September 18, 2023 • 43 mins
A wealthy man is poisoned in 1830s England, and there are many suspects, including several heirs. Would coffee grounds prove to be crucial evidence in a murder case that helped change forensics? Sandra Hempel in her book, The Inheritor’s Powder, tells us the story of a determined chemist who shifted the outcome of a historic case.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
How do you know you're not being poisoned? Your friends
and family are smiling kindly at to you. How do
you know one of them isn't trying to murder you?
And of course you didn't know, you didn't know.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:49):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. A wealthy man is poisoned in eighteen
thirties England, and there are many suspects, including several errors.
(01:14):
Will coffee grounds prove to be crucial evidence in a
murder case that helped change forensics? Santra Himple in her book,
The Inheritor's Powder tells us the story of a determined
chemist who shifted the outcome of a historic case. Will
you just set the scene for me of where you
(01:34):
want to start the story. Where are we, what's the
time period, like politics, all of that for context?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Right, The time context is, as you said, it's a
really fascinating time. It's just before the beginning of the
Victorian era. Victoria came to the throne in eighteen thirty seven,
so the king on the throne at the time was
William the Fourth, her uncle, who is largely unknown. We
(02:03):
go normally from the Georgians to the Victorians and everyone
forgets about poor old William, stuck in the middle. But
that was the case. It was a strange time, really.
There was a lot going on in terms of unrest,
political unrest, particularly in the countryside, which is where this
(02:24):
story is set. In terms of the criminal justice system,
which this story is concerned with, there's a big hangover
from the Georgian times. A lot of reforms that were
going to come in to the way crimes were investigated
and where trials were organized had yet to come in.
(02:44):
So in some ways, you know, they were stuck in
a bit of a time war.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
But that point catch me up on where we were
in forensics, in the world of forensics in this time period.
In this time period in the United States, it was
really investigations world there onto the third degree, you know,
the police just cajoling people and abusing people until they confessed.
There was little in the way of anything and any
(03:08):
kind of investigator could gather and be used in court.
Was it like that in Britain in this time period?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yes, absolutely, there was no such thing as you know,
a detective in those days. It was well before the
profession of detective existed, and so the whole thing was
really a bit of a mess in that a magistrate
might get involved in investigating a suspected case, and then
(03:35):
there was the coroner involved if someone had died, and
the police usually you know that there was no as
you say, forensic science of any kind, no proper investigation,
no rules about how you went about investigating, and so
it was a complete mess actually and just down to
(03:56):
luck whether in fact the crime got investigated in first pace.
Actually sometimes it just didn't. There were no protocols to follow.
Quite often, what would happen if someone was thought that
somebody had been murdered, the local doctor would be called in.
But usually, I mean they knew nothing whatsoever about how
(04:17):
to go about investigating at all. They knew nothing about
trying to preserve the evidence. So again, you know, we're
just in the hands of complete amateurs bumbling around and
nobody properly taking control of what was happening.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Now, I've done some stories set in the seventeen hundreds
where doctors haven't been able to identify victims of poison
only based on their physical appearance, like a blackened face?
Is that through here? Where are we with toxicology in
eighteen thirty three? Can they find out anything?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
No? I mean we're not anywhere with toxicology. I mean
that's science. The modern science of toxicology just didn't exist. Obviously,
they had no way of investigating other than, as you say,
they would just look for signs on the body. They
would also look at the circumstances in which someone had
(05:11):
died to see whether it was likely that they might
have been poisoned. But I mean, the case was, the
suspicion was, and in fact, the fact was that an
awful lot of cases of poison were just not recognized
as being a criminal poison It wasn't recognized as if
(05:31):
it had been murdered, that it was murder. And lots
of cases were put down to natural disease.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Which there were a lot, there's a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
That was a lot absolutely because hygiene was absolutely appalling
or nonexistent, and so people would go down with food
poisoning and they would regard it very much as we
might nowadays regard going down with cold. You know, it
was just one of those things, and you waited and
(06:02):
hoped that you would get better. But apart from food poisoning,
there was dysantree, there was typhoid, those kinds of diseases
that affect the digestion and stomach. Very very difficult not
to confuse all of those diseases with criminal poisoning or
any kind of poisoning, you know, really, because sometimes people
(06:24):
did take poison, particularly arsenic, by accident, and dreadful stories
about arsenic being left around in the packet and children
getting hold of it thinking it was sherbet or sugar
or something and taking it by mistake.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Because particularly arsenic was very widely used, right was it
used for killing rats? That was one of its usefulnesses right.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Absolutely, and that's all they had. You know, there was
lots of again because of the conditions of the people
were living in There were rats and mice everywhere, and
there were also bugs as well, you know, there were
things like cockroaches, bed bugs, fleas. So it worked as
this insect a side as well. People would wash flaws
(07:07):
and bedding and that sort of thing down down with arsenick,
and it was all they had. And it was very
cheap because it was like sort of by product of
some of the processes of the industrial Revolution. You could
buy it over the counter with no questions asked.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Really, one of the things that I think is the
strength of the mini strengths of your book is that
it is nonfiction and it reads like a mystery novel.
Those are my favorite kinds of books and I try
to write those types of books, and you did it
so well here. So let's start with the mystery. Start
where it makes sense to you. I always want to hear,
(07:42):
of course, as much about the victim as possible, but
where do we start to really unravel this?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Just to set the background, I mean, thank you so much,
first of all for saying that it read like a
murder mystery story because that was exactly how I tried
to write it. I love those kinds of books too,
so thank you, thank you for your kind words about that.
The story itself is a sort of classical murder mystery
(08:08):
set in an English village. The crime was motivated by greed,
and it was carried out with horrible callousness. The killer
appeared to be a member of the victim's close family.
Although several people had a motive, as some of them
had behaved very suspiciously, it was hard to imagine really
that any of them had the sort of psychopathic personality
(08:31):
that really I think was needed for this crime. And
the murder scene was a large house belonging to an elderly,
wealthy farmer. George Bogel was an eighty one year old patriarch.
He was the head of a large extended family, and
he was a highly respected local figure. Been a church
warden for many years, and he was a member of
(08:53):
the Vestry Committee, which was the local authority that ran
the parish, and they dealt with important matters such as
setting the local taxes. So he was quite a figure
of some distinction. He was also a very shrewd businessman.
He started out as a tenant farmer with just a
small parcel of land, but he gradually inquired more and
(09:15):
more fields and orchards and he built up large herds
of cattle and pigs. He and his wife Anne lived
a very simple, thrifty and really god fearing life, following
the old country ways and the residents of Plumpstead they
were the local village worthies really, such as the vicar
(09:35):
of the local church, the magistrate, and being in the
English village. Although it was a tiny village, there were
three pubs. It was very typical.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
You do mention at some point that the parish constables
are known for being inebriated.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Absolutely. I mean. There was a wonderful story of the
young policeman who was sent to investigate this murder, sent
to search someone's house, and he came away with the
evidence two packets of arsenic. But on his way back
to the station he went on a pub crawl, of course,
(10:11):
and he said that he was sheltering from the rain,
but he managed to, in the rain go to three
different pubs.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
When he started.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Handing round the packets of arsenic showing his drinking mates,
somebody spilt the contents of one packet down their trousers. Yeah,
and eventually the policeman eventually staggered back to hand in
what remained of this evidence. He also had a bottle
of something which he thought contained arsening. He managed to
drop that on the pub floor and break it. So
(10:42):
this is the kind of standard of place and the
standard of investigation we're dealing with you.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
That's helpful in your story. I think we get back
to plumpstead, so churches and pubs, and George Bodle and
his wife Anne, very wealthy but not flashy, and they
just seemed to have a nice, big extended family. But
everything is calm, not as much a drama as we
would expect in a murder story, at least on the onset.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
That's right. I mean, I thought it was quite a
coincidence that the story really begins on the morning of
November second, which is all Soul's Day, which is also
known as the Day of the Dead. So I thought
that was quite appropriate, really, And it began. The drama
began just after breakfast, and George and Anne and their
(11:30):
daughter Elizabeth who was on a visit, and granddaughter Betsy
who lived with them, and a maid called Sofia were
all suddenly taken violently ill with vomiting and diarrhea, and
as we've already said, at that time this wasn't unusual.
