Seddon almost bragged about his acquisition of Ms Barrow’s assets, telling her cousin, ‘I am always open to buy property. This house I live in, fourteen rooms, is my own, and I have seventeen other properties. I am always open to buy property at a price.’ He confirmed the position in a formal letter sent to the Vonderahes: ‘She stated in writing that she did not wish any of her relatives to receive any benefit at her death. She had simply left furniture, jewellery, and clothing. F.H. Seddon, Executor.’ And when asked why Ms Barrow had been buried in a public grave instead of the family vault in Highgate, Seddon replied, ‘I thought it was full up.’
Frustrated by Seddon’s attitude, Frank Vonderahe went to the police with his suspicions. Five weeks later, on 14 November, Eliza Barrow’s body was exhumed and sent to the pathologist William Willcox for a post-mortem. The doctor’s findings, together with the expert opinion of the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, were devastating for Seddon – Ms Barrow had been poisoned with arsenic. According to Willcox, the fatal dose was probably taken within two days of death. ‘The symptoms are of a very acute and pronounced character,’ he said. ‘The patient is faint, collapsed, has severe pain in the abdomen, vomiting and purging; sometimes cramp in the legs; death resulting in a few days.’
On 4 December, Seddon was approached in the street in Tollington Park and arrested on suspicion of murder. Seddon’s reply was curiously melodramatic:
Absurd. What a terrible charge … wilful murder. It is the first of our family that has ever been accused of such a crime. Are you going to arrest my wife as well? If not, I would like you to give her a message for me. Have they found arsenic in her body? She has not done this, herself – it was not carbolic acid was it, as there was some in her room, and Sanitas is not poison is it?
A month later his wife was also charged. Her reply was more subdued: ‘Yes, very well.’
Further evidence emerged which deepened the suspicion against the Seddons; a search of No. 63 Tollington Park uncovered a watch and a ring belonging to Ms Barrow in the Seddons’ wardrobe. It turned out that Frederick Seddon had commissioned a jeweller to remove Ms Barrow’s name from the back of the watch and to enlarge the ring the day after her death. The Seddons claimed that they were given the jewellery as a present, but they were unable to explain what had happened to the large sum of money, estimated at between £380 and £750, which Ms Barrow kept in her cash box. The only possible conclusion was that it had vanished into the Seddons’ pockets. Even more damning was the evidence of a pharmacist in Crouch Hill who claimed to have sold a 3d packet of ‘Mather’s Arsenical flypapers, to poison flies, wasps, ants, mosquitos, etc.’ to the Seddons’ sixteen-year-old daughter, Maggie, on 26 August – six days before Ms Barrow was taken ill. Mrs Seddon also admitted to buying flypapers on around 4 September – but neither Ernie Grant nor the maid had noticed them being used in the house. Tests carried out by Dr Willcox showed that the arsenic could be extracted by soaking or boiling them in water. It might then have been added to the Valentine’s Meat Juice that Mrs Seddon fed to Ms Barrow during her illness. ‘I think arsenic might be administered in Valentine’s Meat Juice without detection,’ concluded Dr Willcox. ‘The Valentine’s Meat Juice and the fly paper solution are exactly similar in colour.’
Advert for Valentine’s Meat Juice. (Author)
But who had actually poisoned Ms Barrow? Frederick Seddon had motive aplenty, but there was nothing that actually put the arsenic in his hands. When the case came to trial at the Old Bailey his barrister, the legendary Edward Marshall Hall, told the jury:
You may have suspicion. You may feel that here there is a strong motive against the male prisoner. You may feel that he has behaved badly in the unfortunate matter of the funeral. You may feel many things which are to his prejudice; but I submit to you that there is no evidence whatever upon which you can find him guilty of the administration of the poison.
