The Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer

by Jones, Kaye;

  Two years later, in 1886, Dr Orange retired from Broadmoor and Dr David Nicolson became the new superintendent. Nicolson had worked in several convict prisons and had published a series of articles entitled The Morbid Psychology of the Criminal. He had much experience to offer and was every bit as caring as Dr Orange, though more organised in his approach to running and managing the asylum. Nicholson found Christiana to be a ‘quiet and orderly’ patient, ‘cheerful and pleasant in conversation’ but ‘very vain’. He wrote in her file that she ‘courts and desires attention and notoriety’ and ‘pushes herself forward on all occasions’. This may have been Christiana’s attempt at gaining recognition and attention from her new superintendent but, for Nicolson, it was further proof of her insanity. A few years later, he reported that she was ‘always ready to be taken notice of and to endeavour to place herself in the foreground of whatever is going in’. Even at the age of 62, Christiana’s desire to be the centre of attention had not decreased in the slightest.

  Dr Nicholson made few notes on Christiana in his ten years as the superintendent of Broadmoor. When he retired in 1895, Dr Richard Brayn assumed control and he employed very different methods to his two predecessors. Brayn had worked as the medical governor of the Woking and Aylesbury prisons and believed in discipline and using punishments like solitary confinement. He did, however, revamp the asylum internally which gave it an airy and cheerful feel, in spite of his strict regime.15 At the time of his arrival, Christiana was in her mid-sixties and entering a period of ill-health. She suffered bouts of influenza in 1897 and 1900, the latter of which was ‘rather severe’ and left her weak and looking more aged. In the following year, she had catarrh, chronic constipation and dyspepsia but made significant improvement after taking regular doses of cascara sagrada, a natural laxative. But this recovery was short-lived: by the end of 1901, her sight began to fail rapidly and she complained of ‘vague pains’ about the body, particularly in her upper back. She was advised not to attend the New Years’ Ball but Christiana could not miss being the centre of attention, even during a period of illness.

  As her physical health declined, she became ‘gloomy’ and ‘dissatisfied’ and argued frequently with other patients. By 1906, she was unable to walk without assistance, suffered bouts of neuralgia and had to be removed to the infirmary in November. But even in this state, her vanity was ‘unabated’ and she continued to worry about her personal appearance. While in the infirmary one afternoon, Dr Brayn overhead the following conversation between Christiana and a patient who had come to visit her:

  Christiana: How am I looking?

  Patient: Fairly well.

  Christiana: I think I am improving, I hope I shall be better in a fortnight, if so, I shall astonish them; I shall get up and dance! I was a Venus before and I shall be a Venus again!

  But the Venus of Broadmoor would not get up and dance again. Over the next year, she became weaker and experienced pains in her legs that made her spend most of her time in bed, only getting up on the occasional afternoon. In April 1907, Dr Brayn observed that she talked a great deal to herself and complained of being left outside in the airing court for an entire night when she had, in fact, been bedridden for over a month. Her condition continued to weaken and she died of ‘senile debility’, a Victorian term for old age, on the morning of 19 September 1907.16

  Though it had been almost forty years since the Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer hit the headlines, Christiana’s passing did not go unnoticed by the press. One newspaper called her crimes a ‘curiously cunning and subtle attempt at wholesale poisoning’ and her trial one of the ‘most notorious of the last century’.17 Others recalled this ‘long-forgotten tragedy’ as they related the facts of the case to the Edwardian public.18 Christiana was still remembered as late as 1970 when ITV dramatised the play, Christiana Edmunds, which explored her crimes in depth and prompted the nation to think twice about taking chocolates from strangers. Christiana’s cultural reputation has therefore endured long after her death: she was Brighton’s lady poisoner, a woman driven mad by sexual desire and vanity, and her celebrity status in England’s criminal history is something she would likely be proud of.

