The Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer

by Jones, Kaye;

  The man at the centre of Christiana’s obsession, Dr Beard, also had to tread carefully but for very different reasons. He was a married man and, by entertaining or encouraging Christiana’s affections, he risked not only his marriage but also his professional reputation. When he first attended Christiana in 1867, he was in his seventh year of marriage to Emily and the couple had three children: Hugh, born in 1861; Arthur, born 1863; and Emily, born 1866. Their fourth child, Frank, was born the year that he met Christiana, in 1867, and their fifth child, Edith Mary, arrived in 1869. Emily had become acquainted with Christiana through her husband and the pair had become good friends, frequently calling on each other at home, but she had no knowledge of Christiana’s letters nor of her intense feelings towards her husband.

  Late one evening in September 1870, while Dr Beard was away, Christiana called at his house on Grand Parade. It was not unusual for Christiana to call at Emily’s house so late: in fact, Emily was glad of the company during one of her husband’s many absences in London. One of the servants showed Christiana to the drawing room, where she found Emily sitting with Miss Richardson, her deaf and elderly lodger, and Christiana explained that she had brought some chocolates from Maynard’s, the confectioner, for the children, a gesture which Emily appreciated. Christiana then sat down, took out one of the chocolate creams and placed it into Emily’s mouth. Emily was immediately overcome by its cold and metallic taste and had to leave the room to spit the chocolate out. Christiana offered no explanation for her actions; she simply made her excuses and left the house.

  This bizarre incident left Emily feeling baffled. She was certain that the chocolate cream was responsible for the excess saliva and diarrhoea that she experienced that night but unsure if Christiana knew that the cream would cause these effects. Dr Beard returned from London later in the month and, after a few days, Emily related the strange events of that night. She had no reason to believe that Christiana harboured any ill-will towards her and was certain that the whole affair was little more than an accident. However, her husband suspected foul play immediately. After all, he knew that Christiana was in love with him and he now feared that she viewed his wife as an obstacle to their union. Dr Beard did not divulge this information to Emily but he did warn her to stay away from Christiana and her mother for the time being.

  The next day, Dr Beard called at Gloucester Place to see Christiana but this was not a social visit. He had come to question her about the chocolate creams, specifically why she had attempted to poison his wife. Christiana strongly refuted his accusations, claiming that she had no intention of ‘doing mischief’ and that she had herself fallen ill after eating some of the same batch of chocolate creams. She craved his sympathy and understanding but he was infuriated by her denial and lack of any adequate explanation. Perhaps to force a confession, he proceeded to tell her of the spectroscope, an instrument he had recently read about which was capable of detecting poison in animal tissue, but this only heightened Christiana’s indignation. She would not admit to any wrongdoing and Dr Beard had little choice but to take his leave and hope that this would be the end of their acquaintance.18

  As he walked back to Grand Parade, Dr Beard replayed his conversation with Christiana. She protested his accusation so strongly that he briefly wondered if she really was telling the truth. He had heard many stories of food contamination before now and it was not unreasonable to consider the possibility that Christiana’s sweets contained more than just chocolate. Food adulteration was a widespread practice in Victorian England, routinely carried out by manufacturers to keep production costs to a minimum. While some of the additives used were relatively harmless; bread was made from cheaper potato flour instead of wheat, for example, and milk was routinely diluted with water; others were not so innocuous. Poisonous copper sulphate provided the bright green colouring in jars of pickles and other preserved vegetables. Boric acid removed the sour taste from spoiled milk. Cheese was dyed with red lead and bread whitened with arsenic. Even a cup of tea could be harmful to health: retailers often reused old tea leaves by re-curling them and then adding colour with dangerous chemicals like copper.19

