Two women died in the house of a Glasgow physician within weeks of each other. The first, Jane Cowan Taylor, had arrived to nurse her ailing daughter; the second, Mary Jane Pritchard, was the wife of the man under whose roof they both resided. In July 1865, Edward William Pritchard stood before the High Court of Justiciary, charged with having poisoned them. The indictment enumerated several noxious substances, various articles of food, and multiple occasions; yet the initial depositions presented no seamless narrative. Instead, they laid bare the fractured recollections of domestic servants, the shifting dates of an intermittent malady, and words uttered in distress—words that might be construed as suspicion, yet could not stand alone as proof.
The trial opened in Edinburgh on Monday, 3 July. Pritchard pleaded not guilty. The defence moved that the two charges be tried separately; the court repelled the motion, directing that the indictments be taken together. The Crown maintained that between 10 and 25 February, Jane Taylor had been administered tartarised antimony, aconite, and opium, notably in tapioca, beer, and a proprietary preparation known as Battley’s Sedative Solution. With respect to Mary Jane, the libel alleged the repeated administration of tartarised antimony and aconite, chiefly in food and drink, between December and March. Such were the terms framed by the prosecution; their formal precision did not mean that every grain or individual act was already beyond dispute.
The circumstances that brought the prisoner to the bar arose from the swift succession of the deaths. Jane Taylor, a woman of some seventy years, had journeyed from Edinburgh to care for her suffering daughter. She died in Glasgow towards the close of February, her demise initially attributed to apoplexy. Mary Jane followed her to the grave in March, gastric fever being the cause assigned at the time. According to the record of the first day, the investigation altered its course only after the bodies were exhumed and medical examiners reported finding antimony in the viscera. Yet the court had still to distinguish between the detection of a chemical substance, the medical construction of symptoms, and the hand that had administered the draught.
Catherine Lattimer, formerly the household cook, related that upon returning from a visit to Carlisle in October, she found Mary Jane Pritchard in failing health. The mistress spoke first of a cold, and subsequently of sickness and retching. Lattimer did not claim to have witnessed every paroxysm; she recounted at times what her mistress had confided to her, at times what she had overheard, freely admitting that she could not fix the dates of several occurrences. The younger woman had travelled to Edinburgh towards the end of November, returning shortly before Christmas with her mother and eldest daughter, and had appeared for a time to mend. Then the vomiting returned. The servant’s chronology, probed and refined under the questioning of the judges, bore the visible marks of an uncertain memory.
An episode of severe cramps, assigned by Lattimer to the first day of February, assumed particular prominence. Having heard Mrs Pritchard vomiting in the pantry, the cook found her lying in bed, her fingers cramped, her speech thick, and her countenance flushed. The sufferer declared that she had never felt so ill; Lattimer summoned Pritchard, who was then in the house. Later, the patient was removed to another bedchamber. Weeks afterwards, around midnight, a fresh seizure alarmed the servants. Mary Jane called out for Dr Gairdner. Lattimer remembered hearing mention of chloroform and severe pain; but as the examination proceeded, she seemed to confound the two crises, prompting the Lord Justice-Clerk to instruct her to sever what she had witnessed with her own eyes from what she had subsequently pieced together.
Mary McLeod, a girl of seventeen employed as housemaid, likewise spoke of recurrent sickness, of meals carried above-stairs, and of long intervals spent by Mary Jane abed. Here too, the court was repeatedly obliged to intervene to ascertain the precise source of her recollection: had she seen the mistress vomit, had she heard her, or had she merely gathered it in conversation? The two servants did not have equal access to the several rooms, and neither could vouch for acts that had passed outside her view. Touching a quantity of tapioca prepared by Lattimer, McLeod stated that the packet had been purchased by one of the children and laid in the lobby; Lattimer had boiled the portion in water and delivered it to the girl, who carried it up to Jane Taylor. Neither witness claimed to have seen any poison introduced into the vessel.
