The Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer

by Jones, Kaye;

  Chapter Nine

  “Most Extraordinary and Most Serious Charges”

  At 11 am on Friday, 18 August, Christiana Edmunds was taken from prison to the Brighton Police Court, a large room in the basement of the Town Hall. This was the first step in the Victorian judicial process: a hearing before the magistrates to determine if Christiana would stand trial for the crime of poisoning Emily Beard. Though she had spent less than twenty-four hours in custody, the news of her arrest had already spread across Brighton and the courtroom was crowded with journalists and members of the public who had arrived long before the proceedings began, eager to hear every detail of the case. As Christiana entered the court and took her seat in the dock, much was made of her personal appearance and social background. The Daily News noted that she wore a black silk dress, black lace shawl and black veiled bonnet1 and The Manchester Times found her very ladylike in her demeanour, though not of a ‘very prepossessing appearance’.2 In contrast, the Evening Gazette highlighted her ‘fair complexion’ and found her ‘good looking’.3 Despite being described as 35-years-old in newspaper reports, Christiana was, in fact, 43 at the time of her hearing and keen to conceal her true age to the hordes of male journalists.

  In the dock, Christiana ‘bowed and smiled at her friends’ who sat beneath her4 and was especially pleased to see her sister, Mary, who had travelled from Lancing in West Sussex to be in court. Christiana’s behaviour suggests that she was completely unaware of her the gravity of her situation. The press called the hearing one of the ‘most extraordinary and most serious charges ever brought before a court of justice’5 and for good reason. Of all the weapons available to the budding murderess, poison was, by far, the most feared and abhorred in Victorian England. Though the majority of poisonings in this period were accidental or suicidal, vivid and dramatic tales of deliberate poisoning, especially by arsenic, had come to dominate the newspapers and capture the public’s imagination, creating a moral panic that endured throughout the century. While the introduction of legislation to control the sale of poison had allayed some of these fears, the Victorians remained unable to eradicate cases of deliberate poisoning and to destroy poison’s cultural reputation as an instrument of ‘death and agony’.6

  That poisoning came to be associated with women was another reason for the fear which accompanied this crime. The Victorians idealised women as ‘angels of the hearth’: nurturing and caring beings who devoted themselves to child-rearing and matters of the home. When a woman committed poisoning, it contravened these well-defined, though restrictive, notions of femininity, making the crime unexpected and therefore all the more shocking. Cases of female-perpetrated poisoning made for exciting reading but raised questions about women’s domestic role, as one journalist from The Times lamented in 1849: ‘It seems almost clear that a woman who would not lift her hand against a man or child will unhesitatingly drop arsenic into their food’. Of course, the reality of poisoning was far different: only 254 women stood accused of murder and attempted murder by poison for the entire period of 1750–19147, a relatively small figure, but these cultural anxieties set the scene for Christiana’s hearing and her treatment by the press.

  The proceedings opened with the testimony of Emily Beard who related a full account of her friendship with Christiana Edmunds, including the poisoning attempt in September 1870 and the poisoned parcel which was delivered to her home on 10 August. In discussing these events, Emily was forced to reveal the extent of Christiana’s feelings towards her husband; a difficult task in such a public forum. Even more humiliating, the letter which Christiana had written to Dr Beard after Sidney Barker’s inquest was read aloud by the prosecutor, William Stuckey. This evidence scandalised the Beards but it was necessary, said Stuckey, in establishing a motive: that Christiana had poisoned Emily in order to have Dr Beard for herself. This was convincing evidence and Charles Lamb, the man tasked with defending Christiana, had only one question to ask Emily Beard in his cross-examination: was she certain that the poisoned chocolate cream of September 1870 had come from Christiana’s pocket? Emily could not state definitively if Christiana had taken it from her pocket or had not;8 but her uncertainty was not enough to concern the prosecution.

  Over the next few hours, the court heard from two of Emily Beard’s servants, Emily Agate and Margaret Knight, and the surgeon, Nathaniel Paine Blaker, who all testified to the ill-effects of the cakes sent to Grand Parade. Next, Isaac Garrett produced the forged notes he had received purporting to come from the coroner, David Black, and the chemists, Glaisyer and Kemp. As the police investigation into Christiana was still ongoing, William Stuckey asked the court to adjourn the proceedings for one week. His request was granted but Christiana was denied bail and instead returned to the prison at nearby Lewes, though the magistrate granted her a visit with her mother and sister.

  Back in Brighton, the adjournment gave the police the opportunity to continue with their enquiries. Chief Inspector White focused on finding the boys who had delivered the forged notes on Christiana’s behalf. He issued notices around the town urging anybody with information to come forward, in the hope that someone might be able to positively identify her in court. Inspector Gibbs was busy too, with preparations for the chemical analysis which, the police hoped, would provide conclusive proof of the presence of arsenic in the victims’ fruits and cakes. On 23 August, he travelled to London to deliver four jars of evidence to Julian Rodgers, a surgeon and professor of toxicology at the London Hospital. The first jar contained some cake and fruit from the poisoned parcels, the second and third had inside the vomit of two of the servants and a handkerchief collected from Nathaniel Blaker was placed in the fourth. As soon as the delivery was made, Gibbs returned directly to Brighton, ready for the proceedings to resume the next day.

