Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Florence was by this stage distraught and making errors of judgement. She remembered that the eminent doctor Sir William Gull was a friend of her father’s and summoned him, though without mentioning poison. It was a breach of etiquette to invite another doctor when she already had a doctor on the case, but Gull and Royes Bell agreed to overlook it. They drove out to Balham together, arriving at six o’clock in the evening. Sir William Gull ordered the sickroom emptied of everyone except the five doctors who were already assembled there. Gull examined Bravo and said, ‘This is not a disease. You have been poisoned. Pray tell us how you came by it.’ Bravo feebly insisted he had taken only laudanum for toothache. ‘You have taken a great deal more than that,’ Gull insisted.

  Mrs Cox now made another of her surprising statements. She said to Sir William Gull that what Charles Bravo had really said to her was, ‘I have taken poison for Gully. Don’t tell Florence.’ It is not known what Gull said to this, but presumably he did not know that Mrs Cox had already given two different versions of this conversation to others present in the room. They must have been very unnerved by this trickle of revelations. Sir William was, in the end, the only one of the medics who thought Charles Bravo had committed suicide.

  Johnson’s analysis of the vomit was useless. He only tested for arsenic, of which there was no trace, but there were other poisons for which he cold have tested. Gull looked out of the window where Bravo had vomited and saw traces on the leads below. He had some collected and took it away for analysis. Gull did not beat about the bush. Before he left with his sample, he told Charles Bravo that he was half dead already and the parents that he would not last through another night.

  He was right. At four in the morning, on 21 April, Charles Bravo died. Mrs Cox was the only person in the household able to function among the grief and distress. She immediately got in touch with the East Surrey coroner, Mr Carter, knowing that there would have to be a post mortem and an inquest. She told him it was a suicide and that it was important to spare the family’s feelings if possible. She went so far as proposing that the inquest could be held at The Priory and that refreshments would be provided for the jurors. Mr Carter fell in with Mrs Cox’s arrangements. There was no notice sent to the press and there would be no reporters.

  The inquest opened on 28 April, and it was evident that Mr Carter had taken for granted that it was a case of suicide. Then Sir William Gull’s pathologist revealed that Charles Bravo had died from a large dose of antimony, taken in the form of tartar emetic. Dr Smith advised Charles Bravo’s father to take the pathologist’s report to Scotland Yard. It was important to trace any tartar emetic in the house. Scotland Yard sent an inspector, who completely failed to find any trace of the substance. Mrs Cox and Florence had stacks of patent medicines, but all harmless.

  The evidence emerging at the inquest was not consistent with suicide, as witnesses testified to the affectionate relationship between Charles and Florence Bravo. Carter wanted to hurry his suicide verdict through, and refused to hear any testimony from Dr Moore and Dr Johnson, even though both of them wanted to speak. The jurors were by this stage thoroughly uneasy. They returned a verdict that Charles Bravo had died from a dose of tartar emetic but that there was no proof as to how he had taken it.

  The following day, 29 April, the funeral took place at Norwood and the day after that Florence and Mrs Cox withdrew to Brighton, where Mrs Cox had found them an apartment at 38 Brunswick Terrace. Mr Bravo stayed on at The Priory, where he sealed up all his son’s drawers, presumably pending the criminal investigation he anticipated. When Florence heard, she wrote to him at once reminding him that all Charles’s belongings now belonged to her and that no one else had any right to touch anything. She tactlessly proposed that any money he had been in the habit of giving to his son should now be given to her; ‘Poor Charlie told me that you promised to allow him £800 a year.’ This was a very inappropriate thought to be passing through the mind of a grieving widow, and one who had plenty of money already. This kind of thing made her situation far worse. In fact when she next wrote to Joseph Bravo, she apologized for the disagreeable tone of her previous letter. Then she made it worse by adding that Royes Bell had persuaded her that poor Charlie had killed himself because his ex-mistress had been trying to get money out of him. This was very silly stuff, as there had been no trouble at all from that quarter, and Joseph Bravo must have known this.