  Epilogue

  In 2013 the former Broadmoor psychiatrist, Professor Tony Maden, reviewed the case of Christiana Edmunds and suggested that she was suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder at the time she committed her crimes.1 This disorder was not discovered until several decades after Christiana’s death but its clinical presentation bears a striking resemblance to her behaviour during the early 1870s. At its core, Narcissistic Personality Disorder creates an individual who displays an unrealistic sense of superiority and who possesses an overwhelming need for attention, affection and admiration. When these needs are not met, the individual will resort to any number of manipulative tactics to restore their personal sense of power and prestige. Because the individual is driven by their own sense of narcissistic entitlement, these manipulative tactics can take any form, from the destruction of a perceived rival to homicidal violence, and are not accompanied by feelings of remorse or empathy towards those around them.2 In this understanding, then, Christiana’s poisoning spree was an uncontrollable reaction to the loss of Dr Beard’s attention and affection which threatened her sense of entitlement and inflated sense of self. Feeling genuinely slighted, she came to view Emily Beard as implicit in this loss of Dr Beard’s affections and therefore felt justified in trying to take her life. As for her other victims, they were simply an attempt at gaining greater glory in a scheme which played to her sense of grandiosity.

  Underneath the narcissist’s distorted sense of self-worth, there are much darker emotions at play. There is a constant and ‘pervasive sense of deprivation’ and a number ‘seemingly insatiable inner needs’ which continually attack the self-esteem and cause feelings of worthlessness and depressive moods.3 This explains why Christiana continued in her quest for Dr Beard’s affections, even though it made her feel uncomfortable and like she was going mad: it was a compulsion that she could not escape. Similarly, in prison and at Broadmoor, she could never fully settle into the routine of life because she was treated like everyone else and not given the special status that she believed was her rightful entitlement.

  Whatever the truth about her motivations, her death brought the story of the Edmunds family full circle: beginning with her father in Peckham House in 1847 and ending with her own demise in Broadmoor six decades later. The Victorian asylum had come to symbolise and unite the Edmunds, a family plagued by bereavement and mental illness and scarred by the effects of syphilis. If Christiana really was a victim of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, these experiences, combined with a genetic predisposition perhaps inherited from her mother’s family, may well have contributed to its onset in her adult life.4 Whatever prompted Christiana to commit mass poisoning, her obsession with Dr Beard had brought the town of Brighton to its knees in the summer of 1871. It resulted in the tragic death of a 4-year-old boy and, perhaps, in the deaths of many more who sadly passed unnoticed by the authorities, though the records which might confirm this have sadly not survived. In the aftermath of her poisoning spree, the town of Brighton made a full recovery and regained its position as Victorian England’s favourite seaside destination but not everyone in Christiana’s story fared so well. For Dr Charles Beard, the man at the centre of the case, the events of the early 1870s would have a long-lasting impact. In 1886, he was admitted to St Andrews asylum in Northamptonshire after suffering from mental illness for the last fifteen years, a date which corresponds to Christiana’s poisoning spree. According to his medical certificates, Beard believed himself to be the victim of a conspiracy, brought on by a large number of deaths after vaccinations administered some years earlier. He told asylum staff that another Brighton doctor had made claims of bestiality against him and, later, he was accused of taking bribes. Beard believed that this conspiracy against him included the town’s police, post office and a number of highly-re
spected citizens. Staff at the asylum found him to be a ‘courteous, affable and highly intelligent’ man who conversed ‘freely and rationally’ on the events of his life, including his time as a General Practitioner and Local Government Board inspector. Interestingly, he did not divulge a single detail about Christiana and her poisoning spree.

  Dr Beard’s belief in the conspiracy heightened in the years after his admission and, in 1889, he claimed to have witnessed an attack on another patient by five attendants. The Commissioners in Lunacy suggested that Beard be transferred, first to an unnamed asylum and later to the Holloway Sanatorium in London. He was never discharged and died there in 1916, at the age of 88.5 With her husband in the asylum, Emily Beard left Brighton and headed to London. She lived first with her daughter and grandson in Lupus Street before moving in with her son, Hugh, and his family. By 1911 the effects of old age had set in: she was described in the census as ‘feeble-minded’ and died the following year at the age of 84.

