I. The Return to Alfred Street
In Bedford Square, private houses admitted strangers much like the chambers of an inn, and intimacy often overstepped the boundaries a landlord fancied he maintained. Mrs. Maria Soames, a widow, kept two lodging houses in the vicinity of Alfred Street. Catherine Wilson came to lodge with her toward the close of 1855, accompanied by a young man named James Dixon, whom she introduced as her brother. An intimacy grew between the two women; the elder daughter later recalled that her mother frequently repaired to the newcomer’s room.
On Wednesday, October 15, 1856, Mrs. Soames walked to Holloway to visit her half-brother, Samuel Barnes. She asked him for ten pounds; he gave her nine. This sum was initially described as a loan, though Barnes later explained at the trial that it was in all likelihood an instalment from their father’s estate, disbursed as her necessities arose. For two years, the widow had received this inheritance in periodic payments; the money handed over that Wednesday merely prolonged an old family arrangement.
Barnes saw her in good health. Ann Maria Naacke saw her again between four and five o’clock, and subsequently took tea with her and Sarah. Shortly thereafter, Catherine Wilson came down into the kitchen and requested the mother to step up to her room to speak with her. Sarah confirmed the invitation; after that brief parting, the daughters had no recollection of seeing their mother again that evening.
In the morning, Mrs. Soames rose only to tell the young women that she was suffering from a bilious attack, and thereupon returned to bed. Before long, severe vomiting and pain set in. The daughters were familiar with occasional indispositions in their mother, but these, they said, usually passed within a day; on this occasion, her condition grew steadily worse. Catherine Wilson, lodging in the house, went to and fro at the sick woman’s bedside.
II. The Physic Kept Under Lock
Dr. Whidborne was summoned on Friday, October 17. He found Mrs. Soames racked by vomiting and purging, attended by acute pain and restlessness. He thought at first of an ordinary bowel disorder, perhaps English cholera, and prescribed a draught of aromatic confection combined with Battley’s sedative solution. He preserved no specific memorandum of his prescription. In later years, he acknowledged that such a remedy ought to have quieted a common complaint, yet he never claimed to have detected poison by an inspection of the body.
What struck the witnesses most forcibly was the manner in which the vials were kept. Ann Maria testified that Wilson declared the physician had instructed her how to administer the medicine, and that she alone would dispense it. After administering the doses, the lodger carried the phial back to her room and turned the key upon it. Emma Rowe, another inmate of the house, remembered two bottles standing upon a mantelpiece; Wilson, she alleged, informed her that the preparation was of a peculiar nature and had to be given by her own hand. Sarah saw the lodger bring a draught which she represented as brandy and egg; she had not witnessed its preparation.
The mother continued to vomit, complaining incessantly of thirst and burning pain. The medical attendant did not deem her beyond recovery; he was astonished at the suddenness of the end. In the early hours of Saturday, October 18, between three and four in the morning, she expired. The primary examination of the remains brought to light neither a determinate toxic agent nor any decisive lesion. The doctor explained that he had then attributed the demise to inflammation of the bowels, being unable to assign a more positive cause.
The death was attended by declarations that assumed, six years later, a singular importance at the trial. Emma Rowe related that after the decease, Wilson had confided to her that Mrs. Soames had swallowed poison in brandy, driven to despair by a man who had borrowed her money and then deceived her. Rowe also reported having been told of the arrival of a letter. She had kept this tale from the coroner’s inquest; she stated that she had held her tongue for fear of being called as a witness, and only disclosed it to the magistrates when Wilson was already lodged in Newgate under another charge.
Eliza Matthews recounted a similar, though not identical, narrative: a secret marriage, a suitor who had betrayed the widow, sundry borrowings, and a fatal draught. Both women reported confidences uttered after the death; their delays, their discrepancies, and their initial silence at the inquest were vigorously assailed by the defence.
III. Six Years Removed
No immediate arrest followed the death of Mrs. Soames. Her half-brother had procured an inquest because her end appeared to him unaccountably sudden, but the surgeon had not affirmed that a crime had been committed. Rumours circulated in later days regarding other invalids whom Wilson had attended and who had swiftly perished; some among them were sufferers from gout. The court declined to permit these other deaths to become trials within the trial: the indictment concerned Maria Soames alone.
