At Manchester, on the 6th of April 1843, Mary Hunter stood at the bar to answer an indictment whose ultimate issue hung upon a substance which no man had been able to discover. Her husband had expired five months earlier, carried off by a violent disorder which the prosecution ascribed to arsenic. The constabulary proved that Mary had purchased the drug; the medical gentlemen who opened the body described an internal inflammation wholly consistent with an irritant poison. Yet chemical analysis of the stomach and bowels had failed to reveal the slightest trace of it. This negative result extinguished neither the dark suspicions of the neighbourhood nor the grief of the family; it merely confronted the court with a narrower and vastly more difficult question: could the cause of death be held legally proven?
The narrative of Philip Henry Holland, a surgeon of the town, recounts the trial of Mary Hunter, aged twenty-nine years, before Baron Parke. The death of John Hunter had occurred in the closing days of November 1842. The indictment charged that he had languished from the 25th to the 28th of that month following the felonious administration of arsenic by his wife. Holland notes that the prisoner was likewise called upon to answer the coroner’s inquisition. A month after that preliminary inquiry, the radical journal The Northern Star, drawing upon an account from the Manchester Guardian, reported that the coroner’s jury had returned a verdict of wilful murder against her. A substantial concourse had cheered that finding and hooted the wretched woman as she was conveyed away. It now fell to the criminal court to reconsider the charge before another jury, in a forum where the Crown was bound to establish every necessary link of guilt.
Holland’s publication does not profess to be a verbatim transcript of the entire proceeding. The author explains that, having been consulted to aid in the preparation of the medical defence, he chose to give only an abstract of the general testimony, reserving a fuller treatment for those witnesses whose depositions bore directly upon the nature of the fatal illness. He interpolates his own glosses into the narrative and places upon the page what he believes the defence might have established, had it ever been called upon to speak. He wrote, therefore, in the dual capacity of contemporary chronicler and public champion of the acquittal. Such a perspective affords an intimate view of the courtroom, but requires the reader to distinguish the surgeon’s contentious advocacy from the actual words sworn to by the witnesses.
Opening for the Crown, Mr. Wilkins depicted a woman encumbered by secret debts, who lived in mortal dread that her husband might discover her improvidence. He asserted that she had procured arsenic under the idle pretext of destroying vermin; that she had recounted a sinister dream wherein John died suddenly; and that she had sent the children out of the cottage shortly before serving him his meal. According to this recital, Hunter took a portion of stirabout, complained instantly of a hot, burning taste, and fell into violent retching and agony. The prosecutor reproached Mary with having thrown away the vomited matter, burned the remaining meal, delayed sending for medical aid, and displayed an unnatural apathy. He further reminded the court that she had applied for a certificate to obtain her husband’s burial club money and had initially denied buying any poison whatsoever.
These circumstances lent a powerful dramatic colour to the accusation, yet they did not all carry the same weight nor derive from an untainted source. Certain details were inferences drawn by the advocate; others stemmed from depositions taken at the inquest or from recollections revived during the trial itself. Holland observes, for instance, that the allegation regarding the banishment of the children and the supposed absence of bugs had been advanced far more dogmatically in the opening speech than the evidence warranted; he notes that a young girl subsequently testified that Mary habitually sent the infants out whenever she cleaned the house. The jury was thus called upon to weigh not merely physical actions, but the conflicting motives which either party sought to attach to them.
The purchase of the arsenic was among the most clearly established links in the narrative. Alice Belshaw testified that, in the month of November, she had accompanied Mary to a druggist’s shop, where the shopkeeper refused the sale. The apprentice, Thomas Woolfenden, corroborated the application, which had been made openly under the plea of destroying domestic vermin. Richard Davies, another chemist, deposed that he had sold two ounces of the powder after Mary returned accompanied by Elizabeth Dunn to witness the sale. He stated that she had inquired whether the parcel contained enough to kill a person, to which he replied that such a quantity might poison a dozen men. Davies also stated that he had charged her to keep it carefully from the children. Dunn confirmed that she knew the packet contained arsenic, and added that Mary had told her on the road home that she had dropped and lost it.
When examined following her apprehension, Mary Hunter at first denied having bought any drug at all; she subsequently admitted having purchased it to kill vermin, repeating that she had lost it by the way. Such prevarication naturally deepened the cloud of suspicion. Yet it did nothing to resolve the supreme question of administration: the mineral was never found within the dwelling, and chemical reagents failed to detect it either in the morbid matters delivered to the analyst or in a portion of oatmeal recovered from the ash-pit. A neighbour, Sarah Street, described the care bestowed upon John during his agony; she testified that the wife had tasted the food, alerted the neighbours, carried out the discharges as he requested, and fetched a surgeon. Other witnesses imputed a darker design to these identical acts. The domestic scene remained unchanged; only the intention behind it was disputed.
The first medical practitioner summoned to the cottage, Thomas Willis, had seen Hunter on the evening of the 25th of November. He observed severe vomiting, purging, coldness of the extremities, and an almost imperceptible pulse, but concluded at the time that he was dealing with a sharp attack of English cholera. He frankly admitted that he had not suspected arsenic until several days later, upon hearing rumours of the purchase. John Harrison, the surgeon who subsequently attended the deceased, stated that he too had at first diagnosed common cholera. When the symptoms proved unyielding, he altered his opinion; at the post-mortem examination, he found extensive inflammation of the stomach and portions of the intestines. These morbid appearances he deemed compatible with the ingestion of an irritant, and he ultimately attributed death to arsenic, notwithstanding that no chemical trace could be found.
Harrison’s cross-examination occupied several hours. The learned judge pressed him to state clearly the distinction between his anatomical observations and the speculative conclusion he deduced from them. The witness admitted that many of the symptoms occurred equally in natural diseases, that the absence of certain signs commonly associated with arsenical poisoning rendered a positive diagnosis difficult, and that upon his first visit he had entertained no thought of foul play. Thomas Dyson, who had assisted at the dissection, considered the morbid changes characteristic of poison, suggesting that the mineral might have been expelled by vomiting or absorbed into the tissues. He was forced to concede, however, that his detailed report had been drawn up a full week after the autopsy, and that the flesh of the deceased had undergone no chemical examination.
Called to the witness-box, the chemist John Davies returned an answer which, if it did not extinguish all uncertainty, rendered it singularly tangible. He had analysed, both separately and conjointly, the contents of the stomach and the intestines; he had likewise subjected to test the porridge scraped from the ash-pit and a white powder found upon the premises. He declared that he had found neither arsenic nor any other poisonous substance. He believed that even an infinitesimal quantity could have been detected by his processes, notably by Marsh’s apparatus. The prosecution confronted him with the theory that the poison had dissolved and been entirely eliminated during three days of unrelenting vomiting, purging, and the administration of medicines. Davies allowed that such an elimination was physiologically possible, though he could not consider it probable. The judicial inquiry was no longer confined to the mere appearance of the tissues: it was now incumbent upon the Crown to explain why modern science could detect nothing.
The remaining medical testimony failed to dispel the dilemma. John Carson considered that the symptoms and pathological changes might well indicate the presence of an irritant, but admitted that he had never met with a recorded case where death by arsenic had supervened so rapidly without some detectable trace remaining in the body. Thomas Blackburn thought the complete disappearance of the poison possible, but deemed the contrary far more probable. Holland naturally construed these hesitations in the light most favourable to the prisoner; yet his gloss remains that of a polemical pamphleteer, not a judicial finding. Similarly, his remarks on natural gastritis and his private experiments on the solubility of arsenic belong to the medical disquisition he published after the event, and form no part of the record of the court.
On the following day, upon the conclusion of the Crown’s evidence, the judge interposed, inquiring of the gentlemen of the jury whether they thought it necessary that the inquiry should proceed further. They replied that they had heard quite enough. Under the direction of Baron Parke, a verdict of Not Guilty was recorded, and Mary Hunter was discharged. Holland expressly notes that the defence was never called upon to present its witnesses nor to deliver an address: the trial terminated abruptly upon the failure of the prosecution. The acquittal therefore implies no judicial confirmation of the ingenious medical hypotheses set forth in the pamphlet, any more than the previous finding of the inquest had possessed the authority of legal proof.
In the pages that follow, Holland vigorously defends the woman whom the law had set free, exposing the grave deficiencies of the initial inquest. His treatise is by no means impartial; its singular merit lies in dragging to light those profound contradictions which the smooth narrative of the prosecution had glossed over: the abrupt transition of the doctors from cholera to poison, the discrepancies in their post-mortem notes, the vanished stirabout, the purchased powder that could nowhere be found, and the negative result of the chemical tests. This trial leaves us with no substitute certainty. It exhibits rather how a capital charge, constructed upon equivocal domestic acts and divided medical opinions, collapsed the moment the bench perceived that the Crown’s own proof was inadequate. The crowd had cheered the coroner’s verdict; the criminal jury, bound by the strict laws of evidence, pronounced her acquittal.