by Alison Bruce
The exhumation of the body had occurred nineteen days after death and there was rigidity in the fingers and lower limbs which in his experience was another clear indication of strychnine poisoning. He confirmed that all the organs appeared healthy, although all also contained the poison. By his calculations this meant that Holmes had consumed somewhere between seven and twelve grains of strychnine although the 1.31 grains found in her stomach would have been a fatal dose. He confirmed that the victim had not been pregnant either recently or at the time of her death.
He stated that he could imagine ‘no more terrible mode of death’ than by strychnine; the afflicted person remained in complete possession of their faculties and normally died within thirty minutes after the onset of the symptoms, but in an extreme case up to six hours later. Death would either occur through exhaustion or suffocation caused by the chest going into spasm. If taken in water most of the poison would have settled and a smaller quantity would have remained suspended in the liquid. Once drunk it would circulate in the victim’s system very quickly and one of the first symptoms would be stiffness in the back of the neck followed by spasms.
Under cross-examination by the defence he admitted that it was not uncommon for pregnant women to use strychnine in an attempt at abortion or suicide, although he stressed that strychnine could never be a successful way to produce an abortion.
The first of the neighbours called as a witness was Mrs Fisher, who along with Mrs Clara Ashwell had gone to the house at the request of Holmes’s children. Although Fisher had been unable to stay for long she had seen that Holmes was in deep distress, writhing around and shouting. At one point, according to her testimony, Holmes had called out to her daughter, ‘I am so bad.’
Ashwell confirmed this, adding that Holmes had cried, ‘rub me’. Clara had sent the daughter Annie downstairs with the glass to fetch more water and had sent Percy to fetch brandy and a doctor. Ashwell had been unable to give the unfortunate Holmes any brandy as her teeth had been too tightly clenched. After the arrival of the doctor Ashwell had gone downstairs to mix some mustard and water but, by the time she returned, Holmes had died. Another local woman, Sarah Hensman, was present in the room when Holmes passed away.
Constable Purser was called to give evidence and explained how, from the evening of Holmes’s death, he made several searches of the house. Mr Wild, defending, cross-examined Purser. He was critical of the number of visitors allowed entry to the crime scene and demanded to know who had had access to the house after Holmes’s death. Purser stated that he had been the last to leave in the early hours of 8 January, and a key had been given to Mrs Sarah Ann Bull. In the morning Mrs Bull handed the key to Miss Busby.
Sarah Hensman testified that she did not visit the house again until between 8 and 9 on the morning of the inquest when she had returned with Mrs Gale to lay out the body. They had moved the body to the edge of the mattress with Gale being around the far side of the bed pulling out the two feather mattresses from between the body and the palliasse.4 It was then that they noticed some items lying directly underneath where the body would have lain. Hensman noticed that there were two packets and some letters and she left them all on the chest of drawers. She went downstairs to Mr Benjamin Horsford Mash, Holmes’s brother, who came up to the bedroom and read the letters. Despite drawing her attention to the powder in the packet she did not actually see it until shown by the coroner.
Benjamin Horsford Mash appeared as a witness for the prosecution. He was of course Walter Horsford’s cousin and not only knew the accused’s writing but had with him a receipt in his script. He had arrived at Holmes’s house during the day following her death when Constable Purser, Percy Holmes, Mary Busby and Laura Horsford, another cousin of Walter’s, were present. Apart from locking away some silver, he touched nothing. It was a little later when Hensman showed him the letters and papers found under the mattresses. He read them and saw that they were from his cousin. Mash took them to the police station and handed them over to Superintendent Freestone.
Under cross-examination Mash admitted that he had been on bad terms with Horsford. His last correspondence with his cousin had been a letter, about a number of sheep, received two years earlier.