  Christiana outlived the two remaining members of her own family. After her daughter’s confinement in Broadmoor, Ann Edmunds left Brighton and died in Steyning in Sussex in 1893. Christiana’s sister, Mary, died five years later, in 1898, and was survived by her husband, Edward Foreman. There is no mention of Christiana’s reaction to these events in her notes from Broadmoor: she is described as ‘silly and frivolous’ in the year of Mary’s death and ‘quiet and orderly’ around the time of her mother’s passing.6 Like the severity of her crimes, she remained unable to appreciate the consequences of these major events and instead retreated into a world where nothing outside of her invented selves, the Dorothea and the Venus, truly mattered.

  Notes

  15 March 1847

  1. Quoted in G. Davis, ‘The Most Deadly Disease of Asylumdom: General Paralysis of the Insane and Scottish Psychiatry, c. 1840–1890, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, vol. 42, no.3, http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/davis.pdf, 2012, p.267.

  2. E. R. Wallace & J. Gach (eds.), History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, New York, Springer Science and Business Media, 2008, p.391.

  3. J. C. Prichard, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders of the Mind, Philadelphia, Carey & Hart, 1837, p.100.

  4. Ibid, p.103.

  5. Ibid, p.104.

  6. Ibid, p.105.

  7. F. Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1996, p.157.

  8. Ibid, J. Wallis, ‘This Fascinating and Fatal Disease’, The Psychologist, vol 5, no.10, 2012, p.790.

  9. B. Forsythe & J. Melling, The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845–1914, London, Routledge, 2006, p.1.

  10. Wallace & Gach, History of Psychiatry, p.391.

  Chapter 1

  1. W. C. Oulton, Picture of Margate and Its Vicinity, London, Baldwin, Craddock & Joy, 1820, p.33.

  2. Cited in A. Lee, ‘The Sad Tale of the Margate Architect and the Brighton Poisoner,’ p.1.

  3. Lee, ‘The Sad Tale of the Margate Architect and the Brighton Poisoner’, p.2.

  4. Ibid, pp.2–3.

  5. L. Appignanesi, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness, London, Virago, 2014, p.41.

  6. W. Batcheller, A Descriptive Picture of Dover; Or, the Visitors New Dover Guide, Dover, W. Batcheller, 1838, p.14.

  7. Kentish Gazette, 31 January 1831.

  8. Batcheller, New Dover Guide, p.47, and Lee, ‘The Sad Tale of the Margate Architect and the Brighton Poisoner’, p.4.

  9. Cited in Lee, ‘The Sad Tale of the Margate Architect and the Brighton Poisoner’, p.5.

  10. P. Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013, pp.40–45.

  11. The Times 6 April 1842 & 2 May 1842.

  12. Morning Post, 17 January 1842.

  13. Lee, ‘Sad Tale,’ p.5.

  14. Cited in L. Abrams, ‘Ideals of Womanhood in Victorian Britain,’ BBC History, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain/women_home/ideals_womanhood_01.shtml, 2001, n.p.

  15. L. Davidoff & C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006, p.389.

  16. See, for example, I. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Ex-Classics Library, 2009, p.86, available at www.exclassics.com., &, C.Dickens Jr., Dickens’ Dictionary of London, 1879, available at www.victorianlondon.org.

  17. Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes, p.340.

  18. O. Blouet, ‘Public Schools,’ in S. Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011, pp.651–2; Courtesy of King’s School Archives.

  19. Quoted in Branca, Silent Sisterhood.

  20. F. Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe: By Herself, Cambridge, Riverside Press, 1894, pp.58–45, 56.

  21. M. Somerville, Personal Recollections From Early Life to Old Age of Mary Somerville With Selections From Her Correspondence, London, John Murray, 1874, pp.21–24.

  22. Cobbe, Life of, p.p.57–8.

  23. Ibid, p.56.

  24. Ibid, p.57.

  25. Ibid, pp.59–60.

  26. C. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013, p.54.

  27. Cobbe, Life of, p.54.

  28. Ibid, p.61.

  29. D. Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013, p.53.

  Chapter 2

  1. Morning Post, 17 January 1872.

  2. W. A. F. Browne, What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be, London, Longman, 1837, p. 169.

  3. Ibid, p.101.

  4. Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy, to the Lord Chancellor, London, Bradbury & Evans, 1844, see especially pp.54–55.

