The Invention of Murder (39 page)

The sporting connection was, indeed, among the elements of the case that continued to fascinate. In January 1856, long before the trial, the
Racing Times
reported briefly on betting for the Derby, and at much greater length on the presence at Epsom of Captain Hatton, the Chief of the Staffordshire Constabulary. The paper appended a notice requesting ‘Any gentleman who paid the late Mr. Cook money at Shrewsbury Races, or who had, or witnessed any money transactions with him at that time’ to get in touch with Hatton. According to
Household Words,
the gamblers of the Stock Exchange were ‘offering long odds’ on Palmer being acquitted. Even after the verdict, according to the
Racing Times,
‘the turfites’ merely thought of Palmer as ‘a black sheep’, and added that his horses, now sold to pay his creditors, were doing very nicely; in October, one of them, previously known as Chicken, but now the more aggressively named Vengeance, won the Cesarewitch, with Cook’s erstwhile horse Polestar coming an ironic second. Another of Palmer’s horses was renamed Gemma di Vergy, which, the
Racing Times
noted, was the name of a ‘very notorious murderer’ in an opera. (In fact, Donizetti’s Gemma di Vergy is a blameless heroine whose husband is murdered by a slave.)

Other forms of murder sightseeing were possible for those not attracted to the turf: in June, the
Daily News
reported special trains from the Potteries to Rugeley ‘for the express purpose of enabling persons to visit the scenes of the murder!’ A photographer rented Palmer’s house, and advertised his studio ‘at the rear of the PREMISES LATELY OCCUPIED BY W. PALMER’. Madame Tussaud’s had a waxwork in place the day after the execution; Allsop’s in Liverpool was advertising a display five days after that; by 1859 the Royal Parthenon in Trongate had also added its own model of Palmer. If anything, his crimes grew greater rather than less. In the 1869 catalogue to Madame Tussaud’s, Palmer’s ‘victims’ are plural but unquantified; by 1873 ‘he was believed to have poisoned more than a dozen persons’. There were also, as had now become routine, Staffordshire figurines of Palmer, and another of a generic Georgian building carefully labelled ‘Palmer’s house’.

For sheer nastiness, however, it was difficult to compete with a fairground show at the Wilmslow Races, in Cheshire. Here, four months after Palmer’s execution, John Fletcher advertised that he had

The press and public remained obsessed by Palmer for the remainder of the century. The
Sporting Times
was particularly smitten. From December 1879 to February 1881, over forty issues, it published weekly verbatim transcripts of the trial. In 1886 it highlighted Palmer as a ‘Turf Celebrity’ in two issues, returning a month later with ‘Palmer’s Love Letters’ (two rather dull letters he had written several decades before). It mocked – itself? its readers? – with little asides such as ‘we shall get [Palmer] comfortably hanged by about Easter’. This was different only in quantity, not kind, from the
Pall Mall Gazette,
which claimed to have seen ‘the poison bottles of Palmer’ at Madame Tussaud’s – even though anyone who had followed the case had to know they could not be authentic. Perhaps, given this, it should not be surprising that a report appeared in the
Liverpool Courier
in 1875 claiming that Palmer, ‘the Rugby [sic] poisoner’, was ‘brother of an ex-Lord Chancellor’. The 1st Earl of Selborne felt obliged to point out that, as ‘the only person named Palmer who has had the honour to fill the office of Lord Chancellor’, he was not ‘even remotely related to that notorious criminal’. ‘Palmer is not a very uncommon name,’ he added plaintively.

Yet in theatre, Palmer was barely represented. The verdict was delivered on 27 May 1856; on 29 May the Britannia submitted a melodrama,
Monti the Poisoner,
to the Lord Chamberlain for approval. This was a typical recipe of evil squires, betrayed lovers and comic servants, except that the gypsy fortune teller warns the abandoned wife to insure her life. Finally, when good wins out over evil, ‘Oliver kneels C[entre] with children, Stephen points to Policy Insurance which he’s holding up. The others group round him as the curtain descends.’ This play did not last long, and the success or otherwise of
The Rugeley Tragedy, or, the Life and Death of William Palmer!!
at Oldbury is unknown, but its playbill promised that it would conclude with ‘MUSIC AND DANCING, AND A LAUGHABLE FARCE!’ These appear to be the only traces of Palmer onstage.

