There Must Be Evil

by Bernard Taylor

  Questioning the doctor on his suspicions that the child had been given poison, Mr Cottingham asked: ‘Why did you not prescribe some antidote, or some alleviative, or some treatment of the poison to the girl?’

  ‘I did prescribe an alleviative – morphia,’ said the doctor. ‘I did not prescribe an antidote for two reasons. First, I didn’t know what the poison was, and secondly, an antidote for a corrosive poison is useless after the lapse of an hour from the time that the poison has been taken.’

  The judge: ‘Do you mean to say it is impossible to save life after the lapse of an hour, or that the chances are against it?’

  Dr Patterson: ‘If I knew what corrosive it was, I should give the patient a chance, but if I did not it would be unsafe to prescribe. There were new symptoms set in on the Sunday, including purging and blistering of the mouth.’

  Mr Cottingham: ‘Did you tell her mother that she was suffering from poison which had been administered to her?’

  ‘I didn’t think it wise to do so.’

  ‘You suspected the child was being poisoned, and that the mother was poisoning her. Why then did you leave the child in the care of her mother – the whole of Sunday night?’

  ‘Because the child was fatally ill, and it would have done no good whatever to have left her in the charge of anyone else.’

  Mr Cottingham pressed him. ‘Well, you left this woman, whom you suspected of giving poison to her child, alone with the child, and near to the surgery – that is, in close proximity to it?’

  ‘Yes, I did so, but I locked the bismuth in the cupboard.’

  Turning to another line of questioning, Mr Cottingham asked, ‘When you handed over to Dr Harris the intestines for a post-mortem did you tell him of your suspicions?’

  ‘Very likely I did, but I am not sure.’

  With this, Mr Cottingham announced that he had no further questions, but before any new witness could be called, he asked the judge if he would put a question to the doctor; he wanted His Lordship to ask if the chocolate and coconut chips the deceased had eaten on the Friday would do her any harm.

  His Lordship made no attempt to hide his irritation at this, and asked, ‘What are coconut chips?’ Told by Cottingham that they were ‘parts of a coconut’, he said, ‘I don’t see what it has to do with it.’

  ‘I would be interested to find out what quantity of these the child ate, and who saw her eating them,’ Mr Cottingham said.

  ‘Well, it seems a very vague and useless question to me,’ said the judge, ‘but if you insist, I will put the question.’ Then, to Dr Patterson: ‘Would coconut chips have produced the appearance you saw?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would fish?’

  ‘No, not sound fish.’

  ‘Was there anything about the symptoms that would lead you to believe that they might have been produced by eating coconut chips or chocolate?’

  ‘Decidedly not.’

  ‘Or cakes, or anything of such character?’

  ‘No.’

  With this exchange Dr Patterson was allowed to step down.

  As the Chief Constable of Oldham, Charles Hodgkinson, was unable to attend due to his injury, Mr M’Connell requested that his deposition be read out, which was duly done. In his deposition Mr Hodgkinson stated that he went to see the prisoner on 6 January to inquire into the death of her daughter, that the prisoner had told him that the child was in the habit of being constipated, and that when she was in that state her aunt had given her a pill. On his telling her that the doctors suspected foul play, she had said to the Governor of the workhouse, ‘Oh! Governor, why should I kill my darling! I, who have just doubled my insurance on her?’ The statement continued: ‘I told her that she was charged with having administered poison to her daughter, and she replied, “I did nothing of the kind.”’

  After the reading of the statement Ann Sanderson was recalled and stated that Edith Annie had never suffered from constipation and had never been given pills of any kind.

  Following Mrs Sanderson the last of the crown’s witnesses of the day, Dr Robertson, was called. He was to spend some considerable time on the stand. In his testimony he stated that on the night of 2 January he was asked by Dr Patterson to see the child Edith Berry where she lay in bed. ‘She was greatly exhausted, but conscious,’ he said. ‘Her pulse was very quick and heated…The tongue was coated white all over…I have never seen such a tongue.’ He described also the ‘peculiar condition’ of the mouth, the blisters and the redness. On asking Mrs Berry for an explanation for it, he said she told him that she had given the child a lemon with some sugar.