The exhumations raised a medical question rather than supplying an easy answer. Dr. Whidborne stated that portions of the viscera were collected and transmitted to Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor. The latter explained that after the lapse of years, in an advanced state of decomposition, and following violent vomiting and purging, he could not expect to detect colchicum in the remains. He found none.
The medical authorities thus offered two competing readings. Whidborne had initially treated a digestive disturbance and believed in a natural cause; re-examined years later, he conceded that a vegetable irritant might produce identical symptoms, especially under repeated administrations. Taylor considered that the gradual progression of the illness sorted ill with a mere bilious seizure, and that poison might easily be mingled with a drink or a draught without exciting suspicion. Yet neither chemist nor surgeon had isolated any substance within the body. The prosecution could only weave together the clinical symptoms, the conduct ascribed to Wilson, and her own contradictory utterances; it possessed no positive chemical proof.
IV. The Old Bailey
The official proceedings are enrolled under the session commencing September 22, 1862, opening upon the indictment for the wilful murder of Maria Soames. Montagu Williams, who had already defended Wilson in a separate trial concerning Sarah Carnell, records in his memoirs that the Soames trial took place on Thursday, September 25, before Mr. Justice Byles. The two causes must be kept distinct: the acquittal in the Carnell indictment was no adjudication upon the death of Mrs. Soames; Wilson was apprehended as she left the dock, only to be tried upon this fresh accusation.
The elder daughter, the brother, Sarah, sundry lodgers, the physicians, and past correspondents were examined. A letter alleged to have been penned by Wilson was debated upon grounds of handwriting resemblance, which the witnesses identified with varying degrees of certainty. Another letter spoke of a gentleman, borrowed moneys, and an assignation. It agreed with the tale of suicide which Wilson had retailed to several acquaintances, yet that tale issued solely from her lips, not from those of the deceased. Money likewise occupied the court: the nine pounds disbursed by Barnes, the ten pounds Wilson claimed were owing from the mother, and a promissory note which the daughter acknowledged to be in her mother’s hand. Ann Maria had ultimately discharged that note; yet that payment alone could not establish how the paper had been obtained.
The defence did not deny that Wilson’s statements were open to suspicion; it contended that they fell far short of proving the actual administration of poison. Counsel urged that no noxious matter had been discovered, that the confidences were stale and belated, and that the medical gentlemen were at variance regarding their recollection of the original diagnosis. The Crown, by contrast, marshalled the exclusive attendance assumed by the lodger, the fatal decline following successive doses, her familiarity with colchicum, her shifting explanations, and the pecuniary motives.
Mr. Justice Byles delivered a stern charge to the jury, observing that if such deeds could be done with impunity, no person could sit down to a meal in safety. The judicial record preserves the outcome: the jury found Catherine Wilson guilty of murder; the judge pronounced sentence of death. The calendar notes that another indictment for murder remained against her, but that entry does not convert the other deaths mentioned at the bar into separate convictions.
V. What the Verdict Leaves Unsolved
In his reminiscences, Williams relates that Mr. Justice Byles sent for him after the trial and remarked that he had defended his client ably, but that the facts were too strong; in his judgment, the judge added, the advocate had just defended the greatest criminal that ever lived. Such are the words of a barrister recalling a private conversation nearly thirty years after the event; they can substitute neither for sworn depositions nor for the verdict itself.
Catherine Wilson was executed at Newgate on October 20, 1862, according to contemporary accounts reprinted in the Southland Times. The press reported that she maintained her innocence to the scaffold, while reiterating the common rumour of a succession of crimes that had never been brought to judgment. One must resist such uncritical generalisations: the capital sentence attached solely to Maria Soames; the official calendar records a second indictment for murder, not a series of convictions.
Thus the tragedy of Bedford Square resolves itself neither into an invisible drug nor into the legend of an all-knowing poisoner. A woman dies following an acute seizure; the initial attendants diagnose natural causes; later testimony casts the scene in an entirely new light. The trial weighed recollections, letters, petty sums, and the narrow limits of a belated analysis. The jury resolved the doubt; the law executed its penalty; yet the test-tube never yielded that absolute certainty which retrospective narrative so readily ascribes to poison. The archives retain the verdict, and with it, those silences which no verdict can dispel.