Novelists briefly used Palmer’s name as shorthand for a generic murderer, as they had for the Mannings, as in Mrs Braddon’s
Aurora Floyd
in 1863: ‘If Mr. William Palmer had known that detection was to dog the footsteps of crime, and the gallows to follow at the heels of detection, he would most likely have hesitated long before he mixed the strychnine-pills for the friend whom, with cordial voice, he was entreating to be of good cheer.’ The same author’s
Birds of Prey
and
Charlotte’s Inheritance
(1867–68) were involved tales of insurance and murder based on a mishmash of Wainewright and Palmer details.

But before there was any real opportunity for the novelists to get to grips with Palmer, they were brought up short. For only three years later, the whole thing happened again: a medical man was accused of murder, this time within the family.

Thomas Smethurst was reported to have been a hydropathic practitioner at a spa who gave up his practice on his marriage to a prosperous, and much older, woman.
*
By 1858 the Smethursts had rooms in Bayswater, where Isabella Bankes was a fellow lodger. She was a woman of some small property – £1,700 outright, and the income on a lifetime interest in £5,000. After a brief period of time, and a lot of gossiping among the lodgers, she moved to new lodgings in Richmond, and shortly afterwards she was followed by the doctor. The couple went through a bigamous form of marriage, and three months later the new and not-quite-legitimate Mrs Smethurst became ill, was treated by several local doctors called in by Smethurst, but continued to decline. Her sister was informed – it was the first the bride’s family had heard of her marriage – and after a single meeting, Smethurst wrote to say that Mrs Smethurst’s doctor had forbidden future visits. A month after the illness first manifested itself, Smethurst gave a solicitor a draft will leaving everything to him after his ‘wife’s’ death (he said the draft had been drawn up by a barrister, but later it was proved to be in his own handwriting). At Smethurst’s urging, the will was, unusually, executed and signed on a Sunday – an indication of the need for speed. The doctors now suspected ‘unfair treatment’, and had Mrs Smethurst’s ‘evacuations’ tested, at which point the police were called in, and Smethurst was arrested. A letter to his first wife was found, which indicated that they remained on harmonious terms, and that he expected at some point to return to her. The magistrates decided that the case against Smethurst was not strong enough, and he was discharged, only to be rearrested the next day after the second Mrs Smethurst died.

The trial followed the pattern set by Palmer’s, with much emphasis placed by both sides on the medical evidence. Alfred Swaine Taylor was, once more, expert witness for the prosecution, and he testified to finding arsenic and antimony in the medicines Isabella Bankes had been taking, as well as antimony in the viscera. However, he was obliged to confess to the court that the arsenic in the medicine had been introduced by himself in error: he had contaminated the samples by using a copper gauze for the Reinsch test, the gauze itself containing arsenic.
*
He somewhat nullified this admission, however, by adding that the potassium chlorate Mrs Smethurst had been taking had contained enough poison to kill her, and was of a type that dispersed rapidly in the system. Thus, he suggested, the very fact that he could find no poison was in itself evidence that she had been poisoned. The defence responded by highlighting the absence of any symptoms of arsenic or antimony poisoning; furthermore, the quantities of arsenic found in the dying woman’s faeces could easily be accounted for by her various medicines. Other possibilities they suggested were that the symptoms were those of dysentery; Mrs Smethurst’s ex-landlady testified that she had had a history of bilious illnesses. Or, possibly, as she was forty-three years old and pregnant, vomiting should be expected.
†

The judge did not rely entirely on the medical evidence in his summing-up. Instead, it was Smethurst’s bigamy that weighed most heavily: the judge repeated the word ‘felony’ six times in referring to the bigamous marriage. It made sense to focus on this, for otherwise there was no motive. Smethurst inherited Isabella Bankes’ £1,700, but her income – about £200 a year, or the wages of a senior clerk – terminated on her death. His first wife was prosperous, and they had lived very comfortably on her money for over thirty years. They were on good terms, she appeared to have no trouble with the idea of a second Mrs Smethurst. What was he killing for? The jury didn’t pause long, however, finding him guilty in twenty minutes.

