FAMOUS POISONING CASE RECALLED.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LVIII, Issue 8944, 19 December 1907, Page 3

FAMOUS POISONING CASE RECALLED.

-♦ — SWEETS IMPREGNATED WITH { STRYCHNINE. _k "Tjrlfe death at. Broadmoor Asylum of Onristiaua Edmunds, recalls oue of the most notorious criminal trials of the last century. It is more thau thirty-five years siuce Edmunds was tried at the Old Bailey, and almost everybody connected with the trial has pre-deceased her. The Judge, Baron Martin; Sergeaut Ballaufciue, oue of the prosecuting couusol; Sergeaut Parry, one of the couusel who defended; and Sir William Gull, who was iusfcrumeutal, after seutouce of deatli had been passed, iv saving the condemned womau from tho gallows—all have passed away. Edmuuds was sentenced for the murder of a boy named Sidney Albert Barker, at Brighton, and the evidence at the trial revealed a curiously cuuning and subtle attempt at wholesale poisoning,conceived with the object of diverting attention from prisoner herself. Christiana Edmuuds had beeu attended in 1870 by a Brighton medical mau, with whom she appeared to be on very friendly terms. J_a Dnnnrnhflr of that year Edmunds Wm visiting at tho doctor's, and she gaJve 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 Edmuuds With having attempted to poison his wife. She visited the doctor no more. The presumption was that out of jealousy, aud with the view of facilitating her own attachment, she had tried to kill the doctor's wife. Then Edmunds, finding herself cut off from association with the doctor and his wife, planned a diabolical course of action to make it appear that the poisoned sweet-meat had come from a well-known sweetshop in West-street. Brighton. She induced children to go to that shop to purchase chocolate • creams. These she impregnated with strychnine aud 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 memJ ber of the family, Siduey Albert Barker, was immediately poisoned. JMJdmunds distributed other poisoned to children in the street, aud a number were poisoned, but no others died. At the inquest ou Barker, she eveu volunteered evideuce, and told a cunning story of haviug 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 arresred in 1871, aud 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 au epileptic idiot in Earlswood Asylum. The result w T as 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 wheu death released her the other clay she was in her seventy-eighth year. Whatever might have been her mental state at the time when the crime was committed, she

showed unmistakeable signs of insau-

, ity at Broadmoor. She was an exceedingly vain womau, and it is reported her that when she detected the first hairs she secured 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 fine 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.