They just waited to get better. But as the day
passed on, they didn't get at all better. Their symptoms
(11:51):
were particularly severe, and so they sent for the doctor.
The doctor. Nearest doctor was in the town Woolidge, which
was a mile or so away. A man called John
Butler was called out and he arrived on his pony
and trap, and he began examining the patients. But as
he asked them, he was asking them about their symptoms,
(12:13):
and as you said, you know, would be examining their
bodies for any particular signs, but he also asked them
about how they became ill and when they became ill.
He was particularly astute, actually, because not a lot of
doctors would have necessarily picked up on this. But he
thought this was rather odd, this story. He thought it
(12:34):
didn't fit with the normal onset of an outbreak of
food poisoning. For a start, everybody became ill very violently,
very suddenly, at the same time, and immediately after having breakfast,
and there was nothing that they'd had a breakfast, which
seemed obvious cause of you know, food polison. I think
mostly they just had bread or toast, and they didn't
(12:57):
all have the same thing. The only thing that they
did all have was coffee, So it sounds likely that
coffee would give you food poisoning. So he decided that
this was much more like an attack from an irritant
poison of some kind. The top of his list of
likely poisons was arsenic. What surprised me actually when I
(13:18):
was looking into arsenic and just what it was, was
that the matella element arsenic, which is a gray metal,
isn't poisonous at all if it passes through your body
in its pure forms. The compound which is called arsenic trioxide,
which in the nineteenth century was known as white arsenic
(13:39):
that most of us mean when we talk about arsenic,
and this is a very very different matter. It's horribly
deadly in very small doses, and as we've discussed, you know,
it was cheaply and widely available.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So doctor Butler is looking at, you know, these three.
What's the age range of Elizabeth, Betsy and Sofia? Are
they all?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Betsy is I think sixteen? Elizabeth is middle aged, and
Anne is eighty or the same age as George.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Okay, and Sophia I think about eighteen. So doctor Butler
examines them and says, this is strange. They didn't even
digest the food, you know, so that it couldn't have
been the food. And he's looking at the coffee. Does
he think that this is nefarious, that there's murderous intent
here initially, or did he think some bad accident happened
(14:31):
with a household poison.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
He didn't say. He didn't say, we don't know. I mean,
it's hard to imagine that it would be by accident, really,
because it's powerder sometimes sometimes mistaken for sugar. But he
seemed to think that the coffee pot was the key thing.
So I say, it's hard. I guess he was probably
(14:53):
reserving judgment, but it's hard to know. He was sufficiently
concerned that he sent the cleaning lady who came every day.
He sent her rushing around to her daughter's cottage, because
every day, when they finished drinking their coffee, they would
give the coffee pot with the used grounds in the
bottom to missus Lear. She would go round to her
(15:17):
daughter's house. A daughter lived in a nearby cottage. Daughter
had a very large family, I think ten children, and
was in extreme poverty. And such was the poverty that
they would take this coffee pot. They would fill it
up again with water and boil it up and make
a hot drink from the children from these weak coffee grounds.
(15:39):
Coffee grounds had already been used. So that was the
scale of the poverty of some people in the countryside
at that time. When John Butler heard that this coffee
pot and oh well, it's gone round to this woman
with her children, he sent missus Lear rushing back to
the cottage to grab the coffee pot, and she managed
to take it just as one of them children was
(16:00):
about to fill it up with water, put it on
the stove, and they were all going to drink it.
So that's one of the things I mean when I
said how callous this murderer was, because they must have
known that that was what happened.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
But Anne and George are not affected by this this time,
is that right?
Speaker 2 (16:19):
No, they are. They were all ill. George was much
more ill than others because he drunk more coffee than
anyone else.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Had, and he was eighty one.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Also, he was he was Anne was quite old though
I think she was seventy nine, I believe. But she
had a tiny, tiny cup of coffee to his large cup.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
But when doctor Butler gets there, they're all still alive.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (16:41):
They are all still alive. Absolutely, absolutely, they are all
still alive, just very sick. He does the classic thing
of giving them things to, you know, make them sick.
I mean the favorites was salt water, and also they
would actually make people drink oil.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
After that, over the next few days, he visits every
day and continues to try to treat them, and very
very gradually the women start to get better. George doesn't.
He continues very ill, and eventually, on the fifth of November,
he dies, having suffered really, really badly. And obviously by
(17:23):
then everybody is thinking what on earth has gone on here?
And events actually then start to move quite fast. Some
very odd things happen. One of the people who come
under suspicion in the family is this twenty three year
old man who's known as Young John. His father is
(17:45):
known as Middle John. Young John lives with his older
brother and his mother and father and a maid called
Mary Higgins, and they live in a cottage on George
Bowdle's land. A couple of more mornings before the family
gets sick. Young John suddenly appears one morning at the
(18:06):
farmhouse early morning as Sophia the maid is getting the
breakfast ready, and he says, oh, I've come to give
you a hand, which is very odd. He's never done
that before. He normally is stays in bed till about
midday and he helps her. One of the things he
does is to fill huge kettle from the tap in
(18:27):
the yard and bring it in and put it over
the fire. He's there again on the morning that everyone
feels ill when George dies. He then, within a few
hours of George dying, he leaves Plumpstead and he goes
off to southeast London to a place called Clarkenwell, where
his older married sister runs a coffee shop, and he
(18:49):
goes to stay with her, absents himself from the area.
His father, Middle John then goes to see the magistrate
and says, oh, that my son is guilty of poisoning
his grandfather.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Wow, okay, which is.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
A very extraordinary thing to do. He also brings along
the maid Mary Higgins. He's rumored it's quite well known
in the village that the pair are having an affair.
He produces Mary Higgins before the magistrate, and Mary Higgins
counts a story about how she quite recently heard Young
(19:27):
John boasting that he was making a joke of the
fact that it would be a really good idea if
he killed his grandfather and then his father, and then
he will be able to inherit lots of money. So
Mary Higgins recounts this. Then somebody else, and we don't
know who this is, but someone else also goes to
(19:47):
the magistrate and said, you need to have a word
with Young John's friend schoolmaster called John Watts. John Watts
has got something to tell you, So the magistrate sends
for John Watson. John Watts says, well, I went into
town with young John a couple of days ago and
he bought two packets of arsenic while I was with him.
(20:08):
The magistrate issues a warrant for Young John's arrest and
he sends PC Morris of the Young pub Crawl fame
after Clarkenwell to arrest Young John and bring him back
to Plumstead in handcuffs, which he does. Young John is
obviously very much under suspicion of the murder and they
(20:29):
have an inquest, and the inquest goes on for five days,
which is absolutely extraordinary, because you know, our coroner could
get through about two or three inquests a day. They
would just whizz through them. But this one went into
the most incredible amount of interviews with people and had
masses and masses of witnesses. It caught somehow the imagination
(20:51):
of the public. I suppose it was because it was
a very wealthy man and because one of the people
under suspicion was his grandson, so really caught the press's
imagination and the publics, and so it made national news
headlines for days.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
What does young John have to say about any of this.
He's denying everything.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
I'm assuming he's denying absolutely everything. And he's saying that
he did indeed buy packets of arsenic, and indeed P. C.
Morris found them in his bedroom when he went to
search the cottage. But he says he bought them as
a skin treatment, and that was one of the things
arsenic was used for. There were advertisements in the papers saying,
(21:32):
if you want a beautiful complexion, you know by our
arsenic lotion. You know it was used for acne, And
he said you know, he had this suffered with this acne,
and he was in the habit of treating it with arsenic.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Does Sophia, the housekeeper who says that, you know, he
came and helped that morning with the water that would
be for the coffee, does she have any thoughts on
any of this? I know she said it was odd,
But is she suspicious of young John.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
She doesn't seem to be. She liked him a lot,
and he was very charming. By all accounts, he was
an extremely charming young man. He was very friendly, very approachable.
