The servant swallowed the first pill. She sought only to reassure the sick man: if he shrank from the physic his wife offered, perhaps he might consent to take it once he had seen her do the same. William Dazley swallowed the remaining two. Soon after, the young woman was seized with violent sickness—so grave that she was compelled to leave her service. Her mistress reproached her for having taken what was never intended for her.
This circumstance, reported in the newspapers of March 1843 among the depositions taken at Wrestlingworth, offers a far more terrible entrance into the case than the portraits of a monstrous widow with which it has since been embellished. The maidservant had overheard no secret through a partition wall. She had simply wished to help. Her trust had overcome the last resistance of the master she thought she was tending; by the time she recounted the scene, William had been dead for several months.
The Ministration of the Sickroom
Sarah Dazley lived with her second husband in this Bedfordshire village, where illness unfolded before familiar witnesses: kinfolk, servants, neighbours summoned to the bedside, and the apothecary who came and went. None of this offered any guarantee that the ministrations were innocent. In a chamber where several hands brought food or physic, one might observe every separate movement without discerning what their accumulation would bring about.
Another witness declared she had seen Sarah substitute pills she carried upon her person for those delivered by the apothecary. Mr. Sandhill, the surgeon who attended William, had by no means considered his condition desperate. He was astonished to learn of his death and desired to examine the body. Sarah objected; so too did the dead man’s mother. It would be convenient to dwell solely upon the wife’s refusal, lending it in retrospect the sharp clarity of an admission. The mother’s resistance serves to remind us that an identical refusal could unite persons to whom no common purpose could be imputed.
William was laid in the earth in the autumn of 1842. The grave appeared to enclose with his remains all the uncertainties of his final illness. There remained words exchanged in anger, memories of nostrums administered, and the servant girl’s strange seizure; yet these elements did not yet form, in the eyes of the authorities, the coherent narrative that the prosecution would later construct. A dead man leaves behind scattered recollections. At times, an event utterly foreign to his dying hour is required to compel the living to piece them together.
In this instance, that event was a wedding.
The Forbidden Banns
Sarah was betrothed to a man named Waldock. The banns had already been published twice when an informant warned the prospective bridegroom of the deaths that had occurred about his intended bride. The account forwarded to the Lord Mayor of London in March relates that he went straightway to the curate. The printed versions vary in their particulars, yet they agree upon this essential point: the prospect of a third marriage revived suspicions, and the ceremony was stayed.
Accusations were already outstripping what was actually known. A first husband and a child had died before William; common rumour now gathered them under a single explanation. Waldock had no need to conduct a formal inquest to abandon his nuptials. The law, however, required something more substantial than a neighbour’s warning. The authorities resolved to exhume the second husband and subject his remains to chemical analysis.
Sarah quit Wrestlingworth. Inspector Blunden tracked her to London and apprehended her there. In that pursuit, the change of scene did not efface the village: the questions, the names, and the dead followed her to the capital. She was brought before the Mansion House, where orders were made for her removal to face the local inquiry. The officer who had taken her detailed the circumstances of the broken marriage and the proceedings afoot.
A letter had just arrived. It announced the detection of arsenic in the disinterred remains of William. This dispatch lent sudden, material weight to the accusation. It did not, of itself, establish who had administered the poison; but it rendered it impossible henceforth to treat the death as an ordinary sickness whose fatal issue the physician had merely failed to foresee.
What the Witnesses Had Seen
The inquiry gathered two species of proof that had to be reconciled. On the one hand, the chemical examination of the body pointed to the lethal substance. On the other, the witnesses described the daily life of the household, the substituted pills, and the servant girl taken ill after seeking to set an example. The first answered the question of how death had occurred; the second was to fasten the deed upon a specific person and a deliberate will.
The coroner’s jury concluded that Sarah had wilfuly administered arsenic to her husband, and she was committed for trial on the capital charge. The previous deaths were likewise made the subject of inquiry; yet the matter to be determined in court was not coextensive with the sweeping tale the newspapers were beginning to print. A supposed series of crimes took a stronger hold upon the public imagination than a single felony; yet this narrative force could add no further judgment to that which a court of law was empowered to deliver.
At the Bedford Assizes, in July 1843, the trial occupied a single day, with Mr. Baron Alderson presiding. Evidence was given of a violent quarrel between the spouses prior to the illness, and of threats Sarah had reportedly uttered. Such words had to be weighed alongside the rest: hostile speech is not poison, yet the Crown sought therein the criminal intent that chemical reagents could never demonstrate.
The prisoner’s counsel did not leave this edifice unchallenged. Mr. O’Malley exposed the infirmities of the case with a vigour noted in the report of the English Chronicle. We have no warrant to invent for him a more elaborate argument than that preserved in the contemporary records. It suffices to record his presence in the narrative: the facts were contested, the depositions sifted, and the verdict was no mere foregone formality executed upon a prisoner already condemned by popular report.
The jury found Sarah guilty of the murder of William. Baron Alderson passed sentence of death. The charge concerning the child was not inquired into at this trial, as the contemporary report makes clear; we cannot, therefore, multiply convictions merely to match the dark notoriety that had already outrun her.
The Final Gathering
On the 5th of August, 1843, Sarah Dazley was hanged in front of Bedford Gaol. The press reports that she had to be supported on her way to the scaffold. A vast concourse of people witnessed the execution. Mention was made of a confession; yet the newspapers that announced it furnish no text by which its precise nature and extent may be judged. We must therefore leave to that final utterance the silence and distance that separate it from us.
Her body was buried within the precincts of the prison. The affair had begun within the walls of a cottage, traversed the highways to London, and drawn the curious before a gallows; it concluded behind a prison wall. Those who had come to watch dispersed, bearing with them a story to which they had at last seen the final act.
Yet at the beginning there remains the servant girl. The accounts consulted allow us no glimpse of her subsequent life after she quitted that roof. They preserve only the act by which she sought to persuade William to take his physic. In that brief impulse of kindness, the snare had been laid: she had offered her own body as surety for a medicine of whose true nature she knew nothing. It was through her that trust had been won; and it was through her testimony that this very trust became the evidence that condemned.