Did 'Sally Arsenic' Really Poison Her Family?

pronounced this cheeshelm. And she went on trial more than once after continued accusations that she didn't just use arsenic to poison the rats in her house. Sir Sarah, who was born Sarah Parker, was nineteen and pregnant with her first child when she married Richard Chesham, a twenty one year old farmer, in summer of eighteen twenty eight. They named their firstborn daughter, Harriet. In the next ten years, they went on to have five more children, who were

all boys. Philip was born in eighteen thirty, John in eighteen thirty two, Joseph in eighteen thirty four, James in eighteen thirty seven, and finally George in eighteen thirty nine. They lived in Clavering, a small rural village in northwest Essex, and we mean very small. In eighteen forty one there were barely more than a thousand people living in the village and most of the population was under the age of twenty. Sarah and Richard eked out really a meager living.

Sarah and possibly Richard as well, was illiterate. There was little food and little work, and most people farmed just to get by right, and not even always on their own farms. Sometimes they would work for farmers, they were that poor. In January of eighteen forty five, two of their boys, Joseph, who at that time would have been about ten and James, who was probably about eight, both came down with severe stomach pains and vomiting, and they were seen by their local doctor. Yet they still both

passed way. Both, it was believed, had died of cholera. They were buried together in the same coffin most stories report, and they were buried in their local churchyard. This is, of course incredibly tragic, but it was also not really out of character with the times. Cholera was a very common bacterial disease at this point in England's history, and it was easily spread through contaminated water. In general, this was a time when people were unaware of the ways

in which diseases spread. Medicine was not really very sophisticated yet, and because of poor sanitation and poor diet nutrition, as well as dangerous working conditions, the overall British population at this time was actually pretty unhealthy. Life expected see was pretty low, and the fact that Sarah and her husband both lived into their forties is kind of remarkable. And if you were a baby at this time, thanks are

pretty grim for you too. As many as three out of twenty babies didn't live beyond their first birthday, so the death of the two boys was considered a family tragedy, and there was no suspicion at the time against Sarah or her husband, at least not by the authorities. The

small town gossip mill was beginning to run though. The trouble all started during the summer of eighteen forty six, about a year after the boys died, when another young woman in town her name was Lydia Taylor, who may or may not have been the ex girlfriend of Sarah's husband, Richard Bean, accusing Sarah of poisoning her infant son. That baby, named Solomon Taylor, was healthy when he was born, but his good health began to deteriorate rapidly in late June

that year. His mother reported Sarah had visited Lydia and her son three times, and Lydia was certain that her son's death was linked to the gifts of rice pudding and apple turnovers that Sarah had brought along. Lydia reportedly also told authorities she was certain she saw a white, slimy substance on her son's lips before he became ill. Sarah she could continued, insisted that that was just sugar from the desserts, but because Solomon died shortly after eating

Sarah's food, Lydia suspected her of murder. Okay, two questions. Should have baby be those sakes right for one year? Right, like your digestive system is still forming, But absolutely have a spoonful of rice pudding. I guess that's that's the more likely of the two to be digestible. It's not a high place to judge what she fed her son right less than a year old, that's really young to be eaten those any kind of rich dessert just it

just seems weird to me. Again, I'm not a parent, So any parent that has fed your child these things, please don't think I'm judging you. My understanding is just that babies should not be eating food that rich. But this whole accusation kicked off a series of events, none of which were good for Sarah. In August of that year, based on Lydia's story as evidence, Sarah was investigated by local authorities who decided that there was enough in Lydia's

report to move forward. So because of the of Sarah's guilt around town, it was at this time too, that the magistrate requested the bodies of her two sons be exhumed. The remains were examined by local authorities and a local doctor who sent the stomach contents of each child to London for analysis. So while we're pondering that, it makes me want to take a little bit of a break, and when we return, we're going to talk about how Sarah went on trial for the deaths of three boys.

Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's get back into how Sarah's did trial for the poisonings of three children, two of her own, the infant Solomon Taylor's body was tested for arsenic, but none was found. The bodies of Sarah's own children, Joseph and James, were also tested and the outcome I

mean those tests was not so good. Expert and forensic scientists doctor Alfred Swain Taylor, no relation to Lydia and Solomon Taylor told the court that he had found sufficient arsenic in both James and Joseph's stomachs to have proved fatal. So Alfred Swain Taylor's work in this case is actually a really big deal because he himself was a big deal during this time in England, specifically for his work

in the very early days of toxicology. So toxicologists are experts on poison and poisoning and they come up a lot, as you can tell in our episodes. So Taylor had become the go to expert witness for coroners in this country. He appeared at trials and in newspaper articles so often

that he became a minor celebrity himself. Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both used him for inspiration in their writing, and today he's considered the father of British forensic medicine and doctor Taylor testified that he had found yellow arsenic in the boy's stuffe which apparently meant he explained that they had ingested white arsenic while they were still alive. The sulfur released by the body, he said,

was what turned it yellow. So Taylor may have been good at his job time, but this is not exactly the kind of testing you would get from a modern day toxicologist. There's a little bit of guesswork involved, right. I'm still sure that it must have been pretty amazing if you were in the courtroom and you had your witness, you know, pulling out all of this scientific fact about arsenic. Maybe there was no reason to think he was wrong. So based on his evidence, it was decided then that

Sarah should be arrested and put on trial. Actually, let's talk about those trials for just a minute, because Sarah was put on trial three times and something like two days or a day and a half. It was really compressed, but there were three trials, one each for each victim. While the evidence seemed clear to the court that her two sons died of arsenic poisoning, there was no way to prove how the boys had ingested the arsenic to

begin with. The jury deliberated quickly in both cases, and Sarah was acquitted of the charges that she poisoned her son. Despite the findings of the court, locals still believed that Sarah did in fact poison her sons, and that she did so to collect life insurance money. In nineteenth century England, there were such things as burial clubs, which were societies that had sprung up to help poor, working class families give their deceased family members a proper funeral. So these

clubs worked like this. You paid into an association and your weekly payments would be used to cover the funeral expenses of your deceased loved ones when the time came. Parents were known to cover sick children under several plans if they could afford it, so that they would get a good payout. So then there was the third trial. This one was for the poisoning of Solomon Taylor, and if you remember, there was no train of arsenic found in Solomon's body, so the prosecution withdrew that case too,

and Sarah was cleared of these charges as well. And then for a few years things seemed to go pretty quietly. But when Richard passed away, at the age of forty three after a long illness, the rumor mill sprung right

back into action. Having been previously accused of poisoning Lydia Taylor's baby as well as her own two sons, the villagers were convinced, like with all caps, convinced even years later, and after Sarah had been found legally innocent, that the forty one year old farmer's wife had to be responsible

for her husband's death. So Richard had suffered from chronic lung disease, which you know was probably tuberculosis, but because he complained of stomach pain and vomiting before his death, and because Sarah was his wife, authorities ordered an autopsy, and that autopsy did indeed reveal that he had tuberculosis, which may or may not have been hastened by arsenic poisoning because there was a scant amount of arsenic in

his stomach. And so Sarah was arrested again. And although she had been cleared on all of those previous charges, the acquittals from her first three trials were not well received in the local community, sort of as we've been saying, and in eighteen fifty she was brought back into court and technically this was now her fourth four trials. So during this fourth trial it was reported that Sarah cared for Richard during his illness. That is not that unusual

at all. She was his wife, okay, and she fed him milk that was thickened with rice, and apparently had a strict rule that no one else was to bring him food as in her previous trials. They brought doctor Taylor back in to analyze the evidence here as well, and he confirmed that there was a trace amount of arsenic in Richard's body. Where he found a huge amount of arsenic was actually in the bag of rice that

was retrieved from the Chresham and tested as evidence. So arsenic, just in case you didn't know, is a naturally occurring thing in rice. Right, you know, rinse your rice. It's not supposed to be huge amounts of arsenic in your rice,

but it does naturally occur. So, right, we don't know if that huge amount is like if it is a thirty pound bag of rice, and you go, I found X amount of arsenic, but no one's gonna eat the thirty pounds of rice at a time, so it would not be a fatal amount, or is it a cup. You know, right, Huge is a very variable word at

this point. We don't know if they're saying huge in relation to the whole volume or just a huge as if I say I've driven twenty thousand miles, you go, wow, that's amazing, and I go, well over ten years, like it's yeah, yeah, yeah it is. It is interesting that no one in the court, or at least it's not recorded, actually ever asked the question how much should be in