  The inquest had not gone well. Many people were now suspicious, as Florence knew from the flood of anonymous letters arriving at Brunswick Terrace. One of Charles Bravo’s friends, present at the inquest, went to Scotland Yard to have the case investigated. Newspapers began to take up the story. Suspicion circled round Florence. New statements were taken from Florence and Mrs Cox, and as a result of Mrs Cox’s statement in particular a new inquest was opened.

  Before this could take place, Bravo’s body had to be exhumed so that the jurors could view the body. Undertakers cut out a square of the coffin’s lead casing so that the dead man’s decomposed and black face was visible. The inquest on 11 July was packed with distinguished lawyers, yet rather an unruly occasion as the coroner was unable to control interjections from the public and the jury. Inevitably, Florence’s affair with Dr Gully came out (thanks to Mrs Cox’s statement) and much was made of it by lawyers who thought they could make it account for Bravo’s committing suicide. Incredibly, Mrs Cox had not foreseen that the same evidence for the same relationship could be used equally to support a murder charge.

  Florence Bravo made a spectacular impression when she appeared festooned in widow’s weeds and appearing to be on the verge of breaking down. She was pressed hard to admit that she and Gully had been lovers while Gully was still in practice at Malvern. Dr Gully gave his evidence and it contained nothing that suggested he might be implicated in murder. The crowd at the inquest nevertheless treated him as if he was the murderer. At one point a lawyer tried to trap him into admitting that he had prescribed drugs to make Mrs Bravo miscarry, but Gully dismissed that; the prescribed drugs would not cause a miscarriage. So even the attempt to portray Gully as an abortionist, then a grave crime, failed.

  The source of the tartar emetic was a puzzle. The police had found none at The Priory. Now it emerged that three months before Bravo’s death there had indeed been tartar emetic at the property. The coachman, Griffiths, had bought some to treat Florence’s horses. He had also used it at Dr Gully’s stables at Malvern, though against Gully’s wishes. In The Priory stables, Griffiths did what he liked, and bought a huge quantity of tartar emetic. Asked why he had bought enough for a hundred horses when Florence had only four, he said he liked to have things by him. Griffiths had been driving the carriage, with Florence and Mrs Cox on board, when it was involved in a serious collision. Possibly the accident was not Griffiths’ fault, but Charles Bravo sacked him and Griffiths bore him a bitter grudge. But Griffiths insisted that he had poured down a drain all the tartar emetic in the stables before he left; it could not have been his tartar emetic that killed Charles Bravo.

  Charles Bravo must have taken the poison, probably in a drink, some time after half past seven in the evening, and it must have been in either the burgundy he drank at dinner or the water bottle he kept on his bedroom washstand. He always drank a glass of water before going to bed. The medics thought it was more likely that the poison was in the water than the wine, because the wine was in the butler’s sight from about seven o’clock when he had decanted it. But the water in his bedroom could have been poisoned at any time after Florence and Mrs Cox went upstairs and the appearance of Mary and Charles Bravo an hour later. The remains of neither the wine bottle nor the water bottle were available for analysis.

  The upshot of the protracted inquest was that Charles Bravo had not died by misadventure, had not committed suicide, but had been poisoned; there was insufficient evidence to say who had poisoned him. The verdict was stunning. It meant that Mrs Cox’s statement had not been believed, and if the jury had decided s
he was lying, that was as good as saying they thought she or Florence or possibly even Dr Gully had murdered Bravo. Remarkably, no one was ever charged.

  Little is known of Florence’s story afterwards, except that she died only a year after the second inquest. It has even been suggested that Florence herself may have been murdered. It is more likely that she knew why and how her husband had died, and the responsibility and the stress drove her to suicide; she died of excessive drinking. Mrs Cox somehow disappeared from view. Dr Gully, now exposed, in the eyes of Victorian society, as a thorough reprobate and rogue, lost his friends and his professional standing. His name was removed from the membership lists of all the societies to which he belonged. He lived on for another seven miserable years.

  The shadow of suspicion remained over Florence Bravo and her friends. But who really was the murderer? After all this time, it is still uncertain. Given Dr Gully’s extraordinary probity and sense of decency, he is really the unlikeliest suspect. He relinquished all hope of resuming his relationship with Florence the moment she decided to marry Bravo, and had indeed tried hard to keep both her and her companion out of his house.

