There Must Be Evil

by Bernard Taylor

  Mrs Berry’s painstaking letter to Dr Kershaw, with all its lies and contradictions, was never made public, and so, likewise, Dr Patterson never became aware of her continuing scurrilous accusations.

  And it was Dr Patterson who had the last word.

  Today, as we are often reminded, the nation is divided on the matter of the death penalty, and so it has been for years. In those March days of 1887 there were those who, opposed to the extreme punishment, hoped that the Home Secretary would be moved to recommend a reprieve for the condemned woman.

  One such was the editor of a journal called the British and Colonial Druggist, who, hoping to change a few minds in the prisoner’s favour, wrote an article that was republished in the Oldham Standard. Under the title THE VERDICT QUESTIONED, the writer expressed deep concern at the trial and its outcome. He contended that there had been a miscarriage in the judicial system, saying that the coroner’s inquest with a verdict of guilty should have been trumped by the magistrates, who had considered the evidence insufficient to warrant sending the prisoner for trial. Mrs Berry, therefore, he said, should have been set at liberty, instead of which, she had been found guilty of murder and condemned to death.

  His main criticism, however, was with the evidence brought to convict her, saying that what stamped the case as ‘eminently unsatisfactory’ in its circumstances and in its result, was ‘the vague, inexact, and conflicting character of the scientific evidence produced’. With no motive found, he said, it all came down to the jury’s decision to accept the scientific evidence presented. And in this he strongly criticized the three doctors, Patterson, Robertson and Harris, focusing on Dr Patterson for particular calumny. No evidence had proved that the child had been poisoned with sulphuric acid, he maintained, and the testimony positing such was ‘so transparently vague and conflicting that it [was] far from easy…to understand how a body of intelligent men could allow it to weigh with them in a matter of life or death’.

  ‘Altogether we are at a loss to understand the grounds of the verdict,’ the piece concluded. ‘There may be a strong presumption of guilt against the woman, but presumption should not be sufficient in a matter of life and death.’

  The article raised several questions, among them questions on Dr Patterson’s part in the affair. The good doctor, however, as will have been noticed, was not one to take criticism lying down, and having read the article he took up his pen and wrote to the Standard’s editor. In his letter he set out the anatomy of the murder in such a clear and direct way that one would be hard pressed to challenge any part of it. His informative letter was printed in the edition of Saturday 12 March. In it – and not missing the chance to show his contempt for the magistrates who had cleared Mrs Berry at the police court – he wrote:

  Sir: – In inserting a long quotation from the British and Colonial Druggist, a contemporary omitted to make one important statement, viz., that this paper is in no sense of the word a medical journal; that it concerns itself, not with diseases, but with the nature, supply and demand, market price, &c., of drugs; and that the opinion can be of no value from a professional point of view. Now, was the medical evidence in the above case conclusive?

  1. It convinced the coroner’s jury.

  2. We have no evidence that the medical testimony did not convince the four amateurs who sat on the borough bench, led by their noses by Mr Hesketh Booth, their clerk.

  3. It convinced the jury at Liverpool, where the case was properly thrashed out.

  4. It convinced the medical men of Oldham, for of several of them solicited to give evidence, none of them would do so.

  5. It convinced all the medical men of eminence in Manchester, for of all the men in Manchester who have special knowledge of this kind of work (Dr Collingworth and others) not one would take a fee for the defence.

  6. It convinced the three doctors from Manchester for the defence. These gentlemen went to Liverpool; they were present during the four days of the trial; they were prepared to give evidence, but on the last day not one of them would go into the box for the defence.

  7. It must have convinced Mr Cottingham, who (after the exhibition made by Mr Thompson, the chemist, who went as a witness for the defence, but admitted the case for the Crown), threw up the sponge on the medical side of the case.

  I will briefly recapitulate the medical aspects of the case: – On Saturday morning, January 1st, the girl is in perfect health. She is found alone with the prisoner in the surgery by Dillon, who leaves the pair alone there. Five minutes later the deceased is in the next room vomiting urgently; the bloody vomiting continues for thirty hours, with great pain over the stomach, and thirst. In other words, the girl had inflammation of the stomach coming on violently in five minutes from perfect health, and in five minutes after being alone with the prisoner in the surgery. In the surgery, at the disposal of the prisoner, were substances that would produce the above symptoms. The jury found that these early symptoms were due to poisoning, and that the prisoner had administered the poison to the girl in the surgery on that Saturday morning. I may add, from a circumstance that has come to my knowledge latterly, that I know the bottle out of which the girl was poisoned that morning. All this matter vomited during that day went down the sink, except for a small portion which fell on the carpet, which the prisoner, with good judgement, ordered to be washed twice.

