Lord Lucan, Lord Derby, Gladstone, the Marquis of Anglesey, Earl Grey, Lord Denbigh, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar and three sons of the Duke of Richmond were all reported to have attended at least once during the twelve-day trial. Prince Albert was known, or said to be known, to be following the case, and 4d. copies of
The Times
with the trial transcripts reportedly changed hands for 4s.

The trial revolved almost entirely around scientific evidence. This was the first time that strychnine was suggested as a cause of death in a criminal trial in England, and it was also the first time that the mass-newspaper-reading public had watched the role of medical and scientific experts unfold in a judicial setting. Taylor’s belief in strychnine poisoning was, to modern eyes, based on faith rather than reason. On opening Cook’s viscera, he said, ‘There was no smell of opium, of prussic acid, nor of spirits, nor of henbane, nor, indeed, of any poison … In the intestines and stomach there was nothing to indicate the cause of death. there was only a slight trace of antimony on the parts examined, and there was no trace of any other substance.’ He continued, ‘We have no evidence before us to enable us to form a judgment’ on whether antimony ‘was or was not the cause of death’; but still, he was certain that ‘the pills administered on Monday night and Tuesday night contained strychnine’. This he based on the fact that strychnine acts quickly, and Cook had been ‘drawn up like a bow’ (that is, his body had been convulsed in a rigid, tetanus-like arc). He agreed that the anatomists who had examined Cook’s spine and brain had said their appearance was not consistent with strychnine poisoning, and finished off by admitting that ‘I have never witnessed [strychnine’s] action on a human subject.’

This was the problem. None of the prosecution’s nine experts had ever examined a body poisoned by strychnine. Instead, experiments on rabbits had shown them that strychnine metabolized very quickly, and was not always detectable after death (three-quarters of a dose of strychnine metabolizes within a hundred minutes of administration). The prosecution therefore claimed that the failure to find evidence of strychnine simply meant that it metabolized too quickly to be detected, and presented Cook’s symptoms as evidence that the poison had been administered. The defence’s fifteen experts countered that the failure to detect strychnine indicated simply that no strychnine had been ingested. The great names of forensic science of the day went head to head: Taylor was the lead for the prosecution; William Herapath, one of the founders of the Bristol Medical School, Thomas Nunneley, surgeon and lecturer at the Leeds School of Medicine, and Henry Letheby, City of London Medical Officer of Health, all appeared for the defence.

The defence produced a letter Taylor had written after his original analysis, saying that, as the contents of the stomach were missing when the viscera were delivered to him, he could not find for or against strychnine. Another witness suggested that Cook’s symptoms might be attributable to ‘a delicate constitution’, syphilis, ‘disease of the lungs’, ‘mental depression and excitement’, or even a rare form of epilepsy where the patient retains consciousness, although he had to admit that he had never heard of such a thing. Unlike Taylor, both Nunneley and Herapath had actually anatomized bodies known to have been poisoned by strychnine (in Nunneley’s case, he said he had had experience of sixty cases over thirty years), and Herapath testified he had never failed to find post-mortem evidence of strychnine. The defence, however, had to proceed cautiously. They needed to maintain that Taylor was skilful enough to have discovered strychnine if it had been administered – if they suggested he was completely incompetent, it might imply that poison had indeed been present, but he was not clever enough to find it.

The judge leant heavily towards the prosecution, claiming that Herapath and Letheby were not expert witnesses, but ‘advocates’ for Palmer. This was indignantly denied: ‘Why are one half of these gentlemen to be held up to indignation for doing just what they all came to do?’ The remaining, non-scientific, witnesses were damning for Palmer: the two druggists’ assistants who had sold him strychnine; the apothecary who claimed he had asked him how much poison was needed to kill a dog; Cook’s stepfather and his tale of the missing betting book and cash; various servants at the Talbot Inn who synchronized Cook’s recurring bouts of illness with Palmer’s visits; Palmer’s behaviour at the post-mortem; his bribery of the coroner and postmaster; his parlous financial situation. Every piece of evidence on its own was weak, but the combined effect was overwhelming, and Palmer was convicted.

Yet no one considered the case had been proved. The
Morning Chronicle,
among others, agitated that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice, not because Palmer had not committed murder, but because the trial had failed to prove that murder had been committed. The case became an obsession, particularly among the medical profession. The
Lancet
produced a stream of articles on poisoning, medico-legal proof in general, and strychnine in particular, including ‘Notes on Three Lectures on the Physiological Action of Strychnia’ and ‘The Physiological Test for Strychnia’, and a promise that an analysis of the medical evidence would be forthcoming. This was followed by ‘On the Detection of Strychnia in Solution with Potassio-Tartrate of Antimony’, an editorial on medical and scientific witnesses at trials, a letter on the ‘Detection of Strychnine’, and a paper by Henry Letheby on ‘The Medico-Legal Chemistry of Strychnia’. At this time the Crimean War was raging, with its high death toll from typhoid, and Florence Nightingale’s well-publicized nursing crusade was under way. This generated a single article, ‘The Sanitary Condition of the British Army in the Crimea’, and a few essays on battle surgery, but nothing captured the attention of the doctors like Palmer. The
Medical Times
had even had its own dedicated reporter at the trial, and gave fifty-six columns to its coverage.

