Justice Miscarried

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 308, 28 December 1940, Page 3 (Supplement)

Justice Miscarried

SCIENCE AND THE CRIMINAL

THAT justice oft-times miscarried in the trial of alleged poisoners is shown in British records—-the cases, for example, of Kitty Ogilvie and Anne Turner are grave blots on our judicial history. When Thomas Ogilvie died in 1 796 he had already been a long time ailing, and the two medical men who attended him found nothing to suggest that death was due to other than natural causes. Nevertheless, his wife and her brother-in-law, F|atrick, with whom she was said to b« in love, were arrested.

By F. Reeder

No arsenic, the poison allegedly used, was ever traced to either of them; the prosecution went solely on certain passages in letters written by Kitty Ogilvie, attempting to construe these as indicating that she intended to poison her.husband, and on a lot of vague, hearsay gossip regarding her relaturns with her brother-in-law. The latter was hang'ed, but Kitty Ogilvie, a few days before the d..te set for her execution, escaped in disguise to France. Death in the Tower An even worse i—tance is the seventeenth century trial that followed the death of Sir Thomas Overbury. One of the four accused, James Franklyn, turned K : g's Evidence, confessing that he had supplied Anne Turner with the seven deadliest poisons known, and these, with the knowledge of the Lieutenant of the Tower, had been mixed continuously with the victim's food. Anne Turner and Richard Weston, an apothecary's assistant whom Franklyn declared to be her accomplice, were condemned and executed. When Franklyn himself came to trial, he confessed that either the poison he supplied had never been administered or that it had done Sir Thomas Over-

bury no harm, for he now declared, he and Weston had, in fact, stifled him with the bedclothes! Tins case reached its height as a piece of judicial blundering or worse when, after three people, of whom one was certainly innocent and another (Weston) probably so, had been executed, the instigators of the crime, the Farl and Countess of Somerset, pleaded guilty, and escaped with a nominal sentence. Some progress in the identification of arsenic, though the tests were as yet crude, had been made by the middle of the eighteenth centuryagfr is shown by the evidence of Sir Anthony Addington, who proved beyond all doubt, at the trial in 1752, that Mary Blaiidy had administered this poison to her father, Francis Blandy, attorney, of Henley-on-Thames. The "Love Philtre" This was a curious case, in that it is still doubtful whether Mary really intended to murder her father, though that was indubitably the object of her lover, Captain William Cranstoun, who escaped to France when she was arrested. Mary was deeply enamoured of Cranstoun, a younger son of a Scottish peer, and a wild and dishonest rake. Attracted by his rank, Mr. Blandy at first encouraged his advances, but* later discovered that he was already married and, although Cranstoun, by a trick, obtained from his wife a letter disowning him, this did not satisfy the attorney. Cranstoun then gaVe the girl a "love philtre," in the form of a white powder, to put in her father's food; it would, he assured her, make the old man friendly towards him again. She obeyed Cranstoun's instructions, with the result that her father died and Sir Anthonv Addington proved that the white powder was arsenic. Admitting that she had given her father the powder in his food. Mary Blandy protested to the end that she had meant no harm to him, that she believed it to be a harmless "love philtre," and, indeed, most people in those days believed in the efficacy of "live philtres." Nevertheless, she was hanged.