  On Sunday the girl was poisoned a second time, under the following circumstances: – She had a good night on Saturday. On Sunday morning she was much better; the vomiting had almost ceased, and I told the prisoner her daughter would get well. Beatrice Hall read to her during the Sunday. She says the deceased was nearly well. Miss Anderson, a nurse at the imbecile wards, stayed for an hour and a half, going away at twenty past three in the afternoon. During that hour and a half the deceased had been sick but once; she looked well, and was comfortable; she was not purged. She complained of no pain in any part; her lips were not inflamed or blistered. At 3.30 Knight came into the room, sent for by the deceased. She put down the blind, lighted the gas, and had one sentence of conversation. The deceased said, “I would be better but for the vomiting.” Then the prisoner came into the room, and ordered Knight out of it. She was then prepared to do the deed a second time. The prisoner is now alone with the deceased for fifty minutes, at the end of which, at 5.20, Miss Evett knocks at the bedroom door, goes in, and sits by the bed. During that fifty minutes, in which the prisoner and the deceased are alone in that room, there is a complete transformation. A strong corrosive poison is administered to the girl as she lies in her sick bed, which marks the time and method of its administration by burning the lips, and by other tokens given in evidence by Miss Evett. She finds the girl in great pain, she is every moment vomiting bloody matter, she cries for a poultice to relieve her belly, she begs to be placed on the chamber-pot, strains and cries, and evacuates blood. The prisoner, seeing the marks of her guilt on the mouth of her child, takes the initiative, and says, “See, Miss Evett, what the orange has done to Edith’s mouth.”

  Later, Dr Robertson and myself note the above violent symptoms, the blistering of the lips, of a kind impossible in disease; the inside of the mouth painted white (from coagulation of albumen, as in boiling an egg), a state of things never due to disease, and always due to a corrosive; and on post-mortem we note the gullet corroded. The gullet had arrested for a moment the passage down of this blazing, red-hot draught, but the fiend pressed it down her child’s throat. The jury at Liverpool found that in that fifty minutes the girl had been again poisoned, with this time a strong corrosive, and that the prisoner, who was alone with her, was the person who did it. And all the facts given in evidence against the prisoner, her attempts to insure the girl for £100, her wholesale lies for excuses, went in one direction, and that against the prisoner.

  Talk of a petition to reprieve her, a woman who in twelve short months for greed of money, slew by poison her mother and her child. Who in Oldham will sign it, except it be her solicitor and Mr Hesketh B
ooth, the adviser of the magistrates who would not commit, and who are now in the hole which their lack of intelligence and comprehension digged [sic] for them?

  With regard to the particular corrosive employed, we say probably sulphuric acid. We never said positively sulphuric acid, but not unlikely at all oxalic acid, or hydrochloric acid, or some other corrosive. We find a girl with her head cut clean off, and surely it is too much to ask the doctors to swear whether the weapon employed was a butcher’s knife, or a carving knife, or a razor, or what other sharp instrument. The fact that the girl died of a corrosive is beyond a doubt to those that saw her. It has been established beyond a doubt in the eyes even of the defence. It is the exception to find a corrosive acid by analysis if the patient has lived for a short time, if there is violent vomiting and purging, and if, as in this case, the thirsty patient has swilled stomach and bowels cleaned out with frequent and copious draughts. I say, therefore, if a reprieve be sought for, let it be on fair and square grounds, not on any alleged weakness of the medical evidence, the strength of which the defence have admitted, nor on the pretext that the prisoner did not commit the crimes of Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, for the jury at Liverpool, without a moment’s hesitation, found that she did.

  T. Patterson.

  P.S. – Dr Stevenson, of Guy’s Hospital, the highest authority in the kingdom on these matters, writes to me to say that from reading the evidence he came to the conclusion that the poison of Sunday was oxalic or sulphuric acid.

  Dr Patterson’s letter would have found great support among the public at large, and might well have altered the feelings of some of those who had supported the petition for clemency. Here, at last, for everyone to see, was a brilliantly judged, step-by-step account of how Mrs Berry had murdered her child. And not only did it show that the verdict had been a just one, but in doing so delivered a serious blow to any chance that she might have had of being granted a last-minute reprieve.

  As noted above, Dr Patterson’s letter was published on 12 March, and the day previously it was reported that further statements in connection with the case – statements that had not been put before the jury at the trial – were laid before the Home Secretary. It was not announced what was the nature of those statements, but it is possible that they included the letter to Dr Kershaw, the memorandum from Mrs Berry’s female warden, and Mrs Berry’s petition. What is very likely is that they also included official information on the inquest into Mary Ann Finley’s death. Taken together, the Home Secretary would have been presented with precious little in any way favourable to the situation of the condemned woman.

  24

  Strange Reunion – After the Mazy Dance

  While the Home Office considered the situation, preparations for Elizabeth Berry’s execution continued. All had to be ready for the morning of Monday 14 March.

  There had never before been an execution at Walton Gaol. Previously, the execution of condemned prisoners held at Walton had been carried out at Kirkdale Gaol, but following an Act of Parliament in 1886 this arrangement was discontinued. Executions from then on, it was decreed, would be carried out at Walton, which meant that if all went as scheduled, Elizabeth Berry would be the first felon to be executed there.

  Following announcement of the proposed proceedings – not happily accepted by the local community – arrangements were put in place for the hanging. Public executions had ceased in 1868, and all those subsequent would be witnessed only by a limited number of invited persons. It was decided that executions at Walton would take place in an outbuilding known as the Coach House, a kind of large shed which had been used to accommodate the prison vans. The whole thing, it was claimed by the authorities, would be an improvement on the scaffold at Kirkdale. Not only would it be ‘more in accordance with modern refinement’, but the condemned woman would not have to undergo the testing operation of having to mount steps in order to get up onto the scaffold.

