The Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer

by Jones, Kaye;

  Feeling uneasy, Christiana left Garrett’s and covered her face with a veil before entering Caroline Stone’s shop at 7 Queen’s Road. Unsure of how to word her request, Christiana made small talk with Stone, purchased a lace veil and then left the shop. She waited outside for a few minutes before going in and asking Stone for a small favour. She introduced herself as Mrs Wood and explained that she and her husband were naturalists and wanted some poison for the purposes of stuffing a bird but Mr Garrett required a witness before he would sell it to her. Caroline Stone was taken aback by her customer’s unusual request, having never heard anything like it in her thirty years in business. Despite her hesitation, the customer seemed very respectable and Stone had no reason to doubt her intentions so she agreed to accompany her to Mr Garrett’s.

  Back at number 10, Mr Garrett explained to Stone that the new Act had made it necessary to have the signature of a householder as a witness. She agreed to witness the transaction and watched as he placed ten grains of strychnine into a packet and then wrote the following in the poison book: ‘March 28, 1871 – Mrs Wood, Hillside, Kingstown; Strychnia, 10 grains; destroying cats’. If Caroline Stone noticed that the entry contained no mention of stuffing birds, she kept quiet about it. She and Christiana signed the entry and then parted company, with Christiana confident that her true motives for the purchase remained a secret. With a fresh supply of strychnine, Christiana returned home to Gloucester Place and prepared for the second round of poisonings.

  On a cold morning, just after Easter Monday in 1871, Christiana ventured again to Spring Gardens, the place where she had met Benjamin Coultrop at the beginning of March. Though only a mile from Gloucester Place, Spring Gardens was a very different neighbourhood to the one Christiana called home. An area of notorious poverty, its residents were blighted by some of the town’s worst living conditions. When the Government Inspector, Edward Cresy, visited Brighton in 1849 to report on the town’s sanitary condition, he had highlighted Spring Gardens and the surrounding streets as a major source of disease. Cresy observed that sulphurated hydrogen, arising from the excrement in nearby cesspools, was the source of sickness among its residents because ‘this deadly poison pervades all the narrow breathing-places which are found at the backs of continued rows of buildings’. This problem was exacerbated by the poor quality of housing in the district:

  Many of the houses are wretchedly damp, being constructed with inferior bricks and mortar made of sea sand. No methods are adopted for getting rid of even the pluvial waters, and the walls are covered with lichens; so that, added to the want of drainage, a constant decomposition of vegetable matter is going on.10

  While Brighton’s dominance as a centre of tourism had brought great wealth to the town, much of this money was spent on improving leisure facilities and not on creating an infrastructure for its growing number of inhabitants. By 1860, for example, only one-quarter of Brighton’s houses were drained into its eight miles of sewers while the remaining three-quarters relied on cesspools.11 Commenting on this situation, William Kebbell, a local doctor, wrote that ‘the streets and districts of the poor, both in filth and general untidiness, and the squalor of the inhabitants, are a disgrace to any civilised people’.12

  In this place of poverty and disease, where Christiana could pass unrecognised, she soon met Emily Baker, the 9-year-old daughter of Jesse Baker, a painter, and his wife Harriett. She was playing alone outside when Christina approached her and struck up a conversation. She began by asking if Emily liked sweets before finding out her name, age and address. Once Christiana had this information, she handed Emily a bag of chocolate creams from Maynard’s and watched as she excitedly ran home, blissfully unaware of the dangers inside. Christiana returned to Spring Gardens a few days later, in a bold move which brought her dangerously close to being detected, and called at Emily’s house. Her mother, Harriett, opened the door, and Christiana asked her if any children in the area had recently been taken ill. Harriett assumed that the lady at her door was a district visitor, a person who visited poorer families on behalf of the Church of England, and recounted how her daughter had vomited for three days after eating some chocolates. Harriett said she was keen to find the lady who gave them to Emily, prompting Christiana to make her excuses and return to Gloucester Place. Had Emily been at home that day and recognised Christiana, the course of her life would have been very different. But this experience unnerved Christiana nonetheless and, from now on, she adopted a new practice that involved hiring a young boy to go to Maynard’s and purchase chocolate creams on her behalf. One such boy was 12-year-old, William Tye, who Christiana met on North Street in April. She asked him to fetch three ounces of chocolate creams and gave him one shilling to cover the cost. When William returned from Maynard’s, Christiana took the bag of chocolate creams and switched it for a bag hidden in her pocket. These were the creams that she had poisoned at home and Christina distracted him to ensure that he did not see her make the switch and realise the ruse. Now all she had to do was tell the boy that he had purchased the wrong creams and get him to exchange them at Maynard’s for a different type,13 to ensure that her poisoned creams were distributed randomly to other customers and to guarantee a fresh supply for adulteration. Even more advantageous was the sense of anonymity it brought to Christiana; nobody would suspect her of foul play if she was not in Maynard’s shop at the time of purchase.