  Once again, the court was filled with press and spectators long before the hearing commenced at 11 am on Thursday 24 August. Christiana was again occupied in passing notes to her sister as the prosecutor rose and stated that he had new evidence to present against her. It was his belief that Christiana had procured a large quantity of poison under a false name and was responsible for a number of poisoning attacks that had occurred in Brighton over recent months. This immediately prompted an objection from Charles Lamb who complained of the ‘general evidence’ presented by the prosecution in relation to Christiana’s ‘dealings with poison’. He believed that the court should only hear evidence in support of the charge of poisoning Emily Beard with arsenic and anything else should be ruled inadmissible. In other words, Lamb feared that additional charges would be levelled against Christiana and that he would be unable to provide an adequate defence. Lamb was immediately overruled by John Merrifield, the stipendiary magistrate, and the prosecution called its first witness.

  When Adam May stepped into the witness box, Christiana realised that the police had uncovered the full extent of her poisoning spree. Adam May was the boy who took the forged notes to Isaac Garett’s in July to obtain the poison book and he revealed every detail of his meeting with Christiana in court. But when William Stuckey asked Adam if the lady he met was today present in court, he said he could not be sure. This was a small victory for the defence but the prosecution’s next witness, Harriett Cole, knew Christiana personally and swore to seeing her and Adam May walking together along Queen’s Road. Harriett Cole was an unexpected addition to the proceedings. When Christiana had visited her shop at the beginning of June and left a bag of poisoned chocolate creams in a zinc pail by the door, she thought that nobody had seen her. But Harriett Cole had observed the drop and became suspicious of Christiana after her daughter became unwell later that day. She explained to the court that she next saw Christiana at Sidney Barker’s inquest where she asked her about the chocolate creams. Christiana denied all knowledge and Harriett remained suspicious but did not take the matter any further. Her testimony was corroborated by Caroline Walker, another victim of the chocolate creams left at the grocer’s shop, and William Moon, a b
oy who delivered a forged note to Isaac Garrett’s for the purpose of procuring poison. Unlike Adam May, William identified Christiana as the lady who had given him the note and pointed directly to her in the court room.9

  The prosecution’s case against Christiana now overwhelmed the defence. Once again, Lamb objected to the ‘general evidence’ presented by William Stuckey but his objections were overruled by the magistrate. Over the course of the day, the court heard damning testimony from Isaac Garrett and Caroline Stone about Christiana’s purchases of strychnine, under the false name of Mrs Wood, and from Charlotte Pettit and Adelaide Friend, who described Christiana’s trip to Margate and the mysterious box that had accompanied her. Lamb’s fears were realised when the prosecution warned Christiana of the possibility of additional charges as the evidence-gathering continued. Unsurprisingly, she was refused bail when the proceedings were adjourned at 5:10 pm and spent another week in Lewes Prison.10

  Despite the increasing severity of her situation, Christiana appeared ‘cheerful’ at the next court session on Thursday, 31 August. She wore a bonnet of bright blue, decorated with a white rose and bowed at her friends and family as she took her seat in the dock. She surveyed the court with ‘apparent unconcern’ and was again supplied with a pencil and paper to pass notes to her friends and to her solicitor. After some hushed discussion with the bench, William Stuckey declared that Christiana would be additionally charged with the attempted murder by poison of Elizabeth Boys and Isaac Garrett, charges which prompted shock among the spectators. Lamb immediately protested but, as the prosecution explained, new evidence had come to light that would demonstrate Christiana’s guilt and he called the handwriting expert, Frederick Netherclift, to the witness box

  By 1871, graphology, or the study of handwriting, had become a common feature in English criminal proceedings and Frederick Netherclift was one of the finest in his field. He had been trained in handwriting analysis by his father, the late Joseph Netherclift, who was widely regarded as the country’s first expert and had begun testifying in criminal trials in the 1830s. Like his father, Netherclift was a lithographer by trade: a printer who made copies of documents and images by tracing the original onto a prepared surface and using an ink roller to take an impression. It was through the tracing process that Netherclift, and his father before him, had become intimately acquainted with the ‘peculiarities of handwriting’,11 and had learned how to distinguish one person’s hand from another. By the time of Christiana’s hearing, Netherclift had thirty years of experience in handwriting analysis and claimed to have given evidence ‘to almost every court in England’.12 Because of the nature of his profession, Netherclift often appeared in cases of suspected forgeries and inheritance disputes. His most famous case to-date was that of William Roupell, the former Member of Parliament for Lambeth who faced trial in 1862. Roupell was the illegitimate son of Richard Palmer Roupell, a wealthy merchant, who had invested heavily in property and land. Roupell had squandered a fortune and amassed a great debt as he sought to establish himself in society. To solve his financial problems, he set about forging documents in order to obtain by deception the lion’s share of his father’s property. He even destroyed his father’s will and composed a new one in which he disinherited his brother, Richard, and made himself the executor. His father died in 1856 and, by 1862, Roupell could no longer pay the mortgages on his numerous properties and fled to Spain. He was prosecuted for fraud on his return to England and sentenced to penal servitude for fourteen years. But the case went to court on a further two occasions as Roupell’s brother, Richard, sought to reclaim what he believed was his rightful inheritance. The prosecution called Netherclift to examine the deeds to the properties in question and he confirmed that they were all forged by Roupell. In light of his evidence, the jury could not agree on what constituted Richard’s inheritance and he spent the rest of his life trying to recover his father’s fortune.13

