The concoctions did indeed work, but also wrecked the health of the young woman, who, in an advanced state of emaciation exclaimed, ‘Had I never known Mary Bateman, my child would now have been in my arms, and I should have been a healthy woman – but it is in eternity, and I am going after it as fast as time and a ruined constitution can carry me.’ Whether the death of this unfortunate young woman and her unborn child were the first directly attributable to the ministrations of Mary as an abortionist we cannot now know. The only redeeming feature of the whole Stead affair was that eventually Mary was exposed – though Mrs Stead still fervently believed that the charms stitched into her clothing had the power to preserve her life. These were merely a number of long strips of paper tied in a knot enclosing a small scrap of rag and a small piece of gilt leather. When she was eventually persuaded to remove them, upon finding she was still well and breathing, the awful realisation of Mary’s exploitation of herself and her family led the wronged woman to threaten Mary with arrest and imprisonment for fraud, unless she immediately redeemed all the pawned household items and made good on the money she had extorted. Realising the game was up, Mary repaid the sum of four guineas, which we must assume was not honestly come by, but as for returning Mrs Stead’s furniture and clothing, unsurprisingly she reneged on her word. Yet it is a testament to Mary’s skill as a consummate deceiver that she continued to find a flourishing market for her criminal ‘services’, though it was possibly Mary’s next mark, a family called Cooper, that funded the repayment of the four guineas as she undoubtedly ran her scams concurrently.
Whether or not the Coopers were aware of Mary’s infamy, Mrs Cooper was nevertheless persuaded, through ignorance or blind faith, to believe that her husband was intent on selling the contents of their home and deserting with the proceeds. To avoid this and being left destitute, Mrs Cooper was advised by Mary to lodge the best of her furniture in Mary’s house for safe-keeping, including a fine grandfather clock, which very soon ended up in the pawnbrokers, along with the rest of the Coopers’ belongings. At least the Coopers emerged from their dealings with Mary with their lives, which is more than can be said for the three unfortunate women, a mother and two daughters, who ended up buried in the same grave, a consequence of Mary’s evil enterprise. This time, there was another alter ego – enter Miss Blythe.
Chapter 3
From The Hand Of Miss Blythe
As a precursor to the poisoning for which Mary Bateman was eventually to be tried and hanged, the Misses Kitchin, two unmarried Quaker sisters who ran a small drapers shop with their mother near St Peter’s Square in Leeds, certainly had cause to rue their acquaintance with Mary. St Peter’s Square fell within the Quarry Hill district of Leeds, in Georgian times a fashionable and genteel spa area where people came to take the benefit of the waters. From the seventeenth century, the northern spa resorts of Harrogate, Ilkley and the area around Croft-on-Tees were better known for offering a variety of hydro and other therapies, usually rather high-class affairs with residential accommodation. Leeds also began to exploit its own spas owing to the sulphuric waters bubbling up from the underlying geology, but although the waters from St Peter’s Well were said to ward off rheumatism and rickets, the sulphuric waters were also a contributory factor in the development of Leeds’ tanning and dyeing industries.
After ingratiating herself with the Kitchin sisters, Mary sometimes worked in their shop, becoming a confidante of theirs. As many had done before, and would continue to do, the ladies fell for Mary’s special brand of mysticism in predicting their futures. Although we cannot say to what extent the Kitchin sisters were staunch Quakers, it may be testament to Mary’s powers of persuasion that she duped them at all, since White magic, no less than Black, was condemned by Members of the Society of Friends. Some early Quakers were particularly vocal against the practices of ‘cunning folk’, perhaps because they themselves were accused by their critics of using sorcery to attract new members to their faith, and so wanted to distance themselves from such practices. Indeed, the final line of The Extraordinary Life sermonises that ‘Those who trust in Diviners shall be confounded and perish’. Perhaps however, the Kitchin sisters were more amenable to prophecies passed on from a third party, as Mary’s predictions now came from the successor to Mrs Moore, the equally fictitious ‘Miss Blythe’ whom Mary, as her mouthpiece, confidently asserted had the power to divine destinies. Why Mary decided to switch alter egos at this point is a mystery, though Miss Blythe, who apparently lived in Scarborough, was a true proficient and able to ‘read the stars’. Scarborough had been an important medieval stronghold (its castle ruins still dominate the skyline) but the acidic waters discovered by Elizabeth Farrow in 1626 had led to the place becoming a spa town. By 1735, it had new-fangled bathing machines that could be rolled down the beach to the water’s edge. Its elevation to a spa town gave Scarborough a new gentility which may well have impressed the Misses Kitchin.