The account of Jane Taylor’s final evening was similarly gathered in fragments. McLeod spoke of her being taken ill after five o’clock, unable to vomit, and declaring her belief that she had contracted her daughter’s sickness. She asked for hot water and drank it to provoke retching. The girl related that Pritchard, then engaged with a patient in his consulting room, came presently upstairs; subsequently, the elder lady was found insensible, bowed down upon a chair, and was lifted into bed. She expired before the morning, according to the hour McLeod believed she remembered. Lattimer, who had left the doctor’s service a few days prior, could offer no corroboration of the moments of that scene. What one witness remembered could not, of itself, become an undisputed certainty for all.
To the prosecution, the food and the physic were of paramount consequence. The maidservants described tapioca, Battley’s solution, tea, cheese, and an egg-flip. McLeod recounted having tasted a small morsel of cheese sent up to Mary Jane: it had produced, she said, a burning sensation in her throat and a tormenting thirst; the mistress, by her account, left the remainder untouched. She stated further that an egg-draught, brought up late in the evening, was rejected by the stomach almost immediately. Yet the cross-examination exposed how heavily the quantities, the hours, and the sequence of symptoms leaned upon retrospective impressions. These everyday objects had assumed importance only after the deaths; the witnesses could not always be sure who had prepared, carried, or set them aside.
The Crown turned at last to the intimacy subsisting between Pritchard and McLeod. The girl testified that he had kissed her, that they had had carnal connection, and that she had suffered a miscarriage. The defence entered a strenuous protest: no such matter appeared in the libel, and to pursue it risked confronting the prisoner with an offence distinct from the two murders for which he stood indicted. The Lord Justice-Clerk ruled against pressing the enquiry into any medicine administered to procure the miscarriage; he allowed, however, following argument, questions bearing upon the illicit relation itself and upon the jealousy it was alleged to have aroused in Mary Jane. The bench thereby traced a division, imperfect though palpable, between the exploration of a possible motive and the prosecution of a separate crime.
In the course of this same deposition, McLeod repeated a sentence which Mary Jane had allegedly addressed to her husband during a paroxysm of her illness: “Do not cry; you are a hypocrite; if you cry, it was you that did it.” The girl could not affirm with certainty whether these words had been spoken before or after the arrival of Dr Gairdner; pressed upon the point, she acknowledged her confusion as to the exact moment. The phrase fell heavily upon the ear of the court, yet it did not specify what deed was meant, nor upon what foundation the sick woman had uttered her reproach. A court of law cannot elevate words repeated from memory, spoken in agony and fixed only by conjecture, to the rank of chemical analysis or direct observation.
The first day concluded after a prolonged sitting. The witnesses had depicted a wife chronically afflicted, a mother-in-law arriving to tend her, food prepared abovestairs and below, and recurring fits of spasms; they had also disclosed the liaison between Pritchard and McLeod and the disquiet it had brought upon the home. The primary record of this first day closes at this juncture, before the arguments of the four succeeding days. A notice in the Marlborough Press, printed in October and treating of the trial and the prisoner’s subsequent statements, records that the jury returned a verdict of guilty on both capital charges, and that sentence of death was passed. This notice constitutes a contemporary newspaper summary, not a transcript of the sittings not reproduced here.
The same article further recounts two conflicting declarations made by Pritchard within the prison walls after his conviction. In the first, dated 11 July, he confessed to having caused his wife’s death, yet denied having poisoned his mother-in-law, attributing her decease to an overdose of Battley’s solution and admitting only that he had added aconite to the phial after she had expired. A second declaration, dated 19 July, retracted the former and acknowledged the murder of both women, assigning no motive beyond “a terrible madness” and the influence of ardent spirits. The newspaper published these texts, noting of its own accord that the first had been disputed and subsequently withdrawn. They cast light upon the public close of the tragedy, yet they cannot efface the ambiguities of the depositions nor supplant the judicial enquiry that preceded them.
Thus, in the proceedings held at Edinburgh, the antimony and the other poisons named by the Crown sustained two capital charges; the recollections of the servants linked the household fare to the seizures; and the private conduct of the master supplied a contested motive. Yet between the substance detected by the chemists and the hand accused of administering it, the court heard only uneven voices, disputed memories, silences, and questions ruled out of order. The condemnation was the act of the jury, not the self-evident consequence of a chemical formula; and the post-verdict confessions, shifting from one week to the next, bequeathed to history one final, unresolved contradiction.