In order to verify further that the writing on the notes was Horsford’s, William Conney, the stationmaster from the Great Northern railway station at Huntingdon, was called. He produced two recent letters from Horsford, both of which were signed. From Huntingdon a builder named John James Row was also called. Although he had received and subsequently destroyed a letter from Horsford he was shown some blotting paper removed from Horsford’s house, which bore a mirrored copy of the letter, and he was able to confirm that the writing belonged to the accused.
Thomas Henry Garrin, a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and a specialist in handwriting, was called as an expert witness. In his opinion the writing on the ‘coming over on Friday to try and make an arrangement’ letter and the packets marked ‘Take in a little water; ‘tis quite harmless’ and ‘One dose, take as told’ were all of the same hand. The writing was natural and had been written rapidly without any attempt to disguise it. He compared these items of evidence with the writing in the letters to Mash, Conney and Row as well as with three signatures on paperwork for removing swine from a swine-fever area. Garrin testified that every item put before him had been written in the same hand. In his view, Horsford had written all of them.
Under cross-examination, Mr Wild, defending, drew Garrin’s attention to several areas where the handwriting appeared to differ, but Garrin argued that his fourteen years’ experience of handwriting put him in the position where he frequently gave opinions that did not agree with untrained judgements and that he had no doubt in this case that every example shown was Horsford’s.
When Superintendent Freestone took the stand he explained that he had been suffering from whooping cough on the night of Annie Holmes’s death so he had sent Constable Purser. After the inquest he had sent a jar found at Holmes’s house to Dr Stevenson, which was found to contain only baking powder. On 8 January Mr Mash had brought around a variety of papers that had been found under his sister’s mattress and which he had sent to the analyst, Mr Knight, at Cambridge and then delivered back to Dr Stevenson.
Superintendent Freestone had visited chemists in St Ives, Huntingdon and St Neots and had checked their poison registers. These visits drew a blank so he cast his net wider and the following day visited Mr Payne, a chemist at Thrapston where he discovered a record of the poisons bought by Walter Horsford. He also found that other farmers commonly bought large quantities of pure strychnine and, when mixed into a compound known as ‘rattles’, it was an efficient rat killer.
Next he checked the previous four years’ sales of poisons with chemists in Kimbolton, Raunds, Thrapston, Oundle, Peterborough, Huntingdon, St Ives and St Neots and found that no strychnine had ever been sold to the accused’s wife.
On 10 January he obtained a search warrant for Horsford’s house where a letter and some blotting paper were recovered.
The court then heard testimony from Joseph Hind Payne, the Thrapston chemist.
On 28 December 1897 Horsford had purchased arsenic, strychnine, prussic acid and carbolic acid from him. Thrapston was about 12 miles from Horsford’s home which, in the days before motorised transport, was considered some distance.
As required by the Pharmacy Act the chemist kept a poison book, which was signed by Horsford and showed that he had purchased a drachm5 and a half of strychnine (90 grains), a pound of arsenic and an ounce of prussic acid, equating to a shilling’s worth of each. The strychnine was in the form of powder, not crystals. Payne stated that each packet had been clearly labelled with the word ‘POISON’ in red ink. As the chemist did not know Horsford, under the Pharmacy Act another witness was required. Horsford had gone into the street and spotted Walter Pashford of Catworth, a farmer, who was known to both him and the chemist. Pashford witnessed the purchase, then the two men ha
d left the shop together. It was never known whether Horsford’s meeting with Pashford had been accidental or pre-arranged. When Pashford was called he testified only that he had indeed been the one to introduce Walter Horsford to Joseph Payne.
Holmes’s daughter, still only 14, stated that on 5 January, two days before her mother’s death, there had been a knock at the door and she had found a letter in the letterbox. It was addressed to her mother and was in handwriting that she recognised as Horsford’s. She also noted that it bore a Huntingdon postmark, but that unusually her mother did not let her read the letter. She also identified the writing on one of the packets found under the mattress as Horsford’s.