In early September 1803 one of the sisters fell ill. Whether her sickness was genuine or induced by Mary we can only guess and Mary, in feigned concern, took upon herself the task of nursing her. Mary also had the kindness of heart to get medicines for her patient, apparently obtained directly from the hand of Miss Blythe, and personally prepared and administered these powders. Within a week, Miss Kitchin was dead. On hearing of her daughter’s precarious health, the girl’s mother had hurried to Leeds from Wakefield to be by her side, and though Mrs Kitchin had been in perfect health when she embarked on her journey, within days of her arrival both the mother and the surviving daughter appeared to be stricken with the same symptoms of the fatal illness. Just ten days after the first Miss Kitchin had taken a turn for the worse, all three of the women were dead, and at the time the cause of death was attributed to cholera morbus, a disease that was not yet fully understood and which would not hit Britain as a pandemic until 1831.
Pertinent to Mary’s methods, before the development of analytical chemistry increasing the risk that a poisoner would be caught, poison was a popular method of murder. A modus operando frequently employed by females, requiring no physical exertion, the lady of the house was also ideally placed to conveniently administer a poison as they were predominantly involved with the preparation of food and the management of, and access to household remedies and ‘medicines’. In Mary’s case, the administration of the poison which killed the first Kitchin sister was rendered all the more convenient as she dosed her under the confident belief that a remedy was being given.
It would seem, from the symptoms of the victims, that Mary was indeed using arsenic. From the close of the eighteenth century arsenic pervaded almost every aspect of everyday life in Britain, and the poison left a hefty toll of death and debilitation. As a by-product of an emerging smelting industry, it was cheap and readily available as a rat killer by the early 1800s. Though it later became the poison of choice in Victorian melodrama and the popular press, a significant proportion of the fatalities caused by arsenic were more pedestrian, resulting from accidental use in food. Arsenic was virtually odourless and tasteless and easily confused with flour or sugar and other cooking essentials. Two cases long after Mary Bateman highlight the problem. In November of 1858 the ‘Bradford Humbug Poisoning’ had resulted in the accidental arsenic poisoning of more than 200 people when sweets inadvertently made with arsenic were sold from a market stall. A pharmacist’s assistant had accidentally sold arsenic trioxide in place of the harmless calcium sulphate and the terrible results spoke for themselves.
A further mass poisoning, this time of 6,000 people occurred in Manchester in 1900 when seventy people died from drinking local beer. Arsenic in the glucose used for brewing was present in levels that meant anyone drinking five pints of the brew would be ingesting a dangerously high dose and with many men drinking this amount of beer every working day the death toll is less than surprising.
Exposure to arsenical compounds in consumer goods such as fabric dyes and wallpapers was also commonplace, especially fo
r those who manufactured these products, and in the polluted air. Arsenic was even used in medical preparations to treat everything from asthma and cancer to reduced libido and skin problems. Yet William Farr, the Statistic Head of the General Register Office was to comment in 1840 that ‘it is generally asked for to kill ‘rats’, but it is questionable whether arsenic kills more rats than human beings.’ In France, arsenic came to be called poudre de succession, ‘inheritance powder’ and with a cumulative effect acting particularly on the liver and kidneys, it could be administered in small doses over a span of time until a critical level was reached, meaning that the poisoner could be comfortably far away when death occurred.