  It wasn’t only dietary staples, like bread and tea, which were affected by adulteration. Dangerous additives were commonplace in the confectionery industry and contemporaries were particularly concerned about its impact on children as the primary consumers of sweets and chocolates. One of the worst cases occurred in Bradford in 1858 when over 220 people, including a number of children, were accidentally poisoned with arsenic after buying peppermint lozenges from a market stall. Mr Neale, the manufacturer of these lozenges, used a recipe that called for 52 lbs of sugar but this was an expensive ingredient and he was keen to keep costs to a minimum. Instead, he substituted the sugar with calcium sulphate, a much cheaper white powder, but there was a mix-up at his suppliers and he received a cask of white powder that he mistakenly assumed was the calcium sulphate but was, in fact, arsenic trioxide. Having no knowledge of this mistake, Mr Neale prepared the lozenges as normal and transported them to Bradford market, completely unaware that each one contained a lethal dose of arsenic. Almost all of the peppermint lozenges were sold that day and a total twenty people lost their life, with a further 200 requiring hospital treatment.20

  Although the poisoning of Mr Neale’s confectionery was accidental, many confectioners routinely used hazardous substances without any consideration of the consequences. Less than one year after the Bradford poisoning, a group of children from a village in Devon became seriously ill and one almost died, after consuming sweets called bird’s nests that had been coloured with lead. In a similar case at Bristol, one month later, a confectioner admitted to using a lead-based colouring to enhance the appearance of his products and causing six children to become seriously unwell. In an ironic twist, however, local authorities discovered that the confectioner had also become the victim of adulteration, after his supplier adulterated the colouring with arsenic.21 Incidents like this led to the passing of the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act in 1860, the first legislative attempt to limit the use of dangerous additives and to establish better standards of food hygiene. As the act was not compulsory, it did not eradicate the practice of food adulteration but it did raise public awareness of this growing issue. In the meantime, many confectioners continued to adulterate sweets and chocolates with all manner of harmful substances.

  Maynard’s had been in business in Brighton since Dr Beard was a boy and he could not recall a single case of food poisoning in that time. It was, of course, entirely possible that John Maynard had started adulterating his cocoa powder with sawdust or his sugar with sulphate of lime, as many other confectioners did.22 As a man of logic, however, Dr Beard could not accept that someone of Maynard’s standing and reputation would risk it all on a single batch of poisonous chocolate creams. All the evidence pointed to Christiana, though she denied it again in January 1871 when Dr Beard confronted her for a second time. She desperately wished to renew their friendship but he refused and try as she might, Christiana could not convince him of her innocence. After this second meeting, Christiana called at Grand Parade with her mother and demanded that he retract his statement. While there was no ‘absolute threat’ of legal action made to Dr Beard, Christiana and Ann made it very clear that there would be consequences to his accusations. With no real evidence to substantiate his claims, he had little choice but to comply with her wish and retract his statement. He also destroyed around twenty of Christiana’s letters which mentioned that fateful night in September.23 In Dr Beard’s mind, the incident in September had finally been laid to rest but this was only the beginning for Christiana. She was, of course, guilty of attempting to poison Emily Beard but what induced her to commit this crime has been hotly debated since that fateful night. It may have been a hereditary predisposition to madness or, more simply, an overwhelming feeling of malice towards the wife of the man she loved. Whether mad or bad, poisoning Emily and pleading her innocence to Dr Beard ha
d thrilled Christina and she had demonstrated an almost-natural ability to seduce and deceive. How she obtained the poison and adulterated the chocolate cream remains a mystery but it had inspired an idea in Christiana of how to divert suspicion from herself and be redeemed by Dr Beard.

  Chapter Five

  “A Scattering of Death”

  On a cold morning in March 1871, 13-year-old Benjamin Coultrop was selling newspapers in Spring Gardens when a lady approached him. She was wearing a thick veil over her face and enquired about Benjamin’s employer. He told the lady that he had no employer and that he went out with the papers for himself each day. She appeared reassured by his answer and she purchased a paper before mentioning that she had bought herself a bag of chocolate creams and wondered if he might like them. Benjamin had never encountered such a generous customer before and he accepted her offer without hesitation, watching closely as she removed from her pocket a paper bag bearing the name ‘Maynard’s’. The lady then handed Benjamin the bag and left Spring Gardens as quickly as she had appeared.