Unfortunately for the defence case, Frederick Seddon had insisted on entering the witness box, displaying the arrogance and supreme greed that would convince the jury of his guilt. Seddon even implied that Eliza Barrow might have mistakenly drunk the flypaper water herself to quench the thirst brought on by her illness. The jury took an hour to convict him of murder. His wife was found not guilty.
Even now, Seddon refused to be beaten. He crossed the dock to his wife and gave her a loud kiss which echoed through the silence of the court. He then took some papers out of his pocket and made a long speech insisting upon his innocence. ‘Had Miss Barrow thrown herself out through the window … I would have been believed to have thrown her out or pushed her out through the window. Had Miss Barrow fallen downstairs the same thing would have applied.’ In a final gamble he openly made a Masonic sign with his hand, imploring the judge to be merciful. ‘I declare before the Great Architect of the Universe I am not guilty, my Lord.’
The judge, Mr Justice Bucknill, was indeed a Freemason and appeared to be overcome with emotion as he passed the death sentence:
From what you have said, you and I know we both belong to one Brotherhood and it is all the more painful to me to have to say what I am saying. But our Brotherhood does not encourage crime; on the contrary it condemns it. I pray you again to make your peace with the Great Architect of the Universe.
On 16 April 1912, two days before his execution at Pentonville Prison, he wrote a final letter to his wife:
I am still cheerful, and will be till the last, thanks to a clear conscience which sustains me, and this brings me to another important matter I wish to prepare you against. You remember in Crippen’s case how false reports went about, and how he was supposed to have made a confession of his guilt; if you should see anything in the papers which you know is not true, instantly deny it … I have nothing to confess …
Illicitly taken photograph of Frederick Seddon being sentenced to death. (Public domain, Wikipedia)
Ironically, Margaret Seddon ended up telling the Weekly Dispatch that she saw her husband give the poison to Ms Barrow on the night of her death.
Frederick Seddon ended his letter by trying to cast himself as the victim of the unlucky number 13. He claimed there were 13 months between Ms Barrow moving into Tollington Park and her death, 13 days between her taking ill and her death, and 13 weeks between his arrest and trial. He added:
This will be considered by many people as a mere chapter of coincidences, and I would add that the set of circumstances that has surrounded my case, which has been the means of my conviction, are just as strange, and are a mere chapter of coincidences on which a perfectly innocent or business interpretation could have been placed, but on which the prosecution placed the worst possible construction, and thus secured my conviction. There it is. Strange but true. Now I must close with sincere love and best wishes. God bless you all. Love to father. Your affectionate and innocent husband, Fred.
Case Eleven
No. 14 Bismarck Road
1914
Suspect:
George Joseph Smith
Age:
42
Charge:
Multiple Murders by Drowning
Sentence:
Execution
In the middle of the First World War, the Islington street known as Bismarck Road was wiped off the map forever. This destruction was not achieved by an enemy bomb dropped from a Zeppelin (as happened in Stoke Newington, Farringdon Road and other areas of London), but as a result of the anti-German feeling sweeping the country. The animosity and threat of violence was so great that people with German-sounding names changed them to more English-sounding ones, and King George V rebranded the monarchy from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor. Bismarck Road, built in the 1880s and named after the famous Prussian chancellor who unified Germany in 1871, was one of many street names that disappeared not only in London and across the UK, but also in Canada, the United States and Australia. ‘The dislike of everything German is manifestly deepening,’ it was reported in June 1916.
Not merely have reside
nts in this country who bear names suggesting Teutonic origin taken legal steps to adopt British names, but local authorities are being bombarded with applications for the rechristening of thoroughfares called after German cities and celebrities. Even Bismarck Road is not acceptable to the inhabitants of Highgate and the Council has agreed that it shall henceforth be known as Waterlow Road.
This rechristening, using the surname of the former Liberal MP for Islington, David Sydney Waterlow, was approved by the London County Council a few months later.