Young Annie was downstairs when her mother died. She washed out the glass that her mother had drunk from. It was unusual for her mother to take water to bed but she stated that she had not noticed anything unusual about the dregs of water that remained in it.
When cross-examined she said that she was positive that she was able to identify Horsford’s handwriting. She was also aware that her mother kept powders in a workbasket, although she had never been known to take any as, apart from the occasional bout of neuralgia,6 she was in good health.
Under cross-examination she was also pressured to admit that another of her mother’s relatives, William Mash, had been a frequent visitor to their house at Stonely. He had sent money and continued to visit after the birth of the younger son.
In their summing up, on 5 June, the prosecution and the defence were quite different in their approaches. In fact, throughout the trial Mr Wild, the defence counsel, had been astonishingly reluctant to call and cross-examine witnesses, although he did cross-examine Holmes’s daughter in an attempt to prove that her mother had been a ‘woman of loose and profligate character’. Paraphrasing Horsford’s letter Wild commented that his client had no reason to murder a ‘woman that he valued at half-a-crown’.
The prosecutor, Mr Rawlinson, in his closing statement delivered a clear and logical summary of the evidence. He argued that the ‘arrangement’ letter proved that Horsford was keen to keep both the affair and the pregnancy secret from his new wife. No one disputed that the victim had died from strychnine poisoning or that she had access to the substance. There also appeared to be no reason why Holmes would have taken it deliberately. As the packet labelled ‘Take in a little water; ‘tis quite harmless’ was found under the bed, he argued that it was reasonable to assume that she had trusted the instruction and taken the powder it contained. Whoever had written the instruction and sent the packet had clearly wanted her dead; the only person shown to have a motive was Horsford.
Annie Holmes’s daughter, also Annie, drawn by a Leader artist. (The Leader)
Both Holmes and Mash, neither experts, had identified the handwriting, but so too had Garrin and he was an expert in the field of handwriting identification.
Horsford had admitted purchasing 90 grains of strychnine on 28 December 1897, and the evidence proved this. Although he denied murder, he had been unable to demonstrate where those 90 grains had been used.
Wild’s summing up was notably weaker; he argued that the case against Horsford rested on nothing more than prejudice and elaboration, that the letter bore a Huntingdon postmark but not a second Spaldwick one and that the identification of the handwriting was unreliable. He did not include any evidence that could establish his client’s innocence. In fact he pointed out to the jury that ‘if one jot or tittle of evidence had been put forward, or a single document put in he would lose the last word on behalf of the prisoner’.
Justice Hawkins later commented: ‘Of course, counsel’s last word may be of more value than some evidence; but the smallest “jot or tittle” of evidence, or any document whatever that even tends to prove the innocence of the accused, is of more value than a thousand last words of the most powerful speaker I have ever listened to. And I would go further and say that evidence in favour of a prisoner should never be kept back for the sake of the last word. It is the bounden duty of counsel to produce it, especially where evidence is so strong that no speech could save the prisoner.’
The defence concentrated its efforts on attacking the character of Holmes and also pointed out that, at the time her death, Horsford had been miles away at the Falcon Hotel in Huntingdon.
The court was adjourned overnight. On its reconvening Justice Hawkins began his summing up, firstly making it clear to the jury that if they decided that Horsford had deliberately encouraged Holmes to take the poison, whether or not his intent was to kill her, then it was murder. Even if the intention was only to procure an abortion and death resulted from the taking of poison, it was still murder.
The judge castigated the defence for the cross-examination to which the victim’s daughter had been subjected and emphasised that there was nothing to suggest that Holmes had not been living a poor but decent life. He added: ‘It more than pained me when I heard the learned counsel – instructed by the prisoner – cross-examine that poor little girl, left an orphan by the death of the mother, with a view to creating an impression that the poor dead creature was a person of shameless character.’ The judge was satisfied that Holmes had received Horsford as a visitor before his marriage, and had then moved to St Neots. The judge also said that it was beyond doubt that Horsford had lied at the inquest, that he had written the letters and that Holmes believed herself to be pregnant. He said that her supposed pregnancy should be considered sufficient motive for her murder.