Everyone liked him. She was in the habit of, i think,
sort of flirting with him mildly whenever they met. She
certainly wasn't setting out like some of the others to
(22:24):
try to put a noose around his neck, as his
father appeared to be doing. The coroner did decide that
(22:44):
young John should be charged with murder, that he should
stand trial for the murder of his grandfather, at which
young John goes completely to pieces and is sort of
fainting and weeping and on the point of collapse. John Butler,
actually i think, goes him and says, come on, you know,
all right, just pull yourself together. Stick with it. So
(23:05):
they then have this trial at the Crown Court. All
of this stuff about Middle John's bizarre behavior, Mary higgins
bizarre behavior all comes out. It also transpires that Old
George is son in law. Samuel Baxter, who's another local
farmer who married George's daughter, took Old George to the
(23:29):
solicitors just days before he fell ill, and George changed
his will massively in favor of Samuel and Samuel's family.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Wow, this comes out during the inquest or when does
this come out?
Speaker 2 (23:44):
That comes out just before? Actually, but I think it
does come out in the inquest, but I think there's
been some kind of rumour's stories circulating in the village
before that.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Does Anne know this?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
We don't know whether Anne knows that. Actually, Anne is
a very strange character, because there's not a lot on
record about Anne what she says. I mean, there's one
point when young John is taken to see her, and
she obviously is extremely fond of him and I think
doesn't want to see him prosecuted. But apart from that,
(24:18):
we don't know a huge amount about her. She seems
to be sort of quietly there in the background. I mean,
George doesn't seem to have had a lot of time
for young John. I'm not surprisingly really, because George, being
such a hard working man and such a self made man,
doesn't have a lot of time for young John, who
(24:38):
you know, stays in bed half the morning, is supported
largely by his father, is supposed to do laboring work
on the farm, but actually most of the time dodges
off and really has to be chased to do any work,
and spends you know, it's mainly interested in buying clothes
and looking.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Good, flirting with housekeepers and stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Exactly, and generally sort of playing the gentleman, which is
the kind of behavior that George would have had not
a lot of time for. So I don't think they
got on particularly well.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
But this would also have been behavior that would have
irritated middle John, I'm assuming, And do we think that
might be a little bit behind his bizarre accusation and
this arrest that has happened based on, you know, the
purchase of a commonly available poison and the word of
a father and sort of the odd nature of a
(25:29):
surprise visit from you know, young John to Sophia the housekeeper.
And that's it, right, Do they have anything else? On
this guy.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
No, they don't have anything else. I mean at that
time you often didn't need anything else.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
And the trials were a day. The trials lasted a
nano second.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Absolutely, you know, and if you had a motive and
you had opportunity, then that was enough. Quite often, can
you The defense relied very heavily, As you said, first
of all, this circumstantial. But secondly, why would this father
go to the magistrate and try to get his son hanged?
(26:09):
The implication was that he middle John was guilty. Oh
so therefore he was trying to get his son fingered
for a crime that he himself had committed. If it
were to be him, he couldn't have known about the
trip Samuel Baxter taking his father to change the will,
because by the time George died, Baxter inherited most of
(26:31):
George's wealth and George's property.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
How could they go through with a trial with young
John with I know, it's actually your right, more evidence
than they would have had in most cases in this
time period, Knowing that you have somebody, a son in law,
who is going to inherit everything and the change just
happened a few days before, how could they in good
conscience not investigate that angle before putting young John on trial.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, you're absolutely right, I mean it just again is
another example of how badly these things will run.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Privilege right, because I'm assuming Samuel was an upright citizen
and blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Absolutely yes, indeed, and a lot more stuff came out
against Middle John at the trial. The defense he had
previous criminal convictions himself for theft and fraud, and had
actually served some time in prison himself for crime, so
that didn't sort of go down too well with the jury.
(27:30):
And then there are a whole load of character witnesses
for young John. One after the other people trooped into
the witness box to say, you know, a lovely young
man he was, and it's impossible to think that he
could ever ever have harmed anybody. And so he was
found not guilty, and extraordinarily, when he came out of
(27:52):
the court a free man, the jury was outside in
the street and they all cheered him as he came out,
and then he got into this carriage and off he
went back to Plumstead, and when he arrived at the
other end, the villagers were all out cheering him and
welcoming home as a hero.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
So what happens three years after George's murdered We meet
a chemist, is that right? In eighteen thirty six?
Speaker 2 (28:17):
We do, actually we meet chemist at the trial in
eighteen thirty three, because he's called as an expert witness. Again,
expert witnesses in those days, if they were ever called,
were very loosely described as experts. Quite often again, it
was one of those local doctors who'd been called in
(28:39):
because someone died under suspicious circumstances and they will be
expected to pronounce on what had happened. They had no
training whatsoever, And most of the time it was total
hidden miss. I mean, there was one famous, well not
I say famous case, It just happens to be on record.
I'm sure there were loads of others where a local
doctor was called in. Apothecary was called in to say
(29:04):
whether he thought this particular drink contained arseny. Conner a
woman standing trial for having killed her husband with arsenic,
and this apothecary said, oh, yes, I've done a test
and this drink was packed with arsenic, it turned out,
And he was quite happily announced this in court. He'd
never done the test before in his life, and he said,
(29:26):
And to be honest with you, I really don't know
very much at all about arsenic I've never had anything
to do with it. This woman was still hand for murder.
That's the kind of level of competence, expertise, knowledge that
you're dealing with here. But here they have this expert
witness and he is a lot better than most. They
(29:47):
try originally to get Michael Faraday, who is a famous
scientist who did all the work on electro magnetism. Because
Faraday was working in the Woolage Arsenal which is a
big sort of nissions factory down the road. He was
a professor there. He used to come and give a
part time professor give lectures. They asked him would he
(30:08):
do these tests on George's stomach contents, on the coffee
pot grounds and also on the fresh coffee that was
in the jar, And he says, no, I'm too busy.
I can't take that on. But I recommend my assistant,
this man called James Marsh. Marsh had not run the
tests for Arsenick before, but he was a very competent chemist.
(30:30):
He was a self taught man. Actually, he came from
a very humble background. He left school at twelve went
to work as a laborer at the Woolich Arsenal But
he was very very quickly came to people's notice there
as being just a very very naturally gifted chemist and engineer,
and he was quickly taken out of being a laborer
(30:51):
and put into laboratory. And he was at that time
working with Faraday, and he ran these tests for the
presence of arsenic, and he said he found no arsenic
in the stomach contents, he found no arsenic in the
fresh coffee, but he did find a lot of arsenic
in the coffee grounds. And he gave his evidence and
(31:12):
off he went. But he was horrified at the rudimentary
nature of the tests that were currently used for the
presence of arsenic. And one of them involved throwing the
material that you thought contained arsenic onto a fire and
sniffing to see if you could smell garlic, because it
was supposed to the smell of garlic when it was heated,
(31:33):
and if you could, then arsenic was present, and if
you couldn't, it wasn't. And then there were some chemical
tests which involved making a solution of the arsenic material
and adding various chemicals and seeing whether the liquid changed color.
But it was incredible. It wasn't very clear at all.
It wasn't that you know, the liquid was yellow and
it turned bright blue or anything like that. The color
(31:55):
changes were incredibly subtle. They were incredibly difficult to detect.
And Ash was just horrified by this. And so he
went away and he quietly, in his own time, worked
away at perfecting his own tests for the presence of arsenic.