  Christiana did, however, return to Maynard’s shop one last time but not to buy his chocolate creams. She went to make a complaint, the first one John Maynard had received in his twenty-eight years as a confectioner in Brighton. He was taken aback when she told him that she and a friend had been unwell after eating some of his chocolate creams in September. He was even more upset to hear that she had bought another bag in March, which had tasted very unpleasant and made her throat burn. Being entirely innocent of adulteration, Maynard could hardly accept responsibility for Christiana’s illness but he took her complaint seriously and tasted some of the creams for himself. He found nothing wrong with their taste but consented to her suggestion that the creams be chemically analysed. From Maynard’s, Christiana headed to see Julius Schweitzer, a chemist at 86 King’s Road, and requested that he perform the analysis. She told him the same story about the poisoning in September but Schweitzer treated the matter very lightly at first, believing Christiana to be ‘nervous and fanciful’. But Christiana had brought him a sample of her adulterated creams and, as soon as he had tasted one, he quickly changed his mind and agreed to conduct the analysis. At this, Christiana left Schweitzer’s, confident that her ruse to frame John Maynard would now have all the credibility it needed and that she would be exonerated finally for the poisoning of Emily Beard.

  In the meantime, Christiana focused her attention on maintaining a steady supply of strychnine by cultivating a relationship with Isaac Garrett. She visited his shop frequently, talked with him at length about her garden and twice brought him a bundle of home-grown asparagus, all while maintaining the façade that she was Mrs Wood of Hillside. On 15 April she told Garrett that that cats were ‘as destructive as ever’ and that she needed more strychnine to kill them. Garrett was again hesitant to dispense strychnine for this purpose and requested that she fetch Caroline Stone. At her shop, Christiana purchased another veil, prompting Caroline Stone to agree to witness the transaction and Garrett dispensed another ten grains of strychnine. Christiana now had in her possession enough strychnine to kill twenty adults or at least twice as many children.14 At the beginning of May, she returned to Garrett’s to purchase strychnine for the third time. She told the chemist that she and her husband had decided to leave Brighton and move to ‘Devonshire’ but first she needed a little strychnine for the purposes of killing a dog who was too old and sick to accompany them. Garrett cautioned her again about using a poison as strong as strychnine but he supplied her with another ten grains, this time without a witness.

  Christiana’s story about wanting to kill a dog was not a complete f
abrication. There was a dog at her house but it was not old and diseased as she had led Garrett to believe. It was, in fact, the favourite dog of Louisa Taylor, a fellow lodger at 16 Gloucester Place where Christiana had lived since 27 March, having moved with her mother from the house next door. On 27 May, the house servant, Charlotte Pettit noticed Christiana playing with the dog on the upstairs landing. Half an hour later, Christiana had disappeared but the dog had become unwell and began to twist and writhe, as if in agony. The dog died shortly after and Miss Taylor sent for Henry Swayster, the son of a bird stuffer, who delivered it to a local taxidermist, Robert Bragnor. When Bragnor opened the box and saw the dog, he knew instantly that it had been poisoned because of its ‘peculiar rigidity’ and ‘inward bending’ of the backbone. The dog’s mouth was also of an ‘offensive character’, curled into that devilish grin known as Resus Sardonicus, another indicator of poisoning by strychnine. Of all the animals he had stuffed over the years, Bragnor later said that he had never seen one in such a state.15 This sad incident aroused much suspicion among the taxidermist and the lodgers of 17 Gloucester Place but nobody truly believed that Christiana Edmunds, a well-educated and well-bred lady, might be capable of a crime like poisoning. Her social background had afforded her all the protection she needed to continue poisoning Brighton’s unsuspecting public over the summer of 1871.