  Following the child’s death, he went on, he and Dr Patterson performed a post-mortem examination, and the next day he was present when Dr Harris and Dr Patterson made a further examination of the girl’s body.

  Asked what he thought had been the cause of the child’s death, he replied: ‘Corrosive poison.’

  ‘From the post-mortem alone?’ asked the judge.

  ‘No, my Lord,’ said the doctor. ‘From the symptoms during life as well as the post-mortem appearance. The symptoms I saw were not consistent with any form of ordinary disease. The signs and marks I saw pointed to death from corrosive poisoning.’

  Under cross-examination by Mr Cottingham – which was lengthy and very thorough – Dr Robertson said that at first he had suggested that the poison might be oxalic acid, but since the post-mortem he had not come to any absolute conclusion, though in his opinion it was sulphuric acid, which had been suggested by Dr Harris. He had never in his career, he said, had a case of oxalic or sulphuric acid poisoning.

  Shortly after this testimony Mr Justice Hawkins announced that the court would be adjourned for the day.

  *

  Tubercular disease of brain and glands of bowels was given as the cause of death of Harold on his death certificate. It is not surprising that Mrs Sanderson was unable to answer Mr Cottingham’s question about it as she could not read.

  17

  The Verdict

  Wednesday 23 February: the third day of the trial. Soon after its opening at 10.35 a.m. Dr Robertson was recalled by the prosecution.

  Telling of his visit with Dr Patterson to the sick child, he said he asked to see the child’s vomit, and Mrs Berry handed him a towel on which was fresh-coloured blood in an excessively tenacious condition. ‘I have never seen mucus like that,’ he said. ‘I asked to see the evacuations of the bowels, but she said they hadn’t been kept. I asked her when the redness of the child’s lip had commenced but she didn’t reply, though Dr Patterson said, in her presence, that the redness hadn’t been there on his Sunday morning’s visit.’ Concluding his testimony, he said that Mrs Berry told him that her daughter had become much worse after being seen by Dr Patterson.

  In a surprising move, it had been the prosecution’s intention to bring into the witness box John Taylor, the Rochdale chemist who, in February of the previous year, had sold quantities of atropia to the woman calling herself Ellen Saunders shortly before the death of the prisoner’s mother. But it was announced that he was not well enough to attend, and into court came his medical doctor, Dr Edward March, who said that Taylor was suffering from ‘excitement of the brain’. ‘I last saw him this morning,’ he said. ‘He is bordering on acute mania, and is not in a fit state to travel from Rochdale to Liverpool. If he were to travel now it might result in an attack of mania. He has to be watched day by day.’ However, he did then admit that his patient was capable of travelling, and was sane, and therefore would be able to understand any questions put to him. With this, there came deliberation over whether Taylor’s deposition given at Rochdale could be presented in evidence. However, due to the fact that Mrs Berry had not been present at the Rochdale inquest when Taylor had testified, the judge decided that the chemist’s deposition could not be admitted.

  As to the prosecution’s purpose in wanting to bring the chemist into the witness box, it must be a matter for speculation. Any evidence he could give did not
on the surface relate to the matter of Edith Annie’s death, but to that of Mrs Berry’s mother, Mary Ann Finley. It is perhaps likely, then, that he had been called in the hope that he would identify the prisoner at the bar as the woman who had bought the poison atropia from him on two occasions. This being the case, it is a great pity that he did not show up, for had such an identification taken place it would have proved a considerable coup for the prosecution – not to mention providing one of the most dramatic episodes in the whole affair.