And it took him, as he said, three years. He
finally published a paper on this, and his test came
(32:19):
at the problem from a completely different and much more
scientific angle. It was to do with heating up the
arsenal gear. He invented some equipment, He designed some equipment
to be used in the lab, and it was to
do with heating up the arsenic, collecting a gas that
it produced, and really vaporizing the extraneous material, and then
(32:41):
you would finish up with the pure arsenic. If arsenic
was indeed present. That test actually became well, it became
the gold standard, and it stayed the gold standard right
up until the nineteen seventies, which is its warden. And
when I was researching this book, and I spoke to
one or two doctors about it, eld men who'd long retired.
(33:02):
Two three of them said, oh, I remember learning about
the Marsh test at medical school. I remember them telling
us about it, which is absolutely extraordinarily considering that you
know he did that in eighteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
You're right, it's incredible. I mean that the beginning of forensics,
the beginning of any development of any forensics tool. There's
so many mistakes. And one of my books is set
in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties at Berkeley, which is
sort of the beginning of forensics in the United States.
Any new tool, they just treated forensic experts would sit
on the stand and would just treat it as the
(33:36):
definitive answer. This is the answer that I have come
up with using this brand new tool. There is no
wiggle room. It is the definitive answer. And we know
now you can't say that anymore. But it sounds like
Marsh had just intuitively invented something with staying power, which
is very rare. So that's really an incredible character to
(33:59):
have in a book.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Actually, you're right, that's absolutely correct. It is extraordinary that
it wasn't overturned because, as you say, you know These
things are normally only amazing and groundbreaking revolutionary for a
short period of time before they get overturned in something else.
They're displaced by something else. That's normally the way it works. So, yes,
it was absolutely.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
So Marsh, I'm assuming is the one who has preserved
this material. Did he keep the grounds, the coffee and
the stomach contents between that eighteen thirty three and eighteen
thirty six when he developed the test?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
No, I don't think he necessarily. I don't think he
used There's no evidence to show that he actually used
those samples. I think he proved much more likely he
just made up some solutions of us with arsenic trioxide,
you know, and tested those, knowing that he had the arsenic,
(34:53):
that they contained arsenic, but then worked on those to
see whether he could then extract, get rid of all
the rest of the material and be left with this
pure arsenic.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
But in eighteen thirty three he tested the actual grounds
using the old test, and he said that I have
detected arsenic in the coffee grounds. So we think we
know where this has come from. Is it somebody put
it in the coffee?
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Absolutely sounds like a housekeeper to me.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Well, there.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
You are absolutely one thing I want to ask you about.
You know, I often say about poisoners, poison seems like
the ideal weapon. You don't have to be there, it's
hands off. It might be harder to trace depending on
where you are. Even now they have to do individual tests.
There's no one test where it's like, yes, could be cyanide,
it could be arsenic. But you actually have to know
(35:44):
what you're doing, as I think we found out with
this story, because if you don't give someone enough, they
just get sick and they survive, which is what happened
with the women. And if you give them too much,
then you have the blackened face or corroded organs, and
that's a red flag. So the most successful poisoners I've
seen have been the doctors, the people who know how
(36:04):
to do the dosage.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yes, yes, And also I mean one way of doing it,
which was again in the nineteenth century often quite successful,
was to give someone a reputation for having a lot
of gastric problems. So you would feed them a little
bit of arsenic for a few days, and they will
be ill and the doctor will be called in and
(36:27):
then they will get better, and then a few months later,
it would happen again, and they will get better. And
you do that a few times and then oh, you know,
pau Son so suffers so dreadfully with their digestion, has
such stomach problems. And then once you've give them the
person that reputation, everybody, including they themselves, thinks that, you know,
(36:49):
they just have terrible digestive problems, and then you give
them the bigger dose that kills them. Just seems very
very natural. They've already got this history, supposedly history.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
If we get back to George Bodle and his case.
You know, I joked about the housekeeper Sophia, because you know,
she obviously was one of the people preparing the coffee
that ended up being in the centerpiece of this. I'm
not sure what her motive is. I just keep coming
back to Samuel because I'm assuming Samuel still inherited everything.
(37:22):
Is that what happened ultimately with the story.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yes, that's that's absolutely what happened. Yes, I mean, Ky
walked away from the trial, you know, tires snow and
carried on with his successful running of the farm and
his very wealthy life bringing up his children. You know,
he had sons who went into farming, following in their
(37:45):
father's footsteps, ready to take over when the father retired
or died, and just went on very successfully.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Was that unusual because what would happen to Anne? Why
not leave Anne the farm and just a point Samuel
or another male figure, which would have been very typical,
to keep an eye on her funds and everything? Was
she and the other women in the house displaced after
Samuel got everything the.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Money and exactly what happened to all of the money
is not clear. There's no sort of clear records about that.
All we know is that Samuel inherited not everything, but
he inherited a big slice and middle John was disinherited.
So we know that, and we know one of Samuel's
eldest son also directly benefitted and seems to have been okay.
(38:37):
I think she already had, unusually for a woman, some
of her own money when George died, because she was
asked if she wanted to fund a prosecution, and there
was a row over who was going to pay for
the trial, because at that time it wasn't always the
authorities or state that did it. Quite often it was
the relatives of the victim who would actually pay towards
(38:59):
the prosecute and refused to pay, and she clearly didn't
want to see young John, and she said she didn't
have the money, and then I think they looked into
funds and said, yes you do. You know, you absolutely
do have the funds to pay for this if you
choose to do so.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
What is the impact of this case do you think
on forensics? And we know James marsh used it as
sort of a stepping stone for him to create a
test and accurate test for arsenic. Does this change anything
for the women who want to go on and kill
their husbands, you know with arsenic? Does this change the
landscape of murder at all?
Speaker 2 (39:37):
It actually had the reverse effect from the one that
it was expected to have because when he first published
this paper in eighteen thirty six, his fellow scientists and
the press who were all absolutely rejoicing, and there was
some extraordinary claims being made. People said, you know, this
(39:59):
is amazing, it's groundbreaking. Some of them said, this is
the end of arsenic as a murder weapon. No one
will ever ever dare to use it again because they
now know that we can prove definitely that someone has
died from arsenic, that arsenic was in this food that
they were fed, or this medicine they were given, or whatever,
(40:19):
and so it'd been so much easier to finger the
murderer that no one will ever dare use it again. Well,
that absolutely didn't happen. What did happen was because we
don't know whether the murder rate from arsenik went up
or not. What we do know is that the detection
rate went up. It didn't stop people trying it, but
(40:40):
the detection rate certainly went up, and so it appeared
that more and more people were being murdered poisoned by
arsenic than in the past. And this is why so
many women in particular were hanged, because everyone was on
the lookout.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
You know, ultimately, what I love about toxicology and what
I like about your story is that I feel comfortable
with toxicology as a tool. It has been peer reviewed,
it's been tested. It seems fairly straightforward. I could be wrong,
but the National Academy of Sciences says this is one
of the most reliable tools in the forensic science tool belt.
(41:19):
So to be able to see it from the beginning
in the kind of case that inspired a more accurate
test I think is remarkable.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yes, now I absolutely agree with you. I think it
really is remarkable. And I think to be able to
draw a point to a date and say that, really,
if you can ever point to a date and say
that was when something started, and usually it's much more
hazy and sort of subtle than that, but here you
(41:48):
can sort of define when, you know, if you wanted
to say, that's when modern toxicology, the science of toxicology
was born. I mean, I think that's a very good
place to point to. And I just think also that
marsh is such an admirable character because there he was.
He had no formal training, no special facilities at his disposal,
(42:09):
no assistant to help him. He was all on his
own in his spare time. But he just had this
such imagination and such determination that here was a problem
which really, did you know, it was crying out to
be solved, and he solved it. And then he disappears,
more or less back into obscurity again because he's not
say a few doctors said to me, oh, I remember
(42:30):
being told about the Marshal test, but that's it. Nobody
else knows anything about him or has heard of him.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
So someone eventually is held responsible for this? Is that right?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
I will put it no stronger than saying somebody is
revealed as the murderer. Yes.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(43:20):
produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold More and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(43:41):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
How do you know you're not being poisoned? Your friends
and family are smiling kindly at to you. How do
you know one of them isn't trying to murder you?