In Mary’s day, the relatively inexpensive arsenic was readily available in a white oxide powder form derived from the metallic ore, the fatal dose known to be an amount equivalent in size to a pea. Once administered, the poison induced symptoms of irritation and burning to the throat, faintness, nausea and vomiting mucus flecked with blood. Progressive abdominal pain, respiratory constriction and a white ‘furry’ covering to the tongue signalled that within the next 12–18 hours, severe diarrhoea and a weakened, irregular pulse would cause collapse and result in death, the victim conscious until the end. ‘Enlightened’ doctors, familiar with the cholera symptoms occasionally seen in Mary’s day, attributed murder to disease.
Eventually, because of the number of murder cases involving the poison, the government was forced to introduce in 1851 the ‘Arsenic Act’ forbidding the sale of any arsenic compounds to a purchaser who was unknown to the supplying pharmacist. Poison bottles were given distinctive features; coloured glasses like cobalt blue, inky black, and dark green ensured they were easily recognizable, as well as having raised lettering or inlays of the words ‘POISON’ or ‘DEATH’ on the glass, especially useful if you were fumbling by candlelight. Patterns included latticework, deep grooves, geometric shapes, and most commonly, the skull and crossbones, which would have been particularly useful in instances where the consumer was illiterate. Would-be poisoners however were further thwarted by the introduction of a requirement that all manufacturers of arsenic powder mix one ounce of a colouring agent (indigo or soot were employed) to every pound of arsenic powder produced.
But all that lay in the future. Mary, and many of her contemporaries, could buy arsenic with relative ease. In light of Mary’s vocation as a career-poisoner, contextualising her crimes, several cases of note, also hailing from Yorkshire, warrant examination here. Hannah Whitley used a pie as the delivery medium for a fatal dose of arsenic, with the poison concentrated in the crust. Hannah claimed she had been coerced into the act of poisoning by her employer, a local linen weaver named Horseman, who was involved in an on-going feud with the intended victim, Thomas Rhodes, who lived in Hampsthwaite near Harrogate. Her culinary efforts had the desired effect as her pastry made the entire family ill, and resulted in the death of five-year-old Joseph Rhodes.
In her defence, Hannah claimed that Horseman had forced her to put the poison into Rhodes’s food, threatening to kill her if she refused, and that the rest of the Rhodes family were not the intended victims. Nonetheless, while Horseman faced no formal proceedings, it was Hannah who paid the penalty with her life. She was hanged at the York Tyburn on 3 August 1789.
Twenty-two-year-old William Smith employed an ingenious and indeed seasonal method of administering arsenic to poison not only his stepfather but his two half-siblings as well. William’s mother had married a man named Thomas Harper who already had two children of his own, William and Anne. Faced with the ultimate division and diminution of his inheritance, Smith purchased two pennyworth of arsenic from the local apothecary, whose suspicions he failed to arouse as he also purchased some remedies for his horses at the same time. He allegedly had a problem with rats in his barn. Smith decided the perfect way to administer the poison would be to mix it with the ingredients of the Good Friday cake that was being prepared for the household. But unbeknownst to Smith, a maid-servant had seen him interfering with the flour.
The Harpers’ neighbours had been invited for the Easter treat too, but clearly providence was on their side when they were unable to make dinner, and as it turned out only Tom Harper and his two children ended up eating any of the fatal cake. As soon as the poison began to take effect, Smith fled to Liverpool, leaving his victims to suffer in agony until father and both children died the following day. In spite of the motives that had driven Smith’s actions, he found that once on the run he was unable to live with his conscience, and returning home he was immediately arrested and confessed all. At the assizes of 1753, Smith’s own confession, along with the evidence of the apothecary who had sold him the poison and that of the maid-servant who saw him tamper with the cake’s ingredients, ensured he was found guilty and sentenced to death. On Monday 15 August Smith was hanged at the York Tyburn and afterwards his body sent for dissection.
In an attempt to avert any thorough investigation of the three Kitchin deaths, Mary put it about that plague had been the cause of their demise. During the 1780s, extensive building of back-to-back housing in Quarry Hill led to frequent outbreaks of typhoid, typhus fever and other diseases, thanks to the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions. Bubonic plague had made repeated appearances in Leeds through the centuries, and though the last severe outbreak had occurred as long ago as 1645, when the disease struck in Vicar Lane, it had spread so quickly through the town that between March and December of that year over 1,300 people died. The collective memory of the deaths of over one fifth of the estimated 6,000 strong population of Leeds in the mid-seventeenth century was still keen, and by her inference of plague, Mary thereby ensured that there would be no unwanted enquiries, as the lasting fear of infection meant that nobody in the neighbourhood would venture near the Kitchin home or shop premises, the doors of which were prudently closed and padlocked.