  5. Cited in Lee, ‘The Sad Tale of the Margate Architect and the Brighton Poisoner’, pp. 7–8.

  6. Morning Post, 17 January 1872.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Cited in W. L. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Abingdon, Routledge, 1971, p.125.

  9. Morning Post, 17 January 1872.

  10. The Times, 4 July 1843.

  11. Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners, p.44.

  12. William Harnett Blanch, Ye Parish of Camerwell; A Brief Account of the Parish of Camberwell, its History and Antiquities, London, E. W. Allen, 1875, p.349.

  13. Further Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy, to the Lord Chancellor, 1847, p. 347.

  14. Ibid, p.352.

  15. A. Digby, ‘Tuke, William (1732–1822)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

  16. L. C. Charland, ‘Benevolent Theory: Moral Treatment at the York Retreat’, History of Psychiatry, vol. 18, no. 1, http://www.sagepub.com/pomerantzcpstudy/articles/Chapter02_Article01.pdf, 2007, pp.65–66.

  17. J. Conolly, The Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical Restraint, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1856, pp. 50–51.

  18. Further Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners, pp.435–436.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, p.72.

  21. Ibid, p.69; Further Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners, pp. 343–5, 493.

  22. Further Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners, p.435.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid, p.493.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Kentish Gazette, 23 March 1847.

  27. Prichard, Treatise on Insanity, pp.13–14,136–139

  28. John C. Waller, ‘Ideas of Heredity, Reproduction and Eugenics in Britain, 1800–1875,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 32, No.3, p.460.

  29. Prichard, Treatise on Insanity, p.123

  30. Waller, ‘Ideas of Heredity’, p.460.

  31. H. Bennett & T. Wakley (eds.), The London Lancet, New York, Burgess, Stringer & Co., 1845, p.493.

  32. The Literar
y Gazette; and Journal Of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences Etc., London, 1827, p.620.

  33. Mitchell, Daily Life, p.155.

  34. Kentish Gazette, 11 May 1847.

  35. Ibid, 25 May 1847.

  Chapter 3

  1. M. Dobson, ‘Population 1640–1831’ and J. Preston, ‘Industry 1800–1914,’ in A. Armstrong (ed.), The Economy of Kent, 1640–1914, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1995, pp.15, 120.

  2. The National Archives: PROB/11/2054/117.

  3. Ibid.

  4. M. J. Paterson, ‘The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society,’ in M. Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, Abingdon, Routledge, 1972, pp.5–6.

  5. Gorham, The Victorian Girl, pp.27–28.

  6. Quoted in Paterson, ‘The Victorian Governess’, p.10.

  7. Ibid, p.12.

  8. A governess in this period could earn anywhere between £15 and £100 per year but these figures represent the average, and most realistic, earnings.

  9. Ibid, pp.7–8.

  10. Mitchell, Victorian Britain, p.336.

  11. H. Maudsley & J. Sibbald, The Journal of Mental Science: Volume 18, London, J. A. Churchill & Son, 1873, pp.104–105.

  12. Quoted in A. Mangham, ‘Hysterical Fictions,’ The Wilkie Collins Journal, http://wilkiecollinssociety.org/hysterical-fictions-mid-nineteenth-century-medical-constructions-of-hysteria-and-the-fiction-of-mary-elizabeth-braddon/, 2003, n.p.

  13. ‘Hysteria’, Science Museum, http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/menalhealthandillness/~/link.aspx?_id=D300E3E638A847DBBDA462366A03D41A&_z=z, n.p.

  14. F. C. Skey, Hysteria: Six Lectures, New York; Moorhead, Simpson & Bond; 1866, p.41.

  15. Mangham, ‘Hysterical Fictions,’ n.p.

  16. G. Tate, A Treatise on Hysteria, London, 1830, pp.11–12.

  17. Prichard, Treatise on Insanity, p.157.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Mangham, ‘Hysterical Fictions,’ n.p.