And of course you didn't know, you didn't know.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:49):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. A wealthy man is poisoned in eighteen
thirties England, and there are many suspects, including several errors.
(01:14):
Will coffee grounds prove to be crucial evidence in a
murder case that helped change forensics? Santra Himple in her book,
The Inheritor's Powder tells us the story of a determined
chemist who shifted the outcome of a historic case. Will
you just set the scene for me of where you
(01:34):
want to start the story. Where are we, what's the
time period, like politics, all of that for context?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Right, The time context is, as you said, it's a
really fascinating time. It's just before the beginning of the
Victorian era. Victoria came to the throne in eighteen thirty seven,
so the king on the throne at the time was
William the Fourth, her uncle, who is largely unknown. We
(02:03):
go normally from the Georgians to the Victorians and everyone
forgets about poor old William, stuck in the middle. But
that was the case. It was a strange time, really.
There was a lot going on in terms of unrest,
political unrest, particularly in the countryside, which is where this
(02:24):
story is set. In terms of the criminal justice system,
which this story is concerned with, there's a big hangover
from the Georgian times. A lot of reforms that were
going to come in to the way crimes were investigated
and where trials were organized had yet to come in.
(02:44):
So in some ways, you know, they were stuck in
a bit of a time war.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
But that point catch me up on where we were
in forensics, in the world of forensics in this time period.
In this time period in the United States, it was
really investigations world there onto the third degree, you know,
the police just cajoling people and abusing people until they confessed.
There was little in the way of anything and any
(03:08):
kind of investigator could gather and be used in court.
Was it like that in Britain in this time period?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yes, absolutely, there was no such thing as you know,
a detective in those days. It was well before the
profession of detective existed, and so the whole thing was
really a bit of a mess in that a magistrate
might get involved in investigating a suspected case, and then
(03:35):
there was the coroner involved if someone had died, and
the police usually you know that there was no as
you say, forensic science of any kind, no proper investigation,
no rules about how you went about investigating, and so
it was a complete mess actually and just down to
(03:56):
luck whether in fact the crime got investigated in first pace.
Actually sometimes it just didn't. There were no protocols to follow.
Quite often, what would happen if someone was thought that
somebody had been murdered, the local doctor would be called in.
But usually, I mean they knew nothing whatsoever about how
(04:17):
to go about investigating at all. They knew nothing about
trying to preserve the evidence. So again, you know, we're
just in the hands of complete amateurs bumbling around and
nobody properly taking control of what was happening.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Now, I've done some stories set in the seventeen hundreds
where doctors haven't been able to identify victims of poison
only based on their physical appearance, like a blackened face?
Is that through here? Where are we with toxicology in
eighteen thirty three? Can they find out anything?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
No? I mean we're not anywhere with toxicology. I mean
that's science. The modern science of toxicology just didn't exist. Obviously,
they had no way of investigating other than, as you say,
they would just look for signs on the body. They
would also look at the circumstances in which someone had
(05:11):
died to see whether it was likely that they might
have been poisoned. But I mean, the case was, the
suspicion was, and in fact, the fact was that an
awful lot of cases of poison were just not recognized
as being a criminal poison It wasn't recognized as if
(05:31):
it had been murdered, that it was murder. And lots
of cases were put down to natural disease.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Which there were a lot, there's a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
That was a lot absolutely because hygiene was absolutely appalling
or nonexistent, and so people would go down with food
poisoning and they would regard it very much as we
might nowadays regard going down with cold. You know, it
was just one of those things, and you waited and
(06:02):
hoped that you would get better. But apart from food poisoning,
there was dysantree, there was typhoid, those kinds of diseases
that affect the digestion and stomach. Very very difficult not
to confuse all of those diseases with criminal poisoning or
any kind of poisoning, you know, really, because sometimes people
(06:24):
did take poison, particularly arsenic, by accident, and dreadful stories
about arsenic being left around in the packet and children
getting hold of it thinking it was sherbet or sugar
or something and taking it by mistake.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Because particularly arsenic was very widely used, right was it
used for killing rats? That was one of its usefulnesses right.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Absolutely, and that's all they had. You know, there was
lots of again because of the conditions of the people
were living in There were rats and mice everywhere, and
there were also bugs as well, you know, there were
things like cockroaches, bed bugs, fleas. So it worked as
this insect a side as well. People would wash flaws
(07:07):
and bedding and that sort of thing down down with arsenick,
and it was all they had. And it was very
cheap because it was like sort of by product of
some of the processes of the industrial Revolution. You could
buy it over the counter with no questions asked.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Really, one of the things that I think is the
strength of the mini strengths of your book is that
it is nonfiction and it reads like a mystery novel.
Those are my favorite kinds of books and I try
to write those types of books, and you did it
so well here. So let's start with the mystery. Start
where it makes sense to you. I always want to hear,
(07:42):
of course, as much about the victim as possible, but
where do we start to really unravel this?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Just to set the background, I mean, thank you so much,
first of all for saying that it read like a
murder mystery story because that was exactly how I tried
to write it. I love those kinds of books too,
so thank you, thank you for your kind words about that.
The story itself is a sort of classical murder mystery
(08:08):
set in an English village. The crime was motivated by greed,
and it was carried out with horrible callousness. The killer
appeared to be a member of the victim's close family.
Although several people had a motive, as some of them
had behaved very suspiciously, it was hard to imagine really
that any of them had the sort of psychopathic personality
(08:31):
that really I think was needed for this crime. And
the murder scene was a large house belonging to an elderly,
wealthy farmer. George Bogel was an eighty one year old patriarch.
He was the head of a large extended family, and
he was a highly respected local figure. Been a church
warden for many years, and he was a member of
(08:53):
the Vestry Committee, which was the local authority that ran
the parish, and they dealt with important matters such as
setting the local taxes. So he was quite a figure
of some distinction. He was also a very shrewd businessman.
He started out as a tenant farmer with just a
small parcel of land, but he gradually inquired more and
(09:15):
more fields and orchards and he built up large herds
of cattle and pigs. He and his wife Anne lived
a very simple, thrifty and really god fearing life, following
the old country ways and the residents of Plumpstead they
were the local village worthies really, such as the vicar
(09:35):
of the local church, the magistrate, and being in the
English village. Although it was a tiny village, there were
three pubs. It was very typical.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
You do mention at some point that the parish constables
are known for being inebriated.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Absolutely. I mean. There was a wonderful story of the
young policeman who was sent to investigate this murder, sent
to search someone's house, and he came away with the
evidence two packets of arsenic. But on his way back
to the station he went on a pub crawl, of course,
(10:11):
and he said that he was sheltering from the rain,
but he managed to, in the rain go to three
different pubs.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
When he started.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Handing round the packets of arsenic showing his drinking mates,
somebody spilt the contents of one packet down their trousers. Yeah,
and eventually the policeman eventually staggered back to hand in
what remained of this evidence. He also had a bottle
of something which he thought contained arsening. He managed to
drop that on the pub floor and break it. So
(10:42):
this is the kind of standard of place and the
standard of investigation we're dealing with you.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
That's helpful in your story. I think we get back
to plumpstead, so churches and pubs, and George Bodle and
his wife Anne, very wealthy but not flashy, and they
just seemed to have a nice, big extended family. But
everything is calm, not as much a drama as we
would expect in a murder story, at least on the onset.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
That's right. I mean, I thought it was quite a
coincidence that the story really begins on the morning of
November second, which is all Soul's Day, which is also
known as the Day of the Dead. So I thought
that was quite appropriate, really, And it began. The drama
began just after breakfast, and George and Anne and their
(11:30):
daughter Elizabeth who was on a visit, and granddaughter Betsy
who lived with them, and a maid called Sofia were
all suddenly taken violently ill with vomiting and diarrhea, and
as we've already said, at that time this wasn't unusual.