  After Dr March had stepped down, Dr Thomas Harris was called to the stand, and the subject was brought back directly to that of the murdered child. In his testimony he spoke of the dried patches about the dead girl’s lips, and after looking at a photograph of her face, produced a drawing he had made, saying, ‘I made a rough sketch to show the relative size of the patches.’ The photograph and the sketch were here handed to the jury, with the doctor adding: ‘Those marks I’ve described are not consistent with the idea that they have been caused by a lemon and sugar. And they are not consistent with the idea that the patient has been suffering from herpes labialis [commonly known as a cold sore].’ After describing the congested condition of the gullet and the black, corroded, charred patch on it he was asked by Mr Mellor: ‘What would you say was the cause of death?’ and replied that he believed it was caused by the ingestion of a corrosive poison, ‘probably sulphuric acid’.

  ‘Would it alter your opinion if you were told that on analysis no traces of poison could be discovered?’ Mr Mellor asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ the doctor replied, repeating his assertion that through vomiting and purging the traces of a corrosive poison could be worked out of the system within twenty-four hours.

  Mr Cottingham, for the defence, asked the doctor if a corrosive poison, swallowed, would leave marks in the mouth where the poison had come in contact with the surface. Dr Harris replied, ‘Not necessarily. It would in all probability produce changes in the mouth, but usually sulphuric acid does not produce charring in the mouth.’

  Edith Annie on her death bed, a newspaper illustration from one of the photographs taken shortly after her death, showing the blisters around her mouth.

  Mr Cottingham then referred to the doctor’s post-mortem report noting that a ‘cheesy nodule’ had been found in the child’s right lung, and suggested that she had suffered from tuberculosis. Dr Harris would have none of it; the child had not been tubercular, he said. Asked how the poison could have been administered without her complaining, the doctor replied that he didn’t know. As to how it was administered, he said that the marks about the mouth indicated that it ‘was administered in a fluid form, and that there had probably been some accident in its administration’.

  Mr Cottingham: ‘Could the appearances on the mouth be produced by creosote?’

  ‘In my opinion it could not.’

  City analyst Charles Estcourt then took the stand to testify that in the parts passed to him he had found no poisonous matter, organic or inorganic. In his opinion the charred patch on the gullet would have been caused by sulphuric acid. When examining the gullet, he said, he had not tested it for any matter other than sulphuric acid.

  After Mr Estcourt, Henry Jackson of the Prudential Insurance Society was called back to identify the signature of the prisoner on the insurance policies taken out with his company. Following this, the court was adjourned until the next morning.

  The trial had been running for three days now, a rather longer time than some had anticipated, and so far only the witnesses for the prosecution had been heard. The jurors were growing weary, and as the spectators left the courtroom one of the jurors approached the judge to ask how much longer it was likely to take. When the judge said that he could not hazard a guess, the juror remarked on their protracted confinement in their hotel, and their being unable to get any fresh air or exercise. The judge sympathized, and said he would arrange for them to be taken for a drive the next day before the court was resumed.

  His Lordship was true to his word, and after breakfast the following morning the jurors were taken on a carriage ride through the city, taking in some of the sights of interest in the bracing February chill, after which they were conveyed to St George’s Hall for the resumption of the trial.

  There in the courtroom at 10.45, when all were assembled, the judge took his seat, and the first witness of the day was called. This was Dr Patterson, recalled to be questioned about the poisons kept in the surgery. He said that there had been a large number of them in the surgery on New Year’s Day, and that on 9 January he had prepared a list of them. Handed the list by the Clerk, he confirmed that it named all the poisons in the surgery on 1 January that had been lying loose on the counter, and that all of them were irritants or corrosive poisons.

  His Lordship: ‘Among them was there sulphuric acid?’

  ‘There was, my Lord. Not the strongest, though there was sulphuric acid there.’ (Dr Patterson’s list of the poisons kept in the surgery outside the locked cupboard is among the Home Office papers on the case. His paper is headed ‘Corrosives & Irritants not locked up in Surgery on January 1st 1887’, and lists twenty-five poisons. Sulphuric acid is noted twice.)

  Dr Patterson’s evidence concluded the case for the prosecution, and it was then the turn of the counsel for the defence.

