The first child was laid in the earth after a coroner’s jury concluded he had died of natural causes. When poison was at last sought, the body had already rested in the grave for four weeks. In the medical report he published nine years later, Dr. Alfred S. Taylor placed this delay at the very heart of the affair: how was one to establish that a boy who perished at Christmas had ingested arsenic, and who had administered it, when the entire household had shared the same repast, yet a single witness claimed to have seen a white powder fall upon his plate?
In 1845, at the Berkshire Assizes, Thomas Jennings stood indicted for the murder of his son Eleazar, aged three years and eight months, by the administration of arsenic on the preceding twenty-third of December. Taylor, who had examined the viscera and given evidence at the trial, cautioned at the outset that his account was drawn partly from the brief of the prosecution and partly from his own notes taken in court. It is thus neither an unabridged transcript nor a dispassionate review. Yet his narrative preserves the precise stages whereby a demise initially set down among natural casualties became the subject of a capital trial.
The December Repast
The Jennings family inhabited a humble cottage with four young children. The mother chanced to be absent when, on the Monday before Christmas, Thomas, his niece Maria Carter, and the children sat down to their dinner of bacon and potatoes. According to Maria’s testimony, all took salt from the salt-cellar save Eleazar. She recounted having seen her uncle step into the pantry, return with a pinch of white powder between his thumb and forefinger, and place it upon the side of the boy’s plate as though it were salt. The printed report sets forth this deposition as the sole direct evidence that Jennings had administered the poison.
The consequence was not immediate. Half an hour after dinner, the child complained of pain in his bowels. On the morrow, he fell violently ill; by Christmas Wednesday, he was seized with vomiting, and he expired towards the middle of the day. His illness had endured some forty-eight hours. At the final hour, Thomas fetched a surgeon at the entreaty of his wife, but medical aid arrived only after death had supervened. Nothing in that initial examination gave cause to suspect poison. At the inquest held on the twenty-seventh of December, the body was not inspected; the jury returned a verdict of natural death, and the child was buried.
This initial finding weighed heavily upon all that followed. It proceeded from no negative chemical test: no inspection had been made, because no one yet harboured a suspicion of arsenic. The distinction is of the utmost importance. The first inquest verdict merely affirmed what the evidence then adduced allowed men to conclude; it did not resolve the question that chemical analysis would later raise.
About a fortnight after Eleazar’s death, another of Jennings’s children fell sick and died rather suddenly. On this occasion, the body was examined on the eleventh of January. The surgeons discovered acute inflammation of the stomach and intestines; an elementary analysis detected no poison, and the jury once again returned a verdict of natural death. Nevertheless, Mr. Arthur Lamb, the surgeon who had assisted in the post-mortem inspection, remained uneasy. He transmitted to Taylor a phial containing a portion of the liquid drawn from the stomach. Laboratory analysis revealed therein the presence of arsenic, in small quantity.
The second death had thus reversed the import of the first. This fresh discovery did not yet constitute an indictment against Thomas; it established, in Taylor’s view, that another child of the household had likewise been exposed to poison. Henceforth, it was presumed that Eleazar might have perished from the very same cause. The report does not identify this second child by name, nor does it recount any separate trial regarding that death. These boundaries must be observed: the analysis sounded an alarm and revived official inquiry, but the capital charge tried against Jennings concerned Eleazar alone.
Four Weeks Beneath the Earth
The coroner issued an order for the exhumation of the first child. On the twenty-fourth of January, eight-and-twenty days after the burial, the body was disinterred in the presence of the parish constable of Thatcham. Thomas Jennings was present and identified his son. Taylor records that, upon an observation being made regarding the suspicion that the children had been poisoned, Jennings answered that there was no more poison in them than in himself. These words were entered into the record; they do not of themselves explain what Jennings knew, nor what he intended to convey.
Mr. Lamb removed the stomach and intestines entire, secured them with ligatures to prevent the escape of their contents, and conveyed them to London. Taylor examined them at Guy’s Hospital on the following day. The body, he observed, had undergone little putrefaction; the viscera were distended with gas and exhibited patches of vivid redness. Within the stomach, he found a reddish liquid, fragments of fat, currants, and grape-skins. A mustard-yellow patch, mingled with the fruit and situated upon an ulcerated mucous membrane, particularly arrested his attention.