Immediately, the public and the newspapers began to worry away at the verdict.
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
pointed out that while there were grounds for suspicion, the prosecution had not proved that Isabella Bankes had been poisoned at all, much less that she had been poisoned deliberately, and even less that Smethurst had done so. The
Leader
summarized the pros and cons. Against the verdict: the scientific evidence was, at best, inconclusive, given Taylor’s blunder with the copper gauze, and poison could therefore only be considered as ‘affording a probability that required corroboration’. For the verdict: the bigamous marriage, which would be revealed sooner or later, while Isabella Bankes’ death would cover it over; and the money she left. The article then went on to Smethurst’s bad character: he had committed bigamy, he had lied about not being able to afford a nurse, he had kept his second wife’s family away, he had made her sign her will in her maiden name,
*
and on a Sunday, too.

The
Daily News
carried a stream of letters questioning the verdict, and noted other questionable elements. The defence had objected at the very start of the trial to the Lord Chief Baron acting as judge, as he was ‘an intimate personal friend of Dr. Taylor’. The judge had brushed this aside: he had ‘not seen [Taylor] for a considerable time’, and anyway all of the legal confraternity knew the analyst. Then a juryman at the start of the trial said he was ‘strongly prejudiced against the prisoner’. The judge told him he should have mentioned it before, and he was now legally powerless to dismiss him. After the Palmer verdict the newspapers had begun to look at the role of the expert witness. With Smethurst, the
Telegraph
began to question the use of assertion: statements were not proof, it said, highlighting the fact that Taylor had not only not proved that poison was present, he hadn’t even attempted to do so.

With the developments in forensic science, the newspapers had printed blow-by-blow descriptions of post-mortems and analyses, educating their readers as the cases progressed. In the case of William Richardson, acquitted in 1848 of murdering his son (who was also his grandson: he had fathered the child on his daughter), the
Daily News
gave columns of description of the processes the child’s remains were subjected to:

This is a small extract only – the full report went on for columns. Yet as the century progressed, and particularly during these high-profile poisoning cases, the public became increasingly disillusioned with experts. The
Lancet,
after the Palmer case, thought rather optimistically that ‘juries will learn how. authoritative the decision of Medicine may be. and the public will perceive ample reason for placing firm reliance upon science for the detection and prevention of crime’. What the public actually saw was a group of men, all claiming absolute knowledge, and all contradicting each other bad-temperedly. Even when they didn’t disagree, they were frequently and obviously both arrogant and ignorant. At Mrs Brown’s trial in Beaminster for the murder of her husband (see pp.359–62), in the same year as Palmer, the prosecution’s expert rejected her claim that her husband had been kicked in the head by a horse: the wound had to have been produced by a blunt instrument, such as a hatchet, he stated categorically. On cross-examination, he admitted that he had never seen a fractured skull, nor had he seen a wound caused by the kick of a horse, nor, for that matter, by a blunt instrument, nor even a hatchet. His fellow surgeon agreed nevertheless: ‘I know there have been remarkable instances’ when people with serious head injuries recovered, ‘but in this case it is morally impossible’. Dickens may have resuscitated the phrase, if not from this rather obscure trial, then from others (see Alfred Swaine Taylor’s moral certainty on p.242). In
Edwin Drood
(1870), when Drood goes missing, Mr Datchery asks if there are ‘strong suspicions of any one?’ ‘More than suspicions, sir … all but certainties,’ replies the pompous mayor. ‘… But proof, sir, proof must be built up stone by stone … It is not enough that Justice should be morally certain; she must be
im
morally certain.’ ‘Immoral. How true!’ says Mr Datchery. The reading public learned to be distrustful of evidence, and even more distrustful of experts.