FAMOUS POISONING CASE RECALLED.

Manawatu Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 282, 6 December 1907, Page 2

FAMOUS POISONING CASE RECALLED.

The death atßroarimoor Asylum of Christina Edmunds recalls ..w.ui of the most notorious criminal tiiuLs of the last century. It is more than 35 years since Edmunds was tried at the Old Bailey, and almost everybody connected with the trial has predeceased her. The judge, Baron Martin; Sergeant Ballautyne, one of the prosecuting counsel; Sergeant Parry, one of the counsel who defended ; and Sir William Gull, who was instrumental, after sentence of death had been passed, in saving the condemned woman from the gallows —all have passed away. Edmunds was sentenced for the murder of a boy named Sidney Albert Barker, of Brighton, and the evidence of the trial revealed a curiously cunning and subtle attempt at wholesale poisoning, conceived with the object of diverting attention from prisoner herself. Christina Edmunds had been attended in 1870 by a Brighton medical man, with whom she appeared to be on very friendly terms. In December of that year Edmunds was visiting at the doctor's, and she gave a chocolate cream to the doctor's wife, who, finding that it tasted bitter, spat it out, and though she was made unwell, she suffered no permanent injury. Her husband, however, suspected something, and he charged Edmunds with having attempted to poison his wife. She visited the doctor no more. The presumption was that out of jealousy, and with the view of facilitating her own'attachment she had tried to kill the doctor's wife. Then Edmunds, finding herself cut off from associating with the doctor and his wife, planned a diabolical course of action to make it appear that the poisoned sweetmeat had come from a well-known sweet shop in West street, Brighton. She induced children to go to that shop and purchase chocolate creams. These she impregnated with strychnine and then sent them back to the shop, with the excuse that they were not of the right sort. The poisoned chocolates so received back were sold unsuspectingly to a Brighton family, with the result that one member of the family, Sidney Albert Barker, was immediately poisoned. Edmunds distributed other poisoned sweets to children in the street, and a number were poisoned, but no others died. At the inquest on Barker she even volunteered evidence, and tolda cunning story of having herself been ill as a result of eating sweets bought at the West street shop. The verdict of the jury was "Accidental death," and the confectioner, a man of the highest integrity, was exonerated. Edmunds was arrested in 1871, and after a sensational trial was sentenced to death for the murder of the boy Barker. Shortly afterwards it was shown that her father, well-known as the designer of Trinity Church, and many other public buildings in Margate, had died in a lunatic asylum, and that her brother had died as an epileptio idiot in Earlswood Asylum. The result*was that Mr Bruce, the Home Secretary of the day, on a report from Sir William Gull, commuted the sentence, and ordered her detention at Broadmoor. Here she lived for thirty-five years, and when death released her the other day she was in her 78th year. Whatever might have been her mental state at the time when the crime was committed, she showed unmistakable signs of insanity at Broadmoor. She was an exceedingly vain woman, and it is reported of her that she socured odd ends of rope out of which she manufactured a wig of yellow tow. This she invariably wore when she expected a visitor. She also contrived to make_a.flne powder out of a piece of red brick which she rubbed , on her pale cheeks with a most uncanny effect. Her long detention at Broadmoor probably cost the State over £1000.