Palmer had erupted into public consciousness just as doctors were beginning to present themselves as professionals, separating their higher calling from the lower-status apothecaries and surgeons, culminating in the Medical Registration Act (1858), which permitted only those licensed by specific schools to call themselves doctor. Palmer was a medical man, trained at a prestigious medical school; yet he had used his professional status not only to poison, but also to certify for insurance policies for the purposes of fraud. At the end of the century Sherlock Holmes encapsulated the feelings this aroused: ‘When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.’ He then added, ‘Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession’ (Pritchard was executed in 1865 for the murder of his wife and mother-in-law in Glasgow). This was not remotely true, but the idea of the rogue physician was potent. (By the time Conan Doyle was writing, strychnine, in 1856 so mysterious, was familiar even to an army doctor-cum-general practitioner like Watson. In
The Sign of Four
Holmes describes the convulsions and ‘distortion of the face’ of a murdered man, and Watson immediately recognizes the symptoms of ‘some powerful vegetable alkaloid … some strychnine-like substance which would produce tetanus’.)

After such a confused trial, more than ever it was hoped that the criminal would confess before his execution – not for the sake of his soul, but to confirm that justice had been done. The
Journal of Medical Science
reported that ‘Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.’ But he remained mute. He was returned to Stafford Gaol to await execution, which despite heavy rain
*
was attended by perhaps as many as 100,000 people (the
Morning Chronicle’s
estimate), although it may have been half that – still a huge number for a town with a population of 45,000. The
Staffordshire Advertiser
said that between midnight and six o’clock on the morning of the execution, the main road into town was ‘a complete procession’ of all types of vehicles, as were the roads leading from the Potteries. One man claimed to have walked home to Accrington, seventy-five miles away, after the execution. And one journalist complained that ‘Perhaps no criminal of celebrity was ever executed in so inconvenient a place, so far as the facility for obtaining a view is concerned.’

Three years earlier, a German traveller had been told by an Englishwoman that if he wanted to see ‘Our popular festivals. Go to Newgate on a hanging day.’ This was the middle class’s view; and many of the working-class publications echoed it (in large part because they too were written by middle-class authors). In
The Boy Detective,
a penny-dreadful for boys, one character laments, ‘I allers was unlucky. now, arter I made the loveliest weal pie, and put a new feather in my pork pie ‘at … that little snake is respited! … Ain’t it provoking? Sich a day’s pleasure, too …’ The crowds at Stafford seemed to agree that an execution was ‘a day’s pleasure’, yet Palmer’s guilt continued to be in doubt. As late as 1874, the novelist Anthony Trollope had a lawyer say, ‘We were delighted to hang Palmer, – but we don’t know that he killed Cook.’ It was said that Palmer’s final words were, ‘I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.’ This sentence was analysed forwards and backwards. Was he saying that he was guilty of poisoning Cook by some other means? Or that he was guilty of poisoning someone else by strychnine? Or that he was innocent?

From the moment of Palmer’s conviction, trial reports were snapped up by eager amateur detectives. A copy of the
Illustrated and Unabridged Edition of
The Times
Report of the Trial of William Palmer
in the British Library has newspaper reports pasted in at relevant points, as though its owner wanted to provide an ‘I was there’ running commentary. While the cases of Eliza Fenning and others had produced books and pamphlets by journalists claiming to be written by the convicted themselves, for Palmer, publications supposedly written by others appeared. His brother, the Revd Thomas Palmer, indignantly denied that he was the author of
AN INQUIRY INTO the CHARGE of LORD CHIEF JUSTICE CAMPBELL, on the LATE TRIAL of WILLIAM PALMER, illustrative of its dangerous tendencies as destructive to the long enjoyed rights and privileges of all British subjects.
*
The coroner Thomas Wakley similarly repudiated authorship of
The Cries of the Condemned: Proofs of the Unfair Trial of William Palmer.
Less than two weeks after Palmer’s execution, one C.J. Collins, author of
Dick Diminy
(1853), a fashionable tale of the turf, wrote to the
Racing Times
to warn readers that the illustrations had been lifted from his novel to adorn a life of Palmer as though they were portraits.

Other publications were more authentic. Alfred Swaine Taylor published
Poisoning by Strychnia, with Comments on the Medical Evidence Given at the Trial of William Palmer …,
which should more accurately be entitled ‘The medical evidence at the trial, with comments on poisoning by strychnia’, such is the author’s concern to justify his trial evidence via a succession of straw men set up by himself, so that he can with some authority knock them down. By page 2, he is already warning the unsuspecting reader that Palmer’s defence used ‘an unusual amount of sophistry. misrepresentation … [and] personal attacks on witnesses whose evidence was of vital importance’. He also alludes darkly to the ‘attempted intimidation of the jury’, but produces no evidence.

Others just enjoyed the story: the anonymous
The Most Extraordinary Trial of William Palmer,
which went through four editions in less than a year, was published by a specialist in penny-bloods. Other publications advertised in the endmatter all have titles like
Sylvester Sound, the Somnambulist,
or are highwayman tales, or melodramas, or tales of pirates, shipwreck, and the occasional smuggler. At Southwark Police Court the month after the execution, a woman was convicted of shoplifting two titles from a bookstall in a railway station – she had stashed
The Christmas Tree
and
The Illustrated Life of William Palmer
under her shawl, despite being a woman of ‘considerable property’, with ‘highly respectable’ friends. Perhaps she was ashamed of her interest. It wasn’t only the English who were interested. A Greek-language publisher in the City, Stephanos Xenos, published a hefty two-volume work in Greek, the first volume of which was a vindication of his father, who had been accused of forgery; the second was entirely taken up with the trial of Palmer, with many plates of the people and events, including a splendid spread of Polestar winning at Shrewsbury Races.
*