rice and how much was in rice? So it's cited interestingly that Taylor noted in his report that there wasn't enough arsenic found in Richard's body to warrant a murder charge. He just sort of noted that the arsenical rice existed. And despite these things, the chrial just kept moving forward. Why ask questions on top of this kind of dicey

arsenic evidence. Another local woman named Hannah Phillips told the court about conversations she said that she had with Sarah regarding how to get rid of a husband if the need arises, and that those conversations had indicated that it was with arsenic. It was also whispered around the village that Sarah had a reputation for putting a special ingredient into the mincemeat pies that she gave as gifts, and

that ingredient was not Brandy. The prosecution did their best to present her as a disagreeable, angry, and quarrelsome woman. They even had strangers take the stand against her and appearing as her own defense. Sarah addressed the jury herself, but her statement, which it's said was long and a

bit rambling, did not win anyone over. And although she wasn't able to pull together a list of her own witnesses, which would have been in her legal right, she did speak about how the evidence against her was based only on and we quote her from her trial, spite and revenge. The court, like the town, believed that Sarah had murdered before, and also believed that unless she was executed, there would be and we again quote, no safety for mankind. The

coroner too, couldn't see any other outcome than execution. No other outcome, nothing, just execution. What kind of court system is this? There was no court of appeal in England in eighteen fifty one when Sarah was convicted, and she have had no means of challenging the outcome of her case. In any of these instances. So that's a little bit of a downer, and I want to take a break and walk away from it for a second and we return. We are going to talk about Sarah's execution and the

possible problems with this whole case. Welcome back to Criminalia. We're talking about the poison panic that gripped England at the same time as Sarah's trial. Okay, let's take a minute and talk about what life was like in England at this time. So this was kind of the early end of the Victorian Age, and economic conditions in England were pretty dreadful. As we talked about earlier, a lot

of people were living in really abject poverty. There was high unemployment in the eighteen forties, which led to an alarm public health crisis as the number of child and infant poisonings began to increase, both accidental poisonings and intentional ones. Still, most people, though, who died from arsenic poisoning did so because of accidents or mistakes, or long term exposure to

the poison in everyday items such as cosmetics. It was a common ingredient, or often from contaminated groundwater, which still happens today. Most people who died from arsenic poison weren't murdered, but that didn't prevent growing social unease about arsenic In nineteenth century England, the country became gripped in in poison panic.

Sarah was hardly alone as an accused. Between eighteen forty and eighteen fifty, as many as two hundred and forty individuals were charged with murder or attempted murder by poisoning right or wrong. National hysteria surrounding poisonings was growing, and Sarah's trials caught the public's interest. They just they got swept up in this. The Times newspaper commented that Sarah was quote an accepted and repeated murderess who walked abroad

in the village, unchallenged and unaccused. We don't really need to say it, but this was a time when journalistic standards were a little different, very different, and if they had clickabait back then, these headlines would have been for that. We talk about that as a modern thing, but I really do feel like Victoria, the Victorian age news industry, was the origin point of clicking. Absolutely, it's just a

little bit different form. So they also went on to say in these articles that Sarah just did not have the kind of disposition that a mother should have towards her child, and thus she was nicknamed Sally Arsenic. So during the years that Sarah was allegedly poisoning three children and a husband, the Times published one hundred and thirty two articles about poisoning crimes in the UK, So that's

just a couple of years and press it down. So around this time period as well, there were about five hundred to six hundred people who died from being poisoned each year in those years, So we don't really know what the breakdown was of how many of the poisoners were women and how many were men. But what we do know about this press was that they ran seventy three articles about women who were on trial for poisoning crimes and only covered fifty nine men who were accused

of the very same crimes. What I uncovered when I was doing this research was there's not a lot of numbers. There's numbers of deaths, but there's numbers of trials. But if you were a female and you were accused of a crime, you were immediately more interested. And while it might be an indication that women were more likely to

poison in Victorian England. Their editorial calendar may also simply reflect that stories about female criminals, as Maria just suggested, were more sensational and would draw more readers than those of males. Like we said, kind of like clickbait, but nineteenth century style. Right, So let's get back to Sarah's trial. Sarah was convicted in her fourth trial a single count of administering poison with intent, and it's that statement rather