  Over the next few hours, Benjamin ate all but one of the chocolate creams. He gave the last one to his friend, Henry Diggins, who said it tasted funny and spat it out. Benjamin didn’t notice any strange taste to his creams but he started to feel unwell about an hour after he finished the bag: his throat burned, he felt sick and his limbs were stiff. These symptoms did not improve over the next two days and his mother became so concerned that she took him to the hospital. He was admitted as an outpatient and treated for one week, after which he made a full recovery.

  This wasn’t the only strange incident to occur in March. A lady also visited a stationers on North Road and left on the counter a bag of chocolate creams bearing the name ‘Maynard’s’. The stationer’s son, William Halliwell, saw the bag and ran after the lady but she was already out of sight by the time he reached the door. When the same lady returned to the shop a few days later, William offered her the bag of creams but she claimed they weren’t hers and urged William to eat them. Over the course of the day, William ate around ten of the creams but became unwell later that evening. He felt hot, his legs ached and his whole body was stiff. It took six days for William to feel better and return to working in his father’s shop. A few weeks later, he saw the lady leave another bag of Maynard’s chocolate creams on the counter but he threw the bag on the fire, fearing a repeat of his previous illness.1

  The lady responsible for these two incidents was Christiana Edmunds and they formed the first stage of her plan to be redeemed by Dr Beard. She had decided to frame the confectioner, John Maynard, for the poisoning of Emily Beard, while maintaining the façade that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. For Christiana, framing Maynard was not based on a personal vendetta; there was no real connection between the pair prior to 1870 and certainly not any enmity. He was simply the most logical candidate for such a crime because Emily Beard had no obvious enemies and the adulteration of confectionery was a well-known and well-established practice in this period. Part of what attracted Christiana to this plan was the ready availability of a wide range of poisons, of which arsenic was most popular and accounted for 45 per cent of deliberate poisonings between 1750 and 1914.2 Arsenic was ideally suited to adulterating chocolate creams because it is tasteless, odourless and colourless, making it easy to hide in food or drink. It was also relatively cheap to buy, at only two pence per ounce during the nineteenth century.3 But it did one have major drawback and this likely explains why Christiana did not use it in her plan to frame Maynard: by the mid-century, there were two tests for the forensic detection of arsenic and a number of skilled chemists capable of performing them. The first was invented by the chemist, James Marsh, who published his test in 1836. It involved heating a test sample with sulphuric acid and zinc to create a gas. This gas is then heated and confirms the presence of arsenic if it leaves behind any metallic deposits. While the Marsh test could detect minute amounts of arsenic, it was simplified in 1841 by the German chemist, Hugo Reinsch. This test is performed by dissolving the sample into a solution of hydrochloric acid and then inserting a strip of copper foil into it. If the strip turns black or dark grey, it indicates the presence of arsenic. Both the Marsh and Reinsch tests were immediately introduced into English courtrooms and were often used in combination in cases of criminal poisoning. Only one year before Christiana’s attempt on Emily Beard’s life for example, the Dudley poisoning case hit the national press. Fanny Oliver, a 28-year-old Milliner, was accused of murdering her husband by poisoning him with arsenic. The prosecution alleged that Fanny killed him because she wanted to re-establish a relationship with her former fiancé. At her trial in July 1869, Dr Hill, a Birmingham chemist, carried out the Reinsch test but found no traces of arsenic in the contents of Joseph’s stomach. He extracted another sample and performed the Marsh test, finding this time one-hundredth of a grain of arsenic. Fanny was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death while the press and public argued over the reliability of chemical evidence.4 What is most interesting about the Fanny Oliver case is that the Victorian thirst for murder trials had imparted a degree of understanding on the general public about the science of detection. This meant that ordinary people, like Christiana, knew about the Marsh and Reinsch tests and this perhaps accounts for her decision to spur arsenic, the nineteenth-century murderer’s poison of choice, in favour of strychnine, a lesser-used but even deadlier weapon.