The house at No. 14 Waterlow Road, on the left with the wooden door. The murder of Margaret Lofty took place in the bathroom on the first floor. (Author)
But that is not the whole story. It was originally proposed that Bismarck Road should be named after Edith Cavell, the nurse whose heroism in helping Allied soldiers in occupied Brussels led to her being shot by the Germans on 12 October 1915. According to The Times: ‘the name Cavell was objected to on the ground that the road had obtained notoriety by a sensational murder trial.’
The murder in question had taken place a year earlier. At five o’clock on the evening of Thursday 17 December 1914, a newly-wed couple turned up on the doorstep of No. 14 Bismarck Road looking to rent a room. John and Margaret Lloyd were a little flustered, after having been turned away from another house in Orchard Road, half a mile north, and forced to search for an alternative lodging through the cold, dark streets of Highgate. The landlady took them up to a furnished bedroom on the second floor and told them it would cost 7s a week. As they came back down the stairs Mrs Lloyd asked: ‘Have you got a bath?’
Yes, they did, replied Miss Blatch, pointing to the bathroom on the first floor. After paying the first week’s bill, the husband went to fetch the luggage they had left at the train station. When he returned they went out for the evening, before returning for their first night together as a married couple.
John Lloyd, who claimed to be a thirty-eight-year-old land agent, was clearly the dominant figure in the marriage and had a habit of answering any questions directed at his wife before she could answer. He had an aura about him, a magnetic gaze that, together with the well-tended moustache, spoke of authority. By contrast his wife Margaret, also thirty-eight, was introverted, quiet and serious, perhaps even a little dowdy. Still, they seemed happy enough together the following morning, despite Mr Lloyd’s claims that his wife had not been feeling well. ‘She is better,’ he told Miss Blatch. ‘She is very well now except for a little headache.’
The following evening the couple were in the ground-floor sitting room together when Miss Blatch told Mrs Lloyd that she had prepared a bath for her. The landlady then got on with her ironing. She later recalled:
A few minutes after that I heard a sound from the bathroom. It was a sound of splashing. Then there was a noise as of someone putting wet hands or arms on the side of the bath, and then a sigh. The sigh was the last I heard. The next sound I heard was someone playing the organ in the sitting room.
It was a haunting tune – ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ – most famously played on the Titanic as it sank beneath the waves two years earlier. ‘I should say the organ playing went on for about ten minutes,’ said Miss Blatch. ‘The next sound I heard was the front door slam.’
A few minutes later she heard the front doorbell and opened it to find Mr Lloyd holding a paper bag full of tomatoes.
‘I forgot I had a key,’ he told her, adding, ‘I have been for some tomatoes for Mrs Lloyd’s supper. Is she down yet?’ He then went upstairs and called for his wife. A moment later, Miss Blatch heard him say, ‘My God, there is no answer.’
‘Perhaps she has gone to her bedroom,’ replied Miss Blatch, helpfully.
As Mr Lloyd remembered it, he was anxious because his wife had not been well:
I went from the ground floor to the first floor where the bathroom was. There was no light in the room, and I struck a match and lit the gas on the left-hand side going in. I then looked straight to the bath, and saw my wife under the water. The bath was about three parts full … When I lifted her up there was no sign of life, and all over her mouth was froth.
‘When I got into the bathroom the prisoner had Mrs Lloyd in his arms,’ Miss Blatch recalled. ‘He was holding her up over the bath. Her legs were in the bath still. I felt her arm, and it was cold. I then said I would go for a doctor and a policeman.’
PC Stanley Heath was the first on the scene at around quarter past eight that evening. He found Mr Lloyd kneeling beside his wife ‘working the arms of the woman backwards and forwards’. The officer then gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the doctor arrived to confirm that she was in fact dead. There was no sign of a struggle other than a small bruise on her left elbow, no evidence of poison, and no suggestion of a heart attack or brain haemorrhage. It was clear she had drowned.