The chemical conclusions did not rest upon this coloration alone. Taylor describes several processes applied to both the liquid and solid matters, followed by an analysis of the liver. In the liquid, the reactions were faint, indicating mere traces. The yellow patch, by contrast, contained in his judgment arsenic converted into a sulphuret in the course of decomposition. He computed the quantity present in the stomach at five or six grains; the deposits detected in the liver indicated that the poison had been absorbed into the system. He concluded that the arsenic had been taken during the child’s lifetime and had caused his death.
This conclusion belongs to Taylor and the practitioners he cites; it is not a modern scientific finding that a reader might reconstruct solely from the printed report. The interval of time, the condition of the tissues, and the laboratory procedures formed the very crux of the debate. The author acknowledges that post-mortem appearances are difficult to interpret four weeks after death; he counters that arsenic acts as an antiseptic, preserving the tissues, and that a coloured drawing of the stomach had been executed at the time of the dissection. He also adduces the chemical reactions obtained upon copper deposits, and the characteristic octahedral crystals identified as arsenious acid.
It was never a matter of relying upon an isolated sign. The yellow matter, the results of distinct tests, the state of the mucous membrane, and the presence of arsenic in the liver formed, for Taylor, a convergent chain of proof. He estimated that five or six grains had resided in the stomach, observing that a fatal dose for an infant might be far smaller. He further ventured the conjecture that the poison had been mingled with Christmas pudding, since suet, currants, and raisins were found in contact with it. This latter deduction was the expert’s own hypothesis, not the evidence of any guest claiming to have seen such a dish served.
The Powder and the Word
The chemical analysis established, in Taylor’s eyes, the cause of death; the trial had yet to determine how the arsenic had reached the plate. The prosecution relied chiefly upon Maria Carter. Shortly before Christmas, she had likewise seen Jennings deliver to a neighbour a white powder drawn from a bottle, dislodging it with a stick which he subsequently cast into the fire. She had not observed whence the bottle was taken. Following the children’s deaths, two phials containing a white powder were produced at the trial; Carter affirmed that one of them resembled the vessel from which she had seen the powder extracted.
Jennings had at first denied having possessed arsenic for two years past. After its detection in the bodies, he admitted having kept some for the destruction of vermin, stating that he had parted with it. In his voluntary statement, he acknowledged that the phial had been kept upon a shelf in the pantry, hard by the room where the family took their meals. Witnesses confirmed that arsenic was there at the time Eleazar fell sick. The two bottles analysed during the trial contained, according to Taylor, pure white arsenic; together, they held not less than five ounces. Another brown phial contained nux vomica, which Jennings employed to poison crows.
The defence contested both the cause of death and the authorship of the crime. Counsel contended that the symptoms might have arisen from an intestinal worm discovered in the rectum, that Jennings had no motive to slay his offspring, and that Maria Carter might herself have administered the arsenic. Taylor depicts this line of argument as an attempt to divert suspicion upon the niece; the printed account, however, does not provide the full speech of counsel nor the complete answers of each witness under cross-examination. One must therefore guard against mistaking the medical witness’s abridgment for an exhaustive transcript of the proceedings.
One circumstance remained of paramount importance: Maria claimed to have seen the powder laid upon the plate, yet she had not witnessed the preparation of the entire meal, the children’s mother being absent. The report illustrates the considerable weight of this testimony, but also its singular limitations. Chemical tests could demonstrate that Eleazar had ingested arsenic; they could not, of their own power, point to the hand that had placed it in his food.
The Outcome
The jury declared themselves satisfied with the evidence, according to Taylor’s conclusion, and Thomas Jennings was found guilty; the narrative adds that he was subsequently executed, without recording the date of the sentence’s execution. Between the funeral and this verdict, the nature of the inquiry had undergone an absolute transformation: the second child, upon whose body an inquest had likewise returned a verdict of natural death, had provoked an analysis revealing the poison; this, in turn, had caused the earth around Eleazar to be reopened. Exhumation had transmuted buried flesh into chemical testimony.
The case can be reduced neither to the artless speech of a young niece nor to the efficacy of a chemical reagent. Maria Carter furnished the sole direct account of the administration; the phials, Jennings’s contradictory assertions, and Taylor’s analyses supplied the remaining links. The first inquest had not detected the poison because it had not sought it out. The second reading of the corpse rendered the trial possible, yet it was the jury of his peers that judged the indictment against the father. Taylor writes as a medical jurist, with the composure of one whose testimony has just prevailed; his chronicle documents the scientific argument no less than the forensic path by which he sought to convince. What had lain beneath the earth for four weeks did not speak unaided: it had to be opened, tested, and weighed against the spoken words of the household.