than murder. Because doctor Taylor didn't find enough arsenic to prove fatal in Richard's body. She was sentenced to death by hanging. It's reported also that thousands of people came to watch her public execution, and possibly as many as ten thousand people in March of eighteen fifty one. I have to say that if that number is true, and wow, does it feel high, like, particularly considering how small their

village was. There were a thousand people who lived there and most of them were under the age of twenty. Where do these ten thousand people came from? I mean, it's more people than can legally fit in the Miami Beach Convention Center, so I'm not sure if they were bussing them in you think, you think a little exaggerated. There was actually an illustrated verse recounting Sarah's final moments

that was distributed among the spectators. One Stanza read like this wicked, base, deceitful wife, barbarous and cruel mother, doomed to die in the prime of life. Poor Sarah. She was the last woman to be executed for attempted murder in England. So, as we have just uncovered, there was a lot of gossip and only a little bit of evidence in each of Sarah's trials. So was she just

hanged as a result of hearsay and rumor. Although she was convicted of a single count of attempted murder, the public believed that she was responsible for more than that, and maybe also for teaching other women how to kill with arsenic in a deadly poison ring in her small town. There was no proof of that, but that didn't really matter who there as trials sparked a moral panic about poison And this is kind of the interesting and important

thing about her going on trial for four times. Up until eighteen fifty one, arsenic was really cheap and it was really easily available around England, you know, like a small town. You would have found it there too, And although its intended uses were for things like killing rodents and surprisingly treating acne, it quickly became known for its off label uses such as killing family members and it was often for inheritance. And again it was also a

thing to be talked about because it's very sensational. Who doesn't love a little drama varying Victorian England was like the era of the drama lama. I think we all know and this whole set of trials fits right in yep. So the London Medical Gazette at the time reported that with just two pence you could buy enough arsenic to kill about one hundred people. Two pence is the equivalent of two and a half cents in today's dollars, so for you know, one hundred bucks, you could kill those

ten thousand spectators a legend spectators. You could at least kill everybody in your town. So Sarah's trial was one of several actually at this time that caught the attention of both the media as well as Parliament, and in early eighteen fifty one, the Earl of Carlisle introduced the sale of Arsenic Regulation Bill, and this bill put a few rules into effect. There had been no poison rules before,

and it broke down like this. So first, it required arsenic suppliers to keep a register of names of people who bought the poison, as well as the amount they purchased and their reason for buying it, and they had to provide a signature. Second, there were no restrictions on who could sell arsenic even under the bill, but now sellers were only legally allowed to sell it to people

whom they already knew. And third, arsenic, which we have talked about before, in its natural state after it's been processed, is white and an offen resembled sugar, and so at this point it had to be dyed with indigo or soot before it could be sold in individual packets, no

more mistaking it for a household sweetener. So this bill was intended to address the growing public concern over both accidental and deliberate arsenic poisonings, and it was actually in place until it was repealed replaced with the Pharmacy and Poisons Act of nineteen thirty three, so quite a long time.

Because of the way investigations and trials are conducted today, it can sometimes seem easier for us to look back on the past and cry, you know, injustice, Sarah had four trials and they didn't know what they were doing, and we just cry everything was wrong. But there really does just seem to be evidence in Sarah's case that

things could have been done better. There wasn't a lot of evidence against her, and her one sided trial surrounding the death of her husband found trace amounts of a poison that often doesn't have to do with being poisoned. Conviction based on hearsay from locals, including bogus and uninvestigated stories like the one that we found, which was Sarah kept a stash of arsenic in a tree stump outside her house, it's hard to see her execution as a

fine practice of law. So that said, there is an interesting twist to Sarah's story that we actually did not know about when we originally chose her for this season. I love this Yes. Recently, Rosalind Powell, a descendant of Sarah, approached the producers of BBC one's show Murder, Mystery and My Family and asked for help in re examining the

circumstances of Sarah's case. So it's been more than one hundred and sixty years since her execution, and with new eyes on the evidence, investigators from that team found that the tests carried out at the time of Sarah's trial were actually pretty inconclusive, citing that today we now know that it's not unusual to find small traces of arsenic in a human body, like what was found in Richard's body,

