The Yorkshire Witch

by Strevens, Summer;

  As the trial, which was to last eleven hours proceeded, indictment after damning indictment was presented, from the thorough search made by constables in Scarborough which had revealed, predictably, that no such person as Miss Blythe existed, to the discovery of arsenic pills found in the Bateman’s house in Water Lane when the premises were searched after Mary had initially been taken into custody.

  Of the witnesses called by the prosecution, Sarah Stead, Rebecca Perigo’s niece, was the first to take the stand. It was she who had innocently enough recommended the services of Mary Bateman to her distressed aunt. Her testimony was followed by the examination of William Perigo which occupied upwards of four hours. After the full relation of his and his wife’s dealings with Mary Bateman, Judge Le Blanc asked him whether he was certain of ‘what he had advanced on these points’ to which Perigo replied ‘I’ll abide by it while I live, and I will abide by it in another world for ever.’

  Various other witnesses were called to testify, amongst them Thomas Dobbin, from whom William Perigo had bought Miss Blythe’s bed and bedstead, and a William Hick, book-keeper at the Leeds Coachoffice who recalled William Perigo bringing in a parcel addressed to ‘Miss Blythe, Centre Hotel, Buxton’. He related how, three weeks later, a woman came to the Coach-office to enquire after the parcel; presumably Mary, who must have expected the parcel to have been returned to Leeds as the recipient did not exist. However, an oversight on the part of Hick meant that the return of the parcel was delayed until after Mary’s arrest, and when the parcel was finally recovered and the contents investigated, it just so happened to contain the Perigo family Bible, demanded by Miss Blythe the previous October.

  Detrimental testimonies continued to issue from the witness stand. Winifred Bond, who was employed by Mary to run various errands, stated that she frequently took letters to post offices in different towns for her. She was a perfect choice on Mary’s part, as conveniently Winifred could not read. She had on several occasions taken letters over to Bramley to deliver to the Perigos, and often returned with items such as a brewing tub and some malt, as well as some flour and some tea. She stated that Mary was quite implicit as to what Winifred should say if William Perigo were ever to question her, that she should tell him she was employed by Miss Blythe as a domestic, for her house in Fulneck which at the time had a flourishing Moravian church, about five miles west of the centre of Leeds. In fact, Winifred lived in Haworth, near Keighley, not yet the home of the Brontes, having been obliged to leave Leeds at Mary’s request. When Judge Le Blanc asked the witness how Mary Bateman had ‘obliged’ her to quit her home in Leeds, Winifred replied that ‘she was afraid’, fearing the supernatural powers which she supposed Mary to possess.

  When Rose Howgate, neighbour to the Perigos and a long-time friend of Rebecca’s was called to the witness stand, she told the court how she had visited at 10 o’clock on the morning of the fateful Saturday when the final pudding had been prepared with the last packet of poisonous powder. She’d found the couple well, and Rebecca doing some washing. However, when she returned later that afternoon she found both William and Rebecca very unwell indeed and vomiting, and that ‘the colour of what came from them was green and yellow and very frothy’, added to which she could hear her neighbours’ continuous vomiting from her own home next door. Over the course of the following week, Rose Howgate had continued with her neighbourly ministrations, until Rebecca’s death on the Sunday following. Being present when the deceased was laid out, Rose noted that the body ‘was covered in every part with black and white spots, but particularly about the neck and stomach’. Rebecca’s lips were also ‘exceedingly black’ and a great quantity of froth issued from the mouth, and her body was ‘so offensive that every person about her was under the necessity of smoking’. In the days before the inherent health risks of tobacco were identified, smoking pipes or the taking of snuff was often employed as a way of masking foul smells.

  Clearly suspicious of the cause and circumstances surrounding Rebecca’s death, it was Rose Howgate and another neighbour, John Rogerson, who had taken upon themselves the idea of experimentally feeding some of the poisoned pudding to a cat. The poor creature died after vomiting yellow and green matter. John Rogerson was also present with a Joshua Stockdale (possibly Rebecca’s brother - her maiden name was Stockdale) when William Perigo opened the silk purses that were supposed to have contained the guinea notes and coins, and it was also Joshua Stockdale who had accompanied William Perigo, along with Chief Constable Duffield, to the canal side meeting arranged with Mary Bateman. He verified the conversation that had taken place between them before Mary had been taken into custody.