They just waited to get better. But as the day
passed on, they didn't get at all better. Their symptoms
(11:51):
were particularly severe, and so they sent for the doctor.
The doctor. Nearest doctor was in the town Woolidge, which
was a mile or so away. A man called John
Butler was called out and he arrived on his pony
and trap, and he began examining the patients. But as
he asked them, he was asking them about their symptoms,
(12:13):
and as you said, you know, would be examining their
bodies for any particular signs, but he also asked them
about how they became ill and when they became ill.
He was particularly astute, actually, because not a lot of
doctors would have necessarily picked up on this. But he
thought this was rather odd, this story. He thought it
(12:34):
didn't fit with the normal onset of an outbreak of
food poisoning. For a start, everybody became ill very violently,
very suddenly, at the same time, and immediately after having breakfast,
and there was nothing that they'd had a breakfast, which
seemed obvious cause of you know, food polison. I think
mostly they just had bread or toast, and they didn't
(12:57):
all have the same thing. The only thing that they
did all have was coffee, So it sounds likely that
coffee would give you food poisoning. So he decided that
this was much more like an attack from an irritant
poison of some kind. The top of his list of
likely poisons was arsenic. What surprised me actually when I
(13:18):
was looking into arsenic and just what it was, was
that the matella element arsenic, which is a gray metal,
isn't poisonous at all if it passes through your body
in its pure forms. The compound which is called arsenic trioxide,
which in the nineteenth century was known as white arsenic
(13:39):
that most of us mean when we talk about arsenic,
and this is a very very different matter. It's horribly
deadly in very small doses, and as we've discussed, you know,
it was cheaply and widely available.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So doctor Butler is looking at, you know, these three.
What's the age range of Elizabeth, Betsy and Sofia? Are
they all?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Betsy is I think sixteen? Elizabeth is middle aged, and
Anne is eighty or the same age as George.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Okay, and Sophia I think about eighteen. So doctor Butler
examines them and says, this is strange. They didn't even
digest the food, you know, so that it couldn't have
been the food. And he's looking at the coffee. Does
he think that this is nefarious, that there's murderous intent
here initially, or did he think some bad accident happened
(14:31):
with a household poison.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
He didn't say. He didn't say, we don't know. I mean,
it's hard to imagine that it would be by accident, really,
because it's powerder sometimes sometimes mistaken for sugar. But he
seemed to think that the coffee pot was the key thing.
So I say, it's hard. I guess he was probably
(14:53):
reserving judgment, but it's hard to know. He was sufficiently
concerned that he sent the cleaning lady who came every day.
He sent her rushing around to her daughter's cottage, because
every day, when they finished drinking their coffee, they would
give the coffee pot with the used grounds in the
bottom to missus Lear. She would go round to her
(15:17):
daughter's house. A daughter lived in a nearby cottage. Daughter
had a very large family, I think ten children, and
was in extreme poverty. And such was the poverty that
they would take this coffee pot. They would fill it
up again with water and boil it up and make
a hot drink from the children from these weak coffee grounds.
(15:39):
Coffee grounds had already been used. So that was the
scale of the poverty of some people in the countryside
at that time. When John Butler heard that this coffee
pot and oh well, it's gone round to this woman
with her children, he sent missus Lear rushing back to
the cottage to grab the coffee pot, and she managed
to take it just as one of them children was
(16:00):
about to fill it up with water, put it on
the stove, and they were all going to drink it.
So that's one of the things I mean when I
said how callous this murderer was, because they must have
known that that was what happened.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
But Anne and George are not affected by this this time,
is that right?
Speaker 2 (16:19):
No, they are. They were all ill. George was much
more ill than others because he drunk more coffee than
anyone else.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Had, and he was eighty one.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Also, he was he was Anne was quite old though
I think she was seventy nine, I believe. But she
had a tiny, tiny cup of coffee to his large cup.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
But when doctor Butler gets there, they're all still alive.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (16:41):
They are all still alive. Absolutely, absolutely, they are all
still alive, just very sick. He does the classic thing
of giving them things to, you know, make them sick.
I mean the favorites was salt water, and also they
would actually make people drink oil.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
After that, over the next few days, he visits every
day and continues to try to treat them, and very
very gradually the women start to get better. George doesn't.
He continues very ill, and eventually, on the fifth of November,
he dies, having suffered really, really badly. And obviously by
(17:23):
then everybody is thinking what on earth has gone on here?
And events actually then start to move quite fast. Some
very odd things happen. One of the people who come
under suspicion in the family is this twenty three year
old man who's known as Young John. His father is
(17:45):
known as Middle John. Young John lives with his older
brother and his mother and father and a maid called
Mary Higgins, and they live in a cottage on George
Bowdle's land. A couple of more mornings before the family
gets sick. Young John suddenly appears one morning at the
(18:06):
farmhouse early morning as Sophia the maid is getting the
breakfast ready, and he says, oh, I've come to give
you a hand, which is very odd. He's never done
that before. He normally is stays in bed till about
midday and he helps her. One of the things he
does is to fill huge kettle from the tap in
(18:27):
the yard and bring it in and put it over
the fire. He's there again on the morning that everyone
feels ill when George dies. He then, within a few
hours of George dying, he leaves Plumpstead and he goes
off to southeast London to a place called Clarkenwell, where
his older married sister runs a coffee shop, and he
(18:49):
goes to stay with her, absents himself from the area.
His father, Middle John then goes to see the magistrate
and says, oh, that my son is guilty of poisoning
his grandfather.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Wow, okay, which is.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
A very extraordinary thing to do. He also brings along
the maid Mary Higgins. He's rumored it's quite well known
in the village that the pair are having an affair.
He produces Mary Higgins before the magistrate, and Mary Higgins
counts a story about how she quite recently heard Young
(19:27):
John boasting that he was making a joke of the
fact that it would be a really good idea if
he killed his grandfather and then his father, and then
he will be able to inherit lots of money. So
Mary Higgins recounts this. Then somebody else, and we don't
know who this is, but someone else also goes to
(19:47):
the magistrate and said, you need to have a word
with Young John's friend schoolmaster called John Watts. John Watts
has got something to tell you, So the magistrate sends
for John Watson. John Watts says, well, I went into
town with young John a couple of days ago and
he bought two packets of arsenic while I was with him.
(20:08):
The magistrate issues a warrant for Young John's arrest and
he sends PC Morris of the Young pub Crawl fame
after Clarkenwell to arrest Young John and bring him back
to Plumstead in handcuffs, which he does. Young John is
obviously very much under suspicion of the murder and they
(20:29):
have an inquest, and the inquest goes on for five days,
which is absolutely extraordinary, because you know, our coroner could
get through about two or three inquests a day. They
would just whizz through them. But this one went into
the most incredible amount of interviews with people and had
masses and masses of witnesses. It caught somehow the imagination
(20:51):
of the public. I suppose it was because it was
a very wealthy man and because one of the people
under suspicion was his grandson, so really caught the press's
imagination and the publics, and so it made national news
headlines for days.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
What does young John have to say about any of this.
He's denying everything.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
I'm assuming he's denying absolutely everything. And he's saying that
he did indeed buy packets of arsenic, and indeed P. C.
Morris found them in his bedroom when he went to
search the cottage. But he says he bought them as
a skin treatment, and that was one of the things
arsenic was used for. There were advertisements in the papers saying,
(21:32):
if you want a beautiful complexion, you know by our
arsenic lotion. You know it was used for acne, And
he said you know, he had this suffered with this acne,
and he was in the habit of treating it with arsenic.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Does Sophia, the housekeeper who says that, you know, he
came and helped that morning with the water that would
be for the coffee, does she have any thoughts on
any of this? I know she said it was odd,
But is she suspicious of young John.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
She doesn't seem to be. She liked him a lot,
and he was very charming. By all accounts, he was
an extremely charming young man. He was very friendly, very approachable.