  Chapter Six

  “For the Pure Love of Deception”

  Early on the morning of Monday 12 June, Charles Miller was on his way back to his lodgings on West Street after going for a walk around town. This was Miller’s second day on holiday in Brighton, having travelled by train from London on Saturday with his brother, sister and her family. As he strolled down West Street he called in at Maynard’s sweet shop and asked the assistant, Annie Meadows, for a bag of her best chocolate creams. Maynard’s stocked three types of chocolate creams but the best, by far, were the French variety which were kept in the bottom compartment of a glass case on the counter. The demand for these creams had been very high lately; Annie and her fellow assistants had served a number of young boys over the last few weeks but, rather unusually, every bag of creams had been returned and exchanged for another. As nobody had reported a problem with their taste or quality, these creams were put back into the glass case on the counter and then placed into a bag by Annie and handed over to Charles Miller.1

  When Miller returned to his lodgings at 30 West Street, he was warmly welcomed by his 4-year-old nephew, Sidney, to whom he gave the first chocolate cream from the bag. He then handed a cream to his brother, Ernest, before eating a few himself. But not long after, Miller noticed a strange, coppery taste in his throat and his legs felt heavy and stiff. He tried to get up from his chair but fell backwards and a second attempt left him feeling as though his body was ‘without joints’.2 Charles was so unwell that the landlady, Mrs Freeman, sent for James Tuke, a surgeon who lived close by. After a full examination, Tuke could find no obvious cause for Miller’s strange symptoms but he was certain that the chocolate creams were not responsible and declared them perfectly safe to consume. A few hours later, Miller began to feel much better and, at 4.00 pm, he gave another chocolate cream to his nephew, Sidney.3

  But within minutes of eating the cream, Sidney suddenly began to cry and called to his uncle that he didn’t like the chocolate. His mother, Selicia, ran to him and picked him up. She asked him what was the matter but Sidney was unable to answer her because his muscles had already started to spasm. The family called again for a doctor and a nearby surgeon, Richard Rugg, arrived soon after to find Sidney ‘in strong convulsions’.4 The family quickly told Rugg about the chocolate creams and how the boy’s uncle had fallen ill earlier that day. Recognising this as the work of poison, Rugg applied to the nearest chemist for an emetic and, in the meantime, placed a mixture of cold water and vinegar to Sidney’s head in an attempt to control his increasingly violent convulsions. Sadly, before the emetic arrived, Sidney suffered one final convulsion and died in the doctor’s arms.

  Had the first doctor, James Tuke, attended Sidney Barker, the aftermath of his tragic death could have played out very differently. Richard Rugg, on the other hand, knew that Sidney had been poisoned and was keen to know how this little boy had met his end. In cases of a suspicious death, it was the doctor’s duty to inform the authorities and Rugg duly contacted the police and the coroner after he left the grieving family at West Street. In the meantime, Sidney’s uncle, Ernest, went to Maynard’s to purchase some more chocolate creams and handed them over to William Gibbs, the police inspector in charge of the investigation.

  In his twenty years on the Brighton Police Force, William Gibbs had become accustomed to dealing with drunks, thieves and prostitutes but he had relatively little experience with poisoners. In 1863, while Gibbs was still a constable, Mary Ann Day, a mother of eight from Kemptown, died after eating a mince pie laced with arsenic. The police arrested Mary’s fiancé, William Sturt, and alleged that he had poisoned her after changing his mind about their impending marriage. William was tried in March 1863 but the jury found him not guilty and her case remained unsolved. A few years later, after Gibbs’ promotion to sergeant, Doctor Alfred Warder was accused of murdering his wife, Ellen, by administering doses of aconite, or wolf’s bane, to her over the course of a month. Before Warder could be arrested and tried, he fled to London and committed suicide by drinking cyanide. It later transpired that Warder’s first two wives had died of unnatural causes but it was, by then, too late for an investigation to be made into the doctor’s marital history.