He said that Horsford’s appearance at the Falcon Hotel coincided with the date he had promised Annie that he would visit and, rather than being in his favour, it was suspicious that he had made sure he was nowhere nearby. Also suspicious was the fact that the accused had never gone to his victim’s house after her death to pay his respects.
The judge queried the defence’s strategy noting that, ‘the learned counsel had been content with vague surmises without a shadow of evidence to support them.’ Finally he concluded that the strychnine bought by Horsford was responsible for Holmes’s death so all that remained was for the jury to decide whether Horsford was responsible for her taking it.
While the case had lasted for five days and the judge’s summing up for two and a half hours the jury returned after only twenty-five minutes with a verdict of guilty. Horsford was asked by the Clerk of Arraigns if there was any reason why he should not receive the death penalty and he simply replied: ‘All I can say is that I am an innocent man.’
Justice Hawkins placed the black cap on his head and sentenced Horsford to death.
Later that day Horsford was transferred by closed carriage to Chesterton prison, 14 miles away, where he was to await execution. His execution was at 8 a.m. on Tuesday 28 June 1898 at Cambridge gaol where the hangman, James Billington, calculated that a 7ft drop would be required. According to a report in The Times Horsford ‘walked to the execution chamber firmly and apparently unconcerned’. The chaplain said a prayer and Horsford’s death was instantaneous.
Just after his execution this notice appeared in The Times:
The St. Neots Murderer. We are requested by the Home Office to state that Walter Horsford, shortly before his execution, placed in the hands of the Governor of Cambridge Prison a written statement confessing his guilt and admitting the justice of his sentence.
Justice Hawkins received some criticism for the case. There was an accusation made that he had shown bias in his summing up and Horsford was said to have been convicted on circumstantial evidence. In 1904 the publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons produced a book entitled The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins, (Baron Brampton). In Chapter 35 Sir Henry answers the criticism that he ‘had gone quite to the limits of a Judge’s rights in summing up the case’. He described the detail of the case, then his summing up and the circumstantial evidence, then poses the question:
If a Judge may not deal with the fallacies of a defence by placing before the jury the true trend of the evidence, what other business has he on the Bench? And it was for
thus clearly defining the issue that someone suggested a petition for a reprieve, on the ground that the evidence was purely circumstantial, and that my ‘summing up was against the weight of the evidence’. Truly a strange thing that circumstances by themselves shall have no weight.
But there was another strange incident in this remarkable trial: the jury thanked me for the pains I had taken in the case. I told them I looked for no thanks, but was grateful, nevertheless.
I have learnt that the jury, on retiring, deposited every one on a slip of paper the word ‘Guilty’ without any previous consultation – a sufficient indication of their opinion of the weight of the evidence.
This was the last case of any importance which I tried on circuit, and if any trial could show the value of circumstantial evidence, it was this one. It left the identity of the prisoner and the conclusion of fact demonstrable almost to mathematical certainty.
A supposed eye-witness might have said: ‘I saw him write the paper, and I saw him administer the poison.’ It would not have added to the weight of the evidence. The witness might have lied.
Throughout the investigation there appears to have been no mention of a young woman named Fanny James although her story appeared in the St Neots’ Advertiser shortly after Horsford’s execution in an article entitled ‘Singular Co-incidence’.
When he was in his late teens Horsford had courted James and they both lived at Stow Longa. In 1890 James decided to visit her sister-in-law and went by trap to Kimbolton then by train on to Kettering.
In December, some weeks after her arrival, she received a letter. After supper she took it to her room. When her sister-in-law eventually went to say goodnight to her she found James suffering convulsions – symptoms that fitted the description of strychnine poisoning. Just before her death she cried out, calling Walter Horsford by name.