Sarah's alleged victim. The barristers and judge determined there are two barristers in a retired judge who who were the investigators, had likely died from natural causes like cholera and tuberculosis, like we expect it. Ultimately, Sarah's family did get an unsafe verdict, and that means the original guilty verdict should be overturned. And while this isn't a binding judgment, it has inspired her family to continue to pursue her case

and get her name cleared permanently. It's really exciting, you know. I mean, it is the guy, the retired judge and the two barristers, you know, the retired judge who came down with this. He was like, I realized that, you know, I can't just make a proclamation right now and say that, you know, let's overturn it. But I think everybody's hoping that the evidence and the sort of you know, off record trial will really help her family in this manner,

I hope. So it's one of those ways. One of the things that I love about studying history is that we think of it as settled business that happened in the past. But history is alive and it's affecting people today, and it can still shift, and what we understand of the past can still change. So this is a prime example of that. Absolutely, you know, ultimately, with that in mind, and you look back at her story, you just wish she'd just moved to a different town, just moved to London,

maybe the town next door. Like the people in this village are terrible, just try, try again, try again. So with that in mind, what did you come up for for our cocktail this week? Colleg So this What's Your Poison? Is brought to you by my desire to sweeten Sarah's story.

Ah yeah, So I started to look at I wanted to come up with a cocktail that was sort of pretty and lovely, and I searched around on the internet for some ideas, and the cocktail that kept coming up that I thought was most interesting to me was the Arsenic and Old Lace, which is an existing cocktail that a lot of people make. You'll find different variations on

the recipe. Obviously, that play that it is named after is a twentieth century play and does not apply to the Victorian era, but the arsnickness of it, and there's it's got a very sweet list of ingredients, not literal sweet taste, but just it's a beautiful assortment. So it starts with two ounces of gin, one ounce of driver mooth, one ounce of violet liqueur. Some people will do creme de violette. Sometimes you can just get a regular violet liqueur.

You can actually make your own violet liqueur not that hard, and then varying degrees depending on the recipe. All of these amounts shift from recipe to recipe for this cocktail under different different bartenders versions a little anywhere from a

splash of absinthe to one and a half ounces. One and a half seems very heavy to me and is an outlier, but most of them are like an eighth of an ounce, a tenth of an ounce, half a spoon, a splash, and so normally to make a narsenic and old lace, you would stir all these ingredients with ice and then strain them into a chilled glass, normally like a coop glass. But I wanted to make it a little bit sweeter and softer. And this is also inspired by the fact that gin is not my natural choice

in spirits. It's a little bity for me. It's not mine either, so I'm curious about where you had it. I added a spoonful of simple syrup and it just softens up the edges of the gin a little bit and makes it a little more palatable. Now I will say my husband said it tasted like children's robotessin But again, keep in mind I always have to caveat that he is not a drinker and doesn't really like the taste

of any alcohol. So you know, he's definitely one of those people that I would say eighty percent of drinks he goes taste like medicine. Keep that in mind, noted, but it is it was a really it's a nice the I'm always a fan of any floral liqueur. I just love them. I like to use them in everything. I love to make a rose liqueur and just keep it on hand. It occurred to me as well, if you, like me, are not a gin person, this same recipe would be beautiful with vodka. That's good to know. Yeah,

that's my thing I always want. I'm not a bartender. I just I enjoy cocktails and I like learning about them. So the one thing I always encourage people is like, there aren't really like rules. You know, don't don't be foolish and drink too much and please drink responsibly, but like you can make substitutions and try different stuff. You're not going to go to cocktail jail. Like, fine, this isn't Victorian English. People are gonna come watch you die.

It's not Victorian England. You're not gonna go to cocktail jail. So yeah, give it a whirl. Any or any variation on it that sounds delightful. I had. I had one with lunch so I could test it before we recorded. It's delightful you would like to make this. We highly encourage it, but also we wanted to thank you once again for spending time with us today and hearing about Sarah's story, which to me has like one of the best de newmal of any of the stories we've talked

about so far and maybe in the future too. Like she just her end was a pretty good one. It's really pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast, you could do so. We would love for that to happen. So you can get Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Criminalia is a production

of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.