At Slough, a man took his leave of Sarah Hart’s cottage while she lay in her death throes upon the floor. He made for the railway station, altered his course by way of an omnibus diversion, and boarded the London train. A witness warned the station-master after his departure; the electric telegraph outran the traveler upon the wires. When John Tawell stepped down in London, a police officer was already waiting for him. Sarah, for her part, would never speak again. The trial would be tasked with reconstructing what had transpired within that room, and with determining how far the circumstantial evidence might lead.
The report by David Skae, published in 1845 in the Northern Journal of Medicine, begins by retracing Sarah’s secluded life. She had formerly been in service to Tawell, a druggist and dealer in chemical preparations. Following the death of his first wife, Sarah had become pregnant by him, quitted his household, and brought two children into the world. Tawell continued to visit her and to contribute toward their maintenance, providing approximately one pound per week. Sarah resided at Bath Place, near Slough; her own parents had not known where she lived for several years.
Tawell had since remarried. He concealed his connection with Sarah from his new wife and sought admission into the Society of Friends, or Quakers. According to Skae, he had prevailed upon Sarah to hold herself aloof from the world, and she had resigned herself to living in isolation. This liaison explains the discreet calls and the money handed over in secret; the report affords no glimpse of the letters that passed between them, nor of Sarah’s own view of this arrangement.
An earlier visit, on September 30, had left behind a disquieting memory. Tawell had called upon Sarah and asked a woman lodging with her to fetch some porter. After he took his departure, Sarah fell violently ill, dizzy and unable to keep her feet. She vomited for a great part of the night, then recovered. Her companion and the children drank what remained of the bottle without suffering the slightest indisposition. The judicial summary would revisit this episode as a possible antecedent; yet nothing in that scene alone could establish what the liquor had contained.
On January 1, 1845, Tawell quitted London, leaving his greatcoat behind at the Jerusalem Coffeehouse. He informed the waiter that he was going to dine in the West End and would return toward nine o’clock. Instead, he took the four o’clock train for Slough and repaired to Bath Place. He sent Sarah to the neighboring public-house to purchase a bottle of porter. A witness caught sight of her returning with the liquor, in robust health and of good cheer.
Between six and seven o’clock that evening, a neighbor, Mrs. Ashley, heard a stifled groan issuing from Sarah’s dwelling. She laid down her work, took up her candle, and stepped out. Tawell was just passing through the gate of the little garden. Mrs. Ashley said to him that she feared her neighbor was taken ill; he returned no answer. She observed him in great agitation, unable to open the gate, the latch of which was caught by a button. She opened it for him, then went into Sarah’s house.
The young woman lay near the door, her limbs extended toward the hearth. Her dress was in disorder, one stocking down, one shoe off, her cap lying some distance away and her hair undone. Her eyes remained fixed; she stirred no more. Mrs. Ashley raised her slightly and perceived froth at her mouth. The surgeon summoned to the spot believed her dead; as he still fancied he felt a motion of the jaw, he attempted to bleed her. A little dark blood flowed, and then no further sign of life appeared.
Tawell did not run directly to the railway. He got into an omnibus bound for Eton and asked to be set down near Herschel House. From there, it appears he walked back toward the station. He boarded a train that departed at about a quarter to eight. The Reverend E. T. Champneys, a cousin of the surgeon who had just attended Sarah, noticed Tawell at the station and communicated his suspicions to the station-master once the train had departed. The intelligence was flashed to London by the electric telegraph. A police officer subsequently shadowed Tawell’s movements and arrested him on the following morning.
At first, Tawell denied having been at Slough at all. The day after his arrest, he offered the constable a different tale. Sarah, he said, had asked for some beer; she had allegedly poured the contents of a small vial into her glass, declared her intention to make away with herself, and thrown the remainder into the fire. He affirmed that he had left her upon the hearthrug, not believing that she was in earnest. When questioned concerning his letters, he answered that he kept no such correspondence. This explanation cast the responsibility of the vial entirely upon Sarah and presented her end as a deliberate act she had previously announced.
On the day following the demise, some eighteen hours after, the surgeons Champneys and Pickering inspected the corpse. They perceived an odor which they recognized as that of prussic acid. They discovered no lesion of the examined organs that might account for the death. The stomach contents were preserved and analyzed in London. The initial tests searched notably for oxalic acid and various metallic poisons, yielding nothing. Following distillation, further chemical reactions indicated the presence of prussic acid.
The medical debate proved far from straightforward. The analysts had not detected the scent of the poison in the stomach itself, where the porter may have masked it. The quantity measured in a fraction of the contents was extrapolated to the whole. Apple fragments were present, but no pips; experiments conducted on the pips of fifteen apples yielded only a trace, deemed negligible by Mr. Cooper. The defense pressed these uncertainties and maintained that the witnesses could not swear a lethal dose had been found. Skae’s report defends the conclusions of the physicians, while conceding that the quantitative analysis might have been more complete.
Another piece of evidence connected Tawell with the substance in question. On the morning of January 1, he had purchased a vial of prussic acid, alleging that he required it for his varicose veins. The shopman was acquainted with his name and confirmed the sale. Medical prescriptions were produced to show that the acid was occasionally ordered in those days for the pain associated with that complaint; the purchase, of itself, did not demonstrate the alleged criminal use. It took its place, however, in a train of circumstances: the visit, the bottle of porter, the hasty exit, the railway journey, and the contradictory statements made after the arrest.
The defense by Mr. Fitzroy Kelly relied upon scientific doubt and the absence of direct proof. He disputed the competence of medical men who had never personally witnessed a death occasioned by prussic acid, and suggested that apples, a cake, or other substances in the system might have accounted for the chemical traces. He argued further that Tawell had neither motive nor temptation to kill. Mr. Baron Parke reminded the jury that a case of poisoning did not demand ocular demonstration at every step; circumstantial evidence was sufficient to convince, provided the jurors were satisfied that poison had indeed been administered.
After deliberating for half an hour, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of guilty. Skae records that prior to his execution, Tawell confessed that he had committed the crime in the manner described at the trial.