Everyone liked him. She was in the habit of, i think,
sort of flirting with him mildly whenever they met. She
certainly wasn't setting out like some of the others to
(22:24):
try to put a noose around his neck, as his
father appeared to be doing. The coroner did decide that
(22:44):
young John should be charged with murder, that he should
stand trial for the murder of his grandfather, at which
young John goes completely to pieces and is sort of
fainting and weeping and on the point of collapse. John Butler,
actually i think, goes him and says, come on, you know,
all right, just pull yourself together. Stick with it. So
(23:05):
they then have this trial at the Crown Court. All
of this stuff about Middle John's bizarre behavior, Mary higgins
bizarre behavior all comes out. It also transpires that Old
George is son in law. Samuel Baxter, who's another local
farmer who married George's daughter, took Old George to the
(23:29):
solicitors just days before he fell ill, and George changed
his will massively in favor of Samuel and Samuel's family.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Wow, this comes out during the inquest or when does
this come out?
Speaker 2 (23:44):
That comes out just before? Actually, but I think it
does come out in the inquest, but I think there's
been some kind of rumour's stories circulating in the village
before that.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Does Anne know this?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
We don't know whether Anne knows that. Actually, Anne is
a very strange character, because there's not a lot on
record about Anne what she says. I mean, there's one
point when young John is taken to see her, and
she obviously is extremely fond of him and I think
doesn't want to see him prosecuted. But apart from that,
(24:18):
we don't know a huge amount about her. She seems
to be sort of quietly there in the background. I mean,
George doesn't seem to have had a lot of time
for young John. I'm not surprisingly really, because George, being
such a hard working man and such a self made man,
doesn't have a lot of time for young John, who
(24:38):
you know, stays in bed half the morning, is supported
largely by his father, is supposed to do laboring work
on the farm, but actually most of the time dodges
off and really has to be chased to do any work,
and spends you know, it's mainly interested in buying clothes
and looking.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Good, flirting with housekeepers and stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Exactly, and generally sort of playing the gentleman, which is
the kind of behavior that George would have had not
a lot of time for. So I don't think they
got on particularly well.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
But this would also have been behavior that would have
irritated middle John, I'm assuming, And do we think that
might be a little bit behind his bizarre accusation and
this arrest that has happened based on, you know, the
purchase of a commonly available poison and the word of
a father and sort of the odd nature of a
(25:29):
surprise visit from you know, young John to Sophia the housekeeper.
And that's it, right, Do they have anything else? On
this guy.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
No, they don't have anything else. I mean at that
time you often didn't need anything else.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
And the trials were a day. The trials lasted a
nano second.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Absolutely, you know, and if you had a motive and
you had opportunity, then that was enough. Quite often, can
you The defense relied very heavily, As you said, first
of all, this circumstantial. But secondly, why would this father
go to the magistrate and try to get his son hanged?
(26:09):
The implication was that he middle John was guilty. Oh
so therefore he was trying to get his son fingered
for a crime that he himself had committed. If it
were to be him, he couldn't have known about the
trip Samuel Baxter taking his father to change the will,
because by the time George died, Baxter inherited most of
(26:31):
George's wealth and George's property.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
How could they go through with a trial with young
John with I know, it's actually your right, more evidence
than they would have had in most cases in this
time period, Knowing that you have somebody, a son in law,
who is going to inherit everything and the change just
happened a few days before, how could they in good
conscience not investigate that angle before putting young John on trial.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, you're absolutely right, I mean it just again is
another example of how badly these things will run.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Privilege right, because I'm assuming Samuel was an upright citizen
and blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
Absolutely yes, indeed, and a lot more stuff came out
against Middle John at the trial. The defense he had
previous criminal convictions himself for theft and fraud, and had
actually served some time in prison himself for crime, so
that didn't sort of go down too well with the jury.
(27:30):
And then there are a whole load of character witnesses
for young John. One after the other people trooped into
the witness box to say, you know, a lovely young
man he was, and it's impossible to think that he
could ever ever have harmed anybody. And so he was
found not guilty, and extraordinarily, when he came out of
(27:52):
the court a free man, the jury was outside in
the street and they all cheered him as he came out,
and then he got into this carriage and off he
went back to Plumstead, and when he arrived at the
other end, the villagers were all out cheering him and
welcoming home as a hero.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
So what happens three years after George's murdered We meet
a chemist, is that right? In eighteen thirty six?
Speaker 2 (28:17):
We do, actually we meet chemist at the trial in
eighteen thirty three, because he's called as an expert witness. Again,
expert witnesses in those days, if they were ever called,
were very loosely described as experts. Quite often again, it
was one of those local doctors who'd been called in
(28:39):
because someone died under suspicious circumstances and they will be
expected to pronounce on what had happened. They had no
training whatsoever, And most of the time it was total
hidden miss. I mean, there was one famous, well not
I say famous case, It just happens to be on record.
I'm sure there were loads of others where a local
doctor was called in. Apothecary was called in to say
(29:04):
whether he thought this particular drink contained arseny. Conner a
woman standing trial for having killed her husband with arsenic,
and this apothecary said, oh, yes, I've done a test
and this drink was packed with arsenic, it turned out,
And he was quite happily announced this in court. He'd
never done the test before in his life, and he said,
(29:26):
And to be honest with you, I really don't know
very much at all about arsenic I've never had anything
to do with it. This woman was still hand for murder.
That's the kind of level of competence, expertise, knowledge that
you're dealing with here. But here they have this expert
witness and he is a lot better than most. They
(29:47):
try originally to get Michael Faraday, who is a famous
scientist who did all the work on electro magnetism. Because
Faraday was working in the Woolage Arsenal which is a
big sort of nissions factory down the road. He was
a professor there. He used to come and give a
part time professor give lectures. They asked him would he
(30:08):
do these tests on George's stomach contents, on the coffee
pot grounds and also on the fresh coffee that was
in the jar, And he says, no, I'm too busy.
I can't take that on. But I recommend my assistant,
this man called James Marsh. Marsh had not run the
tests for Arsenick before, but he was a very competent chemist.
(30:30):
He was a self taught man. Actually, he came from
a very humble background. He left school at twelve went
to work as a laborer at the Woolich Arsenal But
he was very very quickly came to people's notice there
as being just a very very naturally gifted chemist and engineer,
and he was quickly taken out of being a laborer
(30:51):
and put into laboratory. And he was at that time
working with Faraday, and he ran these tests for the
presence of arsenic, and he said he found no arsenic
in the stomach contents, he found no arsenic in the
fresh coffee, but he did find a lot of arsenic
in the coffee grounds. And he gave his evidence and
(31:12):
off he went. But he was horrified at the rudimentary
nature of the tests that were currently used for the
presence of arsenic. And one of them involved throwing the
material that you thought contained arsenic onto a fire and
sniffing to see if you could smell garlic, because it
was supposed to the smell of garlic when it was heated,
(31:33):
and if you could, then arsenic was present, and if
you couldn't, it wasn't. And then there were some chemical
tests which involved making a solution of the arsenic material
and adding various chemicals and seeing whether the liquid changed color.
But it was incredible. It wasn't very clear at all.
It wasn't that you know, the liquid was yellow and
it turned bright blue or anything like that. The color
(31:55):
changes were incredibly subtle. They were incredibly difficult to detect.
And Ash was just horrified by this. And so he
went away and he quietly, in his own time, worked
away at perfecting his own tests for the presence of arsenic.