  While Inspector Gibbs shared Rugg’s suspicions towards the chocolate creams purchased at Maynard’s, he could not be certain that a crime had been committed until he saw the results of the postmortem, the next stage in the process of investigating a suspicious death. This was carried out the next day by Richard Rugg who found Sidney’s body to be ‘unusually rigid’ but otherwise in a very healthy condition. The only organ in which Rugg could find any damage was the brain; it appeared ‘slightly congested’ but this was, he claimed, to be expected in a case of death by convulsions. 5 Overall, there was nothing to indicate the cause of Sidney’s death and the borough coroner, David Black, requested that he remove Sidney’s stomach to allow for further investigation by an expert. Rugg duly carried out his request and placed the stomach and its contents into a glass jar which he then handed over to Inspector Gibbs.

  By 1871, it had become standard practice for coroners to consult with a chemical expert in cases of an unexplained death, especially where poisoning was suspected. While local doctors, like Richard Rugg, were capable of and responsible for carrying out post-mortems, they often lacked the required specialist knowledge to detect and identify poison. Rugg, for example, would later admit that the Barker case was the first time he had ever seen a case of strychnine poisoning and he therefore had no idea how to diagnosis or detect this poison in the human body. The cost of consulting with an expert could be high but it was a necessary expense in the process of determining the cause of death. For the analysis, David Black hired Dr Henry Letheby, a chemical analyst and public health official from London, who had risen to become one of the country’s leading medical experts. In fact, Dr Letheby acted as a medical witness in twelve criminal poisoning cases during his career, a figure which ranked him the fourth most-consulted expert of the nineteenth century.6

  On the evening of 16 June, Inspector Gibbs travelled to London to personally deliver the glass jar containing Sidney’s stomach and two packets of Mr Maynard’s chocolate creams to Dr Letheby. The packet marked ‘1’ contained the creams purchased by Ernest Miller on the day that Sidney died while the second packet, marked ‘2’, was bought on 15 June by Charles Miller and Inspector Gibbs. While Gibbs returned to Brighton, Dr Letheby set to work straightaway by examining the contents of the glass jar. Like Rugg, he found Sidney’s stomach to be in a very healthy condition and its contents smelled faintly of chocolate. He looked for signs of irritation, which woul
d indicate poisoning by arsenic or antimony, but found nothing. Having heard the violent circumstances of Sidney’s death, he next considered a mineral poison, like strychnine, or its close relative, brucine,7 and extracted a sample from Sidney’s stomach for testing. Dr Letheby performed the colour test, a method reliably used for the last decade to detect the presence of mineral poisons, which was quick and simple to carry out. He began by mixing the test sample with a little sulphuric acid and some potassium dichromate. This produced a vivid purple colour and he then waited for the sample to change colour. If it turned red, it indicated the presence of strychnine and, sure enough, the sample turned to red only a few minutes later. To be certain of the result, Letheby performed another, though slightly different, version of the colour reaction test. He extracted another sample from Sidney’s stomach but, this time, mixed it with ferric chloride. Within seconds, the sample turned to blue, proving beyond all doubt that Sidney Barker was a victim of deliberate poisoning by strychnine.8

  Back in Brighton, the news of Sidney Barker’s death began to spread around the town while Christiana’s poisoning spree continued unabated. Only a few days after his death, Christiana visited Cole’s grocery shop on Church Street and purchased a few small articles. She was served by the owner’s wife, Harriett Cole, who knew her as a regular customer. In a scene reminiscent of the poisoning of William Halliwell, Christiana dropped a paper bag in a zinc pail by the door and left the shop, knowing that Harriett would find it but hoping that she wouldn’t realise who had left it there. Later in the day, when Harriett retrieved the bag, she opened it up to find several large and small chocolate creams and three lemon bull’s-eyes inside. Harriett ate two of the bulls-eyes and gave the other to her daughter who complained of a funny taste and spat it out. The chocolate creams were given the next day to one of Harriett’s customers, 10-year-old Henry Walker, who took them home as a gift to his mother, Caroline. She ate a piece of the larger chocolate cream and was not prepared for what happened next: