When the Lord Chief Justice Campbell delivered the case into the hands of the jury, he charged them first to banish from their minds all they had heard prior to the opening of the trial. In the town of Rugeley, in Staffordshire, public opinion had already pronounced upon William Palmer. It was precisely to escape such prejudice that the venue had been removed from the county: Parliament had authorised its transfer to the Central Criminal Court in London, upon the application of the accused. The thirty-one-year-old surgeon, standing at the bar, pleaded not guilty to the murder of John Parsons Cook.
In opening the case, the Attorney-General set the prosecution against the background of the turf. Cook, a gentleman who had inherited an estate and abandoned the law, kept racehorses and betted; he and Palmer had become intimates. According to the Crown, Palmer was crushed beneath an accumulation of debt and looked to the winnings Cook had just secured at Shrewsbury. On the first morning, the doors were besieged by persons furnished with admission cards; the public curiosity aroused by the proceedings had suffered no abatement. Yet the Attorney-General warned the jury that fraud and forgery, even if established beyond question, would not suffice to prove murder.
Twelve days of testimony had laid before the press and the jurors a bewildering volume of detail. Campbell sought, in his turn, to trace its proper boundaries. The financial malversations laid to Palmer’s charge—bills of exchange, disputed signatures, and fraudulent dealings—were “most discreditable,” he conceded, but they could never stand as proof of murder. In England, said he, a man must be tried solely upon the evidence bearing upon the specific indictment. Moreover, the two sides had offered contrary explanations of the deceased’s dissolution: the Crown maintained that Cook had been poisoned with strychnine; the defence pleaded natural disease, denying that the symptoms accorded with the effects of that drug.
The jury had not witnessed Cook’s illness. For the most arresting scene of the tragedy, their judgment rested upon Lavinia Barnes, a chambermaid at the Talbot Arms in Rugeley. Thither Cook had returned from the races, and there he lay lodged. On the Saturday, Palmer sent Ann Rowley to fetch broth from the Albion inn, and subsequently had it carried to the sick man. Barnes took it upstairs, but Cook was seized with such sickness that he could not taste it. She carried the vessel back to the kitchen and informed Palmer. “He must have it,” the surgeon replied. Elizabeth Mills then carried it up again; on the morrow, according to Barnes, Mills was seized with violent vomiting.
Barnes did not profess to have seen who had prepared the broth, nor what it contained. In her deposition, Rowley detailed the remainder of its passage: she had warmed the broth in Palmer’s kitchen, whereupon he poured it into a cup and instructed her to say that Jeremiah Smith had sent it. Robinson, the innkeeper, had made it, yet Rowley knew not by whose order. Interrogated by the judge as to the reason for this direction, she replied that Palmer had assigned none. Her testimony established the passage of the dish and the words uttered; it did not establish the contents of the cup.
On the night Cook was seized with violent anguish, the bell of his bedchamber rang out. Barnes ran upstairs. She heard him cry, “Murder!”, declare that he was suffocating, beat the bed with his arms, and call upon Christ. She dispatched a messenger for Palmer. When the surgeon entered, Cook had somewhat composed himself; he said to him, “Oh, doctor, I shall die.” Palmer answered, “Do not be alarmed, my lad.” Barnes perceived Cook drink a dark mixture and cast it up again; she knew not who had handed it to him.
On the morrow, Cook appeared somewhat revived. Toward midnight, a fresh alarm was raised. Barnes remained upon the stairs and heard the cries; she saw Palmer enter and subsequently come forth. He said that Cook was far less ill than on the night before. Barnes thereupon entered the chamber, but withdrew before the sufferer expired. After his death, she found Palmer holding a coat, rummaging through its pockets, and looking beneath the bolster. When she exclaimed that Cook could not be dead, he answered, “He is. I knew he would be.” Such were the observations of Barnes, as preserved in the record of her testimony; it lay with the jury to determine what weight they should bear.
On Thursday, Palmer returned to the inn and asked for the key to the chamber, stating that he sought books, papers, and a paper-knife to return to the stationer. On the following day, he bade Barnes search for Cook’s betting-book. She and Mills searched the bed and the room, but not the drawers; they found it not. Barnes had seen Cook with this book upon previous occasions, though she could not recall having seen it in the chamber.
The prosecution did not rest solely upon the scene in the sick-room. Charles Newton, assistant to the surgeon Salt, swore that he had supplied Palmer with strychnine on the preceding Monday evening. He had not disclosed this at the coroner’s inquest; the circumstance came to light only subsequently, whilst he was on his way to London. Lord Campbell dwelt upon this omission, leaving the assessment of the witness’s credibility to the jury. Charles Joseph Roberts, an apprentice to Hawkins the druggist, related another visit: Palmer had first asked him for prussic acid, and then for six grains of strychnine and a liquid preparation of opium. He paid for the drugs and carried them away. Palmer had bought nothing at that shop for some two years. Roberts had not entered the transaction in any day-book, he explained, because cash sales across the counter were not customarily recorded.
For the defence, the failure to discover strychnine in Cook’s stomach was a circumstance of vast moment. The medical men who had analysed the remains, Doctors Taylor and Rees, had detected not the slightest trace of it. Yet these same witnesses testified that they had likewise failed to detect strychnine in two animals which they had themselves poisoned in the course of their experiments. The report also mentions the presence of antimony in the samples. These findings could not, therefore, decide the issue of their own force. In the summing-up of the judge, the Crown connected the symptoms with the poison; the defence contended, on the contrary, that natural disease accounted for them, and that Palmer had an interest in keeping Cook alive.
Campbell did not instruct the jury that chemical analysis had established the fact of poisoning. He reminded them that the absence of strychnine must be duly weighed, and then framed the decisive question: could the symptoms have proceeded from natural disease? If they deemed that they were also consistent with the operation of strychnine, it remained for them to decide, from the whole compass of the evidence, whether Palmer had administered it. Counsel for the prisoner, Serjeant Shee, interposed that the direction should explicitly state that those symptoms might have arisen from other causes. Campbell answered that his summing-up had fairly submitted both questions to the jury. He strictly forbade them to convict upon suspicion, however strong, and enjoined them to give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt, should any remain.
The jury retired after two o’clock in the afternoon. During their absence, the Ordinary of Newgate took his seat beside the judges, ready to perform his office should a conviction ensue. Outside, the concourse swelled as tidings of the deliberation spread abroad. An hour and seventeen minutes later, the jury returned. To the inquiry of the Clerk of Arraigns, the foreman answered, “Guilty.” Palmer betrayed scarce any emotion. He remained silent when asked whether he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. Lord Campbell then pronounced the capital sentence.