  Strychnine was one of a number of poisons extracted from trees in the nineteenth century but it was, by far, the strongest, capable of killing an adult with a dose as low as 30mg, one-sixth of the required dosage for death by arsenic.5 It is derived from the dried seeds of the Strychnos Nux-Vomica, a tree native to India, and was used widely in England from the 1820s. Despite being so lethal, strychnine’s primary use was medicinal and it was prescribed for a wide range of ailments, from deafness and headache to rheumatism and cholera. One London-based physician, Dr R. Rowland, hailed strychnine as a wonder drug for women and used it to treat neuralgia, period pains, amenorrhoea and hysteria.6 By the 1840s strychnine had also become a staple ingredient in pest control, particularly in the fight against rats, and was freely available for purchase by the general public.

  Despite its wide availability and toxicity, deliberate poisoning by strychnine was relatively uncommon, accounting for only 41 of the 504 poisoning cases brought before the English courts between 1750 and 1914.7 Even after the passing of the Pharmacy Act in 1868, which imposed stricter rules on its general purchase, there were more cases of poisoning by opium and prussic acid (cyanide) than strychnine.8 Perhaps it was strychnine’s bitter taste which made it less popular among Victorian would-be murderers. It was far more difficult to disguise the poison in food or drink, as demonstrated by the experience of Emily Beard and Henry Diggins, both of whom spat out the chocolate cream. While Benjamin Coultrop and William Halliwell noticed no strange taste, the sudden onset of symptoms illustrates the speed with which strychnine attacks the body. In fact, signs of strychnine poisoning can appear in as little as fifteen minutes and generally begin with a burning sensation in the throat, difficulty swallowing and a feeling of anxiety and restlessness. Because strychnine disrupts the nerve signals between the brain and the muscles, the victim next experiences painful contractions of the muscles throughout the body that gradually increase in strength and intensity. As the muscles become exhausted, the victim can no longer breathe and dies from asphyxiation. This process takes one to two hours and such a violent death leaves many victims in a state of opisthotonus, where the head, neck and spine are arched backwards, and rigor mortis quickly sets in. Fortunately, for Benjamin and William, there was not enough strychnine in the chocolate creams to kill them, though they experienced a number of unpleasant symptoms for several days after ingestion.

  These early attempts then demonstrate that Christiana still had a way to go in her plan to frame Mr Maynard. There was no talk of any poisoning in town and no suspicion among the authorities, despi
te Benjamin Coultrop’s admission to hospital. Perhaps his doctors believed he was suffering from tetanus, the only natural disease that resembles the effects of strychnine poisoning. Either way, neither Benjamin nor the hospital considered the possibility that he had been deliberately poisoned and so Christiana prepared to buy more of Maynard’s chocolate creams and adulterate them with strychnine. While strychnine was readily available from any chemist, the passing of the Pharmacy Act in 1868 had regulated its sale to the general public. It could only be purchased, for example, if the buyer and seller were already acquainted, or were introduced through a witness who knew both parties. Once a sale was made, the seller had to label the poison with his name and address and enter the details of the transaction into a poison book before the buyer signed it to verify the transaction. By limiting access to dangerous poisons, it was hoped that the Pharmacy Act would discourage people from deliberate poisoning but there were, of course, ways around the legal technicalities, as Christiana would now prove.

  On 28 March 1871, Christiana went to see Isaac Garrett, the chemist on Queen’s Road who supplied her neuralgia medication. She bought some toilet articles and then asked Garrett if she could buy a ‘small quantity of strychnine’ because she and her husband were ‘much annoyed’ by some cats and wanted to get rid of them. Although Garrett had known Christiana as a customer for four years, he knew nothing personal about her, not even her name, and therefore had no notion that her story about the cats was untrue. He objected to her request on the grounds that strychnine was too strong a poison for destroying cats but Christiana assured him that ‘no harm could possibly happen’. She said she had no children and that only she and her husband would handle the poison.9 This pacified Garrett somewhat and he agreed to sell it to her if she brought a witness whom they both knew. After some consideration, Garrett suggested Caroline Stone, a milliner who lived three doors down, and instructed Christiana to go and fetch her.