STRANGE WIPE-POISONING CASE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 4258, 17 July 1895, Page 5

STRANGE WIPE-POISONING CASE.

Dr Robert W. Buchanan has just been executed in New York for the murder of his wife by poisoning. The case is a remarkable one, and has occupied the attention of the American public for many months. The murderer, it will be seen from the following narrative, was a Scotchman :— On April 22, 1892, the wife of Dr Robert W. Buchanan, a practising physician at No. 267, West Eleventh street, was taken ill without any preliminary warning. Next day she expired in the presence of two doctors, a nurse, and a clergyman, who, one after the other, had been hastily summoned by the apparently distracted husband. On April 25 she was buried, the doctors giving a certificate of cerebral apoplexy as the cause of death. For some weeks the corpse lay undisturbed in its tomb. Meanwhile whispers, which had begun to circulate ever since the woman's death, gathered in force and volume. The authorities were aroused. On June 25, just forty-four days after the burial, the body was exhumed. It exhibited no trace of cerebral apoplexy, but an analysis of the stomach resulted in the finding of morphine. Dr Buchanan was arrested on suspicion of having administered the poison. The testimony produced by the prosecution at the trial, which began March 20, 1893, may be summed up as follows : — Robert W. Buchanan was born in Scotland in 1862. He went to Halifax, N.S., and started in life as a druggist's clerk. In 1883 he graduated at the Chicago College of Physicians and Surgeons, and; having married in the interim, he settled down to practise hi New York in 1887. He was not very prosperous. His wife proved unfaithful, and he separated from her, retaining his daughter Gertrude. He took to drinking and dissipation. Then he fell in with a woman named Annie Sutherland, the keeper of a notorious house in Newark. Though ten years older than he, she fell desperately in love with him. She urged him to divorce his wife and marry her. As she had money, Buchanan readily consented. He obtained his divorce on November 12, 1890. On November 27 Annie Sutherland signed a will in Buchanan's favor. Two days later she became Mrs Buchanan by a secret marriage. The woman's money raised Buchanan from the gutter. Ostensibly he prospered. He devoted himself to his practice, and became a public surgeon and a commissioner in lunacy. But his domestic life was a wretched one. He grew to hate the woman to whom he owed his apparent prosperity. In April, 1892, came an open rupture. Mrs Buchanan No. 2 threatened to return to Newark and resume her disreputable life. This was the condition of things on that fateful morning when she was taken sick. It was shown by several witnesses, all friends or acquaintances of Buchanan, that even before this he had threatened to " dump the old woman," that he had prepared the minds of those around him for the announcement of her death, either by natural causes or by suicide, so that no surprise or suspicion might be felt; that he had called Carlyle Harris, whose case was just then before the public, a fool for not concealing the traces of the morphine he had administered ; that he had said it was an easy thing for a doctor familiar with drugs to get rid of his wife ; and that he had successively got all witnesses out of the way until he was left alone with the woman in their home. As to motive, it was shown that if the woman were dead he would avoid an unpleasant scandal, rid himself of a person whom he loathed, and come into possession of her property. It was further shown that after the funeral he abandoned himself to unseemly levity, and plunged into a round of dissipation, and that on May 16 he had remarried his divorced wife. When public suspicion had been aroused he had expressed a fear lest his other wife's body might be exhumed, had openly wished that he had cremated her, and had made preparations for flight to South America. Expert testimony further sought to establish the fact that if morphine and atrophine had been successively used the latter would neutralise the former in so far as external manifestations were concerned. This went to explain why the doctors called in at the death scene had failed to recognise from the symptoms the presence of morphine, which was detected by the autopsy. Buchanan was defended by Brook and O'Sullivan. At that time the latter was almost unknown. He sprang at a bound into celebrity. He brought to bear upon the defence all the powers of his mind, all his varied resources as a thoroughly equipped physician aud a trained lawyer, all his energy and dialectical and oratorical skill. He was a pathologist with pathologists, a chemist with chemists, a doctor with doctors, a druggist with druggists, a lawyer with lawyers. He browbeat, confounded, and bewildered the experts for the prosecution, he laughed at their tests, he exposed the fallibility of their science. He won over the jury. And then, in an evil moment for himself, Dr Buchanan, flushed with the victory of his legal allies, took the stand in his own behalf. He evidently remembered the saying current at the time that Carlyle Harris would have been saved if he had been put on the stand— that his failure to testify was taken by the jury as an admission of guilt. A mental wreck through dissipation and nervous exhaustion, Buchanan collapsed utterly at the first fire of cross-examination. He gasped and trembled, he contradicted himself, he wound himself in the meshes of the most obvious and impossible falsehoods. His forbidding and even repulsive appearance prejudiced the jury against him, and emphasised his utter defeat. Not all the brilliant efforts of his counsel could save him. "When the case went to the jury they returned a verdict of "Guilty of murder in the first degree." That was on April 28, 1893. Since that time all possible agencies have been brought to save him from his doom. All proved useless.