Mary’s nerves must have been tested however by the visiting doctor who attended the last surviving Kitchin sister on her deathbed. He was of the strong opinion that the sickness and sudden death bore the hallmarks of poisoning, and on examining many of the vessels and cooking utensils in the house, his suspicions were clearly aroused as he asked whether any water for poisoning flies had been used; a reasonable supposition as at this time, manufacturers included arsenic in fly papers. A typical flypaper contained 150–400mg of soluble arsenic salts, and was consequently the source of a potentially lethal dose, provided that it could be administered without arousing suspicion. By soaking such a flypaper in water, a would-be poisoner could extract most of the soluble arsenites within a few hours, obtaining a tea-coloured solution which could then be disguised in a cup of strong tea or coffee, or a glass of brandy. However, the dilutions of arsenic obtained from fly papers were also innocently employed by some women to enhance their looks in a homemade face wash, as would be highlighted in the 1889 murder trial of Florence Maybrick, accused of poisoning her husband, who when she came to give evidence in her defence, claimed the arsenic she had extracted from fly papers was purely for cosmetic use.
This turn of events must have alarmed Mary as the attending doctor also wanted to ‘open the body’ to perform an autopsy on the last Kitchin sister to die. It would be wrong to assume that the standards of forensic investigations practised by the medical fraternity at this time were crude, or to suggest that the surgeons were not competent in their conduct of autopsies. In 1752, matters had been improved for the advancement of anatomical study in England with the passing of an Act that allowed judges to substitute dissection instead of a sentence of hanging in a metal cage at the gibbet after execution and as we shall see a circumstance that is most pertinent to the story of Mary Bateman. However, as no family member was left alive to give their consent to the procedure, the body was buried without any investigation and Mary thus avoided detection. The last of the Kitchins was laid to rest in the same grave as her sister and her mother, presumably in the seventeenth century Quaker burial ground attached to the Friend
s’ Meeting House, known as Camp Hill Court, between Water Lane and Great Wilson Street.
Some time after the funeral, the creditors were called in to assess the estate of the Kitchin sisters. Though their draper’s shop was known to be an entirely solvent business, it was found that both house and shop were all but empty of goods and chattels, and the account books were also missing. Clearly, Mary had used the convenient closure of both premises due to ‘plague’ as a cover under which to strip both house and shop behind closed doors, to the extent that, when all claims on the estate had been adjudicated, the meagre belongings left met only eightpence in the pound for each creditor’s total claim.
Obviously Mary had hit her stride as a poisoner. Unencumbered by any moral restraint, in the guise of a caring nurse or a well-meaning practitioner, Mary was skilled at presenting a persona of benevolence, masking her true intention. Killing someone with poison, by its very nature, requires careful planning and subterfuge, so it comes as no surprise that poisoners tend to be cunning, sneaky, and creative, and reliant on verbal and emotional manipulation, all attributes which could be applied to Mary in spades. As far as her motives for murder were concerned, they may have been driven by greed and the very real need to conceal her guilt, common factors influencing many other murderers past and present. Not counting those of her victims who must have earlier succumbed to her various ‘remedies’ and abortifacients, in the past she had been forced to resort to repayment to avoid prosecution for theft and extortion. Mary now availed herself of the advantage of using poison to silence her victims. And as long as she evaded detection, the feelings of power and control she experienced as a result of her successes over those whose expectations she had raised, and upon those whose fears she had played (while all the time draining their purses) must had increased her confidence in her future endeavours. Even so, following the deaths of the Kitchin family, presumably as a precautionary measure, Mary must have persuaded her husband that it would be prudent to quit March Lane; it was time to move again, and for Mary to manufacture her most audacious and public exploit yet, and one of a sacrilegious nature.
The Yorkshire Witch Page 5