  Netherclift’s involvement in the Roupell case brought him to national attention and his remit of cases began to widen. Whether the charge was fraud or attempted murder, he prepared for each case in the same way, with a careful analysis of the samples forwarded to him by the authorities. For Christiana’s hearing, he had analysed the address labels on the poisoned parcels and the forged letters sent to Isaac Garrett. For the purposes of comparison, the prosecution had sent to him a letter written by Christiana, likely the one she wrote to Dr Beard after the inquest. In court, the prosecution asked Netherclift about the process of examination:

  William Stuckey: Is it the general characteristics in the handwriting you go upon?

  Frederick Netherclift: Certainly; style is a different thing altogether. Handwriting may be written either upright or sloping; we therefore look for characteristics.

  Stuckey: How do you generally proceed?

  Netherclift: I first of all examine the admitted handwriting and pick out some 12 or 14 of its peculiarities. I then compare that handwriting with the disguised, and if I find it to contain the same characteristics I consider I have good ground for believing them to be the same handwriting.14

  Netherclift stated that after a ‘careful and minute examination’ on these points, he became ‘firmly convinced’ that the same person had composed each of the samples and that a deliberate attempt had been made to disguise the handwriting of the address labels and the forged letters. But, in an attempt to discredit Netherclift, Lamb showed him the poison book from Isaac Garrett’s shop and asked him to comment on two signatures made by Caroline Stone, the milliner. Netherclift noted that the two signatures were different and Lamb asked if they were at all alike. He replied ‘I should not like to say they were written by the same person unless I had half an hour’s examination and compared them with other specimens of her handwriting. I would not undertake to give an off-hand opinion upon them’. But Lamb persisted in this subject:

  Charles Lamb: Would you pledge your reputation that they are written by the same person?

  Frederick Netherclift: – I refuse to give an opinion without comparing them with other signatures. If you want an opinion with reference to them you can have it by giving me time and furnishing me with other signatures but I shall expect my fees!

  Netherclift’s remarks caused laughter in the courtroom. In his thirty years of giving evidence, he had faced many attempts to discredit his analysis but he knew too well how to handle the likes of Charles Lamb. He had faced a similar situation eight years earlier, during his crossexamination in the Roupell Forgery case, prompting him to make the most famous assertion of his career: that he could copy a signature so perfectly that his own father, the great expert, would be ‘bothered’ by it. The prosecutor tried then to mock him: ‘And between you, I suppose, you could have bothered a good many people?’ Netherclift’s reply was short but enough to silence the prosecutor: ‘No doubt’.15

  Back in the Brighton courtroom, one of the magistrates rose to remind the court that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, had recently paid ‘one of the highest compliments he possibly could’ to Netherclift, in remarking that ‘he had never yet found him wrong in his life’.16 Such high praise immediately silenced Charles Lamb and the proceedings turned next to the much-anticipated results of the chemical analysis.

  After receiving the jars of evidence from Inspector Gibbs, Professor Julian Rodgers carried out a careful analysis of their contents. With over thirty years’ experience in toxicology, Rodgers was well-experienced in the detection of poison and had appeared as an expert witness in a number of criminal proceedings. In his most recent case, Rodgers exonerated the wife of Thomas Pownall, a retired colonel in the army, from the charge of murdering her husband by poison.17 One year earlier, in November 1869, Rodgers’ solved the mysterious deaths of two young children, Emily and Charles Baronius. A post-mortem had failed to ascertain the cause of death and the coroner called on Rodgers to investigate. He found that a batch of contaminated mussels, still present in the stomach, had caused the untimely dea
th of the two children.18 In contrast, the case of Christiana Edmunds was considerably more straightforward because very little effort, he said, had been made to disguise the poison. In the first jar, for example, Rodgers found cakes sprinkled with a ‘most dangerous quantity’ of arsenic and one piece of the preserved fruit had been ‘literally stuffed’ with it. Of the fresh fruit, the peaches had begun to decompose but this only highlighted the appearance of white powder on the surface which Rodgers identified as strychnine. Although he had not yet calculated exact quantities, he was confident that each item contained enough poison to kill its intended victim. The vomit collected from the servants and placed into the second and third jars also revealed dangerous levels of arsenic and he even found trace amounts on the handkerchief. The evidence against Christiana was now so overwhelming that Charles Lamb did not even attempt a cross-examination of Professor Rodgers.19 Only Christiana appeared unmoved by his evidence: ‘she made no sign of fear and was … the least excited person in the court’, wrote one reporter from the Morning Post.20