Mr Lloyd’s reaction to this sudden tragedy was to tell the doctor that he hoped the inquest would not return a verdict of suicide; ‘as I should not like it said that my wife was insane.’ Then when PC Heath informed him that the body would be removed ‘in due course’, he replied, ‘Cannot it be removed tonight?’ The next morning he set about arranging the funeral. He wanted the cheapest possible, and haggled the price down to £6 10s. On 23 December, Margaret Lloyd was buried in a common grave at Islington Cemetery.
The coroner’s investigation came to the obvious conclusion that this was an accidental death. But they were unaware of several telling details that pointed suspiciously towards murder.
Six days before her sudden demise, Margaret Lloyd (then known by her maiden name of Margaret Lofty) had finalised an insurance policy that would pay out £700 in the event of her death. She had not told her family about it, or informed them of her plans to marry. The first her family knew of the wedding was in a letter Margaret sent on the evening of 16 December, shortly after arriving at Bismarck Road:
No doubt you will be surprised to know that I was married today to a gentleman named John Lloyd. He is a thorough Christian man, who I have known since June. I met him at Bath … I have every proof of his love for me. He has been honourable and kept his word to me in everything. He is such a nice man …
The next day, a few hours before her death, she visited a solicitor’s office at No. 84 Islington High Street and asked to draw up a will naming her husband as sole beneficiary. She was adamant it had to be typed out and signed straight away.
All of this was done at the request of her husband, John Lloyd. Except his name was not John Lloyd at all, it was George Joseph Smith, a forty-two-year-old serial bigamist and swindler with a taste for romantic poetry and passionate letters. He had first married in 1898 but since then had accrued seven other ‘wives’ with the aim of stealing all of their money. Two of these women, like Margaret Lofty, had drowned in the bath.
Smith’s downfall began with an innocuous story in the News of the World headlined: ‘Found Dead in Bath – Bride’s Tragic Fate on Day after Wedding’. The report of Margaret Lloyd’s death was spotted by Charles Burnham, whose daughter, Alice, had died at a boarding house in Blackpool on 12 December 1913, five weeks after marrying George Joseph Smith. She too had taken out life insurance. Her death was reported with the strikingly similar headline: ‘Bride’s Sudden Death in Bath’. Mr Burnham contacted his local police in Aylesbury and both newspaper clippings were sent to Scotland Yard. The case was taken up by Inspector Arthur Neil, who set about interviewing the landlady at No. 14 Bismarck Road as well as the local doctor, PC Heath and the undertaker. His suspicions that John Lloyd and George Joseph Smith were the same man were confirmed on 1 February 1915, when he and his officers cornered ‘John Lloyd’ in Shepherd’s Bush. At first he denied being Smith, but when he realised that Mr Burnham would identify him, he confessed to using a false name on the register of his marriage to Margaret Lofty. ‘But that is all you can put against me,’ he added. ‘You may think it strange, but it was the irony of fate that my two wives should have died in the same way.’
Two
wives accidentally drowned in a bath may have been a coincidence, but three was beyond belief. Later that February, after it was reported that Alice Smith’s body was being exhumed, Scotland Yard received information about the death of Bessie Mundy in a bath in Herne Bay. She had married a man named Henry Williams in Weymouth in August 1910, but he had disappeared with £100 of her money a month later. Then, in May 1912, she ran into him again and allowed herself to be duped a second time. In her eyes he was an art dealer, a popular gentleman, and ‘a good and kind husband’. She made a will naming him as the beneficiary of her £2,500 estate and five days later he found her dead in the bathtub at their room in a boarding house in Herne Bay, Kent. Henry Williams was, of course, George Smith.
The police bolstered their circumstantial case with the evidence of the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, who had already seen Dr Crippen and Frederick Seddon off to the gallows. Spilsbury’s theory was that Smith drowned his victims by pulling up their feet as they lay in the bath, causing their heads to be submerged. The sudden rush of fluid into their nose and mouth would cause an immediate blackout, preventing them from struggling to raise their head above water. He recruited a young swimmer to test his hypothesis:
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