  It is possible that the death was misadventure, and that Charles Bravo could not tell the doctors what he had taken or how because it would incriminate him. He may have been trying to kill Florence. When he sacked the coachman, he was in a strong position to commandeer the stock of tartar emetic. He may then have fed the emetic to Florence in very small but regular doses in order to undermine her health. The classic way of poisoning people in the nineteenth century was to administer small doses over a long period to establish that the victim was sickly. When death eventually occurred, the doctor was likely to write it off as due to chronic illness such as consumption. Charles Bravo may therefore have had tartar emetic in his possession and secretly fed it to Florence; her health had been undermined ever since their marriage. Charles Bravo’s motive would have been to make sure that he did, after all, own his wife’s property, lock, stock and barrel. He was, as he said, taking laudanum for his toothache. He was probably suffering unusually badly from toothache on the evening when he took the poison, in fact so distracted by the pain that he drank from the wrong bottle.

  The only problem with this is the failure of the police to find any trace of tartar emetic at The Priory. Someone must have helped him dispose of it during the three days he took to die. That person may have been his father, who was so keen after Charles’s death to go through his belongings. Perhaps he was not trying to find evidence to incriminate Florence but attempting to remove any evidence that Charles had been trying to poison himself or Florence. It may even be that Charles’s mother asked to be allowed to nurse her son in order to get Florence out of the way so that Joseph could search the bedroom thoroughly.

  Another theory is that Florence poisoned him because he was working towards dismissing Mrs Cox to save money, and she wanted to keep Mrs Cox. Another is that it was Mrs Cox herself, who in a way stood to lose more than anyone if Charles Bravo remained alive. Jane Cox was an accomplished though not consistent liar and deceiver. She was also a very active organizer, someone who liked to control events, make things happen. She might well have seen herself having a very much happier life with her friend Florence if Charles Bravo was not around, and with Florence’s income to support her, her sons’ futures were assured too. The problem with identifying Mrs Cox as the murderer is that she and Florence were living hand in glove. If either one of them was guilty of planning the murder and carrying it out, the other is likely to have been complicit. On the other hand, if the behaviour of the two women in the hours and days after the poisoning are considered, Florence Bravo’s behaviour was that of a genuinely surprised and grief-stricken wife; Janie Cox’s behaviour was controlled, controlling, manipulative, effective. Mrs Cox ran The Priory household from top to bottom.

  Mrs Cox was not really seriously suspected at the time, though she must have aroused the suspicions of the clutch of doctors assembling round Charles Bravo’s bedside. This needs to be explained. In the mid-nineteenth century, crimes like this one were seen as crimes of passion or marital crimes; husbands killed their wives, wives killed their husbands, husbands killed their wives’ lovers. A purely economic motive, which is what we are visualizing for Mrs Cox, was not really allowed for. The likeliest suspect is Mrs Cox. Did she murder Charles Bravo – for social security?

  The Pimlico Mystery: The Death of Edwin Bartlett

  In 1886 Adelaide Bartlett found herself on trial at the Old Bailey for murdering her husband, Thomas Edwin Bartlett. Adelaide had mysterious origins. She was born in New Orleans in 1855, an illegitimate child who was probably the daughter of Adolphe Collot de la Tremouille, the Comte de Thouars d’Escury. Her mother is thought to have been an English girl called Clara Chamberlain. Adelaide spent her childhood in France and was then sent to England to live with a maternal aunt and uncle in Kingston on Thames.

  It was at Kingston that she was introduced to Edwin Bartlett. He fell in love with her and decided to marry her. At thirty, he was eleven years older and he was moderately well off; he owned some grocery shops. Adelaide’s parents in New Orleans approved of the marriage and her father provided a dowry.

  As soon as they were married, Edwin took the odd step of sending his new wife off to boarding school to remedy the gaps in her education. She only saw her husband in the school holidays. Then Edwin sent her off to finishing school in Belgium. By 1878, he was satisfied that her education was complete and she was allowed to move in with him in an apartment over one of the grocery shops in Hern Hill.