  Further evidence of Mary’s procurement of poison was provided by eleven-year-old Thomas Gristy, who remembered that about two years previously he had accompanied Jack Bateman, Mary’s son, who would himself have been eleven years old at the time, in April 1807 to Mr Clough’s apothecary shop in Kirkgate. At this time the sale of drugs and poisons was practically unrestricted, and they could be bought like any other commodity, arsenic often being employed in pest control. In this instance when Jack Bateman handed over the paper upon which was written the request for 4d worth of arsenic, Mr Clough had refused to sell it to the boys saying that it was poison, even though Jack Bateman maintained it was to be used ‘to kill bugs with’.

  The most damning witness testimony came however from Thomas Chorley, a practicing surgeon of nearly seventeen years standing from Call Lane in Leeds who was listed in the Leeds Directory of 1798, under the ‘Physic’ section. It was Chorley who had examined William Perigo on the day after his wife’s death, he having fallen ill after eating but a single mouthful of the sixth Saturday pudding and just two teaspoons of the ‘special’ honey, and had noted symptoms indicative of poisoning in his patient. Chorley had also analysed the contents of the jar of honey from which Rebecca had eaten so freely. His personal observations and the tests he had carried out on the dog were all indicative of poison. He also carried out an analysis of the bottle found in Mary’s possession on the day of her arrest, when she had arranged to meet William Perigo at the canal side. The bottle and its content were produced in court, and the solution confirmed as a spirituous liquid, probably rum, but also containing two powders, the lighter of which it was supposed was oatmeal while the other was arsenic.

  In addition to the testimony provided by Chorley, two further expert witnesses from the medical fraternity were called to the stand and examined regarding the symptoms Rebecca had suffered before and at her death. Dr Lawson of York and Mr James Lucas, formerly a consulting surgeon of Leeds but at the time of Mary’s trial practising in Masham, both concurred, in their opinion, that from the evidence they had heard Rebecca Perigo’s death could not have arisen from any ‘natural disease’ and that her symptoms ‘were such as would be produced by corrosive sublimate of mercury being received into the stomach’. It would appear that Mary had covered her bases and had employed two different poisons – sublimate of mercury in the ‘special’ honey (which Chorley had identified), and arsenic to lace the pudding powders.

  At this juncture, the verdict seemed a foregone conclusion; Mary had no counsel, and no recourse to explain or contradict the evidence presented with any satisfactory testimony of her own, other than that taken down in her examination by the Leeds magistrate subsequent to her arrest and now read before the court.

  The lop-sided, not to say unfair, nature of the judicial system in 1809 is exposed by this. Justice was supposed to be blind and impartial, its scales weighed by evidence. Despite the acquisition of considerable sums of money over the years from various scams, Mary could probably not afford a lawyer. Given the prosecution’s evidence and the witnesses called, he would have had his work cut out to sway a jury, but stranger things have happened. Let us for a moment assume that Mary did have counsel. What could he have done?

  Initially, he would have denied all charges on Mary’s behalf and would have cross-examined the prosecution witnesses. He
would have challenged Wright’s assertion that the Miss Blythe letters were in Mary’s handwriting. Wright was not a graphology expert and there is still huge controversy about what handwriting can tell us forensically. The barrister would then have called into question the competence of the Scarborough police who had been unable to find Miss Blythe. There was no doubt that, had the woman been genuine, her psychic powers would have made her reclusive and not the sort to be listed in the town’s Directories. He may also have put a doubt into the jury’s minds about the Leeds police search of the Batemans’ house which had produced the arsenic pills. We have already established that arsenic had conventional household uses at the time and that is before any assertion, later commonplace, of the police planting evidence to bolster their case.