And it took him, as he said, three years. He
finally published a paper on this, and his test came
(32:19):
at the problem from a completely different and much more
scientific angle. It was to do with heating up the
arsenal gear. He invented some equipment, He designed some equipment
to be used in the lab, and it was to
do with heating up the arsenic, collecting a gas that
it produced, and really vaporizing the extraneous material, and then
(32:41):
you would finish up with the pure arsenic. If arsenic
was indeed present. That test actually became well, it became
the gold standard, and it stayed the gold standard right
up until the nineteen seventies, which is its warden. And
when I was researching this book, and I spoke to
one or two doctors about it, eld men who'd long retired.
(33:02):
Two three of them said, oh, I remember learning about
the Marsh test at medical school. I remember them telling
us about it, which is absolutely extraordinarily considering that you
know he did that in eighteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
You're right, it's incredible. I mean that the beginning of forensics,
the beginning of any development of any forensics tool. There's
so many mistakes. And one of my books is set
in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties at Berkeley, which is
sort of the beginning of forensics in the United States.
Any new tool, they just treated forensic experts would sit
on the stand and would just treat it as the
(33:36):
definitive answer. This is the answer that I have come
up with using this brand new tool. There is no
wiggle room. It is the definitive answer. And we know
now you can't say that anymore. But it sounds like
Marsh had just intuitively invented something with staying power, which
is very rare. So that's really an incredible character to
(33:59):
have in a book.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Actually, you're right, that's absolutely correct. It is extraordinary that
it wasn't overturned because, as you say, you know These
things are normally only amazing and groundbreaking revolutionary for a
short period of time before they get overturned in something else.
They're displaced by something else. That's normally the way it works. So, yes,
it was absolutely.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
So Marsh, I'm assuming is the one who has preserved
this material. Did he keep the grounds, the coffee and
the stomach contents between that eighteen thirty three and eighteen
thirty six when he developed the test?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
No, I don't think he necessarily. I don't think he
used There's no evidence to show that he actually used
those samples. I think he proved much more likely he
just made up some solutions of us with arsenic trioxide,
you know, and tested those, knowing that he had the arsenic,
(34:53):
that they contained arsenic, but then worked on those to
see whether he could then extract, get rid of all
the rest of the material and be left with this
pure arsenic.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
But in eighteen thirty three he tested the actual grounds
using the old test, and he said that I have
detected arsenic in the coffee grounds. So we think we
know where this has come from. Is it somebody put
it in the coffee?
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Absolutely sounds like a housekeeper to me.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Well, there.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
You are absolutely one thing I want to ask you about.
You know, I often say about poisoners, poison seems like
the ideal weapon. You don't have to be there, it's
hands off. It might be harder to trace depending on
where you are. Even now they have to do individual tests.
There's no one test where it's like, yes, could be cyanide,
it could be arsenic. But you actually have to know
(35:44):
what you're doing, as I think we found out with
this story, because if you don't give someone enough, they
just get sick and they survive, which is what happened
with the women. And if you give them too much,
then you have the blackened face or corroded organs, and
that's a red flag. So the most successful poisoners I've
seen have been the doctors, the people who know how
(36:04):
to do the dosage.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yes, yes, And also I mean one way of doing it,
which was again in the nineteenth century often quite successful,
was to give someone a reputation for having a lot
of gastric problems. So you would feed them a little
bit of arsenic for a few days, and they will
be ill and the doctor will be called in and
(36:27):
then they will get better, and then a few months later,
it would happen again, and they will get better. And
you do that a few times and then oh, you know,
pau Son so suffers so dreadfully with their digestion, has
such stomach problems. And then once you've give them the
person that reputation, everybody, including they themselves, thinks that, you know,
(36:49):
they just have terrible digestive problems, and then you give
them the bigger dose that kills them. Just seems very
very natural. They've already got this history, supposedly history.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
If we get back to George Bodle and his case.
You know, I joked about the housekeeper Sophia, because you know,
she obviously was one of the people preparing the coffee
that ended up being in the centerpiece of this. I'm
not sure what her motive is. I just keep coming
back to Samuel because I'm assuming Samuel still inherited everything.
(37:22):
Is that what happened ultimately with the story.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yes, that's that's absolutely what happened. Yes, I mean, Ky
walked away from the trial, you know, tires snow and
carried on with his successful running of the farm and
his very wealthy life bringing up his children. You know,
he had sons who went into farming, following in their
(37:45):
father's footsteps, ready to take over when the father retired
or died, and just went on very successfully.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Was that unusual because what would happen to Anne? Why
not leave Anne the farm and just a point Samuel
or another male figure, which would have been very typical,
to keep an eye on her funds and everything? Was
she and the other women in the house displaced after
Samuel got everything the.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Money and exactly what happened to all of the money
is not clear. There's no sort of clear records about that.
All we know is that Samuel inherited not everything, but
he inherited a big slice and middle John was disinherited.
So we know that, and we know one of Samuel's
eldest son also directly benefitted and seems to have been okay.
(38:37):
I think she already had, unusually for a woman, some
of her own money when George died, because she was
asked if she wanted to fund a prosecution, and there
was a row over who was going to pay for
the trial, because at that time it wasn't always the
authorities or state that did it. Quite often it was
the relatives of the victim who would actually pay towards
(38:59):
the prosecute and refused to pay, and she clearly didn't
want to see young John, and she said she didn't
have the money, and then I think they looked into
funds and said, yes you do. You know, you absolutely
do have the funds to pay for this if you
choose to do so.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
What is the impact of this case do you think
on forensics? And we know James marsh used it as
sort of a stepping stone for him to create a
test and accurate test for arsenic. Does this change anything
for the women who want to go on and kill
their husbands, you know with arsenic? Does this change the
landscape of murder at all?
Speaker 2 (39:37):
It actually had the reverse effect from the one that
it was expected to have because when he first published
this paper in eighteen thirty six, his fellow scientists and
the press who were all absolutely rejoicing, and there was
some extraordinary claims being made. People said, you know, this
(39:59):
is amazing, it's groundbreaking. Some of them said, this is
the end of arsenic as a murder weapon. No one
will ever ever dare to use it again because they
now know that we can prove definitely that someone has
died from arsenic, that arsenic was in this food that
they were fed, or this medicine they were given, or whatever,
(40:19):
and so it'd been so much easier to finger the
murderer that no one will ever dare use it again. Well,
that absolutely didn't happen. What did happen was because we
don't know whether the murder rate from arsenik went up
or not. What we do know is that the detection
rate went up. It didn't stop people trying it, but
(40:40):
the detection rate certainly went up, and so it appeared
that more and more people were being murdered poisoned by
arsenic than in the past. And this is why so
many women in particular were hanged, because everyone was on
the lookout.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
You know, ultimately, what I love about toxicology and what
I like about your story is that I feel comfortable
with toxicology as a tool. It has been peer reviewed,
it's been tested. It seems fairly straightforward. I could be wrong,
but the National Academy of Sciences says this is one
of the most reliable tools in the forensic science tool belt.
(41:19):
So to be able to see it from the beginning
in the kind of case that inspired a more accurate
test I think is remarkable.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yes, now I absolutely agree with you. I think it
really is remarkable. And I think to be able to
draw a point to a date and say that, really,
if you can ever point to a date and say
that was when something started, and usually it's much more
hazy and sort of subtle than that, but here you
(41:48):
can sort of define when, you know, if you wanted
to say, that's when modern toxicology, the science of toxicology
was born. I mean, I think that's a very good
place to point to. And I just think also that
marsh is such an admirable character because there he was.
He had no formal training, no special facilities at his disposal,
(42:09):
no assistant to help him. He was all on his
own in his spare time. But he just had this
such imagination and such determination that here was a problem
which really, did you know, it was crying out to
be solved, and he solved it. And then he disappears,
more or less back into obscurity again because he's not
say a few doctors said to me, oh, I remember
(42:30):
being told about the Marshal test, but that's it. Nobody
else knows anything about him or has heard of him.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
So someone eventually is held responsible for this? Is that right?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
I will put it no stronger than saying somebody is
revealed as the murderer. Yes.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(43:20):
produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold More and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(43:41):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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