  Then a new problem developed. Edwin’s father resented Adelaide’s arrival, seeing her as coming between himself and his son. When Edwin’s mother died, the father moved into Edwin and Adelaide’s house. He promptly accused Adelaide of having an affair with his youngest son, Frederick. Edwin supported Adelaide and made his father formally retract his accusation in the presence of a solicitor.

  The marriage had got off to a very poor start. Later, Adelaide alleged that she and her husband had only had sex once during their marriage. This was with the sole intention of making Adelaide pregnant – and it did. The midwife, Annie Walker, gave a different account of the marriage. She moved into the household a month before the baby was expected. She observed that the Bartletts always slept together and believed that the ‘single act’ Adelaide referred to was simply the one occasion when the Bartletts had unprotected sex.

  Annie Walker saw that this would be a difficult delivery and that the baby’s life was in danger. She recommended that a doctor should be summoned. Edwin objected that he did not want a man interfering with his wife, and only agreed to the doctor being present at the last minute. By then it was too late to save the baby, which was born dead. Adelaide decided then that she would not have any more children. Annie Walker remained on friendly terms with the Bartletts after the stillbirth. She testified at the trial that Adelaide complained that Edwin had written a will stipulating that she could not remarry.

  In 1883, Edwin and Adelaide moved to East Dulwich, to live over another of Edwin Bartlett’s shops. In 1885, they moved to Merton Abbey near Wimbledon. There they made friends with George Dyson, a Wesleyan minister. The three became great friends. Edwin encouraged displays of affection between Adelaide and George, to the extent of enjoying seeing them kiss in his presence. The relationship between Adelaide and George Dyson was probably platonic. Edwin made a new will, leaving everything he had to Adelaide, and this time not stipulating that she could not remarry; quite the contrary, he made it clear that if he died he expected Adelaide to marry Dyson.

  In August 1885, Edwin and Adelaide Bartlett moved into two furnished rooms on the first floor of 85 Claverton Street, Pimlico. The house belonged to a registrar of births and deaths, Frederick Doggett. Edwin was still encouraging Dyson to visit Adelaide as much as possible, going so far as buying Dyson a season ticket from Putney to Waterloo to enable Dyson to visit frequently. Dyson was supposed to be
teaching Adelaide Latin, maths, geography and history. The Doggett’s maid on several occasion came upon Dyson and Adelaide in compromising positions; once she found them on the floor together.

  By this stage, Adelaide was no longer sleeping with Edwin. They both slept in the drawing room. She slept on a couch, and he slept on a folding bed. One reason why Adelaide no longer wanted to sleep with her husband was his bad breath. Edwin suffered from tooth decay and an incompetent dentist had cut back the decaying teeth to the gums and fitted dentures over the stumps. In late 1885, Edwin was treated by a doctor for gastritis and diarrhoea. Another dentist removed the decaying teeth and stumps. This improved Edwin’s health, but he was still depressed and hysterical.

  Adelaide decided she needed to get a second opinion on Edwin’s condition. She made the extraordinary statement, ‘If Mr Bartlett does not soon get better his friends and relations will accuse me of poisoning him.’ Dr Dudley looked at Edwin, said his gums were uninflamed, but declared his general health to be sound. Dudley recommended a daily walk. Now Edwin started to demand to have sex with Adelaide again. This was difficult for her, partly because Edwin had virtually forced her to get engaged to Dyson; his foul breath was also a great deterrent.

  On 27 December 1885, Adelaide asked her friend George Dyson to buy some chloroform for her. In the hands of skilled medics, chloroform can be used as an anaesthetic, but a small dose can sometimes stop the heart and cause instant death. Dyson wanted to know why Adelaide hadn’t asked Edwin’s doctor for the chloroform. She said Edwin had a complaint that caused paroxysms and that the doctor did not know about; she knew from past experience, she said, that chloroform would ease his pain. Dyson did as he was told, and bought two ounces from a chemist in Putney and another two ounces from another in Wimbledon. He combined his two purchases and gave Adelaide the four-ounce bottle. The chemists were told that the chloroform would be used to get rid of grease stains.