DEATH OF A NOTORIOUS PRISONER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3778, 14 December 1907, Page 3

DEATH OF A NOTORIOUS PRISONER.

The recent death at Broadmoor Asylum of Christiana Kdmunds, at the age of 78, recalls one of the most notorious criminal trials of the past century. It is more than 35 years since this woman was tried and sentenced by Baron Mantin at the Old Bailey for the murder of a boy named Sidney Albert Barker, at Brighton, and the evidence at the trial revealed a curiously cunning and subtle attempt at wholesale poisoning, conceived with the object of diverting suspicion from the criminal herself. Christiana Kdmunds had been attended in 1870 by a Brighton medical man, with whom she appeared to be on very friendly terms. In December of that year Kdmunds was visiting at the doctor’s, and she gave a chocolate cream to the doctor’s wife, who, finding that it tasted bitter, spat it out, and though she was made unwell, she suffered no permanent injury. Her husband, however, suspected something, and he charged Kdmunds with having attempted to poison his wife. Then Kdmunds, finding herself cut off from association with the doctor and his wife, planned a diabolical course of action to make it appear that the poisoned sweetmeat had come from a well-known sweet shop in Brighton. She induced children to go to that shop and purchase choclate creams. These she impregnated with strychnine, then sent them back to the shop with the excuse that they were not of the right sort. So the poisoned sweets got into the hands of other customers, and one of them, the boy Barker, died. Kdmunds distributed other poisoned sweets to children in the street, and a number were poisoned, but no others died. She even volunteered evidence at the inquest on Barker, saying that she herself had been made ill by sweets bought at the shop where she had “planted” the poisoned chocolates. She was sentenced to death but, insanity being proved to exist in her family, the sentence was commuted to confinement at Broadmoor.