  Their first witness was William Thompson, from Manchester, an experienced analytical chemist. Questioned by Mr Byrne, he said that in his opinion if sulphuric acid had been administered by the girl’s mouth he should have expected to find marks in the throat and mouth similar to those on the lips, and to find traces of the acid for weeks afterwards in the gullet. Strong sulphuric acid, if applied to the skin, he said, would cause great pain for a while, and if swallowed would cause intense pain on those parts with which it came in contact. His opinion was founded upon experiments he had made. Sulphuric acid would produce vomiting, and if such ejected matter came in contact with a carpet, many of the colours would be destroyed. If the carpet was woollen he would expect to find the acid in combination with the wool. A towel vomited on would be destroyed unless it was a very large one.

  Cross-examined by Mr M’Connell, he said that sixteen years earlier he had examined the viscera of a person who had died from sulphuric acid poisoning, and as far as he could remember the whole of the tissues of the gullet were marked by the acid. Shown a photograph of the dead child’s face with the marks about the mouth, he said, ‘Looking at the photo, I should assume that the poison was administered by drinking.’ He went on to say that if a person had lived for a few days after taking a corrosive poison, and vomited frequently, he would still have expected to find traces in the body after death. This he had concluded from experiments made with sulphuric acid upon some animal flesh, and upon his own hand.

  He was then handed Dr Patterson’s list, after which he was asked by the judge, ‘Would you say that some of the poisons on this list of Dr Patterson’s would produce the same corrosive effect?’

  ‘Yes, they would.’

  On the properties of creosote, the witness said that it would not char, and a single drop would make not make any impression upon the skin.

  Mr Thompson’s testimony at an end, he was allowed to step down. The time was 12.25. It had been understood that counsel for Mrs Berry had brought a number of witnesses to the courthouse to give evidence, but to the great surprise of the prosecution, Mr Cottingham announced that he would be calling no more.

  And so it now fell to him to present the defence’s case. The last time he had made such an address had been before the magistrates, and he had succeeded in having the case against his client dismissed. Now, facing the jury in the Liverpool courtroom, he was well aware of the task before him. This time his client’s life hung in the balance.

  He began by speaking of the gravity of the offence for which the prisoner was on trial. In the history of the ages, he said, murder by poisoning was looked upon as the most diabolical, as it not only involved the crime of murder
and great cruelty, but was by its nature premeditated and cold-blooded. ‘And you must remember,’ he said, ‘that Mrs Berry is not only charged with poisoning a fellow creature, but also with causing the death of her child.’

  After saying that there had been shown no motive for such a crime, he suggested that Dr Patterson had never acted as if the child had been given poison in the first place. The doctor had prescribed for ulceration of the stomach, but later claimed to have suspected poisoning – and that the child’s mother had administered it. ‘But if he really believed that the child was being poisoned,’ he said, ‘how could he leave the mother in charge of all the poisonous medicines at her disposal and not take any precautions to prevent the life of the child being further tampered with?’ For all the work of the doctors, they had not been able to prove that the child had indeed been poisoned, let alone say what the poison was, and the whole course of the doctors’ conduct ‘was antagonistic to the hypothesis that poison was administered by anybody, much less the prisoner’. As for the post-mortem, it was not until the doctors had held their examination that they came to the conclusion that poison had been administered, yet they would not say what the poison was. ‘Is it not a matter of surprise that none of these men should have hit upon the real cause of death?’ he said. ‘They all three agreed that sulphuric acid was probably the poison used, but they were not certain.’

  He then tried to cast doubt on the contention that sulphuric acid could have been administered by the girl’s mouth. Sulphuric acid would have had an immediate effect on the lips, he said, and on all other parts of the body with which it came into contact. Further, while the chemist Mr Thompson had said positively that he should expect to find traces of sulphuric acid after death, Mr Estcourt’s findings showed nothing that might not be found after death from natural causes. Had the jury, he asked, ever heard of a case of criminal poisoning where poison in some form or other had not been found on analysis? All of this, he said, led him to posit the concept that the whole of the child’s sickness was not as much in the way of poisoning as the result of acute inflammation of the bowels.