  Sarah Stead offered nothing incriminating other than that she had introduced Mary to her aunt so a defence counsel might have let her get off lightly. William Perigo would have spent far longer than his four hours in the witness box. A good brief would have had every sympathy for the man’s loss, so that he should not alienate the jury, but would point out that for most of Miss Blythe’s correspondence, the court only had William’s memory and this was not sufficient. Even the prosecution had alluded to ‘an extraordinary folly’ on Perigo’s part and a clever defence lawyer could have pushed this to the point where the man appeared an imbecile whose testimony could not be relied upon.

  The calling of Thomas Dobbin as a witness would merely have served to prove Perigo’s stupidity. The man had bought a bed from him, which takes us nowhere near the assumption of murder. In the case of William Hick, the book-keeper at the Leeds Coach-office, if Mary was the woman who had called to collect a parcel addressed to Miss Blythe, why didn’t he point her out in court? Winifred Bond’s testimony could easily have been demolished. She was illiterate and afraid of Mary. On either score, defence counsel could have called into question her reliability.

  Rose Howgate’s testimony did not point to Mary at all. She had seen the pudding preparation and witnessed the poison’s effects, but Mary, of course, was nowhere to be seen. The defence would have pointed this out too. Little Thomas Gristy was almost irrelevant. It is likely that children’s testimony was not taken as seriously as adults’ in the courts of the day and all the boy had done was to witness Mary’s son trying to buy arsenic, ostensibly for legal reasons – ‘to kill bugs with’. Circumstantial evidence like this has hanged people but it has acquitted them too.

  The defence counsel would probably have had most difficulty with Mr Chorley, the surgeon, but he would have found an expert witness of his own who would have rebutted Chorley’s findings. The later infamous poisoning cases of the century – Charles Bravo, James Maybrick, the many victims of William Palmer – all produced rebuttal witnesses of this type. All of the science would, in all probability, have gone straight over the heads of the jury, so the issue would have come down to personalities – both of the duelling doctors and the clashing counsel.

  As it was, there was no defence counsel. Under the law as it stood, Mary was not allowed to speak in her own defence so the arraignment testimony had to suffice. It said that it had been more than three years since she had been in Leeds, variously residing in Manchester, Bedale, Richmond and Masham, and that she had not been in Leeds when William Perigo claimed he had been instructed to bring her the half a peck of wheat, amongst various items extorted from the Perigos at the behest of Miss Blythe. She herself had contributed half the money toward the purchase of the cheese, presumably the six to eight pound one requested in Miss Blythe’s letter of October 1806, and that ‘she never had any honey or powders’ and that Rebecca Perigo ‘never brought any honey pot to her’. She had never spoken to either husband or wife about any honey, and neither her husband nor anyone ‘never fetched any powder’. In short her defence was a straightforward denial of any involvement in the death of Rebecca, Mary insisting that it was ‘utterly false’ that she ‘ever did send for any poison by any person’. Any avenue of opportunity in shifting the blame to Miss Blythe had already been closed off of course when the constables in Scarborough had failed to find any such person. In fact, Mary had already admitted to the Leeds magistrates that there was in fact no such person as Miss Blythe in existence. Indeed, during her arraignment at Leeds, Mary had also stated ‘that all the letters were written by Hannah Potts except the last five or six’. Whether Hannah Potts really existed, perhaps as an acquaintance of Mary’s, or was merely another invention on her part like Miss Blythe, we will never know.

  In his summing up of the case, Sir Simon Le Blanc reminded the jury that to bring in a guilty verdict they had to satisfy themselves on three points. These were that Rebecca Perigo had died from poisoning, that the poison had been administered with the knowledge and contrivance of Mary Bateman, and that it had been done in the expectation of causing Rebecca Perigo’s death. The jury, as was always the case in those days, was entirely male and the judge went on to remind them to render an impartial verdict and that although there was a strong case against Mary for having systematically defrauded the Perigos, this did not automatically make her guilty of murder. However, in view of the overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecution, after conferring for a very short time, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Accordingly Judge Le Blanc placed the black cloth sentencing cap over his powdered wig and proceeded to pass sentence of death:

  ‘Mary Bateman, you have been convicted of wilful murder by a jury who, after having examined your case with caution, have, constrained by the force of evidence, pronounced you guilty. It only remains for me to fulfil my painful duty by passing upon you the awful sentence of the law. After you have been so long in the situation in which you now stand, and harassed as your mind must be by the long detail of your crimes and by listening to the sufferings you have occasioned, I do not wish to add to your distress by saying more than my duty renders necessary. Of your guilt, there cannot remain a particle of doubt in the breast of anyone who has heard your case. You entered into a long and premeditated system of fraud, which you carried on for a length of time which is most astonishing, and by means which one would have supposed could not, in this age and nation, have been practised with success. To prevent a discovery of your complicated fraud, and the punishment which must have resulted therefrom, you deliberately contrived the death of the persons you had so grossly injured, and that by means of poison, a mode of destruction against which there is no sure protection. But your guilty design was not fully accomplished, and, after so extraordinary a lapse of time, you are reserved as a signal example of the justice of that mysterious Providence, which, sooner or later, overtakes guilt like yours. At the very time when you were apprehended, there is the greatest reason to suppose, that if your surviving victim had met you alone, as you wished him to do, you would have administered to him a more deadly dose, which would have completed the diabolical project you had long before formed, but which at that time only partially succeeded; for upon your person, at that moment, was found a phial containing a most deadly poison. For crimes like yours, in this world, the gates of mercy are closed. You afforded your victim no time for preparation, but the law, while it dooms you to death, has, in its mercy, afforded you time for repentance, and the assistance of pious and devout men, whose admonitions, and prayers, and counsels may assist to prepare you for another world, where even your crimes, if sincerely repented of, may find mercy.

  ‘The sentence of the law is, and the court doth award it, that you be taken to the place from whence you came, and from thence, on Monday next, to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be given to the surgeons to be dissected and anatomized. And may Almighty God have mercy upon your soul.’

  With regard to the stipulation of Mary’s sentence concerning ‘dissection’, in 1752 the ‘Act for the better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder’, more commonly known as the ‘Murder Act’, mandated the dissection of the bodies of executed murderers (in
cluding females), though the gibbeting of the remains of male malefactors was still reserved for those found guilty of particularly heinous or high profile crimes.

  Dissection was viewed with a very real horror. A practice formerly prohibited by the Catholic Church, after the English Reformation of the sixteenth century, as medical research grew so did the need for cadavers. By the 1700s, in England, the bodies of executed criminals and the ‘unclaimed poor’ were given over to feed the need of surgical teaching schools and hospitals. The legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes did not provide enough ‘subjects’ and eventually the demand for cadavers for medical use outstripped the supply – in 1812 there were twenty-six Medical Schools in Great Windmill Street, London, alone. Body snatching, the gruesome trade of the Resurrection Men, became a lucrative sphere of criminal activity in itself. Certainly the sentence of dissection increased the deterrent effect of the death penalty by preying on the very real dread felt by most of the population at the thought of dismemberment after death. The prevalent and strong belief that dissection and the desecration of a deceased body, rendering it incomplete, would prevent an individual’s entry into Heaven is not as archaic as it would seem.

  When body snatching reached its zenith, with the Resurrection Men working overtime to exhume the bodies of the recently dead, it was not unusual for relatives and friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after interment, to stop it being removed and violated. Iron coffins, too, were used frequently, or the graves were protected by a framework of iron bars called mortsafes. Watchtowers were even built within some cemeteries and night watchman employed to deter those intent on their gory trade. Indeed, in some cases the public feeling against the practice was so strong that bodies were frequently ‘saved’ from the surgeon’s table by the surge of angry crowds intent on snatching the body away post execution, ensuring an intact Christian burial. One notable case in point was the cadaver of celebrity criminal Dick Turpin, executed on York’s Knavesmire gallows in 1739 before a vast crowd, appreciative of his final bravado in the shadow of the noose. In spite of being buried in a very deep grave in the churchyard of St George’s, Turpin’s body was later found disinterred and in the garden of one of the city surgeons. However, the dissectionists were thwarted, as after keeping Turpin’s body in the Blue Boar Inn overnight (in those days a public house often had a room that was used as a temporary mortuary), to prevent any further ‘body snatching’ attempts Turpin was re-buried in St George’s Churchyard, this time the coffin was filled with unslaked quicklime.