  The initial task of the convicts who were given the job of building the structure was to dig the ‘well’ or ‘pit’, into which the body would fall, and over which the scaffold proper would be erected. Working all day, the men set about digging the ten-foot deep pit, after which bricklayers were brought in to brick and plaster its sides. Once the bricking and plastering was complete, the joiners came to set about their labours. Mrs Berry, hearing the sound of their hammering, inquired of her attendant what the noise was. With consideration for her feelings, she was told: ‘Oh, they’re only building outside.’ Word of this being reported, it was decided to move the prisoner to a cell at the other end of the females’ wing until the work was finished.

  And there Mrs Berry waited, continuing to hope for a last-minute reprieve. And it was not considered impossible by some that such might yet be forthcoming – perhaps as a special act of clemency in that year of the Queen’s Jubilee, for which Mrs Berry herself had pleaded. But it was not to be. On Saturday the 12th, the day that saw the publication of Dr Patterson’s calendar of the child’s murder, Mrs Berry’s last hope vanished. She was informed that the Home Secretary did not see fit to interfere in the capital sentence.

  At last everything was ready for the grim business. The gallows were now complete, their efficiency tested to the satisfaction of the visiting justices, and a room made ready for the visit of the executioner. He, James Berry (no relation to the condemned woman) would be travelling from his home in Horton, Bradford. He had been working as hangman since 1884, and would continue in his work till 1891. He had made a contribution to the ghastly practice by refining the ‘long drop’, originally developed by former hangman William Marwood, using a method by which the weight and height of the condemned prisoner more or less determined the length of rope required, all in an effort to ensure that the felon died quickly, and did not hang there dying slowly from strangulation.

  Writing later in his autobiography, Berry said that he rather dreaded the event awaiting him at Walton. Of all the 131 persons that he hanged in his time, only five were women. ‘I never liked to hang a woman,’ he said. ‘It always made me shiver like a leaf, but it was sometimes a consolation in those days to believe that I was carrying out the last dread sentence of the law on one who was not worthy to be allowed to live.’

  It was soon after his arrival at the gaol on the Sunday that a rather remarkable occurrence took place. He was received by the governor, Mr Anderson, who said to him, ‘I didn’t know you were going to hang an old flame, Berry.’

  James Berry, hangman.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Berry asked. He thought the governor’s words were some sort of joke on account of his having the same name as the condemned woman.

  The governor replied, ‘She says she knows you very well. You’d better go and look at her tonight. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.’

  Following completion of the work on the scaffold, Mrs Berry had been returned to her former cell, and it was there that James Berry came later and peered through the narrow observation window in the door to look at her. He recognized her at once, recalling how, just the year before, he had met her in a crowded ballroom at a police ball in Manchester, when she had approached him and invited him to dance with her. So, he said, he had trodden with her ‘the mazy dance’. He remembered her as ‘a young woman of charm and vivacity’, who had chatted gaily to him, telling him about herself and her work as a nurse at the Oldham Hospital. After another dance or two and some refreshment they had discovered that they would be travelling home in the same direction, and as a result she had ridden with him in his cab to the station, and then travelled with him for part of his train journey home.

  Commenting later on the episode, James Berry said, ‘The story goes to show something of the romance in my life.’

  That Sunday night the prison chaplain, the Rev. David Morris, went to the condemned woman’s cell and remained with her almost till dawn. She slept little, he later said, her slumber much broken, sleeping only fitfully and spending much of the night in prayer. With Monday’s
icy dawn a heavy hailstorm passed over the city, accompanied by lightning and thunder. This was followed by a snowfall, which would continue till shortly before the hour of the execution.

  The executioner was early at Mrs Berry’s cell. When the door was unlocked and opened she looked up and saw him. James Berry wished her good morning and she came forward, holding out her hand.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Berry,’ she said. ‘You and I have met before.’

  ‘Where was that now?’ he asked, pretending to have forgotten.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘at the ball in Manchester, given by the police. Surely you haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time ago, and I didn’t realize that I was to officiate at the execution of a friend of mine.’

  ‘No, I suppose you didn’t.’

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry to have to do it.’

  She gave a little toss of her head and said, ‘You’ve no doubt heard a lot of dreadful things about me, but it isn’t all true what people say about one.’

  ‘Well, I’ve heard a great deal about you,’ he said. ‘But you must pull yourself together and die bravely.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll go bravely enough,’ she said, with a shudder. ‘You needn’t be a bit afraid of me. You don’t suppose I’d want to give you any trouble, do you?’

  ‘I hope you won’t give me any trouble.’

  ‘You’ll be easy with me, won’t you?’ she said. ‘You won’t give me any pain. You’ll be gentle with an old friend, won’t you?’

  ‘I shan’t prolong your life a single minute,’ he said.

  He asked her then whether she had made her peace with God, and urged her to make the most of what time remained to her. After that, he left her side.