On the 9th of July, 1842, at Rathmines, Ellen Byrne called her son Luke into the closed bedchamber where her husband had remained shut away for several days. Augustine Byrne lay face down upon the bed. Luke summoned his brother Joseph, who turned the body over; the dead man’s ears had blackened. Luke recalled that Ellen cried out, “Oh no, no!” Joseph remembered her urging him to send for a physician. The first practitioner summoned, Arthur Harvey, found the corpse swollen, the face blackened, the tongue protruding from the mouth, and fluid tinged with blood at the lips and nostrils. An apothecary, he estimated that Augustine had been dead for four or five days, though he conceded that his brief examination did not permit him to determine the cause of death.
This uncertainty would govern the entire case. The bedchamber door had parted the Byrnes from the remainder of the house, but it had not closed off their history. During the week in which the family still believed the couple had merely retired together, the boys knocked upon the door, the servants brought bottles or a dish, and the neighbours occasionally caught the sound of voices. No one save Ellen could say with any certainty what had transpired within. Even she failed to provide a steadfast chronology.
Augustine had married Ellen Wall in 1833. She was a widow who had borne four children by her first marriage; three sons resided with the couple. Their witnesses attested that the spouses generally lived on good terms, outside of their bouts of drinking. Yet those bouts transformed the household. On several occasions, Augustine and Ellen had shut themselves away together for days on end, sometimes in the upstairs room, sometimes in Augustine’s own chamber. Meals grew scarce; spirits, however, were passed in through the ajar door. The family had learned not to take immediate alarm.
On the 30th of June, Augustine returned late in the evening from the Bellewstown races. His stepson Joseph found him eating duck and believed him in liquor. Accounts did not entirely agree as to his condition or the days that followed. Luke, the younger brother, saw him on Sunday, the 3rd of July, lying in bed, seemingly asleep; he stayed barely a minute. That evening, he heard a single low growl or moan, which he recognised as his stepfather’s voice, and then nothing more. Joseph, peering in from the doorway, saw him upon his back. He believed Augustine to be alive, though he did not verify his breathing.
That same Sunday, the boys sought to obtain the keys to the pantry. Ellen opened the door, protested that she did not have them, and resisted when they made to enter the chamber. She was so intoxicated that she fell. The youngest, Valentine, fetched the keys from the mantelpiece. Joseph then heard the voices of his mother and Augustine: she appeared to be scolding him, and he to reply with an irritated grunt. Their neighbour Paul Barry likewise heard words exchanged in the room. He could not make out the phrases, nor did he hear any blows. Quarrels, he observed, were frequent.
Thereafter, the days blurred. The family dined below; sometimes there came a knock at the bedchamber, sometimes someone stepped inside for an instant. One day, Valentine took a dirty cup and a beer jug through the half-opened door; he could not see the interior. His mother bid him bring back more beer. He could no longer say what day it was, nor whether he had subsequently returned with the jug filled. His testimony, at ten years of age, remained hesitant.
The servant Christopher Talt furnished the most detailed narrative, yet he too grew confused over dates and deliveries. On the Tuesday, he believed he recognised Augustine calling for a pint of whiskey. A man’s arm, bared to the elbow, slipped through the opening with money; when Talt returned, the voice rebuked him for his delay. He did not see the face, and subsequently conceded that the voice was not the one he was accustomed to hear. Over the following days, Ellen received rum, a boiled fowl, strawberries, and other provisions. Talt still could not see into the room: she opened it only wide enough to pass the tray, placing herself against the door.
After Tuesday, Talt did not hear Augustine’s voice again. On the Friday, Ellen examined some fish offered by a hawker; the following morning, she asked for two cups of tea, two slices of buttered bread, and a bottle of porter. Later, Talt saw her ascend toward the chamber and shut the door behind her. He then caught a scent he had not remarked before. Barry, the neighbour, had perceived an offensive odour the previous evening in his own room, behind the party wall; he had suspected a dead animal. He could not affirm that it was the selfsame smell.
The accounts contradicted one another as well regarding the final hours. Luke remembered that Ellen had called him to lift Augustine, who lay face down on the bed; Joseph said he found him upon his side. Both recalled his darkened ears and their mother’s initial refusal to believe him dead. Joseph also attributed to her the call for a medical man. Ellen was later said to have told Barry that her husband had died the previous Saturday, and subsequently told the constable that she had heard a gurgling noise and summoned her sons. To the coroner, she reportedly assigned his death to Friday, the 8th of July. Yet the coroner’s inquest also recorded that she had slept in her husband’s bed on the Thursday and Friday. Whether it was a misheard date, a lapse of memory, or an untruth, the testimony did not permit the matter to be resolved.
The medical witnesses failed to lift the veil. Harvey deemed the body to have been dead four or five days, but had conducted no post-mortem examination. Surgeon James Fox described advanced putrefaction and declined to date the death with any certainty. The protrusion of an eye and the tongue might suggest strangulation; Fox, however, considered that the gases of decomposition could account for the eye, and that the tongue, being flaccid rather than swollen, was no conclusive sign. Surgeon Andrew Ellis inclined toward a death following a convulsive struggle, deeming violence probable. Yet he admitted that an epileptic fit could produce similar appearances, and that he could not determine what had provoked such a struggle.
The defence called other medical men. Dr Kirby, who had not viewed the body, held that the appearances might well correspond to an epileptic seizure, and that decomposition might have altered the eyes, the tongue, and the blood. He made no claim to prove a natural death. Mr Baron Pennefather, in his charge, summarised the divergence without allowing medical opinion to usurp the facts: the experts might err; their views alone were insufficient. It was for the jury to determine whether Augustine had died of violence, and whether Ellen had caused it.
The Crown had set forth twelve possible manners in which the man might have been slain: strangulation by the hands or with a cloth, suffocation beneath linen, a pillow, or a blanket, beating, or smothering against the bed. These variations were not twelve pieces of proof; they were merely the legal forms the indictment might assume, whereas no external marks of violence had been discovered upon the corpse. The prosecution dwelt upon the silence of the chamber, the door kept shut, the late-arising odour, and Ellen’s shifting explanations. The defence replied that the couple’s habits, their drunkenness, and the progress of putrefaction rendered such indications entirely equivocal.
In his final summing-up, the judge framed the question otherwise. The jury could not convict upon a high probability. It had to be established beyond reasonable doubt that the death proceeded from violence, and that Ellen’s hand had inflicted it. Had a quarrel degenerated into an affray, followed by concealment? Or had husband and wife remained shut away in such a state of intoxication that Ellen had not perceived that Augustine was dead? The judge laid out these possibilities, while reiterating that he did not decide in the jurors’ stead.
They retired at a quarter to four. Half an hour later, they returned to the court and pronounced Ellen Byrne not guilty. The question was not whether the bedchamber had kept its secret for several days: the witnesses agreed upon the silence, the odour, and the late discovery of the body. It was necessary to link those traces to a violent death and to a specific hand. In Dublin, in August 1842, the